The Monkey Link Read Free Page A

Everyone else will have to study and study to catch up before they know as much as he does—they know a few things, but he knows all. He alone has some idea of the extent to which we know nothing. Then why does he stand frozen in the photograph, looking as if he had some idea what was there, beyond, in the next moment? Smug, brightly illumined among the sparkling vessels and mad blinking indicators—but, after all, he’s in the dark, he’s supposed to have the inspired face of a blind man, a Bruegelesque blind man falling into a hole   …Every second he lowers his hands into the magical black box—what velvety, absolute darkness! No one even knows whether he can pull his hands out of there, out of his vent hood. But he plunges them in and pulls them out, though he is ignorant of what’s in there. Sharper than a razor is the edge between his mind and what occupies his hands, as they putter about so boldly there in the dark of luciferin light.
    What certainty makes him so certain?
    This tale has both its heroine and its hint of a love story. Clara. No, this wasn’t a commonplace, business-trip affair—it was tenderness, a kind of pure love—and its steady glow relieved my loneliness as a journalist. Clara was young, clever, and beautiful. She loved sparkly things and tobacco and could count to five. She loved another man. Valerian Innokentievich was elegant and young. She snuggled up to him like a cat. (The simile is very much out of place: cats weren’t allowed within gunshot. Ornithology.) I suppose it’s already obvious to the uncorrupted reader that Clara   …(Ah, Clara! Parentheses in prose are a written form of whispering.)
    I remember an exercise in the sixth grade, in a grammar that bore Academician Shcherba’s name: something about a girl and her beloved parrot, how she woke up in the morning and he greeted her. It was an exercise on something, say, the pronouns “he” and “she,” but to us, by then, all exercises were about the same thing—the quadratic trinomial. We all covered up the word “parrot,” I remember, and had a remarkable amount of fun with the resulting text.
    Many years later I am presented with an opportunity to write a composition on this topic.
    Certainly this was a kind of jealousy, when I was too shy to touch her but she kept plucking Valerian Innokentievich’s sleeve to make him stroke her again and again. No, the secret of the feminine disposition is indeed a secret: the seriousness of our intentions is our weakest trump. Valerian Innokentievich was pliant and indulgent. He belonged to a younger generation than ours and scrutinized us with sharp, clever eyes, exploiting the advantage of his birth as if we had followed rather than preceded him.
    But enough about my rival. I brought Clara sweet tidbits, gave her cigarettes to peck apart. Crooning, insinuating myself into her trust, I moved a step closer every day. Even the cat loves a kind word   …(The cat again. Why does this word keep sneaking up on my Clara!) My constancy was appreciated—by now she marked my arrival with a glance. No, her heart still belonged to another, but as a woman she found my devotion flattering. She condescended. By now she might have been angry and upset if I had failed to appear someday at dinnertime. I held this sly device in reserve for a crisis in our relationship.
    But enough about myself. Love is knowledge. I came to know three things with Clara’s help. If it weren’t for these, it wouldn’t be worth telling about our relationship here.
    Clara was tame; that is, sufficiently unafraid of man to allow him within arm’s length. But she wasn’t just tame, she was also a crow ; that is, a creature wild and cautious, different, not man. For this reason she was finicky in relationships, and at arm’s length there was a qualitative boundary (to give her time to recoil, fly away) which only the initiate could violate. One day   …
    …   she was sitting on the rung of a stepladder