The Monkey Link Read Free Page B

propped against our kitchen wall. It was a convenient rung for socializing: Clara’s eyes were at the level of a man’s. She gutted my cigarette, I reached out my hand   …She flinched, threw me a sidelong look, sized me up, and decided not to jerk away, not to take off—just stepped lightly along the rung. My hand fell on bare wood.
    I experienced a heartrendingly childish emotion—I so wanted to touch her. I suddenly realized that I had never in my life touched a bird. In one instant, a host of propitiatory thoughts flashed through my mind: how man needed animals, how I’d never had an animal of my own when I was a child (my childhood suddenly appeared more pathetic and impoverished than it had been), I recalled the one baby mouse who had lived with me for a week and then escaped after I’d almost taught him to walk on a knitting needle (he escaped from his glass prison over that same knitting needle), I remembered my dusty knees when I crawled out from under the wardrobe and realized that he had escaped forever   …I decided that this time, without fail, I would bring my daughter a puppy   …Offering all these prayers, unctuously repeating “Pretty Clara, clever Clara,” I lightly touched her claw. She didn’t move.
    “Clever Clara, pretty Clara,” I murmured, stroking her claws more and more boldly. She paid scant attention but permitted me. Cautiously I lifted my hand to stroke her where she might feel it better—she recoiled, sidestepping away. I was allowed only to kiss her hand.
    “Stroke her beak, not her head.” Doctor D. was standing behind me. How long had he been watching?
    “Her beak, you say?” I was embarrassed to be caught. “She’ll grab me!”
    “No, she won’t. Not if you stroke her beak. She’s a predator. With a predator, you have to caress its weapon. Then it’s not afraid. Now, you did start out the right way—the claws are also a weapon.”
    A thought, if it is a thought, enters the mind instantaneously, as though it had always been there, as though a place had been vacated for it. It doesn’t need to be understood. It provokes no doubt.
    “Good Clarra, nice Clarra   …   ” I stroked her beak. This was a much more substantial caress than on the claw. She liked it. She narrowed her eyes, rubbed against it. A crow’s expression does not incline you to sympathy. By nature, a crow looks angry. The Creator had not provided Clara with any means of showing joy, tenderness, love. She could not smile or purr or wag her tail. All the more touching, then, was the stern maiden’s helpless effort at cordiality. Like the crow in Krylov’s fable, she had almost dropped the cheese   …And the delighted thought that Krylov was as accurate as Lorenz flew through my mind with the sweep of Clara’s wing—Krylov’s name means “wing” in Russian—and flew away. It was true: what Clara seemed to like best was “Pretty Clara.” Though I no longer understood why she wasn’t pretty. It didn’t strike me as funny, I said it quite sincerely: Pretty Clara. Flattery would be impossible if the flatterer himself didn’t enjoy it—it wouldn’t be worth his while.
    Now the doctor added, “Do you remember, I was telling you about the ethics of animals? Well, man’s original, animal ethics apparently included an injunction against harming those who trusted him. The dog, and then cats, pigeons, storks, swallows—all of them, in varying degree, became intimate with man through this peculiarity of human ethics, without being purposely domesticated. Notice that man feels no instinctive love for the truly domesticated animals—chickens, pigs, goats.”
    I was delighted. “You mean, only trust evokes love?”
    “Did I say that?” the doctor asked doubtfully.
    Clara was clever, of course, but the doctor wasn’t stupid, either. To tell me such things was to stroke my beak. How gratifying it is to have a human conviction given back to us in the form of a scientific law! This means we