Free The Monkey Link by Andrei Bitov

beak. I leaned back against the dune without pulling my feet out, as if I had grown into the sand. What I saw had no name. I saw water, I saw a fish, I saw sky, I saw a bird   …they had no names. I didn’t know that they were called water, sky, or bird. Perhaps this was fish stretching before me to the horizon, and the fathomless blue above my head was bird? Perhaps what had died in front of me was the water, and the sky had evaporated, vanished from sight? I had no way of knowing that the world didn’t stop beyond the horizon. Words, at last, were as empty as the weightless chitinous integuments mingled here with the sand. So they were empty after all. I had become separated from language, which keeps droning at me that the world exists, that it’s everywhere I go, it’s right here. And, as always, I sighed, I pulled away from the dune through whose eyes I had momentarily looked at what was in front of me. I extracted my feet from the sand, one at a time. The fish was a fish and was called a bream, the bird was not sky but a seagull, what stretched before me was not fish but water, under the name of gulf; oh, and the sky was air, its own airy ocean. Beyond the horizon was Lithuania, invisible to me but solidly fixed. The sky alone had no horizon, beyond it lay the unknown, although that, too, had been stratified by someone into domains and terms—but those words live only in the textbook, and that is why we can still sometimes see into the sky, with this wordless kind of vision. I was confounded by the fact that everything had been named, pinned down by knowledge not contained in the things I saw. Which do we see: objects, or the words naming them? At least it is clear that the world we are coming to know has no reciprocal tie with our knowledge. Even if it is reflected accurately. Our knowledge merely reflects the world. But the world does not look in that mirror.
    The mirror is man. You can lift your hand to your eyes, of course: My hand. Or look at your feet: My feet   …But a man by himself, when he looks before him, does not see himself, and especially doesn’t see his own eyes, any more than a mirror sees itself. But even the things you can see on your person, as belonging inalienably to you—hands, feet, navel, below the navel—are not you, after all, they’re an envelope, a body, you’re inside   …Look before you—you’re not there. Perhaps you are what you see before your eyes?
    The sky was empty and ceased to be empty. All at once many birds flew over, a flock. The sky became empty. When one bird flew over, I saw one bird. Exactly one. How many had flown over just now? Ten? More. A hundred? Fewer. I don’t know exactly how many there were—fifty-five, fifty-nine, I didn’t have time to count them. But one thing is certain: there were a finite number, not one more or one less. I could not learn that number, and no one will ever learn it now. But since that number was exact and final, it exists, as though someone knew it   …“But the very hairs of your head are all numbered   …   ”
    One bird, and then all at once many, but how many?   …The unit—that is the number I know. One—that is the count I keep.
    Dividing by one is reality.
    “I think I can guess—although with difficulty—what you’re getting at,” the doctor said. “Science really does have a certain inherent narrowness. Its concern is not so much world issues as things that can be accurately established. But your complaints show a certain incomprehension of the genre, to use terminology close to your heart. For us, a brilliant idea we can’t prove or confirm by experiment is unprofessional. It’s dilettantism, or leisure at best. Taken on faith, a beautiful idea can carry you far astray, beyond retrieval. There needs to be an element of sluggishness, as it were, in the ethics of the true scientist, who has ideas by the bucketful. Actually, to some extent, we do have a gap in our thinking, between the unit and the