“I just wondered,” said Izya. “But my daughters have never tried it.”
“Daughters?” Andrei exclaimed in surprise. “You have daughters?”
“Three of them,” said Izya. “And not one of them knows what a keta salmon is. I explained to them that keta and sturgeon are extinct fish. Like the ichthyosaurs. And they’ll tell their children the same thing about herring…”
He said something else, but Andrei was too stunned to listen. Would you ever believe it! Three daughters. Izya has three daughters! I’ve known him for six years and nothing like that ever even occurred to me. So then how come he took the plunge and decided to come here? Way to go, Izya… What damned crazy people there are in the world… But no, guys, he thought. It’s all right, it all fits: no normal person will ever reach this pyramid. Once any normal person has reached the Crystal Palace, he’ll just stay there for the rest of his life. I saw them there, those normal people… You can’t tell their faces from their asses… No, guys, if anyone does reach this pyramid, it can only be some kind of Izya number two… And how eagerly he’ll dig up this pyramid and rip open the envelope, and then immediately forget about everything—he’ll die here, still reading… But then, on the other hand, I ended up here, didn’t I? For what? It was good in the Tower. It was even better in the Pavilion. And in the Crystal Palace… I’ve never lived like I did in the Crystal Palace and I never will again… So all right… It’s Izya. He’s got an awl up his ass and he can’t sit still anywhere. But if Izya hadn’t been with me, would I have left that place or stayed? That’s the question!
“Why do we have to go forward?” Izya asked at the Plantation, and the little blackface girls, with smooth skin and big tits, sat nearby and meekly listened to us. “Why, after all, do we have to go forward, regardless of everything?” Izya pontificated, absentmindedly stroking the nearest one on her satin-smooth knee. “Why, because behind us there is either death, or boredom, which is also death. That simple observation must be enough for you, surely? After all, we’re the first, do you understand that? After all, not a single person has yet passed right through this world from one end to the other: from the jungles and the swamps all the way to the zero point… And maybe this whole bag of tricks was only set up in order to find a man like that? So that he would go the whole way?”
“What for?” Andrei asked morosely.
“How should I know?” Izya exclaimed indignantly. “But what is the temple being built for? It’s obvious that the temple is the only goal in sight, but asking what it’s for isn’t the correct question. Man has to have a goal, he can’t manage without a goal, that’s what he was given reason for. If he doesn’t have a goal, he invents one.”
“And you’ve invented yours,” said Andrei. “You have to go all the way. What sort of goal is that?”
“I didn’t invent it,” said Izya. “It’s my unique one and only. I’ve got nothing to choose from. It’s either the goal or aimlessness—that’s the way things are for you and me.”
“But why do you keep hammering that temple of yours into my head?” Andrei asked. “What has your temple got to do with all this?”
“It has a lot to do with it,” Izya parried keenly, as if this was exactly what he’d been waiting for. “The temple, my dear Andriushka, is not only eternal books, not only eternal music. Otherwise they would only have started building the temple after Gutenberg or, as you were taught, after Ivan Fyodorov. No, my dear man, the temple is also built out of deeds. If you like, the temple is cemented together by deeds; it is held up by them, it rests on them. It all began with deeds. First the deed, then the legend, and all the rest only comes afterward. Naturally, what is meant here is the exceptional deed, one that exceeds the normal bounds, inexplicable, if you like. That’s what the temple began with—the significant deed!”
“The heroic deed, in short,” Andrei observed, chuckling derisively.
“Well, so be it, let’s call it heroic,” Izya agreed condescendingly.”
“In other words, you turn out to be a hero,” said Andrei. “In other words, you long to be a hero. Sinbad the Sailor and the mighty Ulysses…”
“And you’re a stupid fool,” said Izya. He said it affectionately, without the slightest offense intended. “I assure you, my friend, that Ulysses didn’t long to be a hero. He simply was a hero. That was his nature. He couldn’t be any other way. You can’t eat shit—it makes you puke, and it made him feel sick being a little king in his seedy little Ithaca. I can see that you pity me, you know: what a crank, a total screwball… I can see that. But there’s no need for you to pity me. Because I know with absolute certainty that the temple is being built, that nothing else serious is happening in history apart from this, and there’s only one purpose in my life—to protect that temple and increase its wealth. Of course, I’m not Homer and I’m not Pushkin; I won’t get to put a brick in the wall. But I am Katzman. And that temple is in me, and that means I’m a part of the temple, it means that with my recognition of myself the temple has expanded by one more human soul. And that’s already wonderful. Even if I don’t add a single scrap to the wall… Although I’ll try to add one, you can be quite sure of that. It will definitely be a very small speck—and, even worse, in time that speck might simply fall off, it won’t be any use to the temple, but in any case I know that the temple was in me, and I also lent it strength…”
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Andrei. “Your explanation is too confused. Some kind of religion: temple, spirit…”
“Well, of course,” said Izya, “since it’s not a bottle of vodka and it’s not a twin mattress, it’s got to be religion. What are you getting bristly about? You’re the one who’s been nagging me about how you’ve lost the ground under your feet and you’re suspended in empty space… And that’s right, you are. That’s what had to happen to you. It happens to any man who thinks even the tiniest little bit… Well, I’m giving you some ground. The most solid ground there can ever be. Plant both feet on it and stand there, if you want, and if you don’t, then bug off! But don’t bellyache afterward!”
“You’re not presenting me with ground to stand on,” said Andrei, “you’re fobbing me off with some kind of amorphous cloud! Well, OK. Let’s say I’ve understood all about this temple of yours. Only what good is that to me? I’m not good enough to be one of the builders of your temple—I’m no Homer, either, to put it mildly… But you at least have the temple in your soul, you can’t live without it—I can see the way you run around the world like a little puppy, avidly sniffing at everything, and whatever you come across, you lick it or take a bite to see how it tastes! I see the way you read. You can read twenty-four hours a day… and you actually remember everything too… But I can’t do any of that. I like to read, but in moderation, after all. I love listening to music. But not twenty-four hours a day either! And my memory’s absolutely ordinary—I can’t possibly enrich it with all the treasures that mankind has accumulated… Even if I never did anything else—I still couldn’t. With me it flies in one ear and out the other. So now what good is your temple to me?”
“Well that’s true, that’s right,” said Izya. “I won’t argue. The temple’s not for everyone… I won’t deny that it’s the heritage of the minority, a matter of human nature… But you listen, and I’ll tell you the way I see it. The temple has”—Izya started counting on his fingers—“builders. Those are the ones who construct it. And then, let’s say… goddammit, I can’t find the right word, religious terminology keeps coming to mind… Well, all right. Let’s call them priests. They’re the ones who bear it within themselves. The ones through whose souls it grows and in whose souls it exists… And there are consumers—those who, so to speak, partake of it… So then Pushkin is a builder. I’m a priest. And you’re a consumer… Don’t pull that face, you fool! That’s really great! After all, without a consumer, the temple wouldn’t have any human meaning. Just think how lucky you are, you blockhead! After all, it takes years and years of special processing, brainwashing, and supremely cunning systems of deception to provoke you, the consumer, into attempting to destroy the temple… And there’s no way the kind of consumer you’ve become now can be pushed into that sort of thing, except maybe under threat of death! Just think, you rattlebrain: the ones like you are an extremely small minority too! Give the majority the wink, give them permission, and off they’ll go, whooping and hollering to smash everything with crowbars, burn everything to the ground with blazing torches… that has already happened, many times over! And it will probably happen again, time after time… And you complain! But if it is possible at all to ask, what is the temple for? there can only be one answer: for you!”