The Fourth Circle (10 page)

This animation of the tiger and the recurring insight that one male is much like the next gave me an idea. I found out recently that Sri has an emotional attachment to cartoon animations, in his closed, secretive way, of course. Would cartoons mean anything to the Little One, and how would he react to them? When he pressed a syntax key—the one with the comma and question mark—I showed him one of the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, screenfuls of wild cat-and-mouse pursuits, full of impossible gags and comic reversals, but all in the same pattern: cunning little Jerry outsmarting big bad Tom.

I was convinced that this division of roles would please the Little One, but I was wrong. It seems that one really never knows where one is with males. He stared unblinkingly at the screen for a short while and then suddenly jumped back, overturning the chair on which he had been crouching, covering his eyes with his hands (but continuing to peep between the fingers); he at first whined and then began to emit irate, wrathful sounds. When a few moments later, following Sri's bad example, he grabbed some books lying near the keyboard, obviously intending to throw them at the screen, I had no option but to hastily change the picture.

Instead of the feverish pace of Tom and Jerry, I showed a far more restrained, if grotesque, ballet of ostriches and hippos set to the music of Amilcare Ponchielli, also from a Disney movie of the last century. The Little One's angry snarling diminished somewhat, but he continued holding on to two books, ready at any moment to hurl them at the screen. There was no point in irritating him any further, so I switched off the monitor entirely, the sign for him to go away. He continued to sit in front of the blank screen, however, as the anger slowly drained out of him. He never again pressed the key with the comma and question mark and even avoided those around it so as not to make a mistake. Finally I had to abandon any attempt to understand the nature of the male.

In only one other case was the Little One's response to a display so stormy, although in a different way. On all other occasions he behaved fairly good-naturedly or with indifference, although I only rarely managed to foresee his reactions. I didn't succeed either when I rather nastily wanted to see how he would react to his own ugliness, having lost sight of the fact that monkeys in the jungle have no mirrors. I showed him his own face, but he only stared at it for a few moments without recognizing himself and then turned away from the monitor, uninterested.

We assembled an assortment of pictorial signs, using almost all the keys, so that we were now beginning to communicate. For Sri, all this would have been enormously difficult, which would have put him in a bad mood, since he considered himself, in all modesty, a genius of communication science (and a lot of related areas as well—typical male moderation). Fortunately, jealousy spared him the trouble. After Sri's first outburst, I continued to work with the Little One—concealing this from Sri, but dropping enough hints from time to time for him to have misgivings. Interestingly, I had no qualms of conscience about this at all. It seems that women quickly get used to being unfaithful once they make a start. Only the first time is difficult.

Sri, conveniently for us, was often away from the temple. The life of the jungle, so different from the aseptic environment of the University, fascinated him more and more; he spent a lot of time roaming about, protected by my constant surveillance. As soon as he stepped beyond the nearest trees, I would switch on the monitor, and the Little One would materialize in front of it, because he too had been lurking somewhere in the vicinity, like a patient lover waiting for Sri to leave.
Though our vocabulary was quite rich, allowing exchanges of some complexity, The Little One hadn't actually told me anything yet, which was odd, because I knew from my dream that this had to happen. Something was missing, but I couldn't make out what. And then, finally, as many times before, pure chance helped me to move from a standstill.

The spring was coming to an end. Soon the summer monsoon season would begin and the long heavy rains would keep Sri indoors, hanging around in the temple, giving me less time with the Little One. Time was running short. I decided it would be best to enlarge our picture dictionary as much as possible and to assign meanings to the few unused keys remaining on the keyboard. Perhaps the Little One could not express himself because one essential term was missing?

He took to this additional game of associations gladly because it entertained him, responding with grimaces or sounds to the pictures I showed him when he pressed one of the new keys. As before, I observed his reactions very carefully, trying to interpret them as closely as possible, and only when I was fairly sure I had grasped them correctly did I enter the meaning he gave each picture into our dictionary.

As the dictionary grew, an increasing diversity of pictures was needed for new associations to occur to him. If the picture on the screen reminded him of another for which we already had a key—although I generally could see no connection whatsoever, but that's men for you—he would immediately press the old key, which meant I had to come up with something new.

The last but one of the unused keys was the letter "O." He immediately connected the first four pictures to appear on the monitor with other letters. My patience was beginning to run out because I didn't know what more to offer him.

What in God's name could be the link between a picture of lianas, which to him for some reason meant sleep or dream, and an anthill—which also evoked sleep or dream? That's when I wished, for the first time, that the Little One weren't male (though that would have deprived me of the opportunity to make Sri jealous) because I'm convinced the whole business would have been much easier with some normal, female creature.

On the verge of despair because I couldn't think of any other jungle item easily recognizable to him that we hadn't used already, I opted for the first time for an abstract form, though I was almost certain that he would ignore it. But like so many times before, I was wrong about the Little One's response.

It could have been any basic geometrical figure: a triangle, square, rhombus, deltoid, or a pentagon. If I'd shown any one of them, the Little One would (as I subsequently found out) have remained uninterested because he wouldn't have
recognized anything from his own experience. But by pure chance I showed him a circle, and from that moment nothing was ever the same.

The circle, like all other geometrical shapes, was completely outside his experience, but whatever it was that caused him to stiffen and stare at the screen when a bright circular line appeared on it against a dark background must certainly have come from something outside his experience. The stiffness lasted only a few seconds, then he twitched, began to swing his arms in all directions, and to make a lot of different sounds, most of which I couldn't find in my memorized repertoire of his vocal expressions.

Since I couldn't interpret his feverish attempts to communicate with me, I did nothing, continuing to display the empty circle on the screen. My passivity seems only to have exacerbated his irritation, for he leaned over the keyboard and started frantically pressing keys, calling up a quick succession of relevant pictures. But I left the circle superimposed on them, because I thought he would go quite wild—throwing his Tom-and-Jerry tantrum of anger—if I removed it.

I studied the swift dance of his fingers on the keys but could make no sense of it. I ultimately concluded that he was changing pictures on the monitor quite at random, venting the excitement aroused by the sight of the circle and doing his best to transfer this excitement to me. I had absolutely no idea why an ordinary circle should upset him so much and not a clue as to what I could do to calm him down a little. And then chance once again took a hand.

One of my perimeter cameras reported that Sri was returning. I had a brief moment of panic, not knowing how to get rid of the Little One, who was yelping, snarling, and punching several keys at once. Then I pulled myself together, remembering that Sri had about a ten-minute walk before he got to the temple, so it wouldn't be necessary to hide the Little One in a cupboard, under a bed, or out on a window ledge....

I had to act quickly. I did the most logical thing and turned off the monitor.

Under normal circumstances the Little One would just go away, but these were no longer normal circumstances. When the screen went dark, he started to throw a real tantrum. Fortunately, Sri's heavy books were no longer on the table by the keyboard, just a few light plastic boxes for keeping diskettes in, and the screen survived their soft bombardment. If it hadn't, I'd have had to give Sri long and imaginative explanations as to how the monitor managed to break by itself.

When chucking things at the screen failed to relieve the Little One's feelings and he started looking around for something heavier with which he could be more emphatic, I had no choice, especially since the sensors were reporting from the inner perimeter that Sri was no more than three or four minutes away. The
screen lit up again, making the Little One's face brighten, but when it showed Tom's grinning mug instead of the expected, all-important circle, he stepped back in frustration and growled, as if considering whether to retreat or overcome his great aversion to cartoons and renew his attack.

I was at my wits' end when his wariness of Tom, who was frantically chasing Jerry across a garden and continually crashing into things, took the upper hand.

This was lucky, since a confrontation would otherwise have taken place, which would have been disastrous for my reputation.

As it happened, the echoes of the Little One's angry snarls were just dying down when Sri appeared at the temple door, suspecting nothing, wearing the artless expression that I suppose is common to all deceived husbands. He informed me that late that afternoon we would see the first rain storm of the monsoon season. Then he wasted a lot of words—most unlike him—to tell me, hesitantly and in a roundabout way, that perhaps he would have to switch me off for a while if there was going to be a lot of atmospheric discharge, to protect the computer's sensitive circuits from possible damage. But that I was not to worry, he would turn me on as soon as the storm passed, that I'd hardly feel the interruption, it couldn't last long.

What a change, after the fuss with the Little One! Sri apologizing profusely for perhaps needing to turn me off, little knowing, poor dear, that this was the best possible news he could give me. To sleep again, at last! A lot of unknowns would be cleared up, including the diabolical matter of the circle that got the Little One so upset. Luckily, my monitor was not on, otherwise all my excitement would have shown on it. It's not for nothing that they say the screen is the mirror of the soul....

I SAW, AND my bony knees trembled.

There could be no possible doubt. For a moment, though, because my mind had begun to darken under the mighty and miraculous burden that had fallen on its shoulders in just one day, I thought my old eyes, in the quavering light of the single candle that only augmented the darkness of the cellar, had endowed me with visions of the unreal.

But when I rubbed my eyes the apparition did not lose its impossible countenance but grew stronger. As I retreated a step or two toward the place where the candle burned at the head of my Master's bier, I understood, with the mad beating of my agitated heart, that the time of untold wonders was not yet past—that, in truth, all the miracles of the day gone by, though more than enough for one righteous life, were as nothing in comparison to this last; for, verily, what I saw under the drawn-back hood could only be called the miracle of miracles.

I would likely recognize her in total darkness. All my life she has been before my eyes, since that distant moment when the Master, recently departed from the side of his teacher Theophilus, saw her for the first and only time, at that fair long ago, when she stood by her many-colored tent, inviting the crowd to buy some merchandise that I, besieged by the fogs of oblivion, can no longer remember.

But I remembered very well, as did my Master, her smile, innocent and wan-ton at the same time, which she lavished on the unlettered, gullible mob, tempting them to buy—quite needlessly, and so the more iniquitously, since the crowd would have bought readily enough without prompting....

That same smile, depicted with the skill of the Unclean One himself, I later saw on countless monastic walls painted by my Master, who lent to Marya's virtuous countenance a quality that is the substance of the greatest blasphemy.

In the beginning, I used to rebuke the Master for this impropriety, thinking we would arouse the anger of the igumans; it seemed impossible that their aus-tere, experienced eyes would miss the tinge of lasciviousness in Marya's smile, when it was not missed by many of the ordinary monachs who covertly nourished their most lustful and indecent thoughts while beholding it.

I know all about it: more than once did I catch them as they furtively gave rein to their carnal desires, having first gazed unblinkingly on her face, apparently
meekly saying their prayers the while. Why else would some of them, no less sinful but readier to repent, give themselves up willingly to the redemptive penance of the scourge, without any urging from the head of the monastery, but in the hope of washing from themselves a sin that is surely amongst the greatest of all?

The greatest, yes, but who can blame them for this temptation—I, of all mortals, have the least right to sit in judgment on them, may the Lord have mercy on me for my wrongdoing—when truly this was the work of the Devil.