Buddha's Little Finger

by Виктор Пелевин

  He skipped over to the fax machine and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello! Yes! That’s right, this is the place. Yes, a 1996 model, it’s done two thousand miles.’

  Serdyuk dropped the sword on the floor and pressed his hands to his bleeding belly.

  ‘Quickly!’ he wheezed. ‘Quickly!’

  Kawabata frowned and gestured for him to wait.

  ‘What?’ he yelled into the receiver. ‘What do you mean, three and a half thousand is too much? I paid five thousand for it only a year ago!’

  The light in Serdyuk’s eyes slowly faded and went out, like the lights in a cinema just before the film. He began slowly slumping over to one side, but before his shoulder reached the floor, all awareness of his body had disappeared; there was nothing left but an all-consuming agony. Through a red, pulsating mist he heard Kawabata’s voice:

  ‘What d’you mean damaged? Where’s it damaged? You call two scratches on the bumper damage? What? What? Arsehole yourself! You shit, you fucking wanker! What? You can go fuck yourself!’

  The receiver clanged back into place and the fax machine immediately began ringing again.

  Serdyuk noticed that the space in which the telephone was ringing and Kawabata was swearing and everything else was happening was somewhere very far away from him; it was such an insignificant segment of reality that he had to focus with all his strength to follow what was going on there. At the same time, there was absolutely no sense in this act of concentration: Serdyuk realized that this concentration was life, it turned out that his entire, long existence as a human being, with all its longings, hopes and fears, had been nothing more than a fleeting thought that had momentarily attracted his attention. And now Serdyuk - although it was not really Serdyuk at all - was drifting through a qualityless void and he sensed he was coming close to something huge that radiated an intolerable heat. The most terrible thing was that this immense thing that breathed fire was approaching him from behind, which meant that it was impossible for him to see what it actually was. The sensation was quite unbearable, and Serdyuk began feverishly searching for the spot where he had left behind the old, familiar world. By some miracle he found it, and Kawabata’s voice sounded in his head like the tolling of a bell:

  ‘On the islands they didn’t believe at first that you would manage it. But I knew you would. And now, allow me to render you the final service. Huh-u-up!’

  For a long time after that there was nothing at all - although it was not really even correct to say that it was a long time, because there was no time either. And then there was a cough, «md a squeaking of floorboards and Timur Timurovich’s voice said:

  ‘Yes, Senya. They found you there like that by the heater with the neck of a broken bottle in your hand. Who were you really drinking with, can you remember?’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Tatyana Pavlovna.’ said Timur Timurovich, ‘two cc’s please. Yes, now.’

  ‘Timur Timurovich,’ Volodin said unexpectedly from the corner, ‘they were spirits, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Timur Timurovich asked politely. ‘Who were spirits?’

  ‘All of them from the House of Taira. I swear they were. And he behaved with them like he wanted to die. Probably he really did want to.’

  Then why is he still alive?’ asked Timur Timurovich.

  ‘He was wearing that T-shirt with the Olympic symbols. You remember the year they held the Olympic Games in Moscow, don’t you? Lots and lots of those little symbols, right? He was cutting through the T-shirt.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well, we should think of them as magic hieroglyphs. I read in a book about a case in ancient times when they drew protective symbols all over this monk, but they forgot about his ears. And when the spirits of Taira came, they took his ears, because as far as they were concerned everything else was invisible.’

  ‘But why did they come to him? I mean, to the monk?’

  ‘He played the flute very well.’

  ‘Ah, the flute,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘Well, that’s logical enough, I suppose. But don’t you find it odd that these spectres are «Dynamo» fans?’

  ‘There’s nothing surprising about that,’ Volodin replied. ‘Some spectres support «Spartak», others support the Army Club. Why shouldn’t some of them support «Dynamo»?’

  7

  ‘Dinama! Dinama! Where the fuck you goin’?’

  I leapt up from my bed. A man was chasing a horse around the yard and yelling: ‘Dinama! Where d’ya think you’re off to? Come ‘ere, yer bugger!’ There were horses snorting and whinnying under my window; looking out, I saw a huge jostling crowd of Red Army I men who had not been there the day before. I could only actually tell that they were Red Army men from their ragamuffin appearance: they were clearly dressed in the first garments that had come to hand, for the most part in civilian garb, and it seemed that their preferred method for equipping themselves must have been pillage. Standing in the centre of the crowd was a man wearing a pointed Red Army helmet with a crookedly tacked-on red star, waving his arms about and issuing some kind of instruction. He bore a striking resemblance to the weavers’ commissar, Furmanov, whom I had seen at the meeting in front of the Yaroslavl Station in Moscow, except that now he had a crimson scar from a sabre cut across his cheek.

  I did not, however, waste long contemplating this motley crew, for my attention was drawn to the carriage standing in the very centre of the yard. Four black horses had been harnessed to a long open landau with pneumatic tyres, soft leather seats and a frame made of expensive timber which still bore lingering traces of gilt. There was something quite unhearably nostalgic in this object of luxury, this fragment of a world which had disappeared for ever into oblivion; its inhabitants had naively supposed that they would be riding into the future in vehicles just like this one. In the event, it was only the vehicles which had survived their jaunt into the future, and only then at the cost of transformation into parodies of Hunnish war chariots - such were the associations triggered by the sight of the three Lewis machine-guns tied together by a metal beam which had been installed in the rear section of the landau.

  As I moved back from the window I suddenly remembered that in Russian the soldiers called this kind of chariot I tachanka. The origins of this word were mysterious and obscure, and although I mentally reviewed all of the possible etymologies as I pulled on my boots, I could not find one that really suited the case. I did, however, come up with a humorous play on words in English: tachanka - ‘touch Anka’. But since the memory of my declaration of feelings the previous day to the lady in question was enough to bring a sullen flush to my cheeks, I felt unable to share my joke with anyone.

  These, more or less, were the thoughts that filled my head as I went down the stairs and out into the yard. Someone said that Kotovsky had asked me to come into the staff barn, and I set off in that direction immediately. Two soldiers in black uniforms were standing on guard at the entrance. As I walked past, they stood to attention and saluted. From the look of concentration on their faces, I realized that they knew me well, but unfortunately the concussion had completely erased their names from my memory.

  Kotovsky was sitting on the table wearing a tightly buttoned brown service jacket. He was alone in the room. I noted the deathly pallor of his face, as though a thick layer of powder had been applied to it. Standing beside him on the table was a transparent cylinder inside which clouds of some molten white substance were clumped together. It was a lamp made out of a spirit-stove and a long glass retort, inside which lumps of wax floated in tinted glycerine: five years be fore they had been the height of fashion in St Petersburg.

  Kotovsky held out his hand. I noticed that his fingers were trembling slightly.

  ‘Since early this morning,’ he said, raising his cool, limpid eyes to my face, ‘for some reason I have been thinking about what awaits us beyond the grave.’

  ‘Then you believe that something does await us?’ I asked.

&n
bsp; ‘Perhaps I didn’t express myself very well,’ said Kotovsky. Let us just say I have been pondering on death and immortality.’

  ‘What could have brought on such a mood?’

  ‘It has never really left me since a certain memorable day in Odessa,’ Kotovsky answered with a cold smile. ‘But that is not important.’

  He folded his arms on his chest and pointed to the lamp with his chin.

  ‘Look at that wax,’ he said. ‘Watch carefully what happens to it. As the spirit-stove heats up, it rises upwards in drops that assume the most fantastic forms. As it rises, it cools. The higher the pieces rise, the more slowly they move. And finally, at some point they stop and begin to fall back towards the very place from which they have just risen, often without ever reaching the surface.’

  ‘There’s a tragedy straight out of Plato in it,’ I said thoughtfully.

  ‘Possibly. But that is not what I have in mind. Imagine that the solidified drops rising upwards in the lamp are endowed with consciousness. In this case they will immediately encounter the problem of self-identification.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Now this is where it becomes really interesting. If one of those lumps of wax believes that it is the form which it has assumed, then it is mortal, because that form will be destroyed -but if it understands that it is wax, then what can happen to it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied.

  ‘Precisely.’ said Kotovsky. ‘In that case it is immortal. But the tricky part is, it’s very difficult for the wax to understand that it is wax - it’s almost impossible to grasp one’s own primordial nature. How can you notice what has been there right in front of you since the beginning of time? And so the only thing that the wax does notice is its temporary lorm. But the form is arbitrary every time it arises, influenced by thousands and thousands of different circumstances.’

  ‘A quite magnificent allegory. But what conclusion can we draw from it?’ I asked, recalling our conversation of the previous evening concerning the fate of Russia, and the facility with which he had directed the subject towards cocaine. It might well prove to be that he was simply trying to obtain the remainder of the powder and was gradually leading the conversation around to that topic.

  ‘The conclusion is that the only route to immortality for a drop of wax is to stop thinking of itself as a drop and to realize that it is wax. But since our drop is capable only of noticing its own form, all its brief life it prays to the Wax God to preserve this form, although, if one thinks about it, this form possesses absolutely no inherent relation to the wax. Any drop of wax possesses exactly the same properties as its entire volume. Do you understand me? A drop of the great ocean of being is the entire ocean, contracted for a moment to the scope of that drop. But now, tell me how to explain this to these drops of wax that fear most of all for their own fleeting form? How can we instil this thought into them? For it is thoughts that drive them towards salvation or destruction, because in their essence both salvation and destruction are also thoughts. I believe it is the Upanishads that tell us that mind is a horse harnessed to the carriage of the body…’

  At this point he clicked his fingers, as though he had been struck by an unexpected idea, and again raised his cold gaze to my face:

  ‘By the way, while we are on the subject of carriages and horses, don’t you think that, after all, half a tin of cocaine for a pair of Oryol trotters is just a bit…’

  A sudden thunderous crash burst upon my ears, startling me so badly that I staggered backwards. The lamp standing beside Kotovsky had exploded, splattering a cascade of glycerine across the table and over the map which was spread on it. Kotovsky leapt off the table and a revolver appeared in his hand like magic.

  Chapaev was standing in the doorway with his nickel-plated Mauser in his hand; he was wearing a grey jacket with a high collar, a shoulder-belt, an astrakhan hat with a slanting watered-silk ribbon and black riding breeches trimmed with leather and decorated with a triple stripe. A silver pentagram gleamed on his chest - I remembered that he had called it ‘The Order of the October Star’ - and a small pair of black binoculars hung beside it.

  ‘That was smart talking there, Grisha, about the drop of wax.’ he said in a thin, hoarse tenor, ‘but what’re you going to say now? Where’s your great ocean of beans now?’

  Kotovsky glanced in perplexity at the spot where the lamp had been standing only a moment before. A huge greasy spot had spread across the map. Thankfully, the wick of the lamp had been extinguished by the explosion, otherwise the room would already have been ablaze.

  ‘The form, the wax - who created it all?’ Chapaev asked menacingly. ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Mind.’ replied Kotovsky.

  ‘Where is it? Show me.’

  ‘Mind is the lamp.’ said Kotovsky. ‘I mean, it was.’

  ‘If mind is the lamp, then where do you go to now it’s broken?’

  ‘Then what is mind?’ Kotovsky asked in confusion.

  Chapaev fired another shot, and the bullet transformed the ink-well standing on the table into a cloud of blue spray.

  1 felt a strange momentary dizziness.

  Two bright red blotches had appeared on Kotovsky’s pallid cheeks.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘now I understand. You’ve taught me a lesson, Vasily Ivanovich. A serious lesson.’

  ‘Ah, Grisha.’ Chapaev said sadly, ‘what’s wrong with you? You know yourself you can’t afford to make any mistakes now - you just can’t. Because where you’re going there won’t be anyone to point out your mistakes, and whatever you say, that’s how it’ll be.’

  Without looking up, Kotovsky turned on his heels and ran out of the barn.

  ‘We’re just about to advance,’ said Chapaev, putting his smoking pistol back into its holster. ‘Why don’t we go in that carriage you won from Grisha yesterday? While we’re at it we can have a little chat.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve already ordered it to be harnessed.’ said Chapaev. ‘Anka and Grisha can ride the tachanka.’

  A dark shadow must have flitted across my face, because Chapaev laughed loudly and slapped me on the back with all his might.

  We went out into the yard and pushed our way through the crowd of Red Army men to the stables, where the prevailing mood was that bustling confusion of alarm and jollity so dear to the heart of every true cavalryman, the mood that always envelops a detachment as it prepares for imminent battle. The soldiers were tightening saddle girths, checking hooves and conversing loudly, but behind the merriment one could sense the sober concentration and the supreme tension in every fibre of their spirit. These human feelings seemed to infect the horses, which were shifting from one foot to the other, whinnying occasionally as they attempted to spit out their bits, and squinting sideways out of their large, magnetic eyes, which seemed to shine with an insane joy.

  I too felt myself falling under the hypnotic influence of inv minent danger. Chapaev began explaining something to two soldiers and I went over to the nearest horse and sank my fingers into his mane. I can recall that second perfectly - coarse hairs under my fingers, the slightly sour smell of a new leather saddle, a spot of sunlight on the wall in front of my face and a quite incredible, incomparable feeling of the completeness, the total reality of this world. I suppose it was the feeling which people attempt to express in phrases like living life to the full’, it lasted for no more than a single brief second, but that was long enough for me to realize yet again that this full, authentic sense of life can never, by its very nature, last any longer.

  ‘Petka!’ Chapaev shouted behind me. ‘Time to be off!’

  I slapped the horse on the neck and set off towards the carriage, glancing sideways at the tachanka, in which Kotovsky and Anna were already seated. Anna was wearing a white peaked cap with a red band and a simple soldier’s blouse with a narrow belt on which hung a small suede holster; her blue riding breeches with the narrow red piping were tucked into high lace-up boots. Decked out
in that fashion, she looked unbearably young, almost like a schoolgirl. When she caught my glance, she turned away.

  Chapaev was already in the carriage. Sitting in front was the silent Bashkir, the same one who had poured the champagne in the train and later had almost skewered me with his bayonet as he stood on his absurd guard duty over a haystack. As soon as I had taken my seat, the Bashkir jerked the reins, clicked his tongue and we rolled out through the gates.

  Travelling behind us came the tachanka with Kotovsky and Anna, followed by the cavalrymen. We turned to the right and set off up the road, which rose steeply, then curved to the right into a green wall of foliage.

  We drove into something like a tunnel, formed by branches that wove themselves together above the road - the trees were rather strange, rather more like overgrown bushes than real trees; the tunnel proved to be very long, or perhaps I had that impression because we were moving slowly. Sunlight filtered through the branches and glinted in the final drops of the morning dew. The brilliant green of the foliage was so dazzling that at one point I completely lost all orientation and I felt as though we were falling slowly down a bottomless green well. I closed my eyes and the feeling passed.

  The thickets on each side of us came to an end as abruptly as they had begun and we found ourselves on an earth road leading uphill. On the left there was a shallow rocky slope, on the right a weathered stone cliff of an incredibly beautiful pale lilac colour, with little trees sprouting here and there in i racks in the stone. We continued our ascent for about a quarter of an hour.

  Chapaev sat with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together on the handle of his sabre, which was thrust against (he floor. He seemed to be absorbed in profound thought on some subject, or to have fallen into a light sleep. Suddenly he opened his eyes and turned towards me.

  ‘Are you still suffering from those nightmares you were complaining about?’ he asked.

  As always, Vasily Ivanovich,’ I replied.

  And still about that clinic?’