Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  Suddenly a figure came hurtling straight at Maria out of the smoke so that she shrieked in fright. In front of her she saw a man in blotchy camouflage fatigues, carrying an automatic rifle. He looked up at Maria and opened his mouth to speak, but then Schwarzenegger took his hand from Maria’s shoulder, grabbed hold of the man’s head, twisted it gently to one side and tossed the limp body away beyond the bounds of their vision. His hand returned to Maria’s shoulder, and Maria pressed herself against his monumental torso.

  ‘Ah, men, men,’ she cooed softly.

  Gradually the smoke began to disperse until once again Maria could see Schwarzenegger’s face, and then the entire massive body, concealed beneath the light grey shroud of the raincoat like a monument waiting to be unveiled.

  ‘Arnold,’ she asked, ‘where are we going?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said Schwarzenegger.

  Maria blushed and lowered her eyes.

  What is an alchemical wedlock, though? she thought. And will it hurt me, I wonder? Afterwards, I mean? I’ve been hurt so many times before.

  Looking up at him she saw the famous dimples in his cheeks – Schwarzenegger was smiling. Maria closed her eyes and walked on, hardly daring to believe in her own happiness, guided by the hand that lay on her shoulder.

  When Schwarzenegger stopped, she opened her eyes and saw that the smoke had almost completely disappeared. They were standing on a street she didn’t recognize, between rows of old houses faced with granite. The street was deserted except for a few stooped figures with automatic rifles darting about aimlessly in the distance, nearer the embankment which was still hidden behind a pall of smoke. Schwarzenegger seemed to loiter in an odd, indecisive fashion, giving Maria the impression that he was tormented by some strange kind of doubt, and she was frightened at the thought that the doubt might concern her.

  I have to say something romantic quickly, she thought. But what exactly? I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

  ‘You know, Arnold,’ she said, squeezing herself against his side, ‘I suddenly…I don’t know, perhaps you’ll think it’s silly…I can be honest with you, can’t I?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Schwarzenegger, turning his black lenses towards her.

  ‘When I’m with you, I want so much to soar up into the sky! I feel as though the sky is so very close!’

  Schwarzenegger raised his head and looked upwards.

  There actually were glimpses of bright blue sky between the streams of smoke. It didn’t seem particularly close, but then neither was it that far away.

  Ah, thought Maria, what nonsense I do talk.

  But it was too late to stop now.

  ‘What about you, Arnold, wouldn’t you like to soar up into the sky?’

  Schwarzenegger thought for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And will you take me with you? You know, I…’ – Maria smiled shyly – ‘I’m so very earthbound.’

  Schwarzenegger thought for another second.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up into the sky.’

  He looked around, as though he were trying to locate landmarks that only he knew, and then he seemed to have found them, because he grabbed Maria decisively by the arm and dragged her onwards. Maria was startled by this sudden transition from poetic abstraction to concrete action, but then she realized that this was the way real men were supposed to behave.

  Schwarzenegger dragged her along the façade of a long Stalin-era apartment block. After a few steps she managed to adjust to his rapid stride and began trotting along beside him, holding on to the sleeve of his raincoat. She sensed that if she slowed her pace at all, Schwarzenegger’s arm would change from a gallantly proffered fulcrum into a steel lever that would drag her implacably along the pavement, and for some reason the thought filled her with a feeling of boundless happiness that sprang from the very depths of her belly and spread in warm waves throughout her body.

  On reaching the end of the building, Schwarzenegger turned through an arch. Once in the courtyard of the building, Maria felt as though they had been transported to a different city. Here the peace of the morning was still unbroken; there was no smoke to be seen, and it was hard to believe that somewhere close at hand there were crazy people dashing about shooting off their automatic rifles.

  Schwarzenegger definitely knew where he was taking Maria. They made their way round a small children’s playground with swings and dived into a labyrinth of narrow alleys between rusting garages. Maria was thinking with sweet terror in her heart that somewhere here, quickly and rather awkwardly, their alchemical wedlock would probably be consummated, when suddenly the passageway led out into an empty space surrounded on all sides by sheet-iron walls of various colours and heights.

  The space wasn’t entirely empty, though. Beneath their feet lay the usual collection of bottles, and there were a couple of old car tyres, a crumpled door from a Lada and other assorted quasi-mechanical garbage of the kind that always accumulates beside garages.

  And, next to them, there was a jet fighter.

  Although it took up almost all of the space, it was the very last thing that Maria noticed, probably because for several seconds her brain filtered out the signals it was receiving from her eyes as a hallucination. Maria felt afraid.

  How could a plane get in here? she thought. On the other hand, how could Schwarzenegger have got here? But even so, this is really strange.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘A model A-4 “Harrier” jump-jet vertical take-off and landing pursuit craft,’ said Schwarzenegger.

  Maria saw the famous dimples in his cheeks again – Schwarzenegger was smiling. She frowned slightly, drawing her frizzy eyebrows together, and the fear in her heart was replaced by a feeling of jealousy for this immense insect of glass and metal, which clearly occupied quite as important a place in Schwarzenegger’s heart as she did herself.

  He approached the plane. Sunk in thought, Maria remained standing on the spot until she was jerked forward in turn – rather as if Schwarzenegger were a tractor and she were some piece of agricultural machinery casually hooked on to it.

  ‘But there’s only room for one,’ she said when she caught sight of the back of the seat through the glass canopy.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Schwarzenegger, and in a single light movement he lifted her up and sat her on the wing.

  Maria drew in her legs and stood up on the angled aluminium surface. A gust of wind fluttered through her clothes, and she thought how well romantic roles had always suited her.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked.

  But Schwarzenegger was already in the cockpit. He had clambered in with amazing speed and agility, and Maria realized it must have been a montage sequence or a piece of slick editing. He stuck his head out of the cabin and smiled, gesturing to her with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a ring; Maria decided she could think of it as her wedding ring.

  ‘Sit on the fuselage,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘at the base of the wings. Don’t be afraid. Imagine it’s a carousel. Imagine you’re sitting on one of the horses.’

  ‘You mean, you’re going to…’

  Schwarzenegger nodded.

  His dark glasses gazed straight into the depths of Maria’s soul and she realized her fate was being decided right here and now. She was being tested, there was no doubt about it: the woman worthy of standing beside Schwarzenegger could not be some feeble coward good for nothing more than multi-episode domestic and sexual intrigue. She had to be able to meet mortal danger face to face without betraying her feelings with anything more than a smile. Maria tried adjusting her expression accordingly, but felt that the smile turned out a little contrived.

  ‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘But won’t I get cold?’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Get up.’

  Maria shrugged and took a cautious step towards the point where the fuselage protruded above the flat surface of the wings like the curved spine of a fi
sh, and then sat down on it neatly.

  ‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘you can ride side-saddle when we go to my ranch in California. Right now you had better sit the ordinary way, or the wind’ll blow you off.’

  Maria hesitated for a moment. ‘Look the other way,’ she said.

  Schwarzenegger smiled with the left corner of his mouth and turned away. Maria threw her leg over the aluminium crest and straddled the fuselage. Underneath her the metal was cold and slightly damp with dew; she hoisted herself up slightly in order to tuck the hem of her jacket underneath her, and suddenly had the strange sensation that the very tenderest parts of her body had been flattened across the angular hips of a metal man lying on his back – some mutant cross between the iron Dzerzhinsky toppled by the wind of change and a robot from hell. She shuddered, but the brief hallucination disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by the feeling that she was sitting on a frying-pan which had just been taken out of the fridge. She was feeling worse and worse about what was happening.

  ‘Arnold,’ she called, ‘are you sure we ought to do this?’

  She usually reserved these words for entirely different circumstances, but this time they just seemed to come out on their own.

  ‘It was you who wanted to soar up into the sky,’ he said, ‘but if you’re afraid…’

  ‘No,’ said Maria, pushing aside her fear, ‘I’m not afraid in the slightest. It’s just that I’m being such a bother to you.’

  ‘No bother,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘It’s going to be very noisy, better put your earphones on. What is it you’re listening to, anyway?’

  ‘Jihad Crimson,’ said Maria, settling the small pink pads on her ears.

  Schwarzenegger’s face froze absolutely still. A strange flickering red light ran across the lenses of his dark glasses – Maria thought it must be the reflection of the leaves falling from the maple trees that stood just behind the garages.

  ‘Arnie,’ she called.

  The corner of Schwarzenegger’s mouth twitched a few times, and then he seemed to recover the power of movement. He turned his head with difficulty, as though it were rotating on a bearing clogged with sand.

  ‘Crimson Jihad?’ he asked.

  ‘Jihad Crimson,’ answered Maria. ‘Nushrat Fatekh Ali Khan and Robert Fripp. Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘it’s not important.’

  His head disappeared into the cockpit. Underneath her, somewhere deep in the plane’s metal belly, she heard an electrical hum that expanded in the space of just a few seconds into a monstrous loud roaring until it seemed to Maria that she could feel the foam-plastic pads being forced into her ears. Then she was tilted smoothly over to one side and the garages drifted down and away behind her.

  Swaying from side to side like a boat, the Harrier rose up vertically into the air – Maria had not even been aware that aeroplanes could fly like that. She thought that if she closed her eyes it might be less frightening, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear, and in less than a minute she had opened them again.

  The first thing she saw was a window moving straight towards her. It was so close already that Maria had a perfectly clear view of a tank turning the muzzle of its gun in her direction from the screen of the television in the room. The tank on the screen fired, and at that precise moment the plane banked steeply and soared away from the wall. Maria almost slid across on to the wing, and she squealed in fear, but the plane soon righted itself.

  ‘Hold on to the antenna!’ shouted Schwarzenegger, poking his head out of the cabin and waving to her.

  Maria looked down. Protruding out of the fuselage directly in front of her was a long metal form with a rounded, slightly swollen tip – it was strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like a narrow vertical wing, and it immediately roused immodest associations in Maria’s mind, although its dimensions were significantly larger than any encountered in real life. One glance at this powerful protuberance was enough to quell her fear and replace it with a joyful inspiration that had always been so lacking with all those languid Miguels and drunken Ivans from the television.

  Everything was quite different this time. The rounded swelling at the tip of the antenna was covered with small holes which reminded her slightly of a shower head and at the same time set her thinking of strange, non-terrestrial forms of life and love. Maria pointed to it and glanced inquiringly at Schwarzenegger. He nodded and gave a broad smile, and the sun glinted on his teeth.

  Maria decided that what was happening to her now must be a childhood dream coming true. In some film or other she had spent a lot of time poring over fairy-tales in books, looking at the pictures and imagining herself flying through the sky on the back of a dragon or a huge bird, and now it was actually happening. Maybe not exactly the way she’d dreamed it, but then, she thought as she laid her palm on the steel projection of the antenna, dreams don’t always come true in the way we expect.

  The plane banked slightly and Maria noticed it was obviously responding to her touching the antenna. More than that, the movement seemed to her to be incredibly animated, as though the plane were alive and the antenna were its most sensitive part. Maria ran her hand along the steel rod and squeezed its upper part tight in her fist. The Harrier twitched its wings nervously and rose a few yards higher. Maria thought to herself that the plane was behaving exactly like a man tied to a bed, unable to take her in his arms, incapable of anything but twitching and jerking his entire body. The similarity was enhanced by the fact that she was sitting just behind the wings, which looked like a pair of wide-spread legs, incredibly muscly, but quite incapable of movement.

  This was certainly amusing, but it was all a bit too complicated. Instead of this huge steel bird, Maria would have preferred to have come across an ordinary camp-bed in the empty space between the garages. But then, she thought, with Schwarzenegger it couldn’t really have been any other way. She glanced at the cockpit. She couldn’t see much, because the sun was reflected in the glass, but he seemed to be sitting there, moving his head gently from side to side in time with the movement of her hand.

  Meanwhile, the plane was rising higher and higher. The roofs of the houses were now far below them, and Maria had a magnificent panoramic view of the city of Moscow.

  There were church domes gleaming on all sides, making the city look like an immense biker’s jacket embellished at random with a remarkable quantity of studs and rivets. There was far less smoke hanging over Moscow than Maria had imagined from down below on the embankment; though some was still visible here and there above the houses, it wasn’t always clear whether it was a fire, pollution from factory chimneys or simply low cloud.

  Despite the revolting ugliness of each of its component parts, viewed as a whole the city looked extremely beautiful, but the source of this beauty was beyond all understanding. That’s always the way with Russia, thought Maria, as she ran her hands up and down the cold steel – when you see it from afar, it’s so beautiful it’s enough to make you cry, but when you take a closer look, you just want to puke.

  The plane suddenly jerked beneath her, and she felt the upper part of the steel rod dangling loosely in her hand. She jerked her hand away, and immediately the metal knob with the small holes fell away from the antenna, struck the fuselage and flew off into space; the powerful protuberance was reduced to a short hollow tube with a screw thread around its top, with the torn blue and red strands of two wires twisted together protruding from its end.

  Maria glanced in the direction of the cockpit. Through the glass she could make out the blond back of Schwarzenegger’s motionless head. At first she thought that he hadn’t noticed anything. Then she thought he must have fainted. She looked around in confusion, saw that the nose of the plane was wavering uncertainly, and immediately her suspicion hardened into certainty. Hardly even aware of what she was doing, she slumped down from the fuselage on to the small flat area between the wings (the stump of the antenna ripped her jacket as she fell) and craw
led towards the cockpit.

  The cockpit was open. Lying there on the wing, Maria propped herself up and shouted:

  ‘Arnie! Arnie!’

  There was no answer. She fearfully manoeuvred herself on to all fours and saw the back of his head with a single lock of hair fluttering in the wind.

  ‘Arnie!’ she called again.

  Schwarzenegger turned to face her.

  ‘Thank God!’ Maria exclaimed.

  Schwarzenegger took off his glasses.

  His left eye was half-closed in a way that expressed an absolutely clear and at the same time immeasurably complex range of feelings, including a strictly proportioned mixture of passion for life, strength, a healthy love for children, moral support for the American automobile industry in its difficult struggle with the Japanese, acknowledgement of the rights of sexual minorities, a slightly ironical attitude towards feminism and the calm assurance that democracy and Judaeo-Christian values would eventually conquer all evil in this world.

  But his right eye was quite different. It could hardly even be called an eye. A round glass lens looking like a huge wall-eye, set in a complicated metal holder connected to wires that ran out from under the skin, peered out at Maria from a tattered socket surrounded by streaks of dried blood. A beam of blinding red light shone directly out from the centre of the lens – Maria only noticed it when the beam shone into her own eyes.

  Schwarzenegger smiled, and the left side of his face expressed exactly what the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to express when it smiles – an indefinable boyish quality between mischief and cunning, immediately making it clear that this is a man who will never do anything bad, and if he should happen to kill a few assholes now and then, it’s not until the camera has repeatedly revealed from several different angles what despicable trash they are. But the smile only affected the left side of his face, the right side remained absolutely unchanged – cold, focused and terrifying.