Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  I glanced around in despair. The dismembered gentleman on the poster returned my gaze with inhuman optimism; I felt sick and terrified. For some reason I felt that the orderlies were sure to enter the office at any moment. I was on the point of turning and running out into the corridor when I suddenly noticed a file lying open beneath other papers which were set out on the table.

  ‘A course of taurepam injections prescribed to precede the hydraulic procedures. Purpose – to block speech and motor functions with simultaneous activation of the psycho-motor complex…’

  There were a few more words in Latin. Pushing these papers to one side, I turned over the cardboard sheet of the file beneath and read the words on it:

  ‘Case: Pyotr Voyd.’

  I sat in Timur Timurovich’s chair.

  The very first entry, on a few bound sheets of paper placed in the file, was so very old that the purple ink in which it had been written had faded, acquiring the kind of historical colour that one finds in documents which speak of people long since dead and buried. I was soon absorbed in what I read.’

  In early childhood no signs of psychological deviance were detected. He was a cheerful, affectionate, sociable child. Studied well at school, enjoyed writing verse which did not demonstrate any particular aesthetic merit. First pathological deviations recorded at about fourteen years of age. Tendency to withdrawal and irritability observed, unrelated to any external causes. According to parents he ‘abandoned the family’; moved into a state of emotional alienation. Stopped associating with his friends – which he explains by the fact that they teased him about his Estonian surname “Voyd”. Says that his teacher of geography used to do the same, repeatedly calling him an “empty shell”. Began to make much slower progress at school. At the same time began intensively reading philosophical literature – the works of Hume, Berkeley, Heidegger – everything which in one way or another deals with the philosophical aspects of emptiness and non-existence. As a result began to analyse the simplest events from a “metaphysical” point of view and declared that he is superior to his peers in “the heroic valour of life”. Began frequently skipping classes, following which his family were obliged to contact a doctor.

  ‘Willingly enters into contact with the psychologist. Trusting. Concerning his inner world declares as follows: he has “a special conception of the world”. The patient reflects “long and vividly” on all objects around him. In describing his psychological activity he declares that his thought “gnaws its way deeper and deeper into the essence of a particular phenomenon”. Due to this feature of his thinking he is able to “analyse any question asked, each word and each letter, laying them out like an anatomical specimen”, while in his mind he has a “ceremonial choir of numerous selves arguing with each other”. Has become extremely indecisive, which he explains, in the first instance, by the experience of “the ancient Chinese” and secondly by the fact that “it is difficult to make sense of the whirlwind of scales and colours of the contradictory inner life”. On the other hand, according to his own words, he is gifted with a “peculiar flight of free thought” which “elevates him above all other laymen”. In this connection complains of loneliness and lack of understanding from those around him. The patient says there is no one capable of thinking “on his wavelength”.

  ‘Believes he can see and feel things unattainable to “laymen”. For instance, in the folds of a curtain or tablecloth, the patterns of wallpaper etc. he distinguishes lines, shapes and forms which express “the beauty of life”. According to his words, this is his “golden joy”, that is, the reason for which he daily repeats the “involuntary heroism of existence”.

  ‘Regards himself as the only successor to the great philosophers of the past. Spends much time rehearsing “speeches to the people”. Does not find placement in a psychiatric hospital oppressive, since he is confident that his “self-development” will proceed by “the right path” no matter where he lives.’

  Someone had crossed out several purple phrases with a thick blue pencil. I turned the page. The next text was titled ‘organoleptic indications’, and was obviously burdened with a superfluity of Latin terms. I began rapidly leafing through the pages. Those written in purple were not even bound into the file – they had most probably slipped in there by accident from some other file. A page had been inserted in front of the following set of papers, which was the thickest, and on it I read the words:

  THE PETERSBURG PERIOD

  (Provisional title taken from the most persistent feature of delusions. Repeated hospitalization.)

  But I had no chance to read a single word from the second part. I heard Timur Timurovich’s voice in the corridor, exasperatedly explaining something to someone else. Rapidly returning the papers on the desk to approximately the same position in which they had been lying before my arrival, I dashed over to the window – the idea occurred to me of hiding behind the curtains, but they hung almost flush against the glass.

  Timur Timurovich’s rumbling voice sounded very close to the door by this time. He seemed to be giving one of the orderlies a dressing-down. Stealing over to the door, I glanced through the keyhole. I could see no one – the owner of the office and his companion were apparently standing several yards away round the corner.

  The action I took then was in large measure instinctive. I quickly left the office, tip-toed across to the door opposite and dived into the dark and dusty broom-cupboard behind it. I was only just in time. The conversation round the corner stopped abruptly and a second later Timur Timurovich appeared in the narrow space which I could observe through the crack of the door. Cursing quietly to himself, he disappeared into his office. I counted to thirty-five (I do not know why it was thirty-five – nothing in my life has ever been associated with that number), then darted out into the corridor and ran noiselessly back to my ward.

  Nobody noticed my return – the corridor was empty, and my companions were asleep. A few minutes after I lay down on my bed the melodic chimes of reveille came drifting along the corridor; almost simultaneously Barbolin came in and said they were going to defumigate the ward, and so today we would be having a second session of practical aesthetics therapy.

  The atmosphere of a madhouse obviously must instil submissiveness into a person. Nobody even thought of expressing indignation or saying that it was impossible to spend so many hours on end drawing Aristotle. Maria was the only one to mutter something dark and incomprehensible under his breath. I noticed that he had woken in a bad mood. Possibly he had had a dream, for immediately on waking he began to study his reflection in the mirror. He did not seem to like what he saw very much, and he spent several minutes massaging the skin under his eyes and running his fingers round them.

  Arriving very late in the practical aesthetics room, he made not the slightest pretence of drawing Aristotle as everyone else, including myself, was doing. Taking a seat in the corner he wound a yellow ribbon round his head, evidently intended to protect his hair against the winds raging in his psychological space, and began looking us up and down as if he had never seen us before.

  There may not have been any wind in the room, but dark clouds certainly seemed to have gathered there. Volodin and Serdyuk did not pay the slightest attention to Maria, and I decided that I had been mistaken to attach so much weight to minor details. But the silence oppressed me nonetheless, and I decided to break it.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Serdyuk, but will you not be offended if I attempt to engage you in conversation?’ I inquired.

  ‘Certainly not, indeed,’ Serdyuk replied politely, ‘by all means, do so.’

  ‘I hope very much that you will not find my question tactless, but can you tell me what it was that brought you here?’

  ‘Otherworldliness,’ said Serdyuk.

  ‘Indeed? But can one really be hospitalized for otherworldliness?’

  Serdyuk measured me up with a long glance.

  ‘They registered it as suicidal vagrancy syndrome arising from delirium treme
ns. Although no one has any idea what that is.’

  ‘Tell me more about it,’ I asked.

  ‘What is there to tell? I was just lying there in a basement out on the Nagornoe road – for entirely personal and highly important reasons. I was fully and agonizingly conscious. Then this copper with a torch and an automatic appeared. Wanted to see my documents, so I showed him. Then, of course, he asked for money. I gave him all I had – about twenty roubles. He took the money, but kept on hanging about, wouldn’t go away. I should have just turned to face the wall and forgotten about him, but I had to go and start up a conversation; what d’you mean poking your porkies out at me like that, are you short of bandits upstairs or something? This pig turns out to be fond of talking – I found out later he’d graduated from the philosophy faculty. No, he says, there’s more than enough of them up there, only they’re not disturbing the social order. What d’you mean by that, I asked him. Well, he says, your ordinary bandit, what is he? Sure, take a look at him and you can see that all he’s got on his mind is how he can find someone to kill and rob, but so what? And the guy who’s just been robbed, he’s not breaking any laws either. He just lies there with his fractured skull and thinks – so now I’ve gone and got robbed. And you’re lying down there – he’s talking to me now – and I can see you’re thinking about something…Like you don’t believe in anything around you. Or at least you have your doubts.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘What did I say?’ echoed Serdyuk. ‘I only went and told him that maybe I did have my doubts. The sages of the East all told us that this world is an illusion – I just mentioned the sages of the East in a way he’d be able to handle, on his own primitive level. Then he suddenly goes all red and says to me: “What the hell’s going on here? I wrote my diploma on Hegel, and here you’ve read something in Science and Religion and you think you can crawl into some basement and lie around doubting the reality of the world?” In short, first they dragged me round to the station, and then round here. I had a scratch on my belly – I cut myself on a broken bottle – so they registered that as attempted suicide.’

  ‘What I’d do with anyone who doubts the reality of the world,’ Maria unexpectedly interrupted, ‘is put them away for ever. They don’t belong in the madhouse, they should be in prison. Or worse.’

  ‘And why’s that?’ asked Serdyuk.

  ‘You want an explanation?’ Maria asked in an unfriendly voice. ‘Come over here and I’ll give you one.’

  Getting up from his place beside the door, he went over to the window, waited for Serdyuk and then pointed outside with his muscular arm.

  ‘See that Mercedes-600 standing over there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk.

  ‘Are you telling me that’s an illusion too?’

  ‘Very probably.’

  ‘You know who drives around in that illusion? The commercial director of our madhouse. He’s called Vovchik Maloi, and his nickname’s “the Nietzschean”. Have you seen him around?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘It’s obvious. He’s a bandit.’

  ‘So think about it – that bandit could have killed a dozen people to buy himself a car like that. Are you telling me they all gave their lives for nothing, if it’s only an illusion? Why don’t you say something? Can’t you see where that leads?’

  ‘Yes, I can see,’ Serdyuk said gloomily and went back to his chair.

  Maria apparently felt a sudden desire to draw. Picking up his drawing-board from the corner, he sat down beside the rest of us.

  ‘No,’ he said, peering through half-closed eyes at the bust of Aristotle, ‘if you want to get out of here some time, you have to read the newspapers and experience real feelings while you’re doing it. And not start doubting the reality of the world. Under Soviet power we were surrounded by illusions. But now the world has become real and knowable. Understand?’

  Serdyuk went on drawing without speaking.

  ‘Well, don’t you agree?’

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ Serdyuk replied gloomily. ‘I don’t agree that it’s real. But as for it being knowable, I guessed that for myself a long time ago. From the smell.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I intervened, sensing that a quarrel was ripening and attempting to lead the conversation into neutral territory, ‘do you have any idea why it’s Aristotle we are drawing in particular?’

  ‘So it’s Aristotle, is it?’ said Maria. ‘I thought he looked pretty serious. God knows why. Probably the first thing they came across in the junk-room.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Maria,’ said Volodin. ‘Nothing happens by accident in here. Just a moment ago you were calling things by their real names. What are we all doing here in the madhouse? They want to bring us back to reality. And the reason we’re sitting here drawing this Aristotle is because he is that reality with the Mercedes-600s that you, Maria, wanted to be discharged into.’

  ‘So before him it didn’t exist?’ asked Maria.

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ snapped Volodin.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You won’t understand,’ said Volodin.

  ‘You just try explaining,’ said Maria. ‘Maybe I will understand.’

  ‘Okay, you tell me why the Mercedes is real,’ said Volodin.

  Maria struggled painfully with his thoughts for a few seconds.

  ‘Because it’s made of iron,’ he said, ‘that’s why. And you can go up to the iron and touch it.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that it’s rendered real by a certain substance of which it consists?’

  Maria thought.

  ‘Yeah, more or less,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s why we’re drawing Aristotle. Because before him there was no substance,’ said Volodin.

  ‘What was there then?’

  ‘There was the number one heavenly automobile,’ said Volodin, ‘compared with which your Mercedes-600 is nothing but a heap of shit. This heavenly automobile was absolutely perfect. And every single concept and image relating to automobiles was contained in it and it alone. And the so-called real automobiles that drove around the roads in ancient Greece were no more than its imperfect shadows. Projections, so to speak. Understand?’

  ‘Yeah. So what came next?’

  ‘Next came Aristotle and he said that of course the number one heavenly automobile existed, and of course all the earthly automobiles were simply its distorted reflections in the dim and crooked mirror of existence. At that time there was no way you could argue with all that. But, said Aristotle, in addition to the prototype and the reflection, there is one other thing. The material that takes the form of the automobile. Substance, possessing an existence of its own. Iron, as you called it. And it was this substance that made the world real. This entire fucking market economy started up from it. Because before then all the things on earth were merely reflections, and what reality can a reflection have, I ask you? The only reality is what makes the reflections.’

  ‘You know,’ I said quietly, ‘that really is quite a big question.’

  Volodin ignored what I had said.

  ‘Understand?’ he asked Maria.

  ‘Yeah,’ Maria answered.

  ‘What do you understand?’

  ‘I understand that you’re a psycho all right. How could they have automobiles in ancient Greece?’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Volodin, ‘how petty and precisely correct. They really will discharge you soon.’

  ‘God willing,’ said Maria.

  Serdyuk raised his head and looked attentively at Maria.

  ‘You know, Maria,’ he said, ‘just recently you’ve turned real bitchy. In the spiritual sense.’

  ‘I’ve got to get out of here, don’t you understand? I don’t want to spend all my life stuck in here. Who’s going to want me ten years from now?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Maria,’ Serdyuk said scornfully. ‘Can’t you understand that the love you and Arnold have can only exist in here?’

&nb
sp; ‘You watch your mouth, stork-face! Or I’ll smash this bust over your stupid head.’

  ‘Go on, just you try it, you berk,’ said Serdyuk, rising from his chair with a face that had turned pale. ‘Just you try it!’

  ‘I won’t have to try,’ answered Maria, also rising to his feet. ‘I’ll just do it, that’s all. People get killed for saying things like that.’

  He stepped towards the table and took hold of the bust.

  What followed lasted no more than a few seconds. Volodin and I leapt up from our seats. Volodin wrapped his arms around Serdyuk, who was advancing on Maria. Maria’s face twisted in a grimace of fury; he raised the bust above his head, swung it back and stepped towards Serdyuk. I pushed Maria away and saw that Volodin had seized Serdyuk in such a way that his arms were pinned to his body, and if Maria were to strike him with the bust, he would not even be able to protect himself with his hands. I tried to pull Volodin’s hands apart where they were clasped on Serdyuk’s chest. Meanwhile Serdyuk had closed his eyes and was smiling blissfully. Suddenly I noticed that Volodin was staring aghast over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw a lifeless plaster face with dusty wall-eyes slowly descending out of a fly-spotted sky.

  5

  The bust of Aristotle was the only thing I retained in my memory when I came round, although I am far from certain that the expression ‘to come round’ is entirely appropriate. Ever since my childhood I have sensed in it a certain shamefaced ambiguity. Round what exactly? To where? And, most intriguing of all, from where? Nothing, in short, but a cheating sleight of hand, like the card-sharps on the Volga steamers. As I grew older, I came to understand that the words ‘to come round’ actually mean ‘to come round to other people’s point of view’, because no sooner is one born than these other people begin explaining just how hard one must try to force oneself to assume a form which they find acceptable.

  However, that is not the point. I regard the expression as not entirely appropriate to describe my condition because when I awoke I did not do so completely – instead, I became aware of myself, so to speak, in that non-material world familiar to everyone on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness, where one’s surroundings consist of visions and thoughts which momentarily arise and dissolve in consciousness, while the person around whom they arise is entirely absent. One usually flits through this state instantaneously, but for some reason I remained stuck in it for several long seconds; my thoughts were mostly of Aristotle. They were incoherent and almost entirely meaningless; the ideological great-grandfather of Bolshevism was not the object of any particular sympathy on my part, but neither did I feel any personal hatred for him as a consequence of the previous day’s events – the concept of substance which he had invented was evidently insufficiently substantial to have inflicted upon me any truly serious damage. Curiously enough, in my half-dreaming state I was furnished with the most convincing of proofs for this – when the bust shattered into shards under the force of the blow, it proved to have been hollow all the time.