Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘I understand.’

  Kotovsky took a sip of champagne.

  ‘By the way, Pyotr,’ he said casually, ‘while we’re on the subject, I heard you have some cocaine.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. Now that the subject has come up anyway.’

  I reached into my travelling bag, took out the tin and put it on the table.

  ‘Please help yourself.’

  Kotovsky needed no further persuasion. The white tracks he sprinkled on the surface of the table looked like two major highways under construction. He went through all the requisite manipulations and leaned back in his armchair. After waiting a minute or so, I asked out of politeness:

  ‘And do you often think about Russia in that manner?’

  ‘When I lived in Odessa, I thought about her at least three times a day,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘It was giving me nosebleeds. Then I gave it up. I didn’t want to become dependent on anything.’

  ‘And what happened now? Was it Dostoevsky who tempted you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘A certain inner drama.’

  I suddenly had an unexpected idea.

  ‘Tell me, Grigory, are you very fond of your trotters?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘We could swap. Half of this tin for your carriage.’

  Kotovsky gave a me a sharp glance, then he picked up the tin from the table, looked into it and said:

  ‘You really know how to tempt a man. Why would you want my trotters?’

  ‘To go driving. Why else?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Kotovsky, ‘I agree. As it happens, I have a set of chemical scales in my luggage…’

  ‘Measure it by eye,’ I said, ‘I came by it very easily.’

  Extracting a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his dressing-gown, he emptied out the papyrosas from it and then took out a penknife and used its blade to transfer part of the powder to the case.

  ‘Won’t it spill?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry, I got this cigarette case in Odessa. It’s special. The trotters are yours.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Shall we drink to our deal?’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said, raising my glass.

  Kotovsky drained his champagne, put the cigarette case in his pocket and picked up the candlestick.

  ‘Well, thank you for the conversation. Please forgive me, I beg you, for intruding during the night.’

  ‘Good night to you. Would you permit me to ask you one question? Since you have already mentioned it yourself – what is the inner drama which is eased so well by cocaine?’

  ‘In the face of the drama of Russia it dwindles to nothing,’ said Kotovsky. He nodded curtly in military fashion and left the room.

  I tried for some time to get to sleep, but was unsuccessful. At first I thought about Kotovsky – I must admit that he had made a rather pleasant impression on me, there was a sense of style to him. Then my thoughts turned back to Chapaev. I began thinking about his ‘nowhere’ and our conversation. At first glance it seemed far from complicated: he had asked me to answer the question, whether I exist because of the world, or the world exists because of me. Of course, it all amounted to nothing more than banal dialectics, but there was a rather frightening aspect to it, which he had pointed out in a masterly fashion with his questions, at first sight so idiotic, about the place where it all happens. If the entire world exists within me, then where do I exist? And if I exist within this world, then where, in what place in the world, is my consciousness located? One might say, I thought, that on the one hand the world exists in me and on the other I exist in the world, and these are simply the poles of a single semantic magnet, but the tricky thing was that there was no peg on which to hang this magnet, this dialectical dyad.

  There was nowhere for it to exist!

  Because its existence required an individual in whose consciousness it could come into being. And that individual had nowhere to exist, because any ‘where’ could only arise in a consciousness for which there was simply no place other than one created by itself…But then where was it before it created this place for itself? If within itself, then where?

  I suddenly felt afraid of being alone. Throwing my military jacket over my shoulders, I went out into the corridor, saw the blue radiance of the moon shining through the window on to the staircase and descended to the hallway.

  The horseless carriage was standing near the door. I walked round it a couple of times, admiring its clean lines – the moonlight seemed to lend it additional charm. A horse snorted somewhere close to me. I turned round and saw Chapaev standing with a curry-comb in his hand, brushing the animal’s mane. I walked over and stood beside him; he looked at me. I wonder, I thought, what he will say if I ask him where this ‘nowhere’ of his is located. He will have to define the word in terms of itself, and will find his position in the conversation no better than my own.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ asked Chapaev.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Something is bothering me.’

  ‘What is it, never seen the void before?’

  I realized that by the word ‘void’ he meant precisely the ‘nowhere’ which I had become aware of only a few minutes earlier.

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Never.’

  ‘Then just what have you been seeing, Petka?’ Chapaev asked gently.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ I said. ‘Where are my trotters?’

  ‘In the stable,’ said Chapaev. ‘And just how long have they been yours and not Kotovsky’s?’

  ‘About a quarter of an hour now.’

  Chapaev laughed.

  ‘You be careful with Grigory,’ he said. ‘He’s not as straightforward as he seems.’

  ‘I have already realized that,’ I replied. ‘You know, Vasily Ivanovich, I just cannot get your words out of my head. You certainly know how to drive a person into a corner.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Chapaev, forcing the curry-comb through the tangles of horsehair, ‘I do. And then I give them a good burst from the machine-gun…’

  ‘But I think,’ I said, ‘that I can do it too.’

  ‘Try it.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall also ask a sequence of questions about place.’

  ‘Ask away, ask away,’ muttered Chapaev.

  ‘Let us start at the beginning. There you stand combing a horse. But where is this horse?’

  Chapaev looked at me in amazement. ‘Petka, have you gone completely off your chump?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s right here in front of your face.’

  I said nothing for several seconds. I had not been prepared for such a turn of events. Chapaev shook his head doubtfully.

  ‘You know, Petka,’ he said, ‘I reckon you’d better get off to bed.’

  I smiled stupidly and wandered back towards the house. Somehow managing to reach my bed, I collapsed on to it and began tumbling down into the next nightmare; I had sensed its inevitable onset as I was still climbing the stairs.

  I did not have to wait for long. I began dreaming of a blue-eyed, blond-haired man tethered with loops to a strange-looking seat like a dentist’s chair. In the dream I knew for certain that his name was Serdyuk, and that what was happening to him now was soon going to happen to me. Coloured wires connected Serdyuk’s arms to a menacing-looking dynamolike machine standing on the floor; I was sufficiently conscious to guess that this mechanism had been added to the picture by my own mind. The handle of the machine was being turned by two men in white coats who were leaning over it. At first they turned the handle slowly, and the man in the armchair merely trembled and bit his lip, but gradually their movements grew faster, and one after another huge shuddering movements began sweeping in waves through the bound man’s body. At last he could no longer restrain himself from crying out.

  ‘Stop it!’ he said.

  But his tormentors only worked even faster.

  ‘Stop the dynamo,’ he roared as loudly as he could, ‘turn
off the dynamo! The dynamo! The dynamo! The DY-NA-MO!!!’

  6

  ‘Next station – “Dynamo”.’

  The voice from the loudspeaker brought Serdyuk to attention.

  The passenger sitting opposite, a weird-looking type with a round, pockmarked face, dressed in a ditty padded kaftan and a turban streaked with splashes of green paint, caught Serdyuk’s senseless glance, touched two fingers to his turban and said loudly:

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Hitler heil,’ Serdyuk replied politely and turned his gaze away.

  He couldn’t figure out who the man was or what he was doing riding in the metro, when an ugly mug like that should have been driving around in at least a BMW.

  Serdyuk sighed, squinted down to his right and began reading the book which lay open on the knees of his neighbour. It was a thin, tattered brochure wrapped in newsprint, on which the words ‘Japanese Militarism’ had been scrawled in ballpoint pen. The brochure was obviously some kind of semi-secret Soviet textbook: the paper was yellow with age and the typeface was peculiar, with a text made up of large numbers of Japanese words set in italics.

  ‘The concept of social duty,’ read Serdyuk, ‘is interwoven for the Japanese with a sense of natural human duty in a way that generates the emotional energy of high drama. This duty is expressed in the concepts on and giri (derived from the hieroglyphs meaning “to prick” and “to weigh down” respectively) which are still very far from being historical curiosities. On is the “debt of gratitude” owed by a child to its parents, a vassal to his suzerain, a citizen to the state. Giri is “obligation and responsibility”, and requires that each individual act in accordance with his station and position in society. It is also obligation in relation to one’s own self, the preservation of the honour and dignity of one’s own person, of one’s name. Duty consists in being prepared to sacrifice oneself in the name of on and giri, which define a specific code of social, professional and human behaviour.’

  His neighbour apparently noticed that Serdyuk was reading his book, and he lifted it closer to his face, half-closing it for good measure, so that the text was completely hidden. Serdyuk closed his eyes.

  That’s why they’re able to live like normal human beings, he thought, because they never forget about their duty. Don’t spend all their time getting pissed like folks here.

  It’s not really possible to say what exactly went on in his head over the next few minutes, but when the train stopped at Pushkinskaya station and Serdyuk emerged from the carriage his own soul had become filled with the fixed desire to have a drink – in fact, to take an entire skinful of something. Initially this desire remained formless and unrecognized, acknowledged merely as a vague melancholy relating to something unattainable and seemingly lost for ever, and it only assumed its true form when Serdyuk found himself face to face with a long rank of armour-plated kiosks, from inside which identical pairs of Caucasian eyes surveyed enemy territory through narrow observation slits.

  Deciding on what exactly he wanted proved more difficult. There was a very wide, but fairly second-rate selection – more like an election than a piss-up, he thought. Serdyuk hesitated for a long time, until he finally spotted a bottle of port wine bearing the name ‘Livadia’ in one of the glass windows.

  Serdyuk’s very first glance at the bottle brought back clear memories of a certain forgotten morning in his youth; a secluded corner in the yard of the institute where he studied, stacked high with crates, the sun on the yellow leaves and a group of laughing students all from the same year, handing round a bottle of that same port wine (with a slightly different label, it was true – in those days they hadn’t started putting dots on the Russian ‘i’s yet). Serdyuk also recalled that to reach that secluded spot, secure against observation from all sides, you had to slip through between some rusty railings, usually messing up your jacket in the process. But the most important thing in all of this wasn’t the port wine or the railings, it was the fleeting reminiscence that triggered a pang of sadness in his heart – the memory of all the limitless opportunities and endless highways there used to be in the world that stretched away from that corner of the yard.

  This memory was followed rapidly by the absolutely unbearable thought that the world itself had not changed at all since those old days, it was just that he couldn’t see it any more with the same eyes as he had then: he could no longer squeeze through those railings, and there was nowhere left to squeeze into either – that little patch of emptiness behind the railings had long since been completely paved over with zinc-plated coffins of experience.

  But if he couldn’t view the world through those same eyes any more, he could at least try for a glimpse of it through the same glass, darkly. Thrusting his money in through the embrasure of the kiosk, Serdyuk scooped up the green grenade that popped out through the same opening. He crossed the street, picked his way carefully between the puddles that reflected the sky of a late spring afternoon, sat down on a bench opposite the green figure of Pushkin and pulled the plastic stopper out of the bottle with his teeth. The port wine still tasted exactly the same as it had always done – one more proof that reform had not really touched the basic foundations of Russian life, but merely swept like a hurricane across its surface.

  Serdyuk polished off the bottle in a few long gulps, then carefully tossed it into the bushes behind the low granite kerb; an intelligent-looking old woman who had been pretending to read a newspaper went after it straight away. Serdyuk slumped back against the bench.

  Intoxication is by its nature faceless and cosmopolitan. The high that hit him a few minutes later had nothing in common with the promise implied by the bottle’s label with its cypresses, antique arches and brilliant stars in a dark-blue sky. There was nothing in it to indicate that the port wine actually came from the left bank of the Crimea, and the suspicion even flashed through his mind that if it had come from the right bank, or even from Moldavia, the world around him would still have changed in the same fashion.

  The world was changed all right, and quite noticeably – it stopped feeling hostile, and the people walking past him were gradually transformed from devoted disciples of global evil into its victims, although they themselves had no inkling that was what they were. After another minute or two something happened to global evil itself – it either disappeared or simply stopped being important. The intoxication mounted to its blissful zenith, lingered for a few brief seconds at the highest point, and then the usual ballast of drunken thoughts dragged him back down into reality.

  Three schoolboys walked past Serdyuk and he heard their breaking voices repeating the words ‘you gotta problem?’ with forceful enthusiasm. Their backs receded in the direction of an amphibious Japanese Jeep parked at the edge of the pavement with a big hoist on the front of its snout. Jutting up directly above the Jeep on the other side of Tverskaya Street he could see the McDonald’s sign, looking like the yellow merlon of some invisible fortress wall. Somehow it all left Serdyuk in no doubt as to what the future held for them.

  His thoughts moved back to the book he had read in the metro. ‘The Japanese,’ Serdyuk thought, ‘now there’s a great nation! Just think – they’ve had two atom bombs dropped on them, they’ve had their islands taken away, but they’ve survived…Why is it nobody here can see anything but America? What the hell good is America to us? It’s Japan we should be following – we’re neighbours, aren’t we? It’s the will of God. And they need to be friends with us too – between the two of us we’d polish off your America soon enough…with its atom bombs and asset managers…’

  In some imperceptible fashion, these thoughts developed into a decision to go for another bottle. Serdyuk thought for a while about what to buy. He didn’t fancy any more port wine. The right thing to follow the playful left-bank adagio seemed like a long calm andante – he wanted something simple and straightforward with no boundaries to it, like the sea in the TV programme Travellers’ Club, or the field of wheat on the share certificate he�
��d received in exchange for his privatization voucher. After a few minutes’ thought, Serdyuk decided to get some Dutch spirit.

  Going back to the same bench, he opened the bottle, poured out half a plastic cupful, drank it, then gulped at the air with his scorched mouth as he tore open the newspaper wrapped around the hamburger he’d bought to go with his drink. His eyes encountered a strange symbol, a red flower with asymmetrical petals set inside an oval. There was a notice below the emblem:

  ‘The Moscow branch of the Japanese firm Taira Incorporated is interviewing potential employees. Knowledge of English and computer skills essential.’

  Serdyuk cocked his head sideways. For a second he thought he’d seen a second notice printed beside the first one, decorated with a similar emblem, but when he took a closer look at the sheet of newspaper, he realized that there really were two ovals – right beside the flower inside its oval border there was a ring of onion, a wedge of dead grey flesh protruding from under the crust of bread and a bloody streak of ketchup. Serdyuk noted with satisfaction that the various levels of reality were beginning to merge into each other, carefully tore the notice out of the newspaper, licked a drop of ketchup off it, folded it in two and stuck it in his pocket.

  Everything after that went as usual.

  He was woken by a sick feeling and the grey light of morning. The major irritant, of course, was the light – as always, it seemed to have been mixed with chlorine in order to disinfect it. Looking around, Serdyuk realized he was at home, and apparently he’d had visitors the evening before – just who, he couldn’t remember. He struggled up from the floor, took off his mud-streaked jacket and cap, went out into the corridor and hung them on a hook. Then he was visited by the comforting thought that there might be some beer in the fridge – that had happened several times before in his life. But when he was only a few feet from the fridge the phone on the wall began to ring. Serdyuk took the receiver off the hook and tried to say ‘hello’, but the very effort of speaking was so painful that instead he gave out a croak that sounded something like ‘Oh-aye-aye’.