Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘Okhae dzeimas,’ the receiver echoed cheerfully. ‘Mr Serdyuk?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk.

  ‘Hello. My name is Oda Nobunaga and I had a conversation with you yesterday evening. More precisely, last night. You were kind enough to give me a call.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk, clutching at his head with his free hand.

  ‘I have discussed your proposal with Mr Esitsune Kawabata, and he is prepared to receive you today at three o’clock for purposes of an interview.’

  Serdyuk didn’t recognize the voice in the receiver. He could tell straight away it was that of a foreigner – although he couldn’t hear any accent, the person talking to him made pauses, as though he were running through his vocabulary in search of the right word.

  ‘Much obliged,’ said Serdyuk. ‘But what proposal’s that?’

  ‘The one you made yesterday. Or today, to be precise.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Serdyuk. ‘A-a-ha!’

  ‘Write down the address,’ said Oda Nobunaga.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Serdyuk, ‘just a moment. I’ll get a pen.’

  ‘But why do you not have a notepad and a pen by the telephone?’ Nobunaga asked with obvious irritation in his voice. ‘A man of business should do so.’

  ‘I’m writing now.’

  ‘Nagornaya metro station, the exit on the right. There will be an iron fence facing you and a house, with an entrance to the yard. The precise address is Pyatikhlebny Lane, house number five. There will be a…What is it now…A plaque.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That is all from me. Sayonara, as they say,’ said Nobunaga and hung up.

  There was no beer in the fridge.

  Emerging on to the surface of the earth from Nagornaya metro station long before the appointed time, Serdyuk immediately saw a fence covered with battered and peeling tin-plate, but he didn’t believe it could be the same one mentioned by Mr Nobunaga – this fence was somehow too plain and too dirty. He walked around the area for a while, stopping the rare passers-by and asking where Pyatikhlebny Lane was. This was something nobody seemed to know, however, or perhaps they simply didn’t want to tell him – most of the people Serdyuk found to ask were old women in dark clothes plodding slowly on their way to some mysterious destination.

  It was a wild place, like the remnants of some industrial region bombed to smithereens in the distant past and now overgrown with wild grass, through which, here and there, pieces of rusty iron protruded. There was plenty of open space and sky, and he could see dark strips of forest on the horizon. But despite these banal commonplaces, this region was very unusual: if he looked to the west, where the green fence was, he saw a normal panoramic cityscape, but if he turned his gaze to the east, his field of view was entirely filled with a vast stretch of emptiness, with a few street lamps towering above it like gallows trees. It was as though Serdyuk had found his way precisely to the secret border between post-industrial Russia and primordial Rus.

  It was not one of the areas where serious foreign companies opened their offices, and Serdyuk decided this must be some two-bit firm staffed by Japanese who had failed to adjust fully to the demands of the changing world (for some reason he thought of the peasants from the film The Seven Samurai). It was clear now why they’d taken such an interest in his drunken phone call, and Serdyuk even felt a surge of sympathy and warm fellow-feeling for these slightly dull-witted foreigners who, just like himself, had not been able to find themselves a comfortable niche in life – and now, of course, the doubt that had been nagging at him all the way there, the idea that he really should have had a shave, quite simply disappeared.

  Mr Nobunaga’s direction that ‘there will be a house’ could have applied to several dozen buildings in his field of view. Serdyuk decided for no particular reason that the one he was looking for was a grey eight-storey building with a glass-fronted delicatessen on the ground floor. Remarkably enough, after he had spent about three minutes walking around the yard behind the building, he spotted a brass oblong on the wall with the inscription ‘TAIRA TRADING HOUSE’ and a tiny bell-push, at first glance invisible against the uneven surface of the wall. About a yard away from the plaque there was a crude iron door hanging on immense hinges, painted with green paint. Serdyuk looked around in consternation – apart from the door, the only other thing the plaque could possibly relate to was a cast-iron manhole cover in the asphalt. Serdyuk waited until his watch showed two minutes to three and rang the bell.

  The door opened immediately. Standing behind it was the inevitable hulk in camouflage gear, holding a rubber truncheon. Serdyuk nodded to him and opened his mouth in order to explain the reason for his visit – but then his jaw dropped.

  Beyond the door there was a small hallway with a desk, a telephone and a chair, and on the wall of this hallway there was a large mural, showing a corridor extending into infinity. But on looking more closely at the mural, Serdyuk realized it wasn’t a mural at all, it was a genuine corridor, which began on the other side of a glass door. This corridor was very strange: there were lanterns hanging on its walls – he could actually see flickering flames through their thin rice-paper shades – and scattered over the floor was a thick layer of yellow sand, across the surface of which narrow mats made of slivers of split bamboo lay side by side to form a kind of carpet-runner. The same emblem that he had seen in the newspaper was drawn in bright red paint on the lanterns – a flower with four diamond-shaped petals (the side petals were longer than the others), enclosed in an oval. The corridor did not actually run off into infinity, as he’d thought at first, it simply curved smoothly to the right (it was the first time Serdyuk had seen that kind of layout in a building in Moscow), and its far end was hidden from sight.

  ‘What’yer want?’ said the security guard, breaking the silence.

  ‘I’ve a meeting with Mr Kawabata,’ said Serdyuk, pulling himself together, ‘at three o’clock.’

  ‘Ah. Come inside then, quick. They don’t like it when the door’s left open for long.’

  Serdyuk stepped inside and the guard closed the door and locked it with something that looked like a massive valve-wheel.

  ‘Take your shoes off, please,’ he said. ‘The geta are over there.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Serdyuk.

  ‘The geta. What they use for slippers. They don’t wear any other shoes inside. That’s a strict rule.’

  Serdyuk saw several pairs of wooden shoes lying on the floor. They looked very clumsy and uncomfortable, something like tall shoe-stretchers with a strap made out of a split string, and you could only put the shoe-stretchers on your bare feet, because the strap had to be inserted between the big toe and the second toe. Just for a second he thought the security guard was joking, but then he noticed several pairs of shiny black shoes with socks protruding from them standing in the corner. He sat down on a low bench and began removing his own shoes. When the procedure was complete, he stood up and noticed that the geta had made him three or four inches taller.

  ‘Can I go in now?’ he asked.

  ‘Go ahead. Take a lantern and go straight down the corridor. Room number three.’

  ‘Why the lantern?’ Serdyuk asked in amazement.

  ‘That’s the rule here,’ said the security guard, taking one of the lanterns down from the wall and holding it out to Serdyuk, ‘you don’t wear a tie to keep you warm, do you?’

  Serdyuk, who had knotted a tie round his neck that morning for the first time in many years, found this argument quite convincing. At the same time he felt a desire to take a look inside the lantern to see whether there was a real flame in there or not.

  ‘Room number three,’ repeated the security guard, ‘but the numbers are in Japanese. It’s the one with three strokes one above the other. You know, like the trigram for “sky”.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Serdyuk, ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘And whatever you do, don’t knock. Just let them know you’re outside – try clearing your throat, or say a few
words. Then wait for them to tell you what to do.’

  Serdyuk set off, lifting his feet high in the air like a stork and clutching the lantern at arm’s length. Walking was very awkward, the shoe-stretchers squeaked indignantly under his feet and Serdyuk blushed at the thought of the security guard laughing to himself as he watched. Around the smooth bend he found a small dimly lit hall with black beams running across the ceiling. At first Serdyuk couldn’t see any doors there, but then he realized the tall wall panels were doors that moved sideways. There was a sheet of paper hanging on one of the panels. Serdyuk held his lantern close to it and when he saw the three lines drawn in black ink, he knew this must be room number three.

  There was music playing quietly behind the door. It was some obscure string instrument: the timbre of the sound was unusual, and the slow melody, built upon strange and – as it seemed to Serdyuk – ancient harmonies, was sad and plaintive. Serdyuk cleared his throat. There was no response from beyond the wall. He cleared his throat again, louder this time and thought that if he had to do it again he would probably puke.

  ‘Come in,’ said a voice behind the door.

  Serdyuk slid the partition to the left and saw a room with its floor carpeted with simple dark bamboo mats. Sitting on a number of coloured cushions scattered in the corner with his legs folded under him was a barefooted man in a dark suit. He was playing a strange instrument that looked like a long lute with a small sound-box, and he took absolutely no notice of Serdyuk’s appearance. His face could hardly have been called mongoloid, though you could say there was something southern about it – Serdyuk’s thoughts on this point followed a highly specific route as he recalled a trip he’d made to Rostov-on-Don the year before. Standing on the floor of the room was a small electric cooker with a single ring, supporting a voluminous saucepan, and a black, streamlined fax machine, with a lead that disappeared into a hole in the wall. Serdyuk went in, put down his lantern on the floor and closed the door behind him.

  The man in the suit gave a final touch to a string and raised his puffy, red eyes in a gesture of farewell to the note as it departed this world for ever, before carefully laying his instrument on the floor. His movements were very slow and economical, as though he were afraid a clumsy or abrupt gesture might offend someone who was present in the room but invisible to Serdyuk. Taking a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket he wiped away the tears from his eyes and turned towards his visitor. They looked at each other for a while.

  ‘Hello. My name is Serdyuk.’

  ‘Kawabata,’ said the man.

  He sprang to his feet, walked briskly over to Serdyuk and took him by the hand. His palm was cold and dry.

  ‘Please,’ he said, literally dragging Serdyuk over to the scattered cushions, ‘sit down. Please, sit down.’

  Serdyuk sat down.

  ‘I…’ he began, but Kawabata interrupted him:

  ‘I don’t want to hear a word. In Japan we have a tradition, a very ancient tradition which is still alive to this day, which says that if a person enters your house with a lantern in his hand and geta on his feet, it means that it is dark outside and the weather is bad, and the very first thing you must do is pour him some warm sake.’

  With these words Kawabata fished a fat bottle with a short neck out of the saucepan. It was sealed with a watertight stopper and there was a long thread tied to its neck, which Kawabata used to extract it. Two small porcelain glasses with indecent drawings on them appeared – they depicted beautiful women with unnaturally high arched eyebrows giving themselves in intricately contrived poses to serious-looking men wearing small blue caps. Kawabata filled the glasses to the brim.

  ‘Please,’ he said, and held out one of the glasses to Serdyuk.

  Serdyuk tipped the contents into his mouth. The liquid reminded him most of all of vodka diluted with rice water. Worse still, it was hot – perhaps that was the reason why he puked straight on to the floor mats as soon as he swallowed it. The feeling of shame and self-loathing that overwhelmed him was so powerful that he just covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kawabata politely, ‘there must be a real storm outside.’

  He clapped his hands.

  Serdyuk half-opened his eyes. Two girls had appeared in the room, dressed in a manner very similar to the women shown on the glasses. They even had the same high eyebrows – Serdyuk took a closer look and realized they were drawn on their foreheads with ink. In short, the resemblance was so complete that Serdyuk’s thoughts were only restrained from running riot by the shame he had felt a few seconds earlier. The girls quickly rolled up the soiled mats, laid out fresh ones in their place and left the room – not by the door that Serdyuk had used to enter, but by another; apparently there was another wall panel that moved sideways.

  ‘Please,’ said Kawabata.

  Serdyuk raised his eyes. The Japanese was holding out another glass of sake, Serdyuk gave a pitiful smile and shrugged.

  ‘This time,’ said Kawabata, ‘everything will be fine.’

  Serdyuk drank it. And this time the effect really was quite different – the sake went down very smoothly and a healing warmth spread through his body.

  ‘You know what the trouble is,’ he said, ‘yesterday…’

  ‘First another one,’ said Kawabata.

  The fax machine on the floor jangled and a sheet of paper thickly covered with hieroglyphics came slithering out of it. Kawabata waited for the paper to stop moving, then tore the sheet out of the machine and became engrossed in studying it, completely forgetting about Serdyuk.

  Serdyuk examined his surroundings. The walls of the room were covered with identical wooden panels, and now that the sake had neutralized the consequences of yesterday’s bout of nostalgia, each of them had assumed the appearance of a door leading into the unknown. But then one of the panels, which had a printed engraving hanging on it, was quite clearly not a door.

  Like everything else in Mr Kawabata’s office, the print was strange. It consisted of an immense sheet of paper in the centre of which a picture seemed gradually to emerge out of a mass of carelessly applied yet precisely positioned lines. It showed a naked man (his figure was extremely stylized, but it was clear from the realistically depicted sexual organ that he was a man) standing on the edge of a precipice. There were several weights of various sizes hung around his neck, and he had a sword in each hand; his eyes were blindfolded with a white cloth, and the edge of the precipice was under his very feet. There were a few other minor details – the sun setting into a bank of mist, birds in the sky and the roof of a pagoda in the distance – but despite these romantic digressions, the main sensation aroused in Serdyuk’s soul by the engraving was one of hopelessness.

  ‘That is our national artist Aketi Mitsuhide,’ said Kawabata, ‘the one who died recently from eating fugu fish. How would you describe the theme of this print?’

  Serdyuk’s eyes slithered over the figure depicted in the print, moving upwards from its exposed penis to the weights hanging on its chest.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, surprising even himself. ‘On and giri. He’s showing his prick and he’s got weights round his neck.’

  Kawabata clapped his hands and laughed.

  ‘More sake?’ he asked.

  ‘You know,’ replied Serdyuk, ‘I’d be glad to, but perhaps we could do the interview first? I get drunk very quickly.’

  ‘The interview is already over,’ said Kawabata, filling the glasses. ‘Let me tell you all about it. Our firm has existed for a very long time, so long in fact that if I told you, I’m afraid you wouldn’t believe me. Our traditions are more important to us than anything else. We can only be approached, if you will allow me to use a figurative expression, through a very narrow door, and you have just stepped through it with confidence. Congratulations.’

  ‘What door’s that?’ asked Serdyuk.

  Kawabata pointed to the print.

  ‘That one,’ he said. ‘The only one that leads into Taira I
ncorporated.’

  ‘I don’t really understand,’ said Serdyuk. ‘As far as I was aware, you’re traders, and for you…’

  Kawabata raised an open palm.

  ‘I am frequently horrified to observe,’ he said, ‘that half of Russia has already been infected with the repulsive pragmatism of the West. Present company excepted, of course, but I have good reason for saying so.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with pragmatism?’ asked Serdyuk.

  ‘In ancient times,’ said Kawabata, ‘in our country officials were appointed to important posts after examinations in which they wrote an essay on beauty. And this was a very wise principle, for if a man has an understanding of that which is immeasurably higher than bureaucratic procedures, then he will certainly be able to cope with such lower matters. If your mind has penetrated with such lightning swiftness the mystery of the ancient allegory encoded in the drawing, then could all those price lists and overheads possibly cause you the slightest problem? Never. Moreover, after your answer I would consider it an honour to drink with you. Please do not refuse me.’

  Serdyuk downed another one and unexpectedly found he had fallen into reminiscing about the previous day – it seemed he’d gone on from Pushkin Square to the Clean Ponds, but it wasn’t clear to him why: all that was left in his memory was the monument to Griboedov, viewed in an odd perspective, as though he were looking at it from underneath a bench.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kawabata thoughtfully, ‘but if you think about it, it’s a terrible picture. The only things that differentiate us from animals are the rules and rituals which we have agreed on among ourselves. To transgress them is worse than to die, because only they separate us from the abyss of chaos which lies at our very feet – if, of course, we remove the blindfold from our eyes.’

  He pointed to the print.

  ‘But in Japan we have another tradition – sometimes, just for a second, deep within ourselves – to renounce all traditions, to abandon, as we say, Buddha and Mara, in order to experience the inexpressible taste of reality. And this second sometimes produces remarkable works of art…’