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.
I 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 imminent 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 cracks 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 the 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?’
‘Oh, if they were only about that. As in every dream, everything changes at a most fantastic pace. Last night, for instance, I dreamed about Japan. But the night before I did dream about the clinic, and do you know what happened? That butcher in charge of everything that goes on there asked me to write down in detail what happens to me here. He said he needed it for his work. Can you imagine it?’
‘I can,’ said Chapaev. ‘Why don’t you do as he says?’
I stared at him in amazement.
‘You mean to say you would seriously advise me to do it?’
He nodded.
‘But why?’
‘You told me yourself that in your nightmares everything changes with fantastic speed. Any consistent activity that you repeatedly come back to makes it possible to create something like a fixed centre to the dream. Then the dream becomes more real. You couldn’t possibly think up any better idea than making notes in your dream.’
I pondered the idea.
‘But what good is a fixed centre to my nightmares if what I really want is to get rid of them?’
&
nbsp; ‘It’s precisely in order to get rid of them – you can only get rid of something that is real.’
‘I suppose so. You mean, then, that I can write down absolutely everything that takes place here?’
‘Of course.’
‘But what should I call you in this journal of mine?’
Chapaev laughed.
‘Petka, it’s no accident you’re dreaming about a mental hospital. What difference does it make what you call me in the notes you make in a dream?’
‘That’s true enough,’ I said, feeling like a complete fool. ‘I was simply afraid that…No, there really must be something wrong with my head.’
‘Call me any name you like,’ said Chapaev. ‘Even Chapaev, if you like.’
‘Chapaev?’ I asked.
‘Why not? You can even write,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘that I had a long moustache, and after I said that I twirled it.’
He twirled his moustache with a gentle, precise movement of his fingers.
‘But I think the advice you were given applies more to reality,’ he said. ‘You should start writing down your dreams, and you should try to do it while you can still remember all the details.’
‘They are quite impossible to forget,’ I said. ‘Every time I come round, I realize that it was no more than a nightmare…But while I am dreaming, it’s impossible to understand what is real in actual fact – the carriage we are sitting in or that white-tiled hell where demons in white coats torment me at night.’
‘What is real in actual fact?’ Chapaev repeated after me, closing his eyes again. ‘That’s a question you’re not likely to find an answer to. Because in actual fact there is no actual fact.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well now, Petka my lad,’ said Chapaev, ‘I once used to know a Chinese communist by the name of Tzu-Chuang, who often dreamed the same dream, that he was a red butterfly fluttering through the grass and the flowers. And when he woke up, he often couldn’t make out whether the butterfly had dreamt it was engaged in revolutionary activity or the underground activist had had a dream about flitting through the air from flower to flower. So when this Tzu-Chuang was arrested in Mongolia for sabotage, what he said at his interrogation was that he was actually a butterfly who was dreaming about what was happening. Now since he was interrogated by Baron Jungern himself, and the Baron is a man of some considerable understanding, the next question was why this butterfly was on the communist side. He said he wasn’t on the communist side at all. So then they asked him why the butterfly was engaged in sabotage, and his answer was that all the things people do are so monstrous, it doesn’t make any difference whose side you’re on.’
‘And what happened to him?’
‘Nothing. They just stood him up in front of a firing squad and woke him up.’
‘And then what?’
Chapaev shrugged.
‘He carried on flitting around the flowers, I suppose.’
‘I understand, Vasily Ivanovich, I understand,’ I said thoughtfully.
The road made another looping turn, and a dizzying view of the town opened up on our left. I spotted the yellow dot of our manor-house and the bright green patch of low trees which it had taken us so long to traverse. The shallow mountain slopes on all sides came together at their base to form a kind of chalice-shaped depression, and lying on the very bottom of the chalice was Altai-Vidnyansk.
It was not the actual view of the town that made the most powerful impression, but the panorama of the chalice formed by the mountain slopes; the town was rather unkempt and reminded me more than anything of a heap of rubbish washed down into a pit by torrential rain. The houses were still half-concealed by the final lingering wisps of morning mist. I was suddenly astonished to realize that I myself was a part of the world which lay on the bottom of this gigantic drain – where this strange, confused civil war was happening, where people were greedily dividing up the tiny, ugly houses and the crooked patches of vegetable gardens in order to gain a firmer foothold in what was literally the sink of creation. I thought about the Chinese dreamer whose story Chapaev had told me and then looked down again. In the face of the motionless world stretched out around me, beneath the calm gaze of its sky, it became inexpressibly clear that the little town at the bottom of the pit was precisely like every other town in the world. All of them, I thought, lie on the bottom of the same kind of depression, even though it may not be discernible to the eye. They are all stewing in a massive devil’s cauldron on the flame that is said to rage at the centre of the Earth, and they are all simply different versions of one and the same nightmare which nothing can change for the better. The only thing that can be done with this nightmare is to awaken from it.
‘If they wake you up from your nightmares the same way they did that Chinaman, Petka,’ Chapaev said without opening his eyes, ‘all that’ll happen is that you’ll drop from one dream into another. You’ve been flitting to and fro like that all eternity. But if you can understand that absolutely everything that happens to you is a dream, then it won’t matter a damn what kind of dreams you have. And when you wake up afterwards, you’ll really wake up – for ever. If you want to, that is.’
‘But why is everything that is happening to me a dream?’
‘Because, Petka,’ Chapaev said, ‘there just isn’t anything else.’
The climb came to an end and we emerged on to a broad plateau. Far away on the horizon, beyond a line of shallow hills, the massive blue, lilac and purple forms of mountains thrust up high into the sky, with an immense open expanse of grass and flowers before them. Their colours were dull and faded, but there were so many of them that the overall tone of the steppe seemed not so much green as straw-coloured. It was so beautiful that for several minutes I forgot all about what Chapaev had said – and about everything else in the world.
Except, strangely enough, for that Chinese dreamer. As I looked at the faded faces of the flowers drifting past our carriage, I imagined him soaring through the space between them, pausing occasionally out of habit to paste up an anti-government broadsheet on a slim shoot of bracken, and then starting in surprise every time he recalled that it was a long time since he had had any broadsheets to paste up. And even if he had had any, who would read them?
Soon, however, I was disturbed from my meditations. Chapaev had obviously given our driver some kind of signal. We picked up speed, and everything around the carriage began to blur into stripes of colour. The Bashkir lashed the horses mercilessly, half-standing on the coach-box and shouting guttural sounds in an unfamiliar language.
The road along which we were travelling could be called that only in name. Perhaps there were fewer flowers growing on it than in the open field, and traces of some ancient rut could still be discerned at its centre, but it was far from easy to guess where it ran. Nonetheless, the surface of the steppe was so ideally even that we were hardly shaken at all. The cavalrymen in black who brought up the rear of our small detachment moved off the road, drew almost level with our carriage and formed into two groups, one on each side, so that now they were hurtling along with us over the grass in the form of an extended arc; it was as though our carriage had sprouted two narrow black wings.
The machine-gun landau in which Anna and Kotovsky were sitting also picked up speed and drew almost level with us. I noticed Kotovsky prodding his driver in the back with his cane and nodding towards our carriage. They were clearly trying to overtake us, and at one point they very nearly succeeded, hurtling along beside us at a distance of only a few yards. I noticed a design on the side of the tachanka, a circle divided by a wavy line into two halves, one black and one white, each of them with a small circle of the opposite colour at its centre – I thought I recognized it as an Eastern symbol of some kind. Beside it there was a large inscription, crudely daubed in white paint:
POWER OF NIGHT AND POWER OF DAY
SAME OLD GARBAGE ANY WAY
The Bashkir lashed our horses, and the tachanka fell behind again.
It seemed incomprehensible to me that Anna could have agreed to travel in a carriage decorated with words of that kind. But then I suddenly had the feeling, which rapidly hardened into certainty, that she was the very one who had written the inscription on the side of the landau. How little, in actual fact, did I really know about this woman!
Our detachment hurtled on across the steppe to the accompaniment of wild whistles from the cavalrymen. We must have covered five or six miles like that – the hills on the horizon had moved so much closer that I could clearly distinguish their large rocks and the trees that grew on them. The surface of the steppe across which our carriage was racing at such speed was now less even than when we had begun our gallop; sometimes the carriage was thrown high into the air, and I began to feel afraid that the excursion would end in a broken neck for some of our company. Then Chapaev drew his Mauser from its holster and fired into the air.
‘Enough!’ he roared. ‘Walk on!’
Our carriage slowed its pace. The horsemen, as though afraid of crossing the invisible boundary of a line projected from the rear axle of our carriage, began dropping out of view behind us one by one. The landau with Anna and Kotovsky also fell back, and within a few minutes we were again far ahead of them.
Ahead of us I noticed a vertical column of smoke rising from behind the hills. It was dense and white, like the smoke from grass and damp leaves thrown on to a fire; the strangest thing about it, however, was that it scarcely widened out at all as it rose, which made it appear like a tall white pillar propping up the sky. It was no more than a mile ahead of us, with its fire concealed by the hills. We continued our advance for a few more minutes and then halted.
The road came to an end at two low, steep-sided hillocks with a narrow path running between them. They were like gateposts to some natural gateway, and were so symmetrical that they looked like a pair of ancient towers which had sunk down into the ground many centuries ago. They seemed to mark a boundary, beyond which the landscape changed, with foothills beginning to merge into the mountains on the horizon. It seemed, too, that it was not only the landscape that was different on the far side; feeling a gust of wind on my face, I looked up in amazement at the column of smoke which rose absolutely straight from a source which must now be very close at hand.
Buddha's Little Finger Page 24
