Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  Kotovsky was wearing a brown two-piece suit; perched on his head was a dandified hat with a wide brim, and he had a leather portmanteau in each hand. He set them down on the floor and raised two fingers to his forehead.

  ‘Good evening, Pyotr,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’

  ‘Are you leaving?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. And I have no idea why you are staying,’ said Kotovsky. ‘Tomorrow or the next day these weavers will torch the entire place. I simply cannot understand what Chapaev is hoping for.’

  ‘He was intending to resolve that problem today.’

  Kotovsky shrugged.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘problems can be resolved in various ways: you can simply drink yourself into a fog, and then for a while they will disappear. But I prefer to deal with them, to sort them out – at least until they begin to sort me out. The train leaves at eight o’clock this evening. It is still not too late. Five days, and we are in Paris.’

  ‘I am staying.’

  Kotovsky looked at me carefully.

  ‘You do realize that you are mad?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It will all end with the three of you being arrested and that Furmanov in supreme command.’

  ‘That does not frighten me,’ I said.

  ‘You mean you are not afraid of arrest? Of course, all of us in the Russian intelligentsia do retain a certain secret freedom à la Pushkine, even in the madhouse, and it is possible…’

  I laughed. ‘Kotovsky, you have a quite remarkable talent for detecting the rhythm of my own thought. I was actually pondering on that very theme only today, and I can tell you what the secret freedom of the Russian intellectual really consists of.’

  ‘If it will not take too long, I should be most obliged to you,’ he replied.

  ‘A year ago, I think it was, there was a most interesting event in St Petersburg. Several social democrats arrived from England – of course, they were appalled by what they found – and we had a meeting with them on Basseinaya Street, organized through the Union of Poets. Blok was there, and he spent the whole evening telling them about this secret freedom which, as he said, we all laud, following Pushkin. That was the last time I saw him, he was dressed all in black and quite inexpressibly morose. Then he left and the Englishmen, who naturally had not understood a thing, began asking us exactly what this secret freedom was; nobody could give them a proper answer, until a Romanian who happened for some reason to be travelling with the Englishmen said that he understood what was meant.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kotovsky, and he glanced at his watch.

  ‘No need for concern, this will not take long. He said that the Romanian language has a similar idiom – haz baragaz, or something of the kind – I forget the exact pronunciation, but the words literally mean “underground laughter”. Apparently, during the Middle Ages Romania was frequently invaded by all sorts of nomadic tribes, and so the peasants constructed immense dugouts, entire underground houses, into which they drove their livestock the moment a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. They themselves hid in these places as well, and since the dugouts were quite excellently camouflaged, the nomads could never find a thing. Naturally, when they were underground the peasants were very quiet, but just occasionally, when they were quite overcome by joy at their own cunning in deceiving everyone, they would cover their mouths with their hands and laugh very, very quietly. There is your secret freedom, the Romanian said, it is when you are sitting wedged in among a herd of foul-smelling goats and sheep and you point up at the roof with your finger and giggle very, very quietly. You know, Kotovsky, it was such a very apt description of the situation, that from that evening onwards I ceased being a member of the Russian intelligentsia. Underground giggling is not for me. Freedom cannot be secret.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Kotovsky. ‘Interesting. But I am afraid it is time for me to be going.’

  ‘Let me see you to the gate,’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘There is the very devil of a commotion out there in the yard.’

  ‘As I was saying.’

  I put the Browning into my pocket, picked up one of Kotovsky’s portmanteaus and was on the point of following him along the corridor when I was suddenly struck by a strange presentiment that I was seeing my room for the very last time. I halted in the doorway and looked around it carefully; two light armchairs, a bed, a small table with copies of Isis for 1915. My God, I thought, if things really are that bad, what does it matter that I shall never come back here? What does it matter that I do not know where I am going? How many places have I already left behind for ever?

  ‘Have you forgotten something?’ asked Kotovsky.

  ‘No, it’s nothing,’ I replied.

  The sight that greeted us when we emerged on to the porch of the manor-house reminded me in some indefinable manner of Briullov’s painting The Last Day of Pompeii. There were not actually any collapsing columns or clouds of smoke against a black sky, just two large bonfires burning in the darkness and blind-drunk weavers wandering everywhere. But the way in which they slapped one another on the shoulder, the way they stopped to relieve themselves in public or to raise a bottle to their lips, the way some half-naked, drunken women were laughing as they staggered around the yard, together with the menacing red glow of the fires that illuminated the entire Bacchanalian scene – all served to induce a sense of impending menace, final and implacable.

  We walked quickly to the gate without speaking; some men with rifles sitting by one of the bonfires waved for us to join them and yelled something indistinct, and Kotovsky nervously stuck his hand in his pocket. Nobody fell in behind us, thank God, but the last few yards to the gate, when our defenceless backs were exposed to this entire drunken rabble, seemed extremely long. We went out of the gate and walked on another twenty steps or so, and then I halted. The street winding spiral-fashion down the hill was deserted: a few street lamps were burning, and the damp cobblestones gleamed dully under their calm light.

  ‘I will not go any further,’ I said. ‘I wish you luck.’

  ‘And I you. Who knows, perhaps we shall meet again some time,’ he said with a strange smile. ‘Or hear news of each other.’

  We shook hands. He raised two fingers to the brim of his hat once again, and without turning to look back, he set off down the street. I watched his broad figure until it disappeared round a bend, and then began slowly walking back. I stopped at the gates and glanced in through them cautiously. The window of Chapaev’s study was in darkness. I suddenly realized why I had felt such horror at the sight I had seen in the yard – there was something about it which reminded me of the world of Baron Jungern. I did not feel the slightest desire to walk back past the bonfires and the drunken weavers.

  I realized where Chapaev might be. I walked along the fence for another forty yards, then glanced around. There was no one in sight. Jumping up, I grabbed hold of the top plank, managed somehow to haul myself up and over it and jumped down.

  It was dark here; the flames of the bonfires were hidden behind the dark silhouette of the silent manor-house. Feeling my way by touch between the trees still wet from the recent rain, I scrambled down the slope into the gully, then slipped and slid into it on my back. The invisible brook was babbling somewhere off to my right; I walked towards it with my hands extended in front of me and after a few steps I glimpsed the brightly lit window of the bathhouse between the trunks of the trees.

  ‘Come in, Petka,’ Chapaev shouted in response to my knock.

  He was sitting at the familiar rough wooden table, which once again bore a huge bottle of moonshine, several glasses and plates, a kerosene lamp and a plump file full of papers; he was wearing a long white Russian shirt outside his trousers, unbuttoned to the navel, and he was already extremely drunk.

  ‘How’s things?’ he asked

  ‘I thought you were intending to resolve the problem of the weavers,’ I said.

  ‘I am resolving it,’ said Chapaev, filling two glasses
with moonshine.

  ‘I can see that Kotovsky knows you very well,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Chapaev, ‘and I know him very well, too.’

  ‘He has just left for Paris on the evening train. It occurs to me that we have made a serious mistake in not following his example.’

  Chapaev frowned.

  ‘But desire still burns within us,’ he chanted, ‘the trains depart for it and the butterfly of consciousness flits from nowhere to nowhere…’

  ‘So you have read it too? I am very flattered,’ I said and was immediately struck by the dreary thought that the word ‘too’ was somewhat misplaced. ‘Listen, if we leave straight away, we could still catch the train.’

  ‘So what’s new for me to see in this Paris of yours?’ Chapaev asked.

  ‘I suppose just what we’ll be seeing here soon,’ I answered.

  Chapaev chuckled. ‘Right you are, Petka.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said with concern, ‘where is Anna at the moment? It’s not safe in the house.’

  ‘I gave her a task to do,’ said Chapaev, ‘she’ll be here soon. You just take a seat. I’ve been sitting here all this time waiting for you – already drunk half the bottle.’

  I sat down facing him.

  ‘Your health!’

  I shrugged. There was nothing to be done. ‘Your health, Vasily Ivanovich.’

  We drank. Chapaev gazed moodily into the dim flame of the kerosene lamp.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about these nightmares of yours,’ he said, laying his hand on the file. ‘I’ve reread all these stories you wrote. About Serdyuk, and about that fellow Maria, and about the doctors and the gangsters. Did you ever pay any attention to the way you wake up from all of them?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, just try to remember, will you?’

  ‘At a certain moment it simply becomes clear that it is all a dream. That’s all there is to it,’ I said uncertainly. ‘When I really begin to feel too bad, I suddenly realize that in fact there is nothing to be afraid of, because…’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘I am struggling to find the words. I would put it like this – because there is a place to which I can wake up.’

  Chapaev slapped the table with his open hand.

  ‘Where exactly can you wake up to?’

  I had no answer to that question.

  ‘I do not know,’ I said.

  Chapaev raised his eyes to look into mine and smiled. He suddenly no longer seemed drunk.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘That’s the very place. As soon as you are swept up in the flow of your dreams, you yourself become part of it all – because in that flow everything is relative, everything is in motion, and there is nothing for you to grab hold of and cling to. You don’t realize when you are drawn into the whirlpool, because you are moving along together with the water, and it appears to be motionless. That’s how a dream comes to feel like reality. But there is a point which is not merely motionless relative to everything else, but absolutely motionless, and it’s called “I don’t know”. When you hit it in a dream you wake up. Or rather, the waking up pushes you into it. And then after that,’ – he gestured around the room – ‘you come here.’

  I heard a staccato burst of machine-gun fire beyond the wall, followed by the sound of an explosion, and the panes of glass rattled in the window.

  ‘There’s this point,’ Chapaev continued, ‘that is absolutely motionless, relative to which this life is as much of a dream as all your stories. Everything in the world is just a whirlpool of thoughts, and the world around us only becomes real when you yourself become that whirlpool. Only because you know.’

  He laid heavy emphasis on the word ‘know’.

  I stood up and went over to the window. ‘Listen, Chapaev, I think they have set fire to the manor-house.’

  ‘What’s to be done, Petka?’ Chapaev answered. ‘The way this world is arranged, you always end up answering questions in the middle of a burning house.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said, sitting back down facing him, ‘this is all quite remarkable, this whirlpool of thoughts and so forth. The world becomes real and unreal, I understand all that quite well. But any moment now some rather unpleasant individuals are going to arrive here – you understand, I am not trying to say that they are real, but they will certainly make us feel the force of their reality in full measure.’

  ‘Make me?’ asked Chapaev. ‘Never. Just watch.’

  He took hold of the big bottle, pulled a small blue saucer over to him and filled it to the brim. Then he performed the same operation with a glass.

  ‘Look at that, Petka. In itself the moonshine doesn’t have any form. There’s a glass, and there’s a saucer. Which of the forms is real?’

  ‘Both,’ I said. ‘Both of them are real.’

  Chapaev carefully drank the moonshine from the saucer, then from the glass, and threw each of them in turn hard against the wall. The saucer and the glass both shattered into tiny fragments.

  ‘Petka, watch and remember,’ he said. ‘If you are real, then death really will come. Even I won’t be able to help you. I’ll ask you one more time. There are the glasses, there’s the bottle. Which of these forms is real?’

  ‘I do not understand what you mean.’

  ‘Shall I show you?’ asked Chapaev.

  ‘Yes, do.’

  He swayed to one side, thrust his hand under the table and pulled out his nickel-plated Mauser. I barely managed to grab hold of his wrist in time.

  ‘All right, all right. Just don’t shoot the bottle.’

  ‘Right you are, Petka. Let’s have a drink instead.’

  Chapaev filled the glasses and then became thoughtful. It was as though he was searching for the words he needed.

  ‘In actual fact,’ he said eventually, ‘for the moonshine there is no saucer, and no glass, and no bottle – there’s nothing but itself. That’s why everything that can appear or disappear is an assemblage of empty forms which do not exist until they are assumed by the moonshine. Pour it into a saucer and that’s hell, pour it into a cup and you’ve got heaven. But you and me are drinking out of glasses, and that makes us people, Petka. D’you follow me?’

  There was another loud bang outside. I no longer had to go over to the window to see the reflected crimson glow flickering in the glass.

  ‘By the way, about hell,’ I said, ‘I cannot remember whether I told you or not. Do you know why these weavers have left us alone for so long?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they believe quite sincerely that you have sold your soul to the devil.’

  ‘Do they now?’ Chapaev asked in amazement. ‘That’s fascinating. But who sells the soul?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, they say – he’s sold his soul to the devil, or, he’s sold his soul to God. But who is the person who sells it? He must be different from the thing he sells in order to be able to sell it, mustn’t he?’

  ‘You know, Chapaev,’ I said, ‘my Catholic upbringing will not allow me to joke about such things.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Chapaev. ‘I know where these rumours come from. There was one person who came here to see me in order to ask how he could sell his soul to the devil. A certain Staff Captain Lambovsky. Are you acquainted?’

  ‘We met in the restaurant.’

  ‘I explained to him how it can be done, and he performed the entire ritual most punctiliously.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Nothing much. He didn’t suddenly acquire riches, or eternal youth either. The only thing that did happen was that in all the regimental documents the name “Lambovsky” was replaced by “Serpentovich”.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘It’s not good to go deceiving others. How can you sell what you haven’t got?’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ I asked, ‘that Lambovsky has no soul?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Chapaev.

  �
��And you?’

  For a second or so Chapaev seemed to be gazing deep inside himself, and then he shook his head.

  ‘Do I have one?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Chapaev.

  My face must have betrayed my confusion, because Chapaev chuckled and shook me by the elbow.

  ‘Petka, neither I, nor you, nor Staff Captain Lambovsky have any sort of soul. It’s the soul that has Lambovsky, Chapaev and Petka. You can’t say that everyone has a different soul and you can’t say everyone has the same soul. If there is anything we can say about it, it’s that it doesn’t exist either.’

  ‘I really do not understand a single word in all of that.’

  ‘That’s the problem, Petka…That’s where Kotovsky made his mistake. Remember that business with the lamp and the wax?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kotovsky understood that there is no form, what he didn’t understand is that there is no wax either.’

  ‘Why is there not?’

  ‘Because, Petka – listen to me carefully now – because the wax and the moonshine can take on any form, but they themselves are nothing but forms too.’

  ‘Forms of what?’

  ‘That’s the trick, you see. They are forms about which all we can say is that there is nothing that assumes them. D’you follow? Therefore in reality there is no wax and there is no moonshine.’

  For a second I seemed to be balancing on some kind of threshold, and then a heavy drunken dullness descended on me. It suddenly became very difficult to think.

  ‘There may not be any wax,’ I said, ‘but there is still half a bottle of moonshine.’

  Chapaev stared at the bottle with murky eyes.

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But if you can only understand that it doesn’t exist either, I’ll give you the order from my own chest. And until I do give it to you, we won’t be leaving this place.’

  We drank another glass and I listened for a while to the sounds of shooting outside; Chapaev paid absolutely no attention to it all.

  ‘Are you really not afraid?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, Petka, are you afraid of something?’

  ‘A little,’ I said.

  ‘What of?’