Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘Death,’ I answered, before pausing. ‘Or rather, not death itself, but…I do not know. I want to save my consciousness.’

  Chapaev laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Have I said something funny?’

  ‘That’s a good one, Petka. I didn’t expect that of you. You mean you went into battle with thoughts like that in your head every time? It’s the same as a scrap of newspaper lying under a street lamp and thinking that it wants to save the light it’s lying in. What d’you want to save your consciousness from?’

  I shrugged. ‘From non-existence.’

  ‘But isn’t non-existence itself an object of consciousness?’

  ‘Now we’re back to sophistry again,’ I said. ‘Even if I am a scrap of newspaper that thinks that it wants to save the light in which it is lying, what difference does it all make if I really do think that, and it all causes me pain?’

  ‘The scrap of newspaper can’t think. It’s just got the words written across it in bold italics: “I want to save the light of the street lamp.” And written beside that is: “Oh what pain, what terrible suffering…” Come on, Petka, how can I explain it to you? This entire world is a joke that God has told to himself. And God himself is the same joke too.’

  There was an explosion outside, so close this time that the panes of glass in the window rattled audibly. I distinctly heard the rustling sound of shrapnel ripping through the leaves outside.

  ‘I tell you what, Vasily Ivanovich,’ I said, ‘why don’t we finish up with the theory and try to think of something practical.’

  ‘To be practical, Petka, I can tell you that if you’re afraid, then both of us are for the high jump. Because fear always attracts exactly what it’s afraid of. But if you’re not afraid, then you become invisible. The best possible camouflage is indifference. If you’re genuinely indifferent, none of those who can cause you harm will even remember you exist – they just won’t think about you. But if you go squirming about on your chair the way you are now, in five minutes’ time we’ll have a roomful of those weavers in here.’

  I suddenly realized that he was right, and I felt ashamed of my nervousness, which appeared particularly pitiful against the foil of his magnificent indifference. Had not I myself only recently refused to leave with Kotovsky? I was here because I had chosen to be, and it was simply foolish to waste what might be the final minutes of my life on anxiety and fear. I looked at Chapaev and thought that in essence I had never discovered anything at all about this man.

  ‘Tell me, Chapaev, who are you in reality?’

  ‘Better tell yourself, Petka, who you are in reality. Then you’ll understand all about me. But you just keep on repeating “me, me, me”, like that gangster in your nightmare. What does that mean – “me”? What is it? Try taking a look for yourself.’

  ‘I want to look, but…’

  ‘If you want to look, why do you keep on looking at that “me” and that “want” and that “look”, instead of at yourself?’

  ‘Very well,’ I countered, ‘then answer my question. Can you give me a simple answer to it?’

  ‘I can,’ he said, ‘try it again.’

  ‘Who are you, Chapaev?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he replied.

  Two or three bullets clattered against the planks of the walls, splinters flew up into the air, and I instinctively ducked my head. I heard quiet voices outside the door, apparently discussing something. Chapaev poured two glasses and we drank without clinking them together. After hesitating for a moment, I picked up an onion from the table.

  ‘I understand what you are trying to say,’ I said, biting into it, ‘but perhaps you could answer me in some other way?’

  ‘I could,’ said Chapaev.

  ‘Then who are you, Vasily Ivanovich?’

  ‘Who am I?’ he echoed, and raised his eyes to my face. ‘I am a reflection of the lamplight on this bottle.’

  I felt as though the light reflected in his eyes had lashed me across the face; suddenly I was overwhelmed by total understanding and recall.

  The blow was so powerful that for a moment I thought a shell must have exploded right there in the room, but I recovered almost immediately. I felt no need to say anything out loud, but the inertia of speech had already translated my thought into words.

  ‘How fascinating,’ I whispered quietly, ‘so am I.’

  ‘Then who is this?’ he asked, pointing at me.

  ‘Voyd,’ I replied.

  ‘And this?’ he pointed to himself.

  ‘Chapaev.’

  ‘Splendid! And this?’ he gestured around the room.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  At that very moment the window was shattered by a bullet and the bottle standing between us exploded, showering both of us with the last of the moonshine. For several seconds we gazed at each other in silence, then Chapaev rose, went over to the bench on which his tunic lay, unpinned the silver star from it and threw it across the room to me.

  His movements had suddenly become swift and precise; it was hard to believe that this was the same man who had just been swaying drunkenly on his stool and gazing senselessly at the bottle. He snatched up the lamp from the table, unscrewed it rapidly, splashed the kerosene out on to the floor and tossed the burning wick into it. The kerosene flared up, followed by the spilt moonshine, and the room was illuminated by the dim glow of a fire just beginning to take hold. Deep shadows were cast across Chapaev’s face by the flames from beneath, and it suddenly seemed very ancient and strangely familiar. He overturned the table in a single gesture, then bent down and pulled open a narrow trapdoor by a metal ring.

  ‘Let’s get going,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do here.’

  I felt my way down a ladder into cold damp darkness. The bottom of the shaft proved to be about two yards below the level of the floor; at first I could not understand what we were going to do in this pit, and then the foot with which I was feeling for the wall suddenly swung through into emptiness. Coming down behind me, Chapaev struck my head with his boot.

  ‘Forward!’ he commanded. ‘At the double!’

  Leading away from the staircase was a low, narrow tunnel supported by wooden props. I crawled forward, struggling to distinguish anything ahead of me in the darkness. To judge from the draught I could feel, the exit could not be very far away.

  ‘Stop,’ Chapaev said in a whisper. ‘We have to wait for a minute.’

  He was about two yards behind me. I sat down on the ground and leaned my back against one of the props. I could hear indistinct voices and other noises; at one point I clearly heard Furmanov’s voice yelling: ‘Get back out of there, fuck you! You’ll burn to death! I tell you they’re not in there, they’ve gone! Did you catch the bald one?’ I thought of them up above, rushing about in thick clouds of smoke among the repulsive chimeras created by their collective clouded reason, and it all seemed incredibly funny.

  ‘Hey, Vasily Ivanovich!’ I called quietly.

  ‘What?’ responded Chapaev.

  ‘I just understood something,’ I said. ‘There is only one kind of freedom – when you are free of everything that is constructed by the mind. And this freedom is called “I do not know”. You were absolutely right. You know, there is an expression, “a thought expressed is a lie”, but I tell you, Chapaev, that a thought unexpressed is also a lie, because every thought already contains the element of expression.’

  ‘You expressed that very well, Petka,’ responded Chapaev.

  ‘As soon as I know,’ I continued, ‘I am no longer free. But I am absolutely free when I do not know. Freedom is the biggest mystery of all. They simply do not know how free they are. They do not know who they are in reality. They…’ – I jabbed my finger upwards and was suddenly contorted by a spasm of irrepressible laughter – ‘they think that they are weavers…’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Chapaev. ‘Stop neighing like a mad horse. They’ll hear you.’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ I gas
ped, choking on the words, ‘they don’t even think that they are weavers…They know it…’

  ‘Forward,’ he said, prodding me with his boot.

  I took several deep breaths to recover my senses and began edging my way ahead again. We covered the rest of the distance without speaking. No doubt it was because the tunnel was so narrow and cramped that it seemed to be incredibly long. Underground there was a smell of dampness, and also, for some reason, of hay, which grew stronger the further we went. At last the hand I was holding out in front of me came up against a wall of earth. I rose to my feet and straightened up, banging my head against something made of iron. Feeling around in the darkness that surrounded me, I came to the conclusion that I was standing in a shallow pit underneath some kind of flat metal surface. There was a gap of two feet or so between the metal and the ground; I squeezed into it and crawled for a yard or two, pushing aside the hay that filled it, and then I bumped against a broad wheel of moulded rubber. I immediately remembered the huge haystack beside which the taciturn Bashkir had mounted his permanent guard, and I realized where Chapaev’s armoured car had gone to. A second later I was already standing beside it – the hay had been pulled away to one side to expose a riveted metal door, which stood slightly ajar.

  The manor-house was enveloped in flames. The spectacle was magnificent and enchanting, much the same, in fact, as any large fire. About fifty yards away from us, among the trees, there was another, smaller fire – the blazing bathhouse where only recently Chapaev and I had been sitting. I thought that I could see figures moving around it, but they could easily have been the dappled shadows of the trees shifting every time the fire swayed in a gust of wind. But whether I could see them or not, there were undoubtedly people there: I could hear shouting and shooting from the direction of both conflagrations. If I had not known what was actually happening there, I might have thought it was two detachments waging a night battle.

  I heard a rustling close beside me, and I pulled out my pistol.

  ‘Who goes there?’ I whispered nervously.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Anna.

  She was wearing her tunic, riding breeches and boots, and in her hand she had a bent metal lever similar to the crank-handles used for starting automobile engines.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said, ‘You have no idea how worried I was about you. The mere thought that this drunken rabble…’

  ‘Please don’t breathe onion on me,’ she interrupted. ‘Where’s Chapaev?’

  ‘I’m here,’ he answered, crawling out from underneath the armoured car.

  ‘Why did you take so long?’ she asked. ‘I was beginning to get worried.’

  ‘Pyotr just would not understand,’ he replied. ‘It even reached the point where I had resigned myself to staying there.’

  ‘But has he understood now?’

  Chapaev looked at me.

  ‘He didn’t understand a thing,’ he said. ‘It was just that the shooting started up back there…’

  ‘Now, listen here, Chapaev,’ I began, but he stopped me with an imperious gesture.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked Anna.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, handing him the crank-handle.

  I suddenly realized that Chapaev was right, as always; there had not been anything that I could be said to have understood.

  Chapaev rapidly swept aside the hay covering the armoured car’s inclined bonnet, inserted the crank-handle in the opening in the radiator and turned the magneto several times. The engine began to purr quietly and powerfully.

  Anna opened the door and got in, and Chapaev and I followed her. Chapaev slammed the door and clicked a switch, and the light, quite blindingly brilliant after the underground darkness, revealed a familiar interior: the narrow leather-upholstered divans, the landscape bolted to the wall, and the table, on which lay a volume of Montesquieu with a bookmark and a packet of ‘Ira’ papyrosas. Anna quickly clambered up the spiral staircase and sat on the machine-gunner’s revolving chair, the upper half of her body concealed in the turret.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said. ‘Only I can’t see anything because of the hay.’

  Chapaev caught hold of the speaking-tube that communicated with the driver’s compartment – I guessed that the Bashkir was there – and spoke into it.

  ‘Scatter the haystack. And don’t get a wheel stuck in any hole.’

  The armoured car’s motor began to roar, the heavy vehicle shuddered into motion and moved forward several yards. There was some kind of mechanical noise above us – I looked up and saw that Anna was turning something like the handle of a coffee-mill, and the turret and seat were turning together around their axis.

  ‘That’s better now,’ she said.

  ‘Switch on the floodlights,’ Chapaev said into the tube.

  I put my eye to the spy-hole in the door. The floodlights turned out to be installed around the entire perimeter of the armoured car, and when they came on, it was as though someone had switched on the street lights in some shadowy park.

  It was a strange vista indeed. The white electric light falling on the trees was a great deal brighter than the glow from the fire; the dancing shadows which had looked like people darting through the darkness disappeared, and I could see that there was no one near us.

  But our solitude did not remain inviolate for long. Weavers with rifles in their hands began appearing at the edge of the pool of light. They stared at us in silence, shielding their eyes from the blinding glare of the searchlights. Soon the armoured car was trapped in a living circle bristling with rifle barrels. I could even hear snatches of shouting: ‘So that’s where they are…nah, they won’t get away…they’ve already run away once…put that grenade away, you fool, it’ll blast our own lads to bits…’

  They fired several shots at the armoured car and the bullets bounced off the armour-plating with a dull clanging sound. One of the searchlights burst, however, and a roar of delight ran through the crowd around us.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Chapaev, ‘everything comes to an end some time. Make ready, Anna…’

  Anna carefully removed the cover from the machine-gun. A bullet struck the door close beside the spy-hole, and just to be on the safe side I moved away from it. Leaning over the machine-gun, Anna put her eye to the sights, and her face distorted itself in a grimace of cold fury.

  ‘Fire! Water! Earth! Space! Air!’ Chapaev shouted.

  Anna rapidly twirled the rotational handle, and the turret began revolving around its axis with a quiet squeaking. The machine-gun was silent, and I looked at Chapaev in amazement. He gestured reassuringly. The turret made a single complete revolution and came to a halt.

  ‘Has it jammed?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Chapaev. ‘It’s all over already.’

  I suddenly realized that I could no longer hear any shots or voices. All the sounds had disappeared, and only the quiet purring of the motor remained.

  Anna climbed down out of the turret, sat herself on the divan beside me and lit a papyrosa. I noticed that her fingers were trembling.

  ‘That was the clay machine-gun,’ said Chapaev. ‘Now I can tell you what it is. It isn’t really a machine-gun at all. It’s simply that many millennia ago, long before the Buddha Dipankara and the Buddha Shakyamuni came into the world, there lived the Buddha Anagama. He didn’t waste any time on explanations, he simply pointed at things with the little finger of his left hand, and their true nature was instantly revealed. When he pointed to a mountain, it disappeared, when he pointed to a river, that disappeared too. It’s a long story, but in short it all ended with him pointing to himself with his little finger and then disappearing. All that was left of him was that finger from his left hand, which his disciples hid in a lump of clay. The clay machine-gun is that lump of clay with the Buddha’s finger concealed within it. A very long time ago in India there lived a man who tried to turn that piece of clay into the most terrible weapon on earth, but no sooner had he drilled a hole in it than the finger pointed at him and h
e himself disappeared. After that it was kept in a locked trunk and moved from place to place until it was lost to the world in one of the monasteries of Mongolia. But now, for a whole series of reasons, it has found its way to me. I have attached a butt-stock to it and I call it the clay machine-gun. And we have just made use of it.’

  Chapaev stood up, opened the door and jumped out. I heard his boots striking the earth. Anna climbed out after him, but I went on sitting there on the divan, gazing at the English landscape on the wall. A river, a bridge, a sky covered in clouds and some indistinct ruins; could it possibly be, I wondered, could it?

  ‘Petka,’ Chapaev called, ‘what are you doing still sitting in there?’

  I got up and stepped out.

  We were standing on a perfectly level circular surface covered with hay, about seven yards in diameter. Beyond the bounds of the circle there was nothing at all – nothing was visible except an indistinct, even light, which it would be hard to describe in any way. At the very edge of the circle lay half a rifle with a bayonet attached. I suddenly recalled the moment in Blok’s ‘Circus Booth’ when Harlequin jumps through the window and breaks the paper with the view of the horizon drawn on it and a grey void appears in the tear. I looked round. The engine of the armoured car was still working.

  ‘But why is this island left?’ I asked.

  ‘A blind spot,’ said Chapaev. ‘The finger pointed at everything there was in the world beyond the bounds of this area. It’s like the shadow from the base of a lamp.’

  I took a step to one side, and Chapaev grabbed me by the shoulders.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going…Don’t get in front of the machine-gun! All right, Anna, put it out of harm’s way.’

  Anna nodded and carefully made her way to stand under the short protruding barrel.

  ‘Watch carefully, Petka,’ said Chapaev.

  Anna squeezed her papyrosa tight in her teeth, and a small round mirror appeared in her hand. She raised it to the level of the barrel, and before I could understand what was going on, the armoured car had vanished. It happened instantaneously and with unbelievable ease, as though someone had switched off a magic lantern, and the picture on the linen sheet had simply disappeared. All that was left were four shallow hollows from the wheels. And now there was nothing to disturb the silence.