Suddenly I understood exactly what I had to do next. Getting up from the bench, I walked across the road and held out one hand in order to hail an automobile. Almost immediately a rattling old vehicle shaped like a drop of water and splattered all over with dirty slush pulled up alongside me. Sitting at the wheel was a bearded gentleman who reminded me vaguely of Count Tolstoy, except that his beard was rather shorter and thinner.
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I am afraid I cannot remember the precise address, but I need a place called “The Musical Snuffbox”. A café. Somewhere not far from here – down along the boulevard and to the left. Quite close to Nikitsky Square.’
‘You mean on Herzen Street?’
I shrugged.
‘I’ve never heard of such a café,’ said the bearded gentleman. ‘I suppose it only opened recently.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘quite a while ago, actually.’
‘Ten roubles. Money up front.’
I opened the door and sat beside him. The automobile set off and I stole a glance at his face: he was wearing a strange-looking jacket cut in a manner reminiscent of the military tunics so beloved by the Bolshevik leadership, but made of material patterned in a liberal check design.
‘You have a fine automobile,’ I said.
He was obviously flattered by my remark.
‘It’s old now,’ he replied, ‘but after the war, there was no finer car in the world than the “Pobeda”.’
‘After the war?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course, just after the war. But for five years at least. But now they’ve completely screwed everything up. You just wait and see, and the communists will come to power.’
‘Please do not talk about politics,’ I said, ‘I understand absolutely nothing about it and I always get confused.’
He gave me a quick look.
‘That, young man, is precisely the reason why everything has fallen apart the way it has, because you and people like you understand absolutely nothing about it. What’s politics about anyway? It’s about how we can carry on with our lives. If everyone thought about how we could sort things out in Russia, then they wouldn’t need any sorting out. And that, if you’ll pardon the expression, is the dialectic.’
‘And just where do you intend to hang this dialectic?’ I asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
We stopped at the beginning of the boulevard. There was a long queue of vehicles ahead of us – there were horns sounding and orange and red lights flashing. The bearded gentleman said nothing, and I thought he might have found my words a little unfriendly. I felt I wanted to smooth over the awkwardness.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘if history teaches us anything, then it is that everybody who has tried to sort things out in Russia has ended up being sorted out by Russia instead.’
‘That’s right,’ said the gentleman. ‘That’s precisely why we have to think about how to sort things out here – so that it won’t happen again.’
‘As far as I am concerned, I have no need to think about it,’ I replied. ‘I know perfectly well how to sort things out in Russia.’
‘Oh yes? And how’s that?’
‘It is all quite simple. Every time the concept and the image of Russia appears in your conscious mind, you have to let it dissolve away in its own inner nature. And since the concept and the image of Russia has no inner nature of its own, the result is that everything is sorted out most satisfactorily.’
He looked at me carefully.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘That’s just what the American Zionists want to hear. That’s exactly how they poisoned the minds of your entire generation.’
The automobile began to move again and turned on to Nikitskaya Street.
‘I do not entirely understand what you are talking about,’ I said, ‘but in that case all that has to be done is to take all the American Zionists and sort them out as well.’
‘And just how would you go about sorting them out, I wonder?’
‘In precisely the same way,’ I replied. ‘And America should be sorted out as well. But then, why bother going into every particular case? If one is going to sort things out, one might as well sort out the entire world at once.’
‘Then why don’t you go ahead and do so?’
‘That is exactly what I intend to do today,’ I said.
The gentleman wagged his beard up and down condescendingly.
‘Of course, it’s stupid of me to try to talk to you seriously, but I should point out that you are not the first person ever to talk such drivel. Pretending that you doubt the reality of the world is the most cowardly form of escape from that very reality. Squalid intellectual poverty, if you want my opinion. Despite all its seeming absurdity, cruelty and senselessness this world nonetheless exists, doesn’t it? And all the problems in it exist as well, don’t they?’
I said nothing.
‘Therefore talk of the non-reality of the world does not signify a highly developed spirituality, but quite the opposite. In not accepting the creation, you also fail to accept the Creator.’
‘I do not entirely understand what “spirituality” is,’ I said. ‘But as for the creator of this world, I am rather briefly acquainted with him.’
‘And how’s that?’
‘Oh, yes. His name is Grigory Kotovsky and he lives in Paris, and judging from everything that we can see through the windows of your remarkable automobile, he is still using cocaine.’
‘And is that all you have to say about him?’
‘I think I can also tell you that his head is presently covered with sticking-plaster.’
‘I see. And would you mind me asking exactly which psychiatric hospital you escaped from?’
I thought for a moment.
‘I think it was number seventeen. Yes, there was a big blue board hanging by the door, with the number seventeen on it. And it also said that it was a model hospital.’
The automobile came to a halt.
I looked out of the window and saw the building of the Conservatory. We were somewhere close to the ‘Snuffbox’ already.
‘Listen, we should try asking someone the way.’
‘I won’t take you any further,’ the gentleman said. ‘Get out of the car and go to the devil.’
I shrugged, opened the door and got out, while the automobile shot off in the direction of the Kremlin. It was rather upsetting that my attempts to speak honestly and sincerely had met with such a reception. But then, by the time I reached the corner of the Conservatory, I had already completely sorted out the bearded gentleman and his devil as well.
I glanced around me on all sides – the street was definitely familiar. I walked along it for about fifty yards and saw a turn to the right and, almost immediately, the familiar gateway in the wall where Vorblei’s automobile had stopped on that memorable winter’s night. It was exactly the same as it had been, except that I think the colour of the house had changed, and standing on the road in front of the gateway were a great many automobiles of various different shapes and styles.
Quickly crossing the inexpressibly depressing courtyard, I found myself facing a door surmounted by a futuristic-looking canopy of glass and steel. A small signboard in English had been hung on the canopy:
JOHN BULL: Pubis International
Light was showing through the pink blinds drawn halfway down several windows beside the door. From behind them I could hear the mechanically plaintive note of some obscure musical instrument.
I tugged the door open, revealing behind it a short corridor hung with heavy fur coats and men’s overcoats, ending in an unexpectedly crude metal partition. A man in a canary-yellow jacket with gold buttons who looked like a convict rose from a stool to meet me; in one hand he had a strange-looking telephone receiver with the wire broken off to leave a stump no more than an inch long. I could have sworn that only a second before he got up he had been talking into i
t – moreover, he had been holding it incorrectly, with the broken-off wire sticking upwards. This touchingly childlike ability to become totally immersed in a fantasy world, so unusual in such a thug, inspired me with a feeling close to sympathy for him.
‘Entry is for club members only,’ he said.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was here quite recently with two friends, remember? One of them hit you in the groin with the butt of his gun.’
The canary-yellow gentleman’s hostile face suddenly expressed weariness and revulsion.
‘You remember?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But we’ve already paid.’
‘I am not here for money,’ I replied. ‘I would just like to sit inside for a while. Believe me, I shall not be here for long.’
He gave a forced smile, then opened the metal partition to reveal a velvet curtain, which he pulled aside, and I entered a dimly lit hall.
The place had not changed very much – it still looked like a run-of-the-mill restaurant with some pretensions to chic. The public seated among the dense clouds of smoke at the small square tables was quite varied and I think someone was smoking hashish. It was all illuminated by a strange spherical chandelier which rotated slowly around its axis, and the spots of dim light it cast drifted around the hall like glimmers of moonlight. Nobody took any notice of me, and I sat at a small table not far from the entrance.
The hall was bounded on one side by a brightly lit stage on which a middle-aged man with a black, feral beard was standing behind the keyboard of a small organ and singing in a repulsive voice:
Kill no one – I have never killed.
Be faithful – I have never failed.
Thou shalt not pity – I would give the shirt from off my back.
Thou shalt not steal – That’s where I really cut myself some slack.
It was the chorus. The song appeared to be about the Christian commandments, but the treatment was rather original. The manner of singing, quite unfamiliar to me, was obviously popular among the audience – every repetition of the mysterious phrase ‘that’s where I really cut myself some slack’ was greeted with audible ripples of applause and the singer bowed slightly, without ceasing to caress his instrument with his immense hands.
I began to feel a little sad. I had always prided myself on my ability to understand the latest developments in art and recognize the eternal and unchanging elements concealed behind the unpredictable complexities of form, but in this case the rift between my customary experience and what I saw was simply too wide to be bridged. There could have been a simple explanation, of course; someone had told me that before he made Chapaev’s acquaintance, Kotovsky had been little more than a common criminal – this could well have been the reason for my inability to decipher the strange culture which had produced the manifestations that had baffled me so completely in the madhouse.
The curtain at the entrance quivered, and the man in the canary-yellow jacket stuck his head and shoulders out from behind it, still clutching the telephone receiver in one hand. He clicked his fingers and nodded towards my table. Immediately a waiter appeared in front of me, wearing a black jacket and a bow-tie, holding a leather folder with the menu.
‘What would we like to eat?’ he asked.
‘I do not wish to eat,’ I replied, ‘but I would happily drink some vodka. I am chilled.’
‘Smirnoff? Stolichnaya? Absolut?’
‘Absolute,’ I replied. ‘And I would also like – how shall I put it? – something to help me relax.’
The waiter gave me a dubious look, then he turned to the canary-yellow gentleman and made some kind of card-sharper’s gesture. The latter nodded. The waiter leaned down to my ear and whispered:
‘Amphetamines? Barbiturates? Ecstasy?’
I pondered the indecipherable hieroglyphics of these names for a moment or two.
‘I tell you what. Take ecstasy and dissolve it in Absolute. That will be just right.’
The waiter turned to the canary-yellow gentleman once again, gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders and twirled one finger in the air beside his temple. The other man frowned angrily and nodded again.
An ashtray and a vase holding paper napkins appeared on my table. The napkins were most à propos. I took the fountain pen that I had stolen from Zherbunov out of my pocket, picked up a napkin and was just about to start writing, when suddenly I noticed that the pen did not end in a nib, but in a hole that looked like the mouth of a gun barrel. I unscrewed the barrel, and a small cartridge with a black lead bullet without any casing tumbled out on to the table; it was like those they sold for Montecristo guns. This clever little invention was even more welcome – without my Browning in my trouser pocket I felt something of a charlatan. I carefully replaced the cartridge, then screwed the pen back together and gestured to the pale gentleman in the canary-yellow jacket to bring me something with which I could write.
The waiter arrived with a glass on a tray.
‘Your order,’ he said.
I drank the vodka in a single gulp, took the pen from the fingers of the canary-yellow gentleman and immediately absorbed myself in my work. At first the words simply did not come, but then the mournful sounds of the organ bore me up aloft and an appropriate text was ready in literally ten minutes.
By this time the bearded singer had disappeared. I had not noticed the moment of his departure from the stage, because the music continued to play. It was very strange – there was an entire invisible orchestra playing, ten instruments at the very least, but I could see no musicians. Moreover, it was quite clearly not the radio, to which I had grown accustomed in the clinic, nor was it a gramophone recording; the sound was very clear, and quite certainly a live performance. My confusion evaporated, however, when I guessed that it was the effect the waiter’s concoction was having on me. I began listening to the music and suddenly made out a very clear phrase in English, sung by a hoarse voice very close to my ear:
You had to stand beneath my window
With your bagel and your drum
While I was waiting for the miracle –
For the miracle to come…
I shuddered.
This was the sign I had been waiting for – it was quite clear from the words ‘miracle’, ‘drum’ (which undoubtedly referred to Kotovsky) and ‘bagel’ (no commentary was required here). It was true that the singer did not seem to know English too well – he pronounced ‘bagel’ like ‘bugle’ – but that was not so important. I stood up and drifted towards the stage through the pulsating aquarium of the hall, swaying as I went.
The music had stopped most opportunely. Clambering up on to the stage, I leaned against the small organ, which replied with a long extended note of an unpleasant timbre, and then looked around at the tense, silent hall. The customers were a very mixed bunch, but as has always been the case throughout the history of humanity, it was pig-faced speculators and expensively dressed whores who predominated. All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility – and beyond the slightest doubt this was the face of that old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate but as alive as ever. Several young fellows looking like overdressed sailors with cheeks rosy pink from the frost appeared by the curtain that covered the entrance. The canary-yellow gentleman rattled off something to them, nodding in my direction as he did so.
Removing my elbow from the rumbling organ, I raised the napkin covered in writing to my eyes, cleared my throat and in my usual manner, using no intonation whatsoever but simply making brief pauses between the quatrains, I read:
Eternal Non-Return
Hundreds of years spent filing at the bars set in the frame
And shifting form and face through flux and dissolution,
A madman bearing Emptiness for his name
Flees from the clutches of a model institution.
He knows quite well there is no time to flee,
Nowhere to go, no path on which to
go there,
But more than that, this self-same escapee
Himself cannot be found, for he is nowhere.
To say the process of the filing does exist
Or that there are no file or bars is all the same.
The madman Voyd clutches his rosary in his fist –
All answers to all questions he disclaims.
For since the world keeps moving but we know not whither,
Better say at once both ‘No’ and ‘Yes’, but swear to neither.
At these words I raised Zherbunov’s pen and fired at the chandelier. It shattered like a toy on a Christmas tree, and a blinding electric light flashed across the ceiling. The hall was plunged into darkness, and immediately I saw the flashes of gunshots from over by the door where the canary-yellow gentleman and the ruddy-faced young fellows had been standing. I went down on all fours and slowly crawled along the edge of the stage, wincing at the intolerable racket. Someone began firing back from the opposite end of the hall, from several barrels at once, and the ricochets struck sparks into the air from the steel door. I realized that I should not be crawling along the edge of the stage, but back into the wings, and I made a turn of ninety degrees.
I heard a groan like the howl of a wounded wolf over by the steel door. A bullet knocked the small organ off its stand and it tumbled on to the floor right beside me. At last, I thought as I crawled towards the wings, at last I had managed to hit the chandelier! But – my God! – was that not always the only thing of which I had been capable, shooting at the mirror-surfaced sphere of this false world from a fountain pen? What a profound symbol, I thought, what a pity that no one sitting in the hall was capable of appreciating what they had just seen. But then, I thought, who knows?
In the wings it was just as dark as in the hall – it seemed that the electricity had failed throughout the building. At my appearance someone dashed away down the corridor, stumbling and falling. They did not get up again, but simply remained concealed in the darkness. Rising to my feet, I set off along the invisible corridor holding my hands out in front of me. It turned out that I remembered the way to the stage door very well. It was locked, but after fiddling with the lock for a minute or so, I opened it and found myself on the street.
Buddha's Little Finger Page 38
