Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘What is here?’ I asked, indicating the place with my finger.

  ‘Would you like to know?’

  I nodded.

  Enlil Maratovich opened the drawer of his desk, took something out of it and tossed it to me.

  ‘Catch!’

  In my hands was a dark glass bottle in the shape of a bat with its wings folded. It was in every particular like the one I had been sent on the day of the Great Fall. Now I understood.

  ‘You want me to … again …?’

  ‘There is no other way.’

  I was seized with dismay. Enlil Maratovich smiled encouragingly.

  ‘Chaldeans,’ he said, ‘regard life as the metaphorical ascent of a ziggurat, at the top of which the Goddess Ishtar awaits them. They have heard of the Tower of Babel, and they think they know what it means. But people are looking in the wrong place. Sacred symbolism should often be understood as exactly the opposite of its superficial appearance. The top is the bottom. Empty is full. The most glittering career is in reality the most abject failure, a stadium is a pyramid, the highest tower the deepest chasm. The summit of Fuji is right at the bottom, Rama. You’ve been through this already …’

  For some reason this incantation worked. I took out of the flask the stopper in the shape of a skull, poured the single drop of preparation on to my tongue, and held it against the roof of my mouth.

  After a few seconds, Enlil Maratovich said:

  ‘Don’t linger too long there. You have things to do up here.’

  ‘There? Where is there?’

  Enlil Maratovich’s smile became even broader.

  ‘Vampires have a motto: “Suckers wear the triple crown – into darkness, back and down!”’

  ‘That I understand,’ I replied. ‘What I mean is, where do I go now?’

  ‘You go there,’ said Enlil Maratovich, and raising his hand pressed down on the Sputnik before him on the desk.

  The room suddenly moved backwards and upwards. The next instant I realised that it was not the room moving, it was my Gothic chair, which had tipped over into the gulf which had opened in the floor, and before I even had time to cry out, I was slipping on my back down a sloping chute of some polished material, into darkness, back, and down, exactly as promised. Frightened of hitting my head, I tried to protect it with my hands, but the chute came to an end and I found myself flying into a bottomless black void.

  For a few seconds I cried aloud, clawing at the air with my hands in an attempt to take hold. When I eventually succeeded in doing so, I realised they were no longer hands.

  THE TREE OF LIFE

  I was gliding down into the darkness for so long I had time not only to conquer my panic but to become bored and extremely cold. Virgil’s phrase about Lake Avernus came to mind: ‘smooth is the descent, and easy is the way.’ The Romans considered that people could accomplish the descent into Hades without difficulty. That’s how much they knew, I thought. The circles I was describing blended into a monotonously wearying passage – not unlike walking down the staircase of a high-rise building during a power cut. The most sinister aspect of it was that I had no sense of nearing the bottom.

  To occupy my mind with something, I tried conjuring up everything I knew about the expression ‘the tree of life’. First of all, it was the name of the tree on which the Scandinavian god Odin hung himself in his attempt to be initiated into the secret of the runes. You have to imagine him hanging upside down … Secondly, in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, which figured in one of the degustations on the theme of ‘local cults’, there had been an excerpt on the subject.

  ‘For their delight is deception,’ I repeated over to myself what I could remember. ‘And their fruit is an incurable poison and their promise is death. And in the midst of paradise, they planted the tree of their life … But I, I will teach you what the mystery of their life is … the root of the tree is bitter and its branches are death, and its shade is hate … Deception dwells in its leaves, and it blossoms from the darkness …’

  The tree that grows into darkness – a beautiful, and morbid, image. Its fruits, apparently, were also death, but I could not remember exactly. The agglomeration of so many such horrors in this description was not, however, especially frightening – after all, many things that made ancient man tremble with fear have long since become a normal part of our daily existence.

  The chasm widened out. I wondered what could possibly have caused this strange geological formation. Enlil Maratovich’s house was built on a hill, so it was possible that at one time it had been the mouth of an ancient volcano. Although, heaven knows, there aren’t too many volcanoes on the outskirts of Moscow … Or it might be a tunnel resulting from a meteorite strike. Of course, there was also the possibility that it was a man-made shaft.

  I began to sense the bottom. It was closer than I thought – the confined walls of the well shaft were giving back too many reflections of the sound waves from my echo-locator, thus providing a misleading impression of the space. Below me was water, a small circular lake. The water was warm and steam was rising from it, which I felt as extra-dense air. I was afraid I might get a soaking or even drown. But as I descended even lower I became aware of a triangular opening in the stone face. It was the entrance to a cave just above the surface of the water, and there I could alight.

  My first attempt was unsuccessful. My wings struck the water and I nearly fell in. I had to gain height again and repeat the manoeuvre. This time I furled my wings too high above the stone shelf and made a rather painful landing.

  As on the previous occasion, the striking of my fists against the cold stone was the signal to shake me free of my dream and simultaneously of my bat body. I stood upright on my feet.

  The surrounding gloom was damp, warm and slightly sultry. What air there was had a whiff of sulphur, and a peculiar kind of mineral smell reminiscent of spas in the Caucasus I had been taken to in early childhood. The floor of the cave was uneven, with large boulders lying about on it, so that I had to tread carefully and pick out a place for each step. A light burned in the depths of the cave, but I could not see where it was coming from.

  What I saw when I turned a corner and entered the lit area was hard to believe.

  Before me was an enormous, empty cavern, an underground hall pierced by spotlights which, however, did not illuminate the space so much as mask it, so blinding were they to anyone entering. The roof of the cavern was so far above I could hardly see it.

  In the centre of the hall towered a gigantic structure to which led a long scaffold bridge made of metal. At first I thought the structure was a huge plant, some sort of shaggy cactus as big as a large house, surrounded by yet more scaffolding to which it was tightly bound by strips of dark material. It could also have been a barrel-shaped cargo rocket on its launch platform, an impression reinforced by the number of pipes and cables extending from it into the darkness. Above the structure were two huge metal rings set into the ceiling.

  I worked my way forward, the ringing of my heels on the metal giving warning of my approach. No one, however, come out to meet me. On the contrary, I noticed several obscure figures scurrying away at my appearance. I had the impression they were women swathed in full-body covering, as in the East. I did not hail them, assuming that they would do so themselves if they wished to make contact with me. The ritual, I thought, might stipulate solitude.

  After another ten metres, I stopped.

  I noticed that this colossal tun, surrounded by scaffolding and pipes, seemed to be breathing. It was alive. And at this moment my faculties experienced one of those small miracles that occur when the mind suddenly assembles a coherent picture from a myriad of formerly random lines and zigzags.

  I was looking at a giant bat trussed with belts and held up by an array of props and braces and buttresses. Her paws, like the upturned base of a giant crane, were forced into the two cyclopean c
opper rings in the stone ceiling, and her wings were bound to her body with ropes and trusses. I could not see her head – judging by the proportions of her body it was in a pit extending far below the level of the floor. Her breathing reminded me of a huge pump working.

  She was old. So old that the odour that came off was more geological than biological – this must have been what I had taken for the sulphurous smell of mineral water. She looked unreal, like a whale enwrapped in its own flippers suspended above the ground in a corset. It was the sort of image a surrealist artist of the last century might have painted under the influence of hashish …

  It was not possible to get close to the bat because she was surrounded by a fence. The scaffolding on which I was walking ended at a tunnel cut into the rock and led downwards. Cautiously I descended the slippery steps and found myself in a passage lit by halogen lamps. It was something like a gallery reinforced by steel framing, such as one sees in a mine on television, and black cables ran along its floor. A light breeze fanned my face: there was a ventilation system.

  I proceeded along the passage. It soon brought me into a circular room carved out of the thickness of the rock. The room was extremely old; the roof was covered in soot, which had eaten so deeply into the stone that it no longer soiled the touch. On the walls were ochre drawings – rune-like zigzags and silhouettes of animals. To the right of the entrance was a darker patch on the wall like a window, except that it was not a window but a recess cut deeper into the rock. Before it stood a primitive altar – a stone slab with various artefacts lying on it. They included terracotta discs, crude beakers and a number of statuettes all resembling one another: figurines of a fat woman with a tiny head, enormous breasts and an equally enormous bottom. Some had been fashioned from bone, others from fired clay.

  I turned one of the lamps round so that its beam fell on the recess above the altar. The opening was covered by a stretched-out piece of animal skin, in the middle of which was a wrinkled human head with long grey hair. It was shrivelled, but there was no sign of decomposition.

  The effect was ghoulish and repellent. I hastily continued along the passage. After a few metres I came to another similar room with a niche in it also containing a mummified head sewn into a piece of animal hide. On the altar before it lay shards of crystal, unrecognisable fossilised organic matter of some description, and some bronze arrowheads. The walls were decorated with rich ornamentation.

  Further on was another such room, then another, and another.

  There were very many of them, and the combined effect was of a history museum exhibition: ‘From Early Man to Our Own Times’. Bronze axes and knives, rust stains where iron implements had disintegrated, scattered coins, drawings on the walls – I would certainly have spent longer looking at it all had it not been for those heads hanging there like monstrous dried cherries. They hypnotised me. I could not even be sure they were dead.

  ‘I am a vampire, I am a vampire,’ I whispered quietly to myself, trying to dispel the terror gripping me. ‘I am the most terrible thing here – nothing can be more terrible than I …’

  But even I did not find this very convincing.

  Gradually furniture began to appear in some of the rooms – benches and chests. Jewellery glittered on some of the heads above the altars, growing progressively more elaborate: earrings, beads, gold combs. One head was adorned with a necklace of small coins. This one I stopped to take a closer look at. And suddenly the money-bedizened head inclined towards me, as if giving me a nod.

  This was not the first time I thought I might have detected some movement, but I had put it down to tricks of light and shade. But now I could hear the tinkling of the coins, and realised that light and shade had nothing to do with it.

  Struggling with my fear, I stepped up closer to the niche. Again, the head twitched, and I saw that it was not the head moving but the animal skin on which it was hanging. And then I finally understood what it was.

  It was the neck of the colossal bat, visible through the apertures in the rock wall.

  I remembered that the Gnostic texts made mention of a certain high-ranking demonic creature, a serpent with the head of a lion – ‘The Lord of This World’. Here everything was the other way round. The giant bat had the neck of a snake which, rhizome-like, wound its way deep into the thickness of the stone. Perhaps there were several such necks, and I was following the path of one of them along a gallery cut into the rock. Altar rooms were set up at those places where the neck could be seen.

  In the rooms I saw much that was wonderful and much that was strange. The chronological sequence, however, was often disrupted, for instance when following a collection of valuable harnesses and weapons that seemed to belong to the era of the Golden Horde, I next came across a room with obviously Egyptian relics, as if I had stumbled into the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid (the gods seemed to be distinctly second-hand: their faces had been maimed by a multitude of knocks). I remember one room lined with sheets of gold inscribed in Church Slavonic: as I passed through it I felt as though I were inside a safe of treasures belonging to an Old Believers’ sect. In another room, my eye was caught by a gold peacock with emerald-green eyes and a rotting tail. I knew that at one time the throne of the emperors of Byzantium was flanked by two such birds – this might have been one of them.

  It eventually dawned on me why there appeared to be such chronological dislocations. In many of the rooms there were two or three ways out. Behind these too were enfilades of more altar rooms, but they were unlit and the very thought of going along such passages filled me with terror. Clearly the garland of lamps was intended to guide the traveller along the shortest route to the goal.

  The altar rooms also differed in mood. Some of them were monastic in their severity; others, on the other hand, reminded me of an aristocratic boudoir. The coiffures of the mummified heads gradually increased in complexity. Wigs began to appear, and layers of cosmetics on the shrivelled faces. I noticed that in all this time I did not see a single male face.

  The deeper I descended into the stone gallery, the stronger grew the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that the end of the journey was approaching. This was clear from the changes in the way the rooms were decorated. I already knew what must await me at the conclusion of the exhibition. There could be no doubt that it would be another head, and this time a live one – that very ‘antenna of a dimension proportionate to the wavelength’ of which Enlil Maratovich had spoken.

  The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century altar rooms were like galleries in a small museum. They were full of pictures, escritoires stood against the walls, and on the altars themselves lay bulky folios with raised gold lettering printed on them.

  One room, which I dated to the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed the most elegant to me, being furnished simply and in good taste. On the walls were two large paintings simulating windows into a garden in which cherry trees were in blossom. The pictures were so skilfully integrated into the space that the illusion was complete, especially viewed from the altar where the head was. The head in this room struck me as relatively unimpressive: it was adorned with no more than a single string of pearls, and the coiffure was extremely plain. On the altar before it was a white enamelled telephone which had been damaged by bullets. Beside it was a long cigarette-holder of coral. Looking more closely I noticed bullet-holes in the furniture and the pictures. There was also a peculiar mark on the temple of the shrivelled head – but this could have been an extended birthmark.

  In the earliest room of the Soviet era the function of the altar was performed by a door resting on two stools. There was a telephone on this one as well: it was black and had a horn-shaped cradle for the handset, with something like the handle of an old car magneto on the side. The room was almost empty: the only decoration was provided by flags standing in the corners and crossed sabres on the walls. The altar niche contained not one but two heads, one hanging i
n the middle and the other huddled away forlornly on its own in the corner. Near the altar was a mourning wreath with a red ribbon woven into it, as withered as the head above it.

  The altar in the next room was a huge office desk with a pile of cardboard folders with papers on it. Here was another telephone: a massive piece of equipment in black ebony, redolent of calm dependability. Bookcases, with rows of books in identical brown bindings, lined the walls. There were no heads at all in the altar recess; all that could be seen were some tubes bound up with insulating tape protruding from the skin.

  The last room, by contrast, was a true museum of late Soviet life with a great number of different objects preserved in it. Garish cut-crystal vases and wine glasses on a sideboard, carpets on the walls, mink coats on hangers, an enormous Bohemian glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling … In the corner stood a colour television set as big as a trunk and covered in dust. In the centre of the altar table, among old newspapers and photograph albums, was yet another telephone – this time a white plastic one, with the USSR coat of arms in gold on the disc. There was a head in the altar niche: an ordinary, unremarkable shrivelled head with a hennaed chignon piled up in a bun at the back, and big ruby earrings.

  The passage did not go any further. The Hall of Mature Socialism, as I privately dubbed this altar room, ended in a steel door. On it hung a nameplate, green with age, on which was written in queerly printed old script:

  Ye Greate Batte

  On the wall I noticed a bell. Shifting nervously from foot to foot, I pressed it.

  Half a minute passed. The lock clicked open and the door opened a few millimetres, but no further. After waiting a little more, I put my ear to the crack which had opened.

  ‘Girls, girls,’ came a hoarse female voice, ‘conceal yourselves, now. How many times do I have to tell you: get behind the screen!’

  I rang once more.

  ‘OK, OK,’ answered the voice. ‘Come on in!’