The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘Of course not, my dear,’ he said patronizingly. ‘I explain things in those terms because then I start to understand the point myself. And the point here is not your experience of life, but mine . . .’

  The next time he started reading a magazine during his flogging. That was insulting enough. But when he started prodding the article with his finger and muttering, ‘Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, you bastard,’ I began to get annoyed and interrupted the procedure, that is, I planted the suggestion of a pause in his mind.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘Tell me, are we doing a flagellation here, or is this a library day?’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, ‘this interview’s outrageous. It’s absolutely incredible!’

  He slapped his fingers down on the magazine.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against detective novels, but I can’t stand it when the people who write them start explaining how we ought to arrange things in Russia.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just like some underage prostitute who’s been given a lift by a long-distance truck driver so she can give him a blowjob suddenly stops work, looks up and starts giving him instructions about how to flush the carburettor in a frost.’

  Pavel Ivanovich clearly didn’t understand just how insulting that sounds in a conversation with a sex worker. But I became aware of my upsurge of rage before it overwhelmed me, so that my soul was immediately flooded with a calm joy.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked in a perfectly natural voice. ‘Maybe she’s serviced so many truckers that she’s picked up all the subtle points and now she really can teach him how to flush his carburettor.’

  ‘Darling, I pity the kind of truck drivers who need to take advice from an underage blowjob provider. They won’t get very far.’

  ‘An underage blowjob provider’ - that was what he said. Why, what a . . . I caught another outburst of fury in the very instant it began, and stopped the anger before it could manifest itself.

  This was great. It was like jumping on to a surfboard during a storm and coasting along over the waves of destructive emotions that can’t even touch you. If only it had always been like this, I thought, so many people would have lived longer lives . . . I did-n’t argue with Pavel Ivanovich about the substance of what he said. It’s best if we foxes who follow the Supreme Tao don’t have any opinions of our own on such matters. But one thing was clear: Pavel Ivanovich was an invaluable exercise machine for training the spirit.

  Unfortunately, I realized too late that the load was too heavy for me. The first time I lost control it didn’t lead to any injuries. I was driven wild by a phrase about Nabokov (not to mention the fact that he had a photocopy of an article entitled ‘The appearance of the hairdresser to the waiters: the phenomenon of Nabokov in American culture’ lying on his desk).

  I had loved Nabokov since the 1930s, ever since I used to get hold of his Paris texts from highly placed clients in the NKVD. What a breath of fresh air those typed pages were in Stalin’s gloomy capital! I remember I was particularly struck by one place in the ‘Paris Poem’, which I didn’t come across until after the war:

  Life is irreversible -

  It will be staged in a new theatre,

  In a different way, with different actors.

  But the ultimate happiness

  Is to fold its magic carpet

  And make the ornament of the present

  Match the pattern of the past . . .

  Vladimir Vladimirovich wrote that about us foxes. That’s exactly what we do, constantly folding the carpet. We watch the endless performance played out by bustling human actors who behave as if they were the first people ever to perform on the stage. They all die off with incredible speed, and their place is taken by the new intake, who begin playing out the same old parts with the same old pomposity.

  Of course, the scenery keeps changing, sometimes far too much. But the play itself hasn’t changed for a long, long time. And since we can remember more exalted times, we are constantly tormented by a yearning for lost beauty and meaning, so those words touched many strings at once . . . And by the way, that carpet from ‘Paris Poem’ was later inherited by Humbert Humbert:

  Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?

  What make is the magic carpet?

  I know what make it is. It was woven in Paris on a summer day sometime around 1938, under gigantic white clouds frozen in the azure heavens, and it travelled to America in a roll . . . It took all the abomination of the Second World War, all the monstrosity of the choices that it dictated, for that carpet to be hung up in Humbert’s reception room . . . and then this scholar of the humanities blurts out:

  ‘Happiness, my darling, is such a contradictory thing. Dostoevsky questioned whether it was permissible if it was paid for by a child’s tear. But Nabokov, on the other hand, doubted whether happiness could ever be possible without it.’

  I couldn’t tolerate a vile insult like that to a dead writer and threw the whip down on the floor. I mean I didn’t just stop making Pavel Ivanovich think he was being flogged, I made him see the whip hit the floor so hard that it left a dent in the parquet. I had to scrape it out afterwards by hand, when he went to the shower. I always avoid arguing with people, but this time I just exploded and started talking seriously, as if I was with another fox:

  ‘I feel insulted when someone confuses Nabokov with his characters. Or calls him the godfather of American paedophilia. That’s such a profoundly mistaken view of the writer. Remember this - Nabokov isn’t speaking for himself when he describes the forbidden charms of a nymphet at such length. He speaks for himself when he describes in meagre terms, in the very merest hint, the impressive financial resources that allow Humbert to freewheel round America with Lolita. A writer’s true heart speaks out very furtively . . .’

  I remembered where I was and stopped. I took Lolita’s story very personally and very seriously. For me Dolores Haze was a symbol of the soul, eternally young and pure, and Humbert Humbert was the metaphorical chairman of this world’s board of directors. Apart from that, in the line of verse describing Lolita’s age (‘Age: five thousand three hundred days’) it was enough to replace the word ‘days’ with ‘years’ and it would more or less fit me. Naturally, I didn’t share that observation with Pavel Ivanovich.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ he said in amazement.

  ‘Of course, what the writer was dreaming about wasn’t a green young schoolgirl, but the modest financial security that would allow him to catch butterflies in peace somewhere in Switzerland. I see nothing shameful in such a dream for a Russian nobleman who has realized the vanity of the heroic feat of a human life. And the choice of subject for the book intended to provide that security offers less insight into the secret aspirations of his heart than what he thought about his new fellow-countrymen and just how indifferent he was to what they thought about him. And the fact that the book turned out to be a masterpiece isn’t hard to explain either - talent is hard to conceal . . .’

  As I concluded this tirade, in my own mind I cursed myself, and with good reason.

  I’m a professional impersonator of an adolescent girl with big innocent eyes. Creatures like that don’t utter long sentences about the work of writers from the last century. They talk simply in monosyllables, mostly about material, visible things. And now . . .

  ‘Well, didn’t you get carried away,’ Pavel Ivanovich muttered in astonishment. ‘Eyes blazing, eh? Where did you pick up all that stuff?’

  ‘Here and there,’ I said in a morose voice.

  I swore a solemn oath to myself never to get into an argument about culture with him again, but only to exploit him for his proper purpose, as a gymnastic apparatus for developing my spiritual strength. But it was too late.

  In modern society it is fatal to give way to social instincts acquired in other times, and in a culture that was very dissimilar. They’re like gyroscopes trained on a planet which was blown to bits:
it’s best not to think where the course they indicate might lead to.

  The people who lived in ancient China were highly spiritual. If I’d demonstrated that kind of knowledge of the classical canon to any scholar then, he’d have gone into debt in order to reward me with double pay and he would have sent a letter in verse to my home, bound to a branch of plum blossom. Perhaps my old memories had led me to expect something similar when I started talking to Pavel Ivanovich about Nabokov. But the result was quite different.

  The next time we met, Pavel Ivanovich asked me to conduct the session on credit because he’d just bought a refrigerator. He expressed this request in the spirit of a secret accomplice, an old comrade tried and tested in journeys to the heights of the spirit. A poet borrowing a bottle of ink from a colleague might have spoken like that. I couldn’t refuse.

  The new refrigerator took up almost half his kitchen, it looked like the tip of an iceberg that had broken through the side of a ship and smashed into the hold. But nonetheless the captain of the ship was drunk and jolly. I’d noticed a long time before that nothing delights a member of the Russian intelligentsia (Pavel Ivanovich could hardly make the grade as an intellectual) as the purchase of a new electrical household appliance.

  I don’t like drunks, so I was acting a bit sullen. No doubt he put that down to the fact that the session was being conducted on credit, and he wasn’t particularly demanding. We got down to work in silence, like a pair of Estonian yachtsmen who have sailed together for ages: he handed me the tattered knout that he kept in the tennis bag with Boris Becker’s signature on it, got undressed, lay down on the sofa and opened a fresh copy of Expert magazine.

  I guessed that what was going on had nothing to do with his disdainful attitude to my art, or even his love for the printed word. Clearly his contrition before Young Russia coexisted in his heart with other vibes about which I knew nothing, and he hadn’t revealed all of his secrets to me. But I felt no urge to penetrate his inner world beyond the depth that had been paid for, and so I didn’t ask any questions. Everything was going as usual - I was lashing his backside with an imaginary knout, thinking my own thoughts, and he was muttering quietly. Sometimes he would start to groan, sometimes to laugh. It was boring, and I felt like some odalisque in an oriental harem, waving away the flies from her master’s fat carcass with regular sweeps of a fan. Then suddenly he said:

  ‘Would you believe it, what a name for a lawyer - Anton Drill. How did he manage to survive with that . . . I bet the kids gave him hell in school . . . People with names like that grow up psychological deviants, it’s a fact. They all need help from a psychotherapist. Any expert can tell you that.’

  Of course, I shouldn’t have got involved in the conversation - there was absolutely no point in taking the situation beyond the limitations of our professional relationship. The reason I didn’t hold back is that names are a sore point with me.

  ‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what name anybody has. I have a girlfriend, for instance, and she has a name that sounds very, very crude. So crude you’d laugh out loud if I told you it. It’s almost a swearword, you could say, that kind of name. But she’s a beautiful girl, clever and kind. A name’s not a prison sentence.’

  ‘Perhaps, my dear, you don’t know your friend very well. If her name has an obscene meaning, then it will come out in her life. Just you wait, it will manifest itself yet. Everything depends on the name. There’s a scientific hypothesis that every person’s name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. Do you understand what a suggestive command is? Do you at least have some idea about hypnotic suggestion?’

  ‘In general terms,’ I replied, and mentally lashed him a bit harder.

  ‘Ooh . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody’s psyche is programmed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said irritably. ‘No two people in the world with identical names are the same.’

  ‘Just as no two ants are the same. But nonetheless ants are divided into functional classes . . . No, a name is a serious thing. Some names are like time bombs.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Here’s a real-life story for you. There was a Shakespeare scholar called Shitman who worked in the Institute of World Culture. He was getting along just fine, until one day he decided to learn English so that he could read his author and benefactor in the original . . . And he wanted to go to England - “to see London and die” as he put it. He started studying. And after a few lessons he learned what “shit” means in English. Can you imagine it? If he’d been a chemistry teacher, for instance, it wouldn’t have been so awful. But for specialists in the humanities words mean a lot, Derrida pointed that out. It’s hard to serve the cause of the beautiful wearing a decoration like that in your buttonhole. He began to feel as if the people in the British Council were giving him queer looks . . . In fact, just then the British Council couldn’t care less about the local Shakespeare specialists, because they were being screwed by the tax police, but Shitman decided it was their personal attitude to him. As you can understand, my dear, when someone looks for confirmation of his paranoid ideas, he always finds it. Anyway, omitting all the sad details, he went insane in a month.’

  By this point I was positively seething with rage. I felt he was trying to insult me, although there were no rational grounds for such an assumption - he couldn’t possibly know my true name. But I remembered that the most important thing was to stay in control. Which I managed to do perfectly well.

  ‘Really?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Yes. In the madhouse he wouldn’t talk to anyone, just yelled so the entire hospital could hear him. Sometimes he yelled “same shit, different day”, sometimes “same shite, different night”. He obviously hadn’t wasted his time studying English. In the end they took Shitman away in a car with military number plates - the special services needed him, let’s put it that way. And nobody knows what’s become of him now, or if they do know, they’re not telling. So much for a midsummer night’s dream, my little darling. And they say nothing depends on a name. But it does, and how. If your friend has an obscenity in her name, sooner or later her path leads to only one place. It’s the madhouse for her. And by the way, Shitman was lucky, the special forces found a use for him. You must have heard about our madhouses. You can get a blowjob for a cigarette in there . . .’

  Spiritual training using a human irritant is like a game of chance in which everything is staked on the kitty. The winnings are very big. But if you can’t take the heat and you lose control, you lose absolutely everything else too. I could have put up with doing the session on credit, even with his theory of obscene names, if only he hadn’t thrown in that blowjob for a cigarette. I wasn’t prepared for that.

  ‘Sweetheart!’ Pavel Ivanovich screamed. ‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong? What are you doing, you snake? Militia! Anybody! Help!’

  When he started calling for the militia, I came to my senses. But it was too late - Pavel Ivanovich had received three lashes that even Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been ashamed of. And even though those three lashes were only hypnotic, the blood that had started running down his back was real. Of course, I regretted what I’d done, but that always happens a second later than it ought to. And anyway, in my heart I played another cunning trick - knowing I would be overwhelmed by repentance at any moment, and adopting the inner stance of a repentant sinner, I said in a final vengeful, voluptuous whisper:

  ‘That’s for you from Young Russia, you stupid old fart . . .’

  As I review my life now, I find many dark spots in it. But the sense of shame I feel for this is exceptionally keen.

  Many shrines in Asia surprise the traveller by
the contrast between the bare poverty of their empty rooms and the multilevel splendour of their roofs - with their upturned corners, precious carved dragons and scarlet tiles. The symbolic meaning here is clear: treasure should not be stored up on earth, but in heaven. The walls symbolize this world, the roof symbolizes the next. Look at the building itself and it’s a hovel. But look at the roof and it’s a palace.

  I found the contrast between Pavel Ivanovich and his ‘roof’ - the modern Russian term for protection - equally fascinating, even though there was absolutely no spiritual symbolism involved. Pavel Ivanovich was merely a petty philological demon. But the roof over his head . . . But then, all in good time.

  The call came two days after the lashing, at eight-thirty in the morning, too early even for a client with special oddities. The number that lit up didn’t mean a thing to me. I’d been up since four o’clock and already managed to get a lot of things done, but just in case I drawled in a sleepy voice:

  ‘Hello-o. . .’

  ‘Adele?’ a cheerful voiced asked. ‘I’m ringing about your advert.’

  I’d already taken the announcement off the site, but someone could easily have saved it for future reference, clients often do that.

  ‘Let a girl get some sleep, eh?’

  ‘Triple rates for short notice. If you’re there in an hour.’

  When I heard the words ‘triple rates’, I stopped being difficult and wrote down the address. One of my Latin American sisters told me that the Panamanian general Noriega liked to drink whisky non-stop all night long, and early in the morning he would send for one of the six women who he always had around him to have sex - my sister knew this, because she was one of them. But that’s Panama - cocaine and hot blood. For our latitudes such early morning passion was a little bit strange. But I didn’t sense any danger.

  For the sake of speed I took the Metro and in fifty minutes I was already there. The client lived in the quiet centre of town. When I walked into the courtyard of the building I wanted (a tall concrete candle with pretensions to architectural originality), I thought at first that I’d made a mistake and this was the back entrance to some bank.