The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  I put the earrings on and looked at myself in the mirror. It looked great. It was clear from the first glance that what I had hanging on my ears were not earrings, but finger rings. And apart from that, it was obvious that the rings were expensive - the diamonds glittered delightfully in the dusty beam of light that illuminated my humble abode. The most stylish part of it was the way an expensive item had been mounted to express emphatic contempt for its monetary value, a combination of the ideals of the financial bourgeoisie and the values of 1968 in a single unified aesthetic object which promised that its owner would put out for Che Guevara as well as Abramovich, and even vaguely hinted that she would only put out for Abramovich on a temporary basis, until Che Guevara moved in (of course, Che Guevara doesn’t really have anything to do with the whole business, nobody’s thinking of putting out for him - it’s just that the girl thinks Abramovich is more likely to go for shiny bait like that). In a word, it was just what the doctor ordered.

  But then I couldn’t give a damn for the doctor. In two thousand years, I’d seen more than enough doctors like that - they make their prescription, and time after time the human heart believes in the same old deception, dashes straight at the cliffs of the world and is smashed to pieces against them. And then it dashes at them again, and again - just like the first time. When you live by the edge of that sea and hear the roar of its waves, you think what a blessing it is that each wave only knows about itself and has no knowledge of the past.

  Of course, no one gives me rings and brooches like that because of the perfection of my soul, which it is beyond modern people’s ability to perceive. The only thing they value is my physical attraction - poignant, ambivalent and overwhelming. I know its power very well - I have learned to understand it over many hundreds of years. But after the meeting with Alexander for some reason I had lost my usual self-confidence. I couldn’t remember time ever moving so slowly - the two days while I waited for his call seemed like an eternity to me. The minutes crawled by from the future into the past like snails, I sat in front of the mirror, gazing at my reflection and thinking about beauty.

  A man often thinks: there’s a beautiful girl, a lovely flower, walking through the town in spring, smiling in all directions, and she’s not even aware of how lovely she is. This thought naturally develops into the intention to acquire this flower who is unaware of her own beauty for considerably less than her market value.

  Nothing could be more naive. The man is aware of her beauty, but the girl, the lovely flower, is not? It’s like a collective farmer from some remote village who has sold his cow and come to Moscow to buy an old Lada walking past the Porsche sales room, seeing a young salesman in the window and thinking: ‘He’s very green . . . maybe he’ll believe that an orange Boxter is cheaper than a Lada, seeing as it’s only got two doors? I must try having a word with him, while he’s in the place on his own . . .’

  A man like that is very funny, of course, and he has no chance at all of getting what he wants. But it’s not all gloom and doom. There is good news and bad news for the collective farmer who has sold his cow:

  1. the bad news is that he’ll never buy anything for less than its market value. Everything’s been worked out, checked and double checked. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

  2. the good news is that this market value is considerably lower than he imagines it to be in his state of hormonal intoxication, multiplied by his inferiority complex and his lack of faith in success.

  There’ll be no new orange Boxter for him, of course - it will be bought by an amiable elderly gent from the Ministry of Social Development. But he might well be able to afford an old Audi. Only it’s not an Audi that he needs, it’s a tractor. The tragedy of this collective farmer, and that of all other men, is that they run after our beauty without understanding its nature. So many different things have been said about it - it’s a terrible and appalling thing, which is also going to save the world, and so forth. But none of that throws even the slightest bit of light on the subject.

  What a fox has in common with the most beautiful of women is that we live off the feelings we arouse. But a woman is guided by instinct, and a fox is guided by reason, and where a woman gropes her way along in the dark, a fox strides proudly forward in the bright light of day.

  But then I must admit that some women cope rather well with their role. Only even if they want to, they can’t reveal their professional secrets, since they themselves do not understand them at a rational level. But we foxes are quite consciously aware of these secrets - and now I’ll tell you about one of them, the simplest and most important.

  Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of beauty should first of all ask himself: where is it located? Can we say that it is somewhere inside the woman who is considered beautiful? Can we say, for instance, that there is beauty in the features of her face? Or in her figure?

  Science tells us that the brain receives a flow of information from the sense organs, in this case from the eyes, and without the interpretations imposed by the visual cortex, this is simply a chaotic sequence of coloured dots, digitized into nerve impulses by the visual tract. Any fool can understand that there is no beauty in that, so it doesn’t find its way into a man through his eyes. In technical terms, beauty is the interpretation that arises in the consciousness of the patient. As they say - in the eye of the beholder.

  Beauty does not belong to a woman and it is not her specific quality - it is just that at a certain time of life her face reflects beauty, as a windowpane reflects the sun that is hidden behind the roofs of the houses. And so we cannot say that a woman’s beauty fades with time - it is simply that the sun moves on and the windows of other houses begin to reflect it. But we know that the sun is not in the windowpanes that we look at. It is in us.

  What is this sun? I’m sorry, but that’s another mystery, and today I was only planning to reveal one. And in any case, from the point of view of practical magic, the nature of the sun is absolutely irrelevant. What matters are the manipulations that we perform with its light, and here lies an important difference between foxes and women. But, as in the previous case, I can only explain it by using an analogy.

  There is a kind of lamp that people wear on their foreheads, on a special strap. They are popular with cyclists and potholers. It’s very convenient - whichever way you turn your head, that’s where the beam of light shines. I use one myself when I ride my bike at night in the Bitsevsky Park - it has three tiny, pointed bulbs that throw a spot of blue-white light on the asphalt surface of the path. Well then, beauty is the effect that arises in a person’s consciousness when the light of the lamp on his head is reflected off something and back into his eyes.

  In every woman there is a mirror, set from birth at a specific angle, and - no matter what the beauty industry might tell us - that angle cannot be changed. But we foxes can adjust the angle of our mirror across a very wide range. We can adapt to suit almost any cyclist. In this process hypnosis works hand-in-hand with flirting: the tail stays under our clothes and we only use it just a little bit to help ourselves. But every fox knows that ‘little bit’ is the key.

  Especially for these notes I translated an excerpt from the memoirs of the Comte de Chermandois, a well-known eighteenth-century adventurer, in which he depicted my sister E Hu-Li for posterity. Chermandois met her in London, where he was taking refuge from the horrors of revolution. They started an affair, but it had an unfortunate ending - the comte died of a heart attack in strange circumstances. But here is how Chermandois describes the moment when a fox adjusts her mirror to direct the beam of reflected light straight into the eyes of her victim:

  I cannot say that she was especially good-looking. On those occasions when I saw her after a long separation, I was amazed at how this skinny little creature with such fierce eyes could have become everything for me - love, life, death, the salvation of my soul. But she only had to meet my glance, and everything changed. First of all a startled doubt that she was loved would appe
ar in those green eyes. At that moment it was obvious that there was nothing to love her for, and every time I experienced a wave of pity, merging into tenderness. But she soaked up those feelings like a sponge soaking up wine, and immediately blossomed into a tormenting beauty that could drive a man insane. A brief exchange of glances changed everything. A moment before it, I was not able to understand how this essentially unlovely woman could have enthralled me, and afterwards I could not grasp how I could have doubted even for a minute the magical power of her features. And the longer I gazed into her eyes, the stronger this feeling became, rousing me to ecstasy, to a state of physical pain - as if she had thrust a knife into a crack in the wall behind which I was trying to hide and, with a few swift movements of the blade, had loosened the brickwork so much that the wall had collapsed and I was left standing before her once again, as naked and defenceless as a child. I have studied this metamorphosis through and through, but I have still not learned to understand the nature of the fire that has seared my soul and reduced it to ashes.

  Alas it is true: beauty is like fire, it burns and consumes, driving you insane with its heat, promising that in the place to which it drives its victim there will be calm, cool shade and new life - but that is a deception. Or rather, it is all true - but not for the victim, only for the new life that will take the victim’s place, and then also be consumed by this pitiless demon.

  I should know what I’m talking about. The demon has served me for more than two thousand years, and although he and I have a long-established working relationship, I am a little afraid of him. The demon of beauty is the most powerful of all the demons of the mind. He is like death, but he serves life. And he does not dwell within me - I only release him from the lamp on the forehead of the beholder, like Aladdin releasing the genie, and when the genie returns to his prison, I pillage the field of battle. It is a hard lot, and the Buddha of the Western Paradise would hardly approve of what I do. But what’s to be done about it? Such is the fate of foxes.

  Not only is it our fate, it is also the fate of our little sister, woman. But only an insensitive and stupid male chauvinist could reproach her for that. After all, woman was not created from Adam’s rib at all, that’s simply a mistake the scribe made when the weather was too hot. Woman was created from the wound through which the rib was extracted from Adam. Every woman knows this, but I can only remember two who have ever admitted as much - the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (‘from friends - for you, the lowdown on the mystery of Eve from the tree - here it is: I am no more than an animal wounded in the belly’) and the Empress Tsy See, who was incredibly irritated by her own membership of the weaker sex (I won’t cite her utterance, firstly because it is obscene and secondly because it is highly idiomatic and difficult to translate). But they gave Adam his rib back, and ever since then he keeps trying to stick it back into the wound - in the hope that everything will heal up and knit back together. No chance. That wound will never heal.

  The Comte de Chermandois’s remark about the knife blade and the wall is a very telling image. We foxes actually do something of the kind - we feel for a man’s secret heartstrings, and when we find them, we try to play the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on them, and that brings down the entire edifice of the personality. In fact, nowadays that’s not so very terrible. The edifice of the modern personality is more like a dugout than anything else - there’s nothing in it to collapse, and its conquest hardly requires any effort at all.

  But then the spoils of conquest are insignificant too - the feelings of modern eye-blinkers, as Nietzsche called them, are shallow, and the barrel organs of their souls only play the ‘Dog’s Waltz’. Summon up in a man like that the most powerful hurricane that he is capable of containing, and the wind is only strong enough to blow a few hundred-dollar bills your way. And you still have to check to make sure they’re not fake, torn or - God forbid! - issued before 1980. That’s the way things are.

  Alexander rang two days later, as he had promised. I was still asleep when I picked up the phone, but I had absolutely no doubt that it was him.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Ada,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

  ‘Ada?’

  I was quite sure I’d never called myself that.

  ‘I’m going to call you Ada,’ he said. ‘We can take it as a diminutive from Adele, can’t we?’

  In Russian there could have been two polar opposite meanings concealed in the name Ada - ‘ad A’ (i.e. ‘hell A’) or ‘A da’ (i.e. ‘Ah yes’). That was worrying. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘call me that, if you like.’

  ‘I want to see you,’ he said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right now.’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘My car’s waiting for you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By the stands at the track.’

  ‘By the stands? But how did you find out where I . . .’

  ‘That’s not difficult,’ he laughed. ‘Mikhalich will drive you.’

  There was a loud knock at the door.

  ‘There,’ said Alexander’s voice in the phone, ‘that’s him. I’m waiting for you, my little flower.’

  He hung up. My little flower, I thought; well, well, he thinks I’m a plant. There was another knock at the door, more insistent this time. Consideration like that was almost insulting.

  ‘Adele,’ a familiar voice called from the other side of the door. ‘Are you there? I can see from the reading I have that you are. Hey!’

  He knocked again.

  ‘You’ve got a sign here that says “No entry. Danger of death.” So maybe you went in anyway and got killed? Are you alive? Answer! Or I’ll break the door down!’

  Idiot, I thought, then all the people will come running. But no, they won’t, it’s still too early . . . Even so, it was better not to risk it. I went to the door and said:

  ‘Vladimir Mikhailovich, quiet! I’ll open up in a moment, just let me get dressed.’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  I got dressed quickly and glanced round my residence - I did-n’t think there was anything compromising in open view. But how had he managed to find me? Had he trailed me, or what?

  ‘I’m opening up . . .’

  Mikhalich came in and blinked for a few seconds as he got used to the darkness. Then he looked round.

  ‘You mean to say this is where you live?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘What, in a gas-pipe junction?’

  ‘It’s not a gas-pipe junction. That sign at the door is just so that people won’t start asking questions.’

  ‘What’s it supposed to be then?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, every place has a function. What kind of premises is it?’

  ‘I dislike premises,’ I said. ‘And I don’t like it when people apply their own premises to me. It’s an empty space under the stands. At first there was a storage space in here. Then they boarded everything off, built a transformer substation behind the wall and forgot about this part. Well, they didn’t just happen to forget. Of course, I had to help them along a bit . . .’

  I shuffled my fingers to make my point clear. Of course, what I should have done was wave my tail, but I wasn’t about to initiate Mikhalich into all the details of my difficult fate.

  ‘Do you have heating at least?’ he asked. ‘Aha, I see the radiators over there. But where’s the toilet?’

  ‘Why, do you want to go?’

  ‘No, I’m just curious.’

  ‘You have to go along the corridor. There’s a shower there too.’

  ‘You really live in this kennel?’

  ‘Why is it a kennel?’ I said. ‘Its layout’s more like a loft, the kind lawyers and political technologists have. Lofts are very fashionable. The ceiling’s slanting, because the stand runs overhead. It’s romantic.’

  ‘But how do you manage without any light?’

  ‘See that little pane of glass just below the ceiling? That’s a window. When the sun rises
, a very beautiful beam of light shines straight in here. And anyway, I can see pretty well in the dark.’

  He cast another glance round my residence.

  ‘Is that your junk in those sacks?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘And the bike’s yours too?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a good bike. Disc brakes, and the fork’s made of carbon fibre.’

  ‘Is the computer made of carbon fibre too?’

  ‘Don’t joke, you already guessed. It’s a rare model, they only make them for Japan. One of the lightest laptops in the world.’

  ‘I get it. So that’s why it’s standing on a cardboard box, is it? Instead of a table? Aren’t you ashamed when you have visitors?’

  His tone had begun to get under my skin.

  ‘You know, Vladimir Mikhailovich,’ I answered, ‘to be quite honest, I couldn’t really say what I care less about, the appearance of the things around me or the opinions of the people I meet. Both of them are over and done with far too quickly for me to be bothered.’

  ‘A dump, that’s what it is,’ he summed up. ‘Does the local militia know about this tramp’s hideaway?’

  ‘Are you going to tip them off?’

  ‘I’ll see how you behave. Right, let’s go.’

  We walked to the car in silence, apart from two occasions when Mikhalich swore - the first time when he had to squeeze through the narrow gap between two sheets of plywood, and the second time when he had to duck under a low partition.

  ‘Please don’t swear,’ I said.

  ‘I tore my sleeve. How do you drag your bicycle through here?’

  ‘Easy. In summer I leave it outside. Who’s going to bother climbing in here?’