The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘’Grr-rra-rra,’ he said. ‘Gr-rrrrra...’

  ‘Hey, bro,’ I babbled, ‘wait. I’ll explain everything . . .’

  He growled and took a step towards me.

  ‘Don’t you even think about it, all right? I’m serious, you big grey wolf, slow down . . .’

  He fell gently on to his front paws or hands and took another step towards me. Entirely different words were required. But where could I find them?

  ‘Listen . . . Let’s discuss everything calmly, eh?’

  He grinned, opening his jaws wide and raising his huge grey tail, almost copying my working pose.

  ‘Wait, grey beast,’ I whispered, ‘don’t . . .’

  He jumped, and for a second I thought the world had been covered by a terrible, low storm cloud. The next moment the cloud collapsed on top of me.

  Lying on the divan, covered with something like the skin of an albino mammoth, I sobbed into the pillow, unable to understand how there could have been so many tears inside me - the pillow was already soaked on both sides.

  ‘Ada,’ Alexander said and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Go away, you monster,’ I sobbed and shook his hand off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said timidly, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I said go away, you dirty animal.’

  I burst into floods of tears again. A minute or two later he tried to touch my shoulder again.

  ‘I asked you three times,’ he said.

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

  ‘What do you mean? I told you. About the bestial body, about physical intimacy. Didn’t I?’

  ‘How was I supposed to guess?’

  ‘Well, for instance, from the smell.’

  ‘Foxes don’t have any sense of smell.’

  ‘I understood all about you straight away,’ he said, stroking my arm awkwardly. ‘In the first place, people don’t smell like that. And in the second place, Mikhalich has been dinning it into my ears. “Comrade lieutenant general, I’ve looked at the recording - you’ve got to sort this dame out properly. She stands on all fours, with her eyes blazing, I’ve never seen eyes so terrible, and on her back she has this huge red lens. And she uses that lens to burn right through our consultant’s brain! She turned the beam on him, and he was totally zonked . . .” At first I thought the ketamine had sent him totally insane. But then I watched the recording, and there it was . . . He took your tail for a lens.’

  ‘What recording’s that?’

  ‘Your client, the one you lashed until he bled, was shooting amateur porn. With a concealed camera.’

  ‘What? When I was working on credit?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, that’s your business. As soon as he came round he brought the tape to us.’

  ‘The fucking intelligentsia,’ I said, unable to restrain myself.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘not very nice. But that’s what people are like. You mean Mikhalich didn’t show you the photos? He had a whole file of them, specially printed for your conversation.’

  ‘He didn’t have time . . . You mean Mikhalich is going to watch all the vile things you just did with me?’

  ‘I don’t have a single camera here, relax, my darling.’

  ‘Don’t call me darling, you beast,’ I sobbed. ‘You filthy depraved male. Nobody’s done that to me in the last . . .’ - for some reason I suddenly decided not to mention any dates - ‘ever done that to me in my life. How vile!’

  He pulled his head down into his shoulders, as if he’d been lashed with a wet rag. That was curious - although my tail apparently had no effect on him, it seemed that my words affected him quite powerfully. I decided to test this observation.

  ‘I’m so tender and delicate down there,’ I said in a pitiful voice. ‘And you’ve torn everything with your huge prick. I’ll probably die now . . .’

  He turned pale, unbuttoned his tunic and took a huge nickel-plated pistol out of its holster. I was afraid he was going to shoot me, the way Robert De Niro shot that tedious woman he was talking to in Tarantino’s film, but fortunately I was wrong.

  ‘If anything happens to you,’ he said in a serious voice, ‘I’ll blow my brains out.’

  ‘Put it away,’ I said, ‘put it away . . . So what if you do blow your stupid brains out? What good will that do me? I told you, don’t!’

  ‘I thought,’ he said quietly, ‘that you were just being coy.’

  ‘Coy? Your dick is three times the size of that pistol, you wolf! I wasn’t being coy, I just wanted to stay alive! Nowadays they even teach children in school that if a girl says “No”, it means precisely “No”, and not “Yes” or “Oh, I don’t know”. All the rape cases in the West are centred round that. Didn’t they explain that in the FSB Academy?’

  He shook his head dejectedly from side to side. It was a pitiful sight. I felt the time had come to stop, or I might overdo it. That recollection of Tarantino had been no accident.

  ‘Do you have some bandages and iodine?’ I asked in a weak voice.

  ‘I’ll send Mikhalich,’ he said, jumping to his feet.

  ‘I don’t want Mikhalich here! The last thing I need is Mikhalich giggling over me . . . Can’t you go to the chemist’s yourself?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘And don’t let that Mikhalich of yours come in here while you’re gone. I don’t want anyone to see me in this state.’

  He was already at the lift.

  ‘I’ll be quick. Hold on.’

  The door closed behind him and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  As I’ve already said, foxes don’t have any sexual organs in the human sense. But we do have a rudimentary cavity under our tails, an elastic bag of skin that’s not connected with any other organs. It’s usually squeezed into a narrow slit, like the bladder of a deflated football, but when we experience fear it expands and becomes slightly moist. It plays the same role in our anatomy as a special hollow plastic cylinder does in the equipment of employees in a great ape reserve.

  The great apes employ the same technologies of social control as are found in criminal and political circles: the males who are in charge ritually humiliate other apes who they think are aspiring to an unjustifiably high status. Sometimes outsiders like electricians and laboratory workers find themselves in this role (I mean in special reserves). In readiness for such a turn of events, they carry an empty plastic cylinder suspended on straps between their legs, and this cylinder is known by the glorious name of a ‘prick-catcher’. It is their guarantee of safety: if a large male obsessed by a sense of social justice jumps them, all they have to do is bend over and wait a few minutes - while the ape’s indignation is expended on the cylinder. Then they can continue on their way.

  And now I could do the same - continue on my way.

  It led me into the bathroom, where the first thing I did was to examine my body. Apart from the fact that the rudimentary cavity under my tail was chafed and reddened, there was no problem. True, my posterior section ached as if I’d been riding a crazed horse for at least an hour (which was a fairly accurate description of what had happened), but that couldn’t really be called an injury. Nature had definitely prepared foxes for encounters with werewolves.

  I’d sensed earlier that I would have to wash myself in his mother-of-pearl bath - and my premonition had not deceived me. My entire tail, back, stomach and legs were covered in that wolf’s filthy muck, which I carefully washed off with shampoo. Then I quickly dried my tail with a hairdryer and got dressed. It suddenly occurred to me that it would be a good idea to search the premises.

  There was practically nothing to search in that luxurious, empty barn of a place - no cupboards, no sideboards, no drawers that opened. The doors leading into the other rooms were locked. But even so, the results of the search were interesting.

  Standing on the desk beside the elegant all-in-one computer was a massive silver object that I had taken at first glance for a figurine. On closer inspection the object turne
d out to be a cigar clipper. It was a figure of Monica Lewinsky lying on her side with one leg raised towards the ceiling to act as a lever, and when it was pressed (I couldn’t resist it) not only did the guillotine in the ring between her thighs snap into action, but a tongue of blue flame appeared out of her open mouth. It was a great little gadget, to my mind the only superfluous touch was the American flag that Monica was holding in her hand: sometimes just a tiny weight is enough to shift the balance and transform a piece of erotica into kitsch agitprop.

  The silver Monica was holding down a big loose-leaf binder on the desk. Inside it there was a pile of very different-looking papers.

  To judge from its high gloss, the paper lying on the very top was a page from some illustrated art book. Staring out at me from it was a huge, yellow-eyed wolf with a rune that looked like the letter ‘F’ on his chest - it was a photograph of a sculpture made of wood and amber (the eyes were the amber part). The caption said:

  FENRIR: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin. Fenrir is bound until Ragnarek. At Ragnarek he will kill Odin and be killed by Widar.

  It wasn’t clear from the caption just how Fenrir was going to catch the sun and devour it, if he was bound until Ragnarek, and Ragnarek would start when he caught the sun and devoured it. But then, it could well be that our world had only continued to exist so far thanks to inconsistencies of that kind: it was frightening to think just how many dying gods had cursed it.

  I remembered who Fenrir was. He was the most fearsome brute in the Nordic bestiary, the central character of Icelandic eschatology: the wolf who would eat the gods when the northern project was shut down. I wanted to believe that Alexander did-n’t identify too closely with this creature, that the yellow-eyed monster was simply an unattainable aesthetic ideal, something like a photo of Schwarzenegger hanging on the wall in a novice bodybuilder’s room.

  Further down the pile there was a page from a book with Borges’s miniature piece ‘Ragnarek’. I knew the story, which had astounded me with its somnambulistically precise depiction of something important and terrible. The hero and his friend witness a strange procession of gods returning from centuries of exile. A wave of human adoration carries them out on to a stage in a hall. They look strange:

  One was holding a branch, something out of the uncomplicated flora of dreams; another flung a clawed hand forward in a sweeping gesture: Janus’s face glanced repeatedly at Tot’s crooked beak with a certain apprehension.

  A dream echo of fascism. But then something very interesting happens:

  Probably roused by the applause, one of them - I don’t remember now exactly who - suddenly broke into a triumphant screeching, unbearably harsh, as if he were either whistling or clearing his throat. From that moment everything changed.

  From then on the text was covered with marks and notes. Words were underlined, framed with exclamation marks and even ringed - evidently to convey the relative intensity of emotion:

  It began with the suspicion (evidently exaggerated), that the Gods could not talk. Centuries of wild and nomadic life had destroyed in them all that was human: the Islamic crescent moon and the Roman cross had shown no condescension to the exiled. The low sloping foreheads, yellow teeth and thin moustaches of mulattoes or Chinese and the out-turned lips of animals spoke of the decline of the Olympic breed. Their clothing was out of keeping with their modest and honest poverty and put me in mind of the dismal chic of the gambling houses and bordellos of Bakho. A carnation bled out of a buttonhole. The outline of a knife-handle was discernible beneath a close-fitting jacket. And then we realized that !they were playing their last card!, that they were !cunning, blind and as cruel as mature, powerful beasts when they are flushed out of the bushes!, and - !IF WE GAVE WAY TO FEAR OR COMPASSION - THEY WOULD ANNIHILATE US!

  And then each of us took out a heavy revolver (the revolvers appeared from somewhere in the dream) AND WE SHOT THE GODS WITH DELIGHT.

  After that there were two pages from the Elder Edda - apparently from a prophecy by Velva. They had been torn out of some gift edition: the text was printed in large red script on glazed paper in a very wasteful manner:

  The wind raises

  Waves to the sky,

  Casts them on to the land,

  The sky grows dark;

  The blizzard hurtles along,

  Swirling furiously:

  These are the portents

  Of the death of the gods.

  ‘The death of the gods’ in the last line had been underscored with a fingernail. The message of the text on the second page was equally morose:

  But there is yet to come

  The most powerful of all,

  I dare not speak

  His name;

  Few are those who know

  What will come to pass

  Following the battle

  Between Odin and the Wolf.

  All the rest was in the same vein. In one way or another most of the papers in the file related to northern myth. The one I found most depressing was a photograph of the German submarine Nagelfahr - in Scandinavian mythology that was the name of the god Loki’s ship, which was made out of the nails of the dead. A highly appropriate name for a Second World War submarine. The unshaven crew members smiling from the bridge looked perfectly likeable - they reminded me of a detachment of modern ‘greens’.

  As I got closer to the end of the file, there were fewer marks on the sheets of paper: as if the person who had been leafing through them and thinking about the collection of material had rapidly lost interest or, as Borges put it in a different story ‘a certain noble impatience’ had prevented him from leafing through all the way to the end. But the guy’s pretensions had been serious, especially by the standards of our mercenary times (‘the age of swords and pole axes’ as it was described in one of the extracts in the file, ‘the time of cursed wealth and great lechery’).

  The last item in the file was a lined page torn out of a school exercise book. It had been inserted into a transparent plastic envelope to protect it. The handwritten text on the page was something like a gift dedication:

  To Sashka, a memento.

  Transform!

  WOLF-FLOW!

  Colonel Lebedenko

  I closed the file and put it back under Monica, then continued with my search. I wasn’t surprised when I found several CDs beside the music centre, all with various performances of the same opera:

  RICHARD WAGNER

  DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

  Götterdämmerung.

  The next curious item that caught my eye was a thick, grey notebook. It was lying on the floor between the wall and the divan - as if someone had been looking through it before going to bed, fallen asleep and dropped it. On its cover was written:

  ‘Shitman’ Project

  Top secret.

  Copy No. 9

  not to be removed from the building

  At that moment I didn’t make any connection between this strange title and the story about the Shakespeare specialist that Pavel Ivanovich had told me. My thoughts followed a different route - I decided it was yet another proof of the power of American cultural influence. Superman, Batman, another couple of similar films, and the mind begins to stereotype reality in their image and likeness. But then, I thought, what could Russia put up against this? The Shitov Project? Who would be willing to spend nights sweating over that for low pay? That Shitov in a poor suit had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire. The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper. Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality . That’s the reason for all the disasters . . .

  I didn’t even bother to open the notebook. I’d had a horror of secret documents ever since Soviet times: they did you no good and they could snow you under with problems, even if you had FSB protection.

 
My eye was caught by several graphic works on paper that were hanging on the walls - runes that had been roughly drawn with either a broad brush or a paw. They reminded me a bit of Chinese calligraphy - the crudest and most expressive examples. Hanging between two of these runes there was a branch of mistletoe - I learned that from the caption on the wall: to look at, it was simply a dry, pointed stick.

  The design on the carpet was curious, it showed a battle between lions and wolves - it looked like a copy of a Roman mosaic. The books on the only bookshelf were mostly massive illustrated editions (The Splendour of Rome, The New Revised History of the Russian Soul, The Origin of Species and Homosexuality and other, simpler titles about cars and guns). But then, I knew that the books on shelves like that had nothing to do with the taste of their owners, because they were chosen by the interior designers.

  Having concluded my inspection, I went across to the glass door on to the roof. The view from there was beautiful. Down below were the dark pits of pre-Revolutionary courtyards improved by restoration work. Towering up above them were a few new buildings of the phallic architecture - an attempt had been made to insert them smoothly and gently into the historical landscape, and the result was that they looked as if they were smeared with some kind of personal lubricant. After them came the Kremlin, proudly thrusting up to the clouds its ancient dicks with the gold balls sewn into their tops.

  This damned job, I thought, it’s terrible how badly it’s perverted my perception of the world. But then, has it really perverted it all that much? It’s all the same to us foxes - we pass through life and barely touch it, like a light shower of rain in Asia. But to be a human being here is hard. Take one step away from the secret national gestalt, and this country will screw you over. A theorem that has been proved by every life followed through to the end, no matter how many glamorous coverlets you spread over the daily festival of life. I should know, I’ve seen plenty of it. Why? I have my own suspicions, but I won’t go into the subject. People probably aren’t simply born here by chance, it’s no accident . . . And no one is able to help anyone else. Could that be the reason why Moscow sunsets always make me feel so sad?