The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  Your world will soon be like ours (at least, for those who are kept on to service the extraction and export of oil), but as yet it still has twilight zones where a salutary ambivalence is the rule. And that is precisely where a soul like yours can be, if not happy, then at least in balance. If these zones of ambivalence are created for you by others, then enjoy them while they still exist. The world will not always be like that. This is me preaching to you in response to your lectures.

  Now about English men. Don’t judge them from your brief encounters in the National. They’re quite different here. Do you remember the writer Yuan Mei, whom our sister U married in 1739? I don’t expect you’ve forgotten him - a scholar from the Hanlin Academy who studied the Manchurian language and collected stories about evil spirits . . . By the way, he knew who our sister really was. That was precisely why he married her.

  His book (it was called What Confucius Did Not Speak Of) is half made up of stories, but it also contains some intriguing ethnographic sketches. In those times England was known as the ‘Land of the Redhairs’. This is what Yuan Mei wrote about the English - I cite the passage in full:

  ‘407. INHABITANTS OF THE LAND OF THE REDHAIRS SPIT AT YOUNG SINGERS

  The inhabitants of the Land of Redhairs often engage in dissolute behaviour with young singers. When they arrange their carousals, they invite young singers, undress them then sit round them and spit at their secret place. They do not require any greater intimacy. When they have finished spitting, they let them go, with a generous reward. This is called “money from the common pot”.’

  This story, which might appear to be historically inaccurate, in fact reflects very accurately how an English aristocrat deals with a woman’s soul when it opens itself to him (fortunately, the system of privileged education here transforms most of them into homosexuals). Before, when I observed the English, I used to wonder what was hidden beneath that impenetrable armour-plating of hypocrisy forged over the centuries. And then I realized - it was precisely that simple act. There is nothing else there, and that minimalism is what guarantees the stability of the order of things here.

  Believe me, if you come to London, you will feel like a spittoon wandering alone among snipers who hawk and spit into your very soul, men for whom equality for women means only one thing - the chance to save a bit on ‘the money from the common pot’.

  As for the super-werewolf... You know, it seems to me you have become too bogged down in introspection. Think - if everything that is most important were inside ourselves, then why would we need the external world? Or do you believe that it no longer holds any possible surprises for you and it is enough simply to sit by the wall on a dusty meditation rug, pushing away the thoughts that crowd round you, like a swimmer pushing away dead jellyfish? What if one of them turns out to be a golden fish that grants wishes? I think it is still too soon to give up on this world - by doing that you might find you have given up on yourself. You know what my hubby said to me yesterday? ‘The super-werewolf will come, and you will see him as clearly as you see me now.’ Even if in my heart of hearts I agreed with you, how would I dare to argue with the head of the house of Cricket? :-=))). But let us discuss this when we meet, my dear. In a week Brian and I shall be in Moscow - don’t turn your mobile off!

  Heads and tails,

  E

  When I finished reading the letter, I shook my head. Someone was in for it soon. The doodle :-=))), which looked like the war criminal Hitler grinning, was an ominous sign that E Hu-Li used - it meant that she had bleak and cruel intentions in mind. But what else was to be expected from the most pitiless fox in our entire family? She’s the same in everything, I thought. Ask her for help, and she advises you to think about something else. The clouds, she says, are just an illusion . . .

  Although, perhaps she’s right? After all, things aren’t nearly as bad as I thought only yesterday. I was bursting with the desire to tell someone about the affair I had been forced to start. But who? Of course, I could spill the whole thing out to a taxi driver, and then make him forget what he’d heard. Only it was dangerous to play pranks like that on the road. No, I have to wait for E Hu-Li, I thought. She’ll certainly be interested in listening to me. And apart from that, she had been making fun of my virginity for so many centuries that it would be a pleasure to throw the news in her face. For all her sophistication, she had never had any lovers like that, except perhaps for one yakshi-devil in the sixteenth century. But compared to Alexander, even he seemed pitiful . . .

  At this point I came back to my senses - my sister’s letter had reminded me about the most important thing of all.

  I had known for a long time that the moment when you are overflowing with the joys or sorrows of life is the best time to practise meditation. I turned off the computer and laid out a foam plastic rug on the floor. It’s absolutely fantastic, a real gift for a meditator, it’s a shame there weren’t any in ancient times. Then I put a cushion filled with buckwheat husks on it and sat on the cushion in the lotus position, with my tail lowered on to the floor.

  The spiritual practice of foxes includes ‘contemplation of the mind’ and ‘contemplation of the heart’. Today I decided to begin my session with contemplation of the heart. The heart plays no part in this practice, apart from a metaphorical one. It’s an accident of translation: the Chinese hieroglyph ‘xin’, which stands for ‘heart’ here, has many different meanings and ‘contemplation of the innermost essence’ would probably have been a more accurate translation. And from a practical point of view, it would have been more correct to call the technique ‘tugging the tail’.

  Every child knows that if you tug a dog or a cat by the tail, they feel pain. But if you pull a fox by the tail, then what happens is beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent tailless monkey. At that moment the fox feels the full weight of all her bad deeds. This is because she uses her tail to commit them. And since every fox, apart from the total failures, has a whole heap of bad deeds to her name, the result is an appalling attack of conscience, accompanied by terrifying visions and insights so overwhelming that the fox loses the very desire to carry on living. The rest of the time our conscience doesn’t bother us at all.

  A lot here depends on the strength of the tug and how unexpected it is. For instance, when we happen to snag our tails on a bush during a chicken hunt (I’ll tell you about that later), we also experience light pangs of conscience. Only while we are running, the corresponding muscles are tensed, and so the effect is not so pronounced. But the essence of the practice of ‘tugging the tail’ lies in giving your own tail a powerful tug at a moment when the area of the tail muscles is as relaxed as possible.

  Not everything here is as simple as it seems. In actual fact ‘contemplation of the heart’ cannot be separated from ‘contemplation of the mind’, because the correct performance of the techniques requires consciousness to be layered off into three independent streams:

  1. the first stream of consciousness is the mind which remembers all its dark deeds from time immemorial.

  2. the second stream of consciousness is the mind which spontaneously and unexpectedly makes the fox tug her own tail.

  3. the third stream of consciousness is the mind as the abstract observer of the first two streams and itself.

  Speaking very approximately, this third stream of consciousness is also the very essence of the technique ‘contemplating the mind’. All of these practices are preliminary - you have to perform them for a thousand years before moving on to the most important, which is called ‘tail of the void’ or ‘artlessness’. This is a secret practice that is not entirely clear even to foxes like me, who have completed the thousand-years preliminary cycle a long time ago.

  And so, I sat in the lotus position, placing my left hand on my knee and my right hand on my tail. I concentrated and began remembering my past - the layers of it that are usually concealed from me by the stream of everyday thoughts. And suddenly, entirely out of the blue, my right hand jerke
d and tugged. I felt a pain in the base of my spine. But that pain was nothing compared with the stream of repentance, horror and shame for what I had done that flooded over me with such great power that tears sprang to my eyes.

  The faces of those who had not survived their encounter with me floated past in front of my face, like yellow leaves drifting past a window in an autumn storm. They emerged from non-existence for only a second, but that second was long enough for each pair of eyes to sear me with a glance full of bewilderment and pain. I watched them, remembering the past, with the tears pouring down my cheeks in two great streams as repentance tore my heart apart.

  At the same time I was serenely aware that what was taking place was simply the insubstantial play of reflections, the rippling of thoughts that is raised by the habitual draughts of the mind, and that when these ripples settled down, it would be clear that there were no draughts and no reflections, and no mind itself - nothing but that clear, eternal, all-penetrating gaze in the face of which nothing is real.

  That is the way I have been practising for about twelve centuries.

  From the very beginning Alexander and I had an unspoken agreement not to pester each other with questions. I wasn’t supposed to ask about things that he couldn’t talk about because of the non-disclosure agreements he’d signed and all the other FSB garbage. And he didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, because my answers might have placed him in an ambiguous position - for instance, what if I suddenly turned out to be a Chinese spy? Things could quite easily have been made to look that way, after all, I didn’t even have an internal passport, and only a fake one for foreign travel.

  I wasn’t really happy with this situation: there were lots of things I wanted to find out about him. And I could see he was consumed by curiosity too. But we were getting to know each other gradually, groping our way along - the information was provided in homeopathic doses.

  I liked to kiss him on the cheek before he transformed into a beast (I could never bring myself to kiss him on the lips, and that was strange, considering the extent of our intimacy). But then, the caresses didn’t last for long - a few touches were enough to trigger the transformation, and after that kissing became impossible.

  For so many centuries a kiss had been simply one element of hypnotic suggestion to me, but now I myself was kissing, even if it was in a childish fashion . . . There was something dreamlike about that. His face was often hidden by a gauze mask, and I had to move it aside. One day I couldn’t stand it any more, I tugged on the lace of the mask that had slipped off his face and said:

  ‘Maybe you could not put it on when we’re together? Who do you think you are, Michael Jackson?’

  ‘It’s because of the smell,’ he said. ‘It has a special chemical that doesn’t let smells through.’

  ‘And what can you smell up here?’ I asked, surprised.

  We were sitting by the door to the roof, which was open (he avoided going out of his mirror-walled birdhouse, because he was worried about snipers, or photographers, or avenging lightning from the heavens). Apart from a very faint whiff of exhaust fumes from the street, I couldn’t detect any smells at all.

  ‘I can smell everything in the world up here,’ he said with a frown.

  ‘Such as?’

  He looked at my white blouse and drew in a deep breath through his nose.

  ‘That blouse of yours,’ he said. ‘Before you, it was worn by a middle-aged woman who used home-made eau-de-cologne made from Egyptian lotus extract . . .’

  I sniffed my blouse. It didn’t smell of anything.

  ‘Seriously?’ I queried. ‘I bought it in a second-hand shop, I liked the embroidered pattern.’

  He drew in another breath of air.

  ‘And what’s more, she diluted the extract with fake vodka. There’s a lot of fusel oil.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked, nonplussed. ‘I feel like taking the blouse off and throwing it away . . . So what else can you smell?’

  He turned towards the open door.

  ‘There’s a terrible smell of petrol. Bad enough to give you a splitting headache. And there’s a smell of asphalt, rubber, tobacco smoke . . . And of toilets, human sweat, beer, baking, coffee, popcorn, dust, paint, nail varnish, doughnuts, newsprint . . . I could go on and on with the list.’

  ‘But don’t these smells get mixed up together?’

  He shook his head in reply.

  ‘It’s more as if they’re layered over each other and contained in each other, like a letter in an envelope that’s lying in the pocket of a coat that’s hanging in a wardrobe, and so on. The worst thing by far is that very often you find out lots of things you absolutely didn’t want to know. For instance, they give you a document to sign, and you can tell that yesterday there was a sandwich with stale salami lying on it. And that’s not all, the smell of the sweat from the hand that gave you the document makes it clear that what it says in the document isn’t true . . .

  And so on.’

  ‘And why does this happen to you?’

  ‘It’s just the usual lupine sense of smell. It often stays with me even in the human phase. It’s tough. But I suppose it saves me from lots of bad habits.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘For instance, I can’t smoke hash. And definitely not snort cocaine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on his way from Colombo to Minsk. And that’s nothing, I even know how many times that ass of his was . . .’

  ‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t go on. I’d already got the idea.’

  ‘And the worst thing is, I never know when it’s suddenly going to overwhelm me. It’s as unpredictable as a migraine.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ I sighed. ‘What a pain.’

  ‘Well, it’s not always a pain,’ he said. ‘There are some things about it I really enjoy. For instance, I like the way you smell.’

  I was embarrassed. A fox’s body really does have a very faint aroma, but people usually take it for perfume.

  ‘And what do I smell of?’

  ‘I can’t really say . . . Mountains, moonlight. Spring. Flowers. Deception. But not a wily kind of deception, more as if you’re having a joke. I really love the way you smell. I think I could breathe that smell in all my life and still keep finding something new in it.’

  ‘Well that’s nice,’ I said. ‘I felt very awkward when you said that about my blouse. I’ll never buy anything in second-hand shops again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But I would be grateful if you’d take it off.’

  ‘Is the smell that strong?’

  ‘No, it’s very weak. It’s just that I like you better without any blouse.’

  I thought for a moment and then pulled the blouse off over my head.

  ‘You’re not wearing any bras today,’ he laughed.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I read that when a girl goes to see her young man and something is supposed to happen . . . You know, if she is ready for something to happen . . . Then she doesn’t put one on. It’s a kind of etiquette.’

  ‘Where did you read that?’ he asked.

  ‘In Cosmopolitan. Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Do you mind that I have small breasts?’

  ‘No, I really like that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go on and on kissing them for ever.’

  It seemed to me that he was talking with an effort, as if his jaws were being cramped by a yawn. That was what usually happened just before the transformation. Despite his reassuring declaration about ‘going on kissing them for ever’, we rarely got that far. But then, his hot wolf’s tongue . . . But I won’t transgress the bounds of propriety, the reader understands perfectly well without that.

  He barely had time to take my knickers off before it all happened: sexual arousal triggered the mysterious mechanism of his metamorphosis. Less than a minute later, standing there in front of me was a sinister, handsome
beast, whose most astounding asset was his instrument of love. Every time I found it impossible to believe that my simulacrum pouch was really capable of accommodating that hammer of the witches.

  When he turned into a wolf, Alexander lost the ability to speak. But he could understand everything he heard - although, of course, I had no guarantee that his wolfish understanding was the same as his human one. His remaining communicative capabilities were inadequate for conveying the complex motions of the soul, but he could reply in the affirmative or the negative. ‘Yes’ was signified by a short, muffled roar:

  ‘Gr-r-r!’

  And he expressed the meaning ‘no’ with a sound like something halfway between a howl and a yawn.

  ‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

  I found this ‘whoo-oo-oo’ rather funny - it was more or less the way a dog whines in the heat when its masters have locked it out on the balcony. But I didn’t tell him about this observation of mine.

  His hands didn’t turn into wolf’s paws, they were more like the fantastic extremities of some movie Martian. I found it impossible to believe those claws were capable of tender touching, even though I knew it from my own experience.

  And so, when he set them on my bare stomach, as always, I felt a bit uneasy.

  ‘What do you want, beastling?’ I asked. ‘Shall I lie on my side?’

  ‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

  ‘On my tummy?’

  ‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

  ‘Kneel down?’

  ‘Gr-r-r!’

  ‘All right, only be careful, okay?’

  ‘Gr-r-rrrrrr-r!’

  I wasn’t entirely certain that last ‘grrrr’ meant ‘yes’, and not just ‘grrr’, but even so I did as he asked. And I was immediately sorry: he took hold of my tail with his paw.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘let go, you monster!’

  ‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

  ‘Really, let go,’ I repeated plaintively.

  ‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

  And then what I was most afraid of happened - he pulled my tail. Not very hard, but still hard enough for me suddenly to remember the Sikh from the National hotel. And when he jerked my tail a little more sharply, I felt so ashamed for the role I’d played in that man’s fate that I sobbed out loud.