I was so frightened that I started squealing. He jumped away from me, turned towards the mirror, saw, shuddered and started whimpering. Only then did I recover my wits. At that point I’d already realized that something terrible had happened to him, some kind of catastrophe, and it was my fault. The catastrophe had been caused by my kiss, by that electrical circuit of love that I had closed when I pressed my lips against his mouth.
I squatted down beside him and put my arms round his neck. But he tore himself away, and when I tried to hold him back, he bit me on the hand. Not really hard, but it started to bleed in two places. I gasped and jerked away. He dashed to the door into the other room, slammed his paws against it and disappeared inside.
He didn’t come out for an entire hour. I realized that he wanted to be left alone and I didn’t intrude on his solitude. I was terrified, afraid that any moment I would hear a shot (he had once promised to shoot himself for an absolutely trivial reason). But instead of a shot I heard music. He’d put on ‘I Follow the Sun’. He listened to the song once, then put it on again. His soul was clearly in need of oxygen.
I was left there, sitting on the carpet in front of the divan. As soon as I calmed down a little bit, I began getting ideas about what might have happened. The first thing I remembered was the deceased Lord Cricket and his lecture about the snake force descending through the tail. Naturally, once I heard the word ‘super-werewolf’, I had regarded all his theories as crazy nonsense, a garland of foul-smelling bubbles in the swamp of profane esotericism. But one aspect of what had happened lent a certain weight to what his lordship had said.
Before his transformation, Alexander had fallen on the floor, just as if someone had tugged on his tail. Or as if his tail had become incredibly heavy. In any case, something unusual had happened, something that had taken him by surprise - and it had something to do with his organ of hypnotic suggestion. And Lord Cricket had said that the transition from a wolf to what he called the ‘super-werewolf’ took place when the kundalini descended to the very tip of the tail. And as well as that . . .
This was the most unpleasant part. As well as that, he had mentioned an ‘involtation of darkness’ that was necessary for this to happen, the spiritual influence of a ‘senior demonic entity . . .’
Little me?
It was hard to believe it. But on the other hand, what the deceased lord had said could well have contained a grain of truth picked up from somewhere by that Aleister Crowley of his. All sorts of secret gatherings and mystical rituals were held in the world - it couldn’t all be absolute charlatanism, could it? One thing was certain - I had played a fatal part in what had happened. Apparently I had been the catalyst for some obscure alchemical reaction. As Haruki Murakami said, the force emanating from a woman is not very great, but it can certainly move a man’s heart . . .
The most terrible thing was the realization that what had happened was irreversible - a were-creature never makes mistakes about things like that. I could tell that Alexander would never again be the way he used to be. And it wasn’t just supposition on my part, I knew it with my tail. It was as if I’d dropped a precious vase that had shattered into a thousand fragments, and now it could never be glued back together again.
I plucked up my courage, walked over to the door through which he had disappeared and opened it.
I’d never been in there before. What I found behind the door was a small space, like a dressing room, with a table, an armchair and cupboards running right round the walls. There was a small digital recorder lying on the table. It was playing the Shocking Blue song again, promising to follow the sun until the end of time.
Alexander was unrecognizable. He had already changed his clothes - now, instead of a general’s uniform, he was wearing a dark grey jacket and a black turtleneck. I’d never seen him dressed like that before. But the most important thing was the elusive change that had taken place in his face - the eyes seemed to have moved closer together and faded somehow. And their expression had altered too - a new despair, balanced by fury, had appeared in them: I don’t think anyone else but me would have been able to separate out these components of his outwardly calm gaze. It was him, but not him. I felt afraid.
‘Sasha,’ I called softly.
He looked up at me and asked: ‘Do you remember the story about the Little Scarlet Flower?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’ve only just realized what it really means.’
‘What?’
‘Love doesn’t transform. It simply tears away the masks. I thought I was a prince. But it turns out . . . This is what my soul is like.’
‘Don’t dare talk like that,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not true. You didn’t understand a thing. It has absolutely nothing to do with your soul. It’s . . . it’s like . . .’
‘It’s like hatching out from the egg,’ he said sadly. ‘You can’t hatch back into it.’
He had expressed my own feeling with astonishing precision. So the change really was irreversible. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to fall through the floor, then through the ground, and keep going to infinity . . . But he didn’t think it was my fault. On the contrary, he made it clear that he thought the cause of what had happened lay in him. What a noble heart he does have, really, I thought.
He stood up.
‘Now I’m going to fly north,’ he said, running his fingers tenderly over my cheek. ‘Come what may. We’ll see each other in three days.’
He appeared three days later.
I wasn’t expecting him that morning, and my instinct had given me no warning. The knock at the door sounded strangely weak. If it had been the militia, the fire inspectors, the public health inspectors, the district architect or any other bearers of the national idea, it wouldn’t have sounded like that - I knew how people knocked when they came for money. I thought it must be the old cleaning lady who cleaned the stand. She sometimes came to ask for hot water. I’d given her an electric kettle twice, but she still came anyway - probably out of loneliness.
Alexander was standing outside - deathly pale, with blue circles under his eyes and a long scratch on his left cheek. He was wearing a crumpled summer raincoat. I could smell alcohol on him - not old, stale fumes, but the way an open bottle of vodka smells. I’d never known him to drink before.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked.
It would have been hard to think of a more stupid question. He didn’t even bother to answer.
‘There’s no time. Can you hide me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Come in.’
‘This place is no good. Our people know about it. Have you got somewhere else?’
‘Yes I have. Come in and we’ll talk about it.’
He shook his head.
‘Let’s go right now. Another five minutes and it will be too late.’
I realized the situation was serious.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Will we be coming back here?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Then I’ll take my bag. And my bike. Will you come in?’
‘I’ll wait here.’
A few minutes later we were already walking away from the equestrian complex along a forest path. I was pushing my bike along by the handlebars: I had an extremely heavy bag hanging over my shoulder, but Alexander didn’t make the slightest attempt to help me. That wasn’t really like him - but I sensed that he could hardly even walk.
‘Will it take much longer?’
‘About half an hour, if we don’t hurry.’
‘What sort of place is it?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘They don’t come any safer.’
I was taking him to my own personal bomb shelter.
It often happens that preparations made in case of war are actually used by a later age for a different purpose. In the eighties many people had been expecting the Cold War to end in a hot one - there were at least three portents that indicated such a development was immin
ent:
1. bully beef from the strategic reserves of Stalin’s time - which were assembled in case there was a third world war - appeared on the shelves in shops (the cans were easily identifiable by the lack of any markings, the distinctive yellowish tinge of the metal, a thick layer of Vaseline and their completely tasteless, almost colourless contents).
2. the American president was called Ronald Wilson Reagan. Each word in his name contained six letters, giving the apocalyptic number of the beast - ‘666’ - a fact that was frequently mentioned with alarm by the journal Communist, where many architects of the future reform worked at the time.
3. the surname Reagan was pronounced exactly like ‘ray gun’ - a fact that I noticed myself.
It became clear several years later that these signs did not portend war, but the end of the USSR: the upper rat had chickened out, thereby fulfilling the first part of its great geopolitical mission. But at that time a war had still seemed very likely, and I was thinking about what I would do when it started.
These thoughts led me to a simple decision. I was already living close to Bitsevsky Park and in its secret depths, criss-crossed with gullies, I often came across concrete pipes, shafts and service ducts. It was clear from the different sorts of concrete that these incomplete underground structures came from various periods of Soviet power. Some were elements of a drainage system, some had something to do with underground heat pipelines and cables, and some were simply unidentifiable, but looked like something military.
Most of them were in open view. But one of these boltholes proved suitable for my purposes. It was located in impassable thickets, too remote for teenage drinkers or courting couples to use as a meeting place. There were no forest tracks leading to it, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone who happened to be out walking passing that way. This is how it looked: there was a concrete pipe about a metre in diameter protruding from the earth in the side of a gully. The bottom of the opposite slope of the ravine was only a few steps away, so it was difficult to spot the pipe from above. Under the ground it branched into two small rooms. One of them had a power distribution box hanging on the wall, and even a socket for a light bulb hanging on a spike hammered into the concrete - evidently there was an underground power cable running nearby.
When I discovered this place, there were no signs of life in it, only garbage left over from the construction work and a rubber boot with a torn top. Bit by bit I brought in a lot of canned food, jars of honey, Vietnamese bamboo mats and blankets. Only instead of war, perestroika broke out, and I had no more need for a bomb shelter. But even so I still used to inspect the place from time to time, thinking of it as my ‘bunker’.
Of course, all my reserves had rotted, but the spot itself had remained undiscovered: only once in the entire democratic period did a tramp attempt to move in (he obviously must have been crawling along the bottom of the gully in a delirious state and then clambered into the pipe). I had to give him a rather severe hypnotic session - I’m afraid the poor man forgot about plenty of other things as well as the gully. After that I hung a protective talisman at the entrance, something I usually avoid doing, since sooner or later you have to pay for magic that changes the natural course of things with your own death. But in this case the intervention was minimal.
When Alexander asked me to hide him, I realized immediately that I couldn’t possibly think of any better place than this. But getting there turned out not to be so easy - he was walking slower and slower, with frequent stops to catch his breath.
Eventually we reached the gully, which was concealed by a proliferation of hazel bushes and some umbrella-shaped plants with a name I could never remember - they always grew to a monstrous size here, almost like trees, and I was concerned that the reason might be radiation or chemical pollution. Alexander scrabbled down into the gully, bent over and climbed into the pipe.
‘Right or left?’
‘Left,’ I said. ‘I’ll just switch on the light.’
‘Oho, so there’s even light. Real luxury,’ he muttered.
A minute later I helped him take off his raincoat and laid him out on the bamboo mats. It was only then I noticed that his grey jacket was soaked in blood.
‘There are bullets,’ he said. ‘Two or three. Can you get them out?’
Fortunately, I’d put my Leatherman in the bag. And I had a bit of medical experience, although the last time I’d practised was a very long time ago, and it wasn’t bullets I removed from a man’s body, it was arrowheads. But there wasn’t really much difference.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Only don’t squeal.’
During the procedure - which proved to be rather long - he didn’t make a single sound. After one particularly clumsy turn of my instrument his silence became so oppressive, I was afraid he might have died. But he reached out for his bottle of vodka and took a swallow. Finally it was all over. I’d really hacked him about, but I’d got all three lumps of silver out - there were still black hairs embedded in two of them, and I realized he had been shot when he was . . . I didn’t know what to call his new form - the word ‘dog’ seemed insulting to me.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Now we have to bandage it up with something sterile. You lie here for a while, and I’ll go to the chemist’s. Shall I get you anything?’
‘Yes. Buy me a leash and a collar.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ he said and tried to smile. ‘I’m joking. Don’t worry about any medicine, dogs heal fast. Buy a few disposable razors and a can of shaving foam. And some mineral water. Do you have money?’
‘Yes. Don’t worry.’
‘And don’t go home. Not on any account. They’re bound to be waiting for you.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ I said. ‘Listen . . . I’ve just remembered. Mikhalich has this instrument that locates things. From a sensor. What if there’s one of those sensors in my things?’
‘Don’t worry about that. He was just bragging to impress you. We don’t have any instruments like that. They found you through the cleaning lady who gets hot water from you. She’s been working for us since eighty-five.’
You learn something new every day.
When I came back a few hours later with two plastic bags full of shopping, he was asleep. I sat down beside him and looked into his face for a long time. He was sleeping as peacefully as a child. And standing on the floor was a glass, with three bloody silver buttons lying in it. It’s hard to kill a werewolf. Take Mikhalich - the more you smash him over the head, the jollier he gets. The champagne’s gone to my head, he says . . . Witty fellow. Of course this was a case of bullets, not champagne - but even so you couldn’t get my Sashenka with a little thing like that.
The myth that a werewolf can only be killed with a silver bullet is very helpful to our community.
1. the wounds never fester and no disinfection is required - silver is a natural antiseptic.
2. fewer bullets are fired at us - people economise on the expensive metal and often go out hunting with only a single bullet, assuming that any kind of hit will be fatal.
But in real life the shot is far more often fatal for the hunter. If people would just use their brains for a moment, then of course they would guess who spreads these rumours about silver bullets. People might think a lot, but they think in a perverted way, and not about the right things.
The plastic bags I had brought contained food and a few small household items. As I went down into the gully and dragged them into the pipe, I suddenly thought that basically I was no different now from thousands of Russian girls who were married and whose frail shoulders had assumed the burden of running the home. It had all happened so suddenly and it was so different from the roles that I had previously played, that I wasn’t sure yet if I liked it or not.
It is usually assumed that were-creatures are not concerned about spiritual problems. People think you turn into a fox or a wolf, howl at the moon, tear someone’s throat out, and all the great questions
of life are instantly answered, and it’s clear who you are, what you’re doing in this world, where you came from and where you’re going . . . But that’s not the way it is at all. We are far more tormented by the riddles of existence than modern humans. But the cinema continues to depict us as complacent, earth-bound gluttons, nonentities who are indistinguishable from each other, cruel and squalid consumers of the blood of others.
I don’t actually think this is a conscious attempt by people to insult us. It’s more likely a simple consequence of their own limitations. They model us according to their own likeness, because they have no one else to take as a prototype.
Even the little bit that people do know about us is usually distorted and vulgarized beyond all recognition. For instance, according to the rumours about were-foxes, they live in human graves. When they hear that, people imagine bones and stench, decomposing corpses. And they think - what repulsive creatures these foxes must be if they live in a place like that . . . Something like a large coffin of worms.
Of course, this is a mistake.
A good ancient grave was a complex structure consisting of several dry, spacious rooms illuminated by sunlight, which was directed into them by a series of bronze mirrors (there wasn’t a lot of light, but it was enough to work by). A grave like that, situated far away from human dwellings, was ideally suited as a home for a being indifferent to the vanity of the world and inclined to solitary contemplation. There are almost no suitable graves left now: they’ve been ploughed up, canals and roads have been built through them. And in the modern communal apartments of the afterlife, even the dead feel cramped.
But sometimes even now nostalgia still drives me to a nearby cemetery - simply to stroll along the avenues and ponder the eternal. I look at the crosses and the stars, read the names, gaze at the faces on the faded photographs and feel so sorry for all these people I never met. Mr Keufer understood so much about life . . . And Mr Solonyan understood even more then Mr Keufer ... And Mr and Mrs Yagupolsky understood even more then Solonyan and Keufer taken together . . . They understood everything, apart from what is most important. And the most important thing was so inexpressibly close. Sad.
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Page 25
