A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  And when they manage to do this, they finally slip into gear with each other. The final morning doubts disappear, and they’re already trying to find the most comfortable spots in this hell they’ve just dashed into so impetuously. They shift from insults to jokes. The fact that they all share the same fate becomes unimportant, since there are still the small differences they’ve learned to see, and it no longer matters that they’re all going to die here; what matters is that someone sleeps on the top bunk a long way from the window.

  You can understand all of this when you’re still little, but there’s no way to express it in words; you understand if from the grownups’ voices that filter through your early morning drowsiness. It seems amazing and strange, but at that time the entire world is amazing, and everything in it is strange. But afterwards they make you get up with all the others. At first the grownups bend down to you from above, proffering you a face distended into a smile. There’s obviously some law in the world which says they have to smile when they turn towards you. The smile is strained, of course, but the most important thing is that you understand they’re not supposed to do you any harm. Their faces are terrible—pocked, blotchy, and stubbly—a bit like the moon in the window, the same close details.

  Grownups are very easy to understand, but there’s almost nothing to be said when they’re around. Often they make you feel really rotten by paying such close attention to your life. Not that they seem to be asking for anything—just for a moment they put down the heavy invisible beam that they carry around all their lives in order to bend down and smile at you, then they straighten up and pick it up again to carry it further—but that’s only how it looks at first glance. In fact what they want is for you to become just the same as they are. They have to pass on their beam to someone before they die—there must be some reason they’ve been carrying it, after all.

  In the evenings several of them often get together and give someone a beating. The one they beat up usually plays along very subtly with the ones who are beating him, and for that they beat him a little less hard. As a rule they don’t let you watch this, but you can always hide behind the bunks and watch everything through the standard one-centimeter gap between the planks. But afterwards—no matter how long it might be after that moment when you hide and watch the entire procedure—afterwards the day will come when you yourself will be squirming there on the floor among the flying feet clad in boots of canvas or felt and trying to play along with the others who are beating you.

  When you begin to read, at first it’s not the text that guides your thoughts, but your thoughts that direct the text. It always breaks off just at the most interesting point, and when you learn from a scrap of newspaper that the audience applauded such and such comrades’ entry, you start thinking such and such must be two really big shots if even their comrades are greeted with applause. Then you close your eyes and start imagining those comrades and that applause, and you have time enough to live through an entire little life that’s completely invisible to all the others sitting on the latrines beside you. And all because of a scrap of newspaper no bigger than the side of a packet of tea, with a tread mark from the sole of a canvas boot.

  But there’s still nothing that can compare with getting your hands on an actual book. It doesn’t matter which one, there aren’t very many here, only five or six, and you read all of them several times; it doesn’t matter because you read each book differently every time. At first what’s important about it are the words themselves. Each of them instantly summons up the thing it signifies (“boot,” “latrine,” “padded jacket”) or creates a gaping, meaningless black hole (“ontology,” “intellectual”), so you have to go to one of the grownups, which you always try to avoid, so that “ontology” becomes a flashlight and “intellectual” becomes a long wrench with an adjustable head.

  The next time, what interests you are entire situations—how someone stumps into a narrow, foul-smelling kitchen, and smashes the waiter Proshka’s rotten hypocritical face to a pulp with his strong worker’s fists. Every one of the grownups has read this little book, and every time, when they enclose their new victim in the circle of stench breathed from their foul mouths, they each take a little step forward in turn and just for a second they become the young champion of justice, Artyom, investing their blows with all their hatred for the lackey’s spirit of the twisted hypocritical waiter as he thrashes about in the center of the circle—probably every beating that ever takes place is a triumph of some imaginary justice. And then, the third time, you find a description of some girl breathing on the top bunks, and that’s all you notice. You have to grow up altogether before you realize just how squalid and uninteresting everything that you’ve read and reread so many times really is.

  You’re happy in childhood because you think you were when you remember it. Happiness in general is nothing but reminiscence. When you were little they let you go out and wander about all day long, and you could walk along all the corridors, looking into any corner you liked and wandering into places no one else might have visited since the people who built them.

  Now this has all become a carefully preserved memory, but then you were just walking along the corridor and feeling fed up because winter was starting again, and it would be dark outside the window almost all the time, and you turn off and wait just in case until two swearing sheepskin-coated guards have gone rumbling past along the adjoining corridor, and then you turn off again through a door that was always closed but today is standing wide open. There’s something shining at the end of the corridor. It turns out there are two great thick pipes running along the walls here, all plastered over and even whitewashed. And there at the far end, where the light is and the iron manhole is standing open, you see this huge blue machine trembling ever so slightly and humming, and behind it another two just the same, and there’s nobody around—you could easily just go down the ladder and enter that magical space that shudders because of all the power it contains.

  You don’t, though, because at any moment they could lock the door behind you, and you walk back, dreaming of finding your way back here again some time. Afterwards, when you begin coming here every day, when caring for these metallic tortoises that never sleep becomes the nominal goal of your existence, you’re often tempted to recall that first time you saw them, but memories wear out if you use them too often, and so you hold this memory—of happiness—in reserve.

  Another memory which you almost never use also has to do with the conquest of space. It was probably earlier: on the side corridors, a winter day (the windows are already blue, twilight is setting in), and the entire immense building is filled with silence; everybody’s at work. It seems there really is nobody at all around—you can tell from the way everything looks. Grownups alter the surroundings, but just now the twilit corridor is unusually mysterious, filled with strange shadows, and even a little frightening. They haven’t turned the lights on yet, but they should soon, and you can allow yourself a rare pleasure—running.

  First you pick up speed moving away from the fire fighting panel along the dark cul-de-sac of the corridor (the panel is very strange: just a board with a glossy painting of an ax, a large hook, and a bucket), then you weave along the corridor for a while, delighting in the freedom and the ease with which you can make the walls lean over, come closer or move away—all with those tiny commands you give your own body. But the most amazing thing, of course, is the turn to the right into the short branch of the corridor that ends in a window covered with wire mesh. Twenty yards before you reach the turn you move in toward the left wall, and then opposite the little plywood door with the inscription PK-15S, you move out and lean over to the right, leaning into a long arc—and then there are just a few seconds, when your right side almost touches the tiles of the floor, that bring you a quite incomparable freedom.

  Then you skim easily along the rest of the corridor, insert your fingers into the cells of the wire mesh and look out of the window: it’s dark already, a few co
ld lamps are burning above the wall, and its columns are topped by tall caps of snow. The sounds coming in through the window are quite different in nature from sounds born anywhere in the corridor or beyond the partition. The difference is not so much in the actual quality of the sound—whether it is loud or quiet, shrill or dull—so much as in what gives it its life. Almost all sounds are made by people, but the sounds created inside the building seem like the rumbling of an intestine or the creaking of the joints in some immense organism—they’re not interesting because they are so ordinary and easily understood. But what comes flying in at the window is almost the only testimony to the existence of all of the rest of the world, so a sound from out there seems unusually important.

  The sound map of the world has also shifted a great deal since your childhood, although its main elements are still the same. There’s the usual, legitimate sound—distant heavy blows of iron on iron, at only a half or a third the rate of your pulse. They have an interesting echo, as though the sound is not coming from a single point, but from the entire arc of the horizon.

  The first thing that this sound was—back in those days when you could still sleep while everyone had to get up—was a timescale, or some kind of external support structure which lent the grownups’ evening arguments and morning beatings the essential qualities of duration and sequence.

  Later the measured note was transformed into the beating of the heart of the world, which is what it remained until somebody said it was piles being driven on the construction sites. Other sounds that could be made out included the humming of distant machines, the howling of a shunting engine on the siding, voices and laughter (very often children’s laughter), the rumble of airplanes in the sky (there was something prehistoric about that), the noise made by the wind and finally, the barking of dogs. They said there used to be some way of communicating with the person in the next cell (it’s hard to believe there could ever have been one to a cell): the person in the first cell began knocking on the wall in a certain way, with his message encoded in the sequence of knocks, and he was answered in the same code from the next cell. It was obviously nothing but a legend—what would have been the point of inventing a special language when you could discuss everything when you met during the general work sessions? But it was the idea that was important, the idea of conveying the essence of meaning through the repetition and combination of the most simple things, such as knocks heard through a wall.

  Sometimes you wonder what we would hear if our Creator was to try tapping out a message to us. Probably something like distant blows on piles being driven into the ground—but definitely at regular intervals, Morse code would be quite out of the question. The more grown-up you are, the less complicated this world is, but there are still a lot of things in it you don’t understand.

  Take, for instance, the two squares of sky on the wall—it’s sky if you sit on the lower bunk, but from the upper bunk you can see the tops of fat chimneys in the distance. At night stars appear in them, and in the daytime there are clouds that raise lots of questions. The clouds have been with you ever since your childhood, and so many of them have already been born in the windows that every time you meet with something new you are astonished. For instance, hanging in the right window at the moment is an open pink fan (it will soon be sunset) made up of row upon row of fluffy vapor—as if all the planes in the world had woven it (it’s interesting to wonder how people who live out their lives up in the skies see the world), but in the left window there’s just a pattern of slanting lines. That puts the infinitely distant point from which the wind blows exactly opposite the right window today. It must mean something, you simply didn’t know the code—that’s what exchanging taps on the wall with God is like. You can’t make any mistakes here. Just as you can’t make any mistakes about the meaning of what’s happening when a blurred spot, a pale irregular triangle, appears on the blank face of a dark November cloud (you’ve seen it before on the bricks beside your face on a summer morning), and the sun shines out of its center through the scudding streamers of mist. Or in the summer there’s the red hill rising up over the horizon (only from the upper bunk).

  There used to be many things and events which were ready to reveal their true nature to your first glance, almost everything around you in fact. When a photograph of the prison taken from the outside (presumably from the watchtower above the bakery zone) was handed round, you couldn’t really understand what all the old convicts were so amazed about—was there really nothing more astonishing than that in their lives? There was the piece of miserable cake in the evening, the familiar stench from the latrine and naïve pride in the abilities of human reason. And exchanging messages with God. All you have to do to answer him is to feel and understand it all. That’s the way you think in childhood, when the world is still built of simple analogies. Only afterwards do you understand that you can’t talk with God because you yourself are his voice, gradually becoming lower and quieter. If you think about it, what’s happening to you is the same thing that happens to a shout on its way to you from the yard where they’re playing football.

  Something was happening to the world where you were growing up—every day it changed slightly, every day your surroundings took on a new shade of meaning. Everything began in the sunniest and happiest place in the world, inhabited by people with a rather funny attachment to canvas boots and black padded jackets—people who were funny, but even more important, who were close to you. It began in the joyful green corridors, in the cheerful glinting of the sunlight on the wire mesh where the paint had peeled away, in the crazed clicking of the swallows who had built a nest under the roof of the metal shop, in the celebration roaring of the tanks rolling out on to parade—although you couldn’t see them beyond the wall, you could tell from the sound when it was a tank going by and when it was a motorized gun; in the friendly chuckling of the grownups in response to some of your questions; in the smile of the guard who came across you in the corridor; in the wagging tail of the huge Alsatian bounding towards you.

  Afterwards the colors in the best of all places gradually faded: you started to notice the cracks in the walls, the powerful stench from the kitchen block, so unpleasant in its very familiarity; you began to realize that beyond the maternal embrace of the wall with its freshly plastered holes there was a life of some kind—in other words, every day there were fewer and fewer questions about your true fate remaining unanswered. And the less that remained hidden from you, the less the grownups were inclined to forgive your purity and naiveté.

  It turns out that simply to see the world is to be tarnished and become an accomplice to all its vileness, and in the evenings there are so many things to be afraid of in the dead-ends of the corridors and the dark corners of the cells. And then through the quivering haze of half-forgotten childhood—like a conjuring trick—there emerges the realization that you were born and grew up in a prison, in the filthiest and vilest-smelling corner of the world. And when you finally understand it, you become subject to the full force of the laws of your prison.

  But what of that? After all, the world wasn’t invented by people, and no matter how hard they might try, there’s no way they can make the life of the lowliest convict the least bit different from the life of the camp quartermaster himself. And what difference does it make what the reason is, if the happiness generated by all souls is identical? There is a set norm of happiness allocated to a person in this life, and no matter what might happen to him, this happiness can not be taken away. If you want to talk about what is good and what is bad, you must at least know who man was made by and what for.

  Objects do not change, but something disappears while you are growing up. In reality it’s you that loses this “something,” every day you walk on irrevocably past the most important thing of all, hurrying on downhill, and you can’t stop, you can’t halt this slow descent into nowhere; all you can do is select the words as you describe what is happening to you. The opportunity to look out of the window is not th
e most important thing in life, but still you’re upset when they stop letting you out into the corridor—you’re almost grown up and when the holiday comes you’ll get canvas boots and a padded jacket as a present.

  Of all the multitude of panoramas available for constant use only one is left (the view from both windows is the same from slightly different angles), and you can only admire it by leaning the short bench against the wall and standing on its edge; a yard surrounded by a low concrete wall, two rusty buses—or rather their remains, hollow yellow shells like dead wasps; the long building of the neighboring prison block under its brown semicircular arched roof; beyond that, prison blocks that are already far away; and the sky, filling the remainder of the rectangular gap.

  What you see every day for years and years is transformed into a monument to yourself—as you once used to be—because it bears the imprint of the feelings of a man who has almost disappeared; in you for a few moments, when you see the same thing that he used to see. In reality, “to see” means to superimpose your soul on the standard impression on the retina of the standard human eye. They used to play soccer in this yard, falling and getting up, kicking the ball, and now there’s nothing left but rusty buses. In reality, ever since you began joining in the common work sessions you get too tired for anything inside you to come to life and play soccer on your retina. But no matter what national change of underwear may lie ahead, nobody can ever take away from the past what someone has seen (the former you, if that means anything), standing on a swaying bench and looking out of the window: a few people kicking a ball to each other, laughing—their voices and the sound of feet striking leather take a long time to reach you. One of them suddenly makes a break forward—he’s wearing a green T-shirt—dribbles the ball toward the goal made of two old floodlights, shoots, scores, and disappears from view—and you hear the players shouting. Remarkable.