A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  A little convict once lived in this cell and saw all this, but he’s not here anymore. Obviously escapes are sometimes successful, but where the escapee takes refuge, not even he can say.

  Bulldozer Driver’s Day

  What are they doing here,

  These people?

  Alarm in their faces,

  Pounding with their crowbars,

  Pounding and pounding.

  —Isikawa Takuboku

  I

  Ivan Pomerantsev leaned with his elbows on the cold damp concrete of the windowsill with the three or four zigzag lines running across it (when Valera wanted to frighten his wife, he would bang it with the iron), blew an obese black fly off the windowpane, and looked out into the yard that was bathed in the last rays of the autumn sunshine. It was warm, and from down below there came a faint smell of linseed oil, exuded by the tin roof of a lean-to shed that had been painted several years ago but still stank whenever the sun heated it even slightly. He could smell fuel oil and cabbage soup, too.

  In the distance he could hear children shouting and horses neighing, but they didn’t seem like natural sounds, more like a tape recording—probably because there didn’t seem to be anything alive anywhere nearby, apart from a motionless pigeon on the windowsill several windows further along. The street was somehow lifeless, as though no one had ever lived on it, or even visited it, and the only thing that made sense of its existence was the rank of faded visual propaganda depicting the unified state of the people and the party in the allegorical form of two muscle-bound figures.

  The bell in the corridor jangled. Ivan shuddered, put down his crumpled hand-rolled cigarette—it was moist and hard, and looked like a souvenir toy log—and went to open the door. The walk was a long one: Ivan lived in a large communal apartment, converted from a section of a hostel, and between the kitchen and the entrance lay about twenty yards of corridor spread with rubber doormats and crammed with children’s sneakers and crude adult footwear. Outside the door he could hear a man’s voice rumbling quietly, with periodic interruptions from a woman.

  “Who is it?” Ivan asked in an everyday tone. He’d already realized who it was—but you couldn’t just open the door right away.

  “We’re here to see Ivan Ilich!” the man answered.

  Ivan opened up. There on the landing stood the so-called “Team of Five” from the Trade Union office, which for their plant consisted of only two people because Osmakov and Altynina, who was wearing a gauzy suit and carrying a package that smelled of herrings which she held well away from her body with both hands, shared all the jobs between them.

  “Ivan! My friend!” Osmakov said with a smile as he stepped inside and held out two trembling palms to Ivan. “How are you? Does it hurt? Where does it ache?”

  “Nothing hurts,” Ivan said, embarrassed. “Let’s go through into the room, shall we?”

  Altynina’s perfume was even stronger than the smell of herrings. As they walked along the corridor, Ivan deliberately dropped back in order not to smell it.

  “Well, now, Ivan,” Osmakov said in a sad, wise voice as he sat down at the table, “they’ve worked it all out and it’s been accepted that what happened was an accident. The cause, my friend, was a welding defect. On the nose ring. And your name has been entirely cleared.” Osmakov suddenly shook his head and looked around as though he was trying to work out where he was—when he managed it he sighed quietly.

  “The bomb’s body is made of uranium, after all,” he continued, “but the ring is steel. You need a special electrode to weld it on. But the lads in shop number two used an ordinary one. Flaming front line May Day heroes! So the ring just broke off, that’s all. Can you remember how it all happened?”

  Ivan closed his eyes. The memory was somehow dull and merely formal, as though he himself was not remembering, but merely running over the various parts played in a story he’d been told by someone else. He saw himself from the outside, pressing the stiff button that stops the conveyor—the button only took effect after a long delay, and the rough black belt had to be driven backwards. There he was setting the hook of the hoist in the ring of the faulty bomb with the fat chalk tick on its side (the stabilizer was welded on crooked, and the whole thing was somehow twisted) and switching on the hoist. The bomb swayed ponderously as it came away from the conveyor belt and climbed slowly upward; the chain wound onto the drum and the brake went on.

  “That’s the fourth today,” Ivan thought, “if we carry on like this it’ll be pissing bonuses come May Day.”

  He pressed another button, an electric motor came to life, and the hoist began slowly creeping along the I-beam welded across the beams of the ceiling. Suddenly something got stuck and the hoist came to a halt. That happened sometimes—probably a dent in the I-beam. Ivan stepped under the bomb and began to sway it to and fro by the stabilizer—that helped it pick up inertia and force the wheel of the hoist through the dented spot on the rail—when suddenly the bomb seemed to yield strangely under his touch and the next second Ivan realized that his right hand was not just clutching the barbed metal of the stabilizer, but actually holding the bomb above his head. The next picture in his memory was seen through the window of the hospital ward: a pole holding up a washing line and half a tree.

  “Vanya,” said Osmakov’s voice, “what is it?”

  “I’m fine.” Ivan shook his head. “I’m just remembering.”

  “Well? Do you remember?”

  “Some of it.”

  “The most important thing, Ivan Ilich” said Altynina, “is that you managed to jump out of the way of the bomb. It fell beside you. But if...”

  “And you got a belt across the kidneys from the lithium deuteride cylinder,” Osmakov interrupted, “the compressed air forced it out when the shell cracked. Good job the cylinder didn’t crack open too—it’s thirty atmospheres inside there.”

  Ivan sat without speaking, listening partly to Osmakov and partly to the big black fly beating itself against the windowpane at regular intervals. “Must be the visitors who disturbed it,” he thought, “it was sitting there quietly before. What is it they want?”

  Soon Osmakov’s reflex responses produced the change that always came over him as a result of simply sitting at a table for a certain length of time: the expression of his eyes softened, the tone of his voice became even more emphatically humane, and his words began tumbling over each other—the longer he talked the more noticeable it became.

  “Vanya,” he said, tracing small circles across the oilcloth with an invisible glass, “you are the genuine article, a hero of truly glorious labor exploits. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I will anyway: the Uran-Bator Pravda is going to print an article about you. The correspondent’s already been to see us and shown us the draft. It tells the whole story, just like it happened, only they call our plant the Uran-Bator Canning Factory, and instead of a bomb, a hundred liter barrel of tomatoes falls on top of you, but then you manage to crawl over to the conveyor and switch it off. And you have a different surname, of course. We thought hard about what would sound best—yours is kind of dead, even a bit reactionary-sounding, May only knows. And your first name doesn’t have any impact. What we came up with was Konstantin Pobedonostsev. It was Vaska from Red Half-Life who suggested it. He’s bright all right, no flickering Mayflies on him.”

  Ivan remembered now—that was the name of the plant’s newspaper—he’d seen it a couple of times. It was hard to read, because everything in it had a different name from its real one: the hydrogen bomb assembly line where Ivan worked was referred to as the “medium-soft plush toy shop” or the “electric doll department,” but when Red Half-Life wrote about the production of a new doll called “Marina” with seven dresses that could be changed and which was intended to decorate the children’s corners on excursion steamers, Ivan imagined a black and yellow picture of foreign parts from the cover of The Jackal and gloated to himself: “Right now, stuffed your bellies full up in your skyscrapers, have you
, you red flag May Day jerk-offs?”

  For six months now, though, Red Half-Life had been distributed only to people on a special list—as a leading article explained, this was “due to the importance attached to the production of soft toys”—and so at first Ivan hadn’t even realized that they were talking about the plant’s in-house newspaper. Osmakov had skipped imperceptibly on to a different topic.

  “That woman’s a real shim-sham altogether,” he said quietly, gazing at something invisible a yard in front of his face. “‘Bloody-red labor-mad!’ I yelled at her, ‘what in fucking May’s name do you think you’re doing taking that fence down?’”

  “Ivan Ilich,” interrupted Altynina, “this will be the first time the town newspaper has ever written about our plant. And the television people might come as well. We’ve already found a place where they can film. And the Sovcom doesn’t object.”

  “How’s that?” Ivan was puzzled.

  “The Sovcom,” Altynina repeated, speaking clearly. “Comrade Parmahamov is busy at the moment—he’s handing over a building to the children. But he phoned himself in person.”

  “What a lot of stupid fuss, Galina Nikolaevna.”

  “The children have to be educated somehow. Otherwise they’re good for nothing but fires and explosions. Yesterday on Sandel Street they blew up another dumpster. They hang around the sandpits.”

  Osmakov suddenly emitted a gurgling sound and slumped forward so that his head fell onto the table. They began fussing over him—or rather, Ivan ran to the kitchen to get a rag while Altynina fussed over Osmakov, bringing him around and explaining where he was and how he had come to be there. When Ivan arrived with the rag, Osmakov already looked quite sober and he sullenly permitted Altynina to wipe the lapels of his jacket with her handkerchief. The visitors immediately began preparing to leave: they stood up, Altynina picked up the package that smelled of herring from the table (for some reason Ivan had thought it was intended for him) and began repacking it, wrapping it in fresh newspaper because the brown juice had already soaked through the old paper and it was about to tear open. Osmakov stared with feigned interest at the calendar on the wall showing a short naked woman standing beside a snow-covered Zaporozhets car.

  At last the herring was packed and the visitors took their leave. Ivan showed them to the door still carrying the rag in his hand, and then carried it back with him to the room, where he threw it on the floor and sat down on the small divan. He attributed the strange feebleness of his condition to the fact that the blow to his kidneys had prevented him from taking a drink for two whole weeks: one week in the hospital and one week at home. But what really bothered him was that he couldn’t remember anything about his life before the accident. Although he could more or less recall the facts, the memories were not really alive. For instance, he could remember how he and Valera used to drink Alabashly wine after their shift and Valera would burp out the words “glory to labor” just at the moment when Ivan was setting the bottle to his lips, so that he would laugh and have to spit out an entire mouthful of fortified port onto the tiled floor.

  But although Ivan remembered himself laughing, and he remembered the struggle with the muscles of his own larynx for that mouthful of liquid with an aftertaste of Martian oil, and he remembered Valera’s laughing face, he simply couldn’t recall the sensation of joy or even understand how he could have taken such pleasure in drinking in a storeroom stinking of urine behind the rusty shield of the fifth reactor. It was the same with his own room. Take the calendar with the Zaporozhets, for instance—Ivan was quite unable to imagine the state of mind responsible for the wish to hang that glossy sheet of paper on the wall. But there it was hanging there. He was equally at a loss to explain the large numbers of empty green glass bottles standing on the floor in front of the wardrobe. He knew that he and Valera had drunk them, and thrown a number of empties out the window; what he couldn’t understand was why he had drunk all this strong port, and in Valera’s company. In short, Ivan could recall all recent events, but he couldn’t recall himself as part of them, and instead of the harmonious personality of a Communist or at least a Christian soul seeking redemption, what he discovered within himself was something strange—as though an empty window frame had been slammed shut by the autumn wind.

  “Marat,” he heard a coaxing woman’s voice from behind the wall, “if you pee out the window, they won’t take you into the Sandel cubs. You listen to what your ma tells you...”

  II

  From early in the morning the entire town knew what was on sale in the wine shop. It would have been useless to try to work out how—there were no announcements on the radio or the television—and in some strange fashion it became known, so that even young children pondering their plans for the evening might well think something like: “Aha! Today the wine shop’s got port for two ninety. Pa won’t be back till after eight. But the vodka’s running out. That means, until eleven...”

  But they never asked themselves how they knew all this, just as they never asked themselves how they knew if it was a sunny day or was pouring rain. The city, of course, had far more than just one or two wine shops, but they all always sold exactly the same thing; even the beer ran out at the same moment in the basement on Spinal Cord Street and the grocery store on Local Ataxia Passage at the other end of Uran-Bator, so that the inhabitants of every region in the city all thought in terms of a single abstract “wine shop.”

  In the same way, Ivan, figuring out that today the wine shop had cognac at thirteen fifty, while around the back there was dry Bulgarian for a ruble seventy plus fifty on top, decided that Valera, his neighbor and drinking buddy, was bound to buy the dry wine and then hang about the storeroom to chat with the loaders—and as he was walking up to the wine shop, he ran straight into him. Valera wasn’t surprised to see Ivan either, as if he had known that he would appear in the triangle of light between the rows of dark-blue crates, against the background of a garland of paper carnations already hanging on the wall.

  “Let’s go,” said Valera. He shifted a clinking bag from one hand to the other, took Ivan by the elbow and led him off down Spinal Cord Street, nodding to his friends and stepping carefully around the stinking pools of vomit.

  When they reached their usual spot, a small yard with swings and a sandpit, they sat down—Valera, as always, on a swing, and Ivan on the planking at the edge of the sandpit. Protruding from the sand were several half-buried bottles, a narrow strip of newspaper that fluttered in the wind, and several dry branches. This sandpit was a great favorite among the area’s bottle ladies—it yielded magnificent harvests, almost as good as the playhouses on the playground in Mundindel Park, and the old women often fought for control of it, knocking each other down right there on Spinal Cord Street and wheezing asthmatically as they strangled each other with their empty string bags. Out of some strange sense of tact they always fought in silence, and the only audible accompaniment to their battles—which often ended up as mass brawls—was rapid breathing and the occasional jangling of medals.

  “Want a drink?” asked Valera, pulling out the plastic stopper with his teeth and spitting it into the dust.

  “I can’t,” answered Ivan. “You know that. My kidneys.”

  “Mine aren’t in any great shape either,” said Valera, “but I still drink. You going to act like a jerk for the rest of your life, then?”

  “I’ll hold out until the holiday,” answered Ivan.

  “It’s sickening just to look at you. As though,” Valera grimaced as he searched for the right word, “as though you’d lost your grip on the thread of life.”

  The dry wine had a bitter smell—Valera threw back his head, tipped up the bottle above his open mouth, and drank down the stream of liquid that swilled from side to side as if from some hydrodynamic effect.

  “There now,” he said, “and already I can hear the birds. And the wind. Quiet sounds like that.”

  “You should write poetry,” said Ivan.

  “Perh
aps I do,” answered Valera. “How would you know, you flaming red banner?”

  “Perhaps you do,” Ivan agreed indifferently.

  He was rather surprised to notice that the yard in which they were sitting consisted of more than just the sandpit and the swings—it also had a small fenced-off flower bed overgrown with nettles, a long yellow block of apartments, dusty asphalt, and a zigzag concrete wall. Off in the distance where the wall met the building there were children rummaging in a garbage pile, sometimes freezing motionless for long periods and blending with the garbage, which made it impossible to tell exactly how many of them there were. “In town the children are well brought up and there aren’t many freaks,” thought Ivan as he watched their noisy bustle, “but once you get to the suburbs, they’re climbing on the swings, and digging in the sandpits; they might even use a knife. Some of them are so repulsive.”

  The children seemed to sense the pressure of Ivan’s thoughts: one of the little figures that had been entirely invisible stood up on skinny legs, circled for a short while around a dented yellow barrel lying a little to one side of the rest of the rubbish, and then set off uncertainly in the direction of the adults. It proved to be a boy of about ten, wearing shorts and a jacket with a hood.

  “Hey, dudes,” he said when he was close to them, “got any matches?”

  Valera had been busy with his second bottle, which had a stopper that resisted his efforts, and he hadn’t noticed the child approaching, but he swung around furiously at the sound of his voice.