Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

Schwarzenegger turned his face towards her.

‘Your eyes,’ he intoned monotonously, ‘are like a landscape of the dreamy south.’

Maria trembled in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting words like these, and Schwarzenegger seemed to understand this immediately. Then something strange happened - or perhaps it didn’t really happen, and Maria simply imagined the faint red letters flickering across the inside surface of Schwarzenegger’s glasses, like running titles on a TV screen, and the soft whirring sound inside his head, as though a computer hard disk drive had been switched on. Maria started in fright, but then she remembered that Schwarzenegger, like herself, was a purely conventional being woven by the thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses which were thinking about him at that very second - and that different people could have very different thoughts about him.

Schwarzenegger raised his empty hand in front of him and flicked his fingers in the air as he looked for the right words.

‘No,’ he said at last, ‘your eyes aren’t eyes - they’re orbs!’

Maria clung tightly to him and looked up trustingly. Schwarzenegger tucked his chin into his neck, as though to prevent Maria from seeing under his glasses.

‘There’s a lot of smoke here,’ he said, ‘why are we walking along this embankment?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Maria.

Schwarzenegger turned round and led her away from the railings, straight into the smoke. After they’d gone a few steps Maria felt frightened: the smoke was so thick now that she couldn’t see anything, not even Schwarzenegger - all she could make out was his hand where it clutched her shoulder.

‘Where’s all this smoke from?’ asked Maria. ‘Nothing seems to be burning.’

‘C-N-N,’ Schwarzenegger replied.

‘You mean they’re burning something?’

‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘they’re shooting something.’

Aha, thought Maria, probably everybody who was thinking about her and Schwarzenegger was watching CNN, and CNN was showing some kind of smokescreen. But what a long time they were showing it for.

‘It’s okay,’ said the invisible Schwarzenegger, ‘it’ll soon be over.’

But there seemed to be no end to the smoke, and they were getting further and further away from the embankment. Maria suddenly had the terrible thought that for several minutes someone else could have been walking along beside her instead of Schwarzenegger, perhaps even the being that had put its arm round Lenin’s shoulder in that same picture, and this thought frightened her so badly that she automatically adjusted her earphones and switched on the music. The music was strcnge, chopped into small incoherent fragments. No sooner had the guitars and trumpets launched into a sweet song of love than they were swamped by a sudden electronic wailing, like the howling of wolves. But anything was better than listening to the sound of distant explosions from the area of the parliament building and the indistinct hubbub of human voices.

Suddenly a figure came hurtling straight at Maria out of the smoke so that she shrieked in fright. In front of her she saw a man in blotchy camouflage fatigues, carrying an automatic rifle. He looked up at Maria and opened his mouth to speak, but then Schwarzenegger took his hand from Maria’s shoulder, grabbed hold of the man’s head, twisted it gently to one side and tossed the limp body away beyond the bounds of their vision. His hand returned to Maria’s shoulder, and Maria pressed herself against his monumental torso.

‘Ah, men, men,’ she cooed softly.

Gradually the smoke began to disperse until once again Maria could see Schwarzenegger’s face, and then the entire massive body, concealed beneath the light grey shroud of the raincoat like a monument waiting to be unveiled. ‘Arnold,’ she asked, ‘where are we going?’

‘Don’t you know?’ said Schwarzenegger. Maria blushed and lowered her eyes.

What is an alchemical wedlock, though? she thought. And will it hurt me, I wonder? Afterwards, I mean? I’ve been hurt so many times before.

Looking up at him she saw the famous dimples in his cheeks -Schwarzenegger was smiling. Maria closed her eyes and walked on, hardly daring to believe in her own happiness, guided by the hand that lay on her shoulder.

When Schwarzenegger stopped, she opened her eyes and saw that the smoke had almost completely disappeared. They were standing on a street she didn’t recognize, between rows of old houses faced with granite. The street was deserted except for a few stooped figures with automatic rifles darting about aimlessly in the distance, nearer the embankment which was still hidden behind a pall of smoke. Schwarzenegger seemed to loiter in an odd, indecisive fashion, giving Maria the impression that he was tormented by some strange kind of doubt, and she was frightened at the thought that the doubt might concern her.

I have to say something romantic quickly, she thought. But what exactly? I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

‘You know, Arnold,’ she said, squeezing herself against his side, ‘I suddenly… I don’t know, perhaps you’ll think it’s silly… I can be honest with you, can’t I?’

‘Of course,’ said Schwarzenegger, turning his black lenses towards her.

‘When I’m with you, I want so much to soar up into the sky! I feel as though the sky is so very close!’

Schwarzenegger raised his head and looked upwards. There actually were glimpses of bright blue sky between the streams of smoke. It didn’t seem particularly close, but then neither was it that far away.

Ah, thought Maria, what nonsense I do talk.

But it was too late to stop now.

‘What about you, Arnold, wouldn’t you like to soar up into the sky?’

Schwarzenegger thought for a second.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And will you take me with you? You know, I… - Maria smiled shyly - ‘I’m so very earthbound.’

Schwarzenegger thought for another second.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up into the sky.’

He looked around, as though he were trying to locate landmarks that only he knew, and then he seemed to have found them, because he grabbed Maria decisively by the arm and dragged her onwards. Maria was startled by this sudden transition from poetic abstraction to concrete action, but then she realized that this was the way real men were supposed to behave.

Schwarzenegger dragged her along the facade of a long Stalin-era apartment block. After a few steps she managed to adjust to his rapid stride and began trotting along beside him, holding on to the sleeve of his raincoat. She sensed that if she slowed her pace at all, Schwarzenegger’s arm would change from a gallantly proffered fulcrum into a steel lever that would drag her implacably along the pavement, and for some reason the thought filled her with a feeling of boundless happiness that sprang from the very depths of her belly and spread in warm waves throughout her body.

On reaching the end of the building, Schwarzenegger turned through an arch. Once in the courtyard of the building, Maria felt as though they had been transported to a different city. Here the peace of the morning was still unbroken; there was no smoke to be seen, and it was hard to believe that somewhere close at hand there were crazy people dashing about shooting off their automatic rifles.

Schwarzenegger definitely knew where he was taking Maria. They made their way round a small children’s playground with swings and dived into a labyrinth of narrow alleys between rusting garages. Maria was thinking with sweet terror in her heart that somewhere here, quickly and rather awkwardly, their alchemical wedlock would probably be consummated, when suddenly the passageway led out into an empty space surrounded on all sides by sheet-iron walls of various colours and heights.