Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

I picked up the travelling bag and followed him out into the corridor. My thoughts were in a state of confused chaos. The man walking ahead of me frightened me. I could not understand who he was - the very last thing he reminded me of was a Red commander and yet, he very clearly was one of them. The signature and stamp on today’s order were exactly the same as those which I had seen yesterday, which indicated that he possessed enough influence to extract the decision he required from the bloody Dzerzhinsky and the shady Babayasin in the space of a single morning.

In the hallway Chapaev halted and took down from the coat-stand a long dove-grey greatcoat with three stripes of shimmering scarlet watered silk running across the chest. Greatcoats ornamented in this manner were the latest Red Guard fashion, but normally the strip fastenings on the chest were made out of ordinary cloth. Chapaev put on his greatcoat and hat and fastened on a belt from which hung a holster with a Mauser, clipped on his sabre and turned to face me. On his chest I noticed a rather strange-looking medal, a silver star with small spheres on its points.

‘Have you been decorated for the New Year?’ I asked.

Chapaev laughed good-naturedly.

‘No.’ he said, ‘that is the Order of the October Star.’

‘I have never heard of it.’

‘If you are lucky, you might even earn one yourself.’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Comrade Chapaev.’ I said, deciding to take advantage of the informal tone of o u r conversation. ‘I would like to ask you a question which you might find rather strange.’

‘I am all attention.’ he said and smiled politely, tapping the long yellow cuff of a glove against his scabbard.

‘Tell me,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye, ‘why were you playing the piano? And why precisely that piece?’

‘Well you see.’ he said, ‘when I glanced into your room you were still sleeping, and you were whistling that fugue in your sleep - not entirely accurately, I am afraid. For my own part, I am simply very fond of Mozart. At one time I studied at the Conservatory and intended to become a musician. But why does this concern you?’

‘It is nothing of importance,’ I said. ‘Merely a strange coincidence.’

We went out on to the landing. The keys really were hanging in the door. Moving like an automaton, I locked the apartment, dropped the keys into my pocket and followed Chapaev down the stairs, thinking that I had never in my life been in the habit of whistling, especially in my sleep.

The first thing that I saw when I emerged on to the frosty, sunny street was a long grey-green armoured car, the same one that I had noticed the previous day outside the ‘Musical Snuffbox’. I had never seen a vehicle like it before - it was clearly the very latest word in the science of destruction. Its body was thickly studded with large round-headed rivets, the blunt snout of the motor protruded forwards and was crowned with two powerful headlights; on its high steel forehead, sloping slightly backwards, two slanting observation slits peered menacingly towards Nikitsky Square, like the half-closed eyes of a Buddha. On the roof was a cylindrical machine-gun turret, pointing in the direction of Tverskoi Boulevard. The barrel of the machine-gun was protected on both sides by two long plates of steel. There was a small door in the side.

A crowd of boys was swarming around the vehicle, some of them with sledges, others on skates; the thought automatically came to mind that while the idiot adults were busy trying to rearrange a world which they had invented for themselves, the children were still living in reality - among mountains of snow and sunlight, on the black mirrors of frozen ponds and in the mystic night silence of icy yards. And although these children were also infected with the bacillus of insanity that had invaded Russia - this was obvious enough from the way in which they looked at Chapaev’s sabre and my Mauser - their clear eyes still shone with the memory of something which I had long ago forgotten; perhaps it was some unconscious reminiscence of the great source of all existence from which they had not yet been too far distanced in their descent into this life of shame and desolation.

Chapaev walked over to the armoured car and rapped sharply on its side. The motor started up and the rear end of the car was enveloped in a cloud of bluish smoke. Chapaev opened the door and at that precise moment I heard a screeching of brakes behind me. An enclosed automobile drew up right beside us and four men in black leather jackets leapt out of it and disappeared into the doorway from which we had emerged only a moment before. My heart sank - I thought they must have come for me. Probably this idea was prompted by the fact that the foursome reminded me of the actors in black cloaks who had borne Raskolnikov’s body from the stage the previous day. One of them actually paused in the doorway and glanced in our direction.

‘Quickly,’ shouted Chapaev from inside the armoured car. ‘You will let the cold in.’

I tossed in my travelling bag, clambered in hastily after it and slammed the door behind me.

The interior decor of this engine of doom enchanted me from the very first glance. The small space separated from the driver’s cabin reminded me of a compartment in the Nord-Express; the two narrow leather divans, the table set between them and the rug on the floor created a cosy, if rather cramped, atmosphere. There was a round hole in the ceiling, through which I could see the massive butt-stock of the machine-gun in its cover; a spiral staircase ending at something shaped like a revolving chair with footrests led up into the turret. The whole was illuminated by a small electric bulb, by the light of which I could make out a picture fastened to the wall by bolts at the corners of its frame. It was a small landscape in the style of Constable - a bridge over a river, a distant thundercloud and romantic ruins.

Chapaev reached for the bell-shaped mouthpiece of the speaking tube and spoke into it: ‘To the station.’

The armoured car moved away gently, with scarcely any sensation of motion inside. Chapaev sat on a divan and gestured to me to sit opposite him.

‘A magnificent machine,’ I said in all sincerity.

‘Yes.’ said Chapaev, ‘this is not at all a bad armoured car. But I am not very fond of machinery in general. Wait until you see my horse…

‘How about a game of backgammon?’ he asked, putting his hand under the table and taking out a board.

I shrugged. He opened up the board and began setting out the black and white pieces.

‘Comrade Chapaev,’ I began, ‘what will my work consist of? What questions are involved?’

Chapaev adjusted his moustache with a careful gesture.

‘Well, you see, Pyotr, our division is a complex organism. I expect that you will gradually be drawn into its life and find your own niche, as it were. As yet it is still too early to say exactly what that will be, but I realized from the way you conducted yourself yesterday that you are a man of decisive character and at the same time you have a subtle appreciation of the essential nature of events. People like you are in great demand. Your move.’

I threw the dice on to the board, pondering on how I should behave. I still found it hard to believe that he really was a Red commander; somehow I felt that he was playing the same insane game as myself, only he had been playing longer, with greater skill and perhaps of his own volition. On the other hand, all my doubts were founded exclusively on the intelligent manner of his conversation and the hypnotic power of his eyes, and in themselves these factors meant nothing at all: the deceased Vorblei, for instance, had also been a man of reasonable culture, and the head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, was quite a well-known hypnotist in occult circles. And then, I thought, the very question itself was stupid - there was not a single Red commander who was really a Red commander; every one of them simply tried as hard as he could to emulate some infernal model, pretending in just the same way as I had done the previous day. As for Chapaev, I might not perceive him as playing the role suggested by his military garb, but others evidently did, as was demonstrated by Babayasin’s order and the armoured car in which we were riding. I did not know what he wanted from me, but I decided for the time being to play according to his rules; furthermore, I felt instinctively that I could trust him. For some reason I had the impression that this man stood several flights above me on the eternal staircase of being which I had seen in my dream that morning.