Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

When I awoke the carriage was shuddering to a regular rhythm as its wheels hammered over the joints of the rails. On the table where I had left my empty tea glass, in some mysterious fashion a bundle had now appeared. Inside it I found an immaculate two-piece black suit, a gleaming pair of patent-leather shoes, a shirt, a change of underwear and several ties, clearly intended to offer me a choice. I was no longer capable of surprise at anything that happened. The suit and the shoes fitted me perfectly; after some hesitation, I selected a tie with fine black polka dots and when I inspected myself in the mirror on the door of the wall cupboard I was entirely satisfied with my appearance, although it was spoilt just a little by several days’ unshaven stubble. Pulling out a pale-purple carnation from the vase, I broke off its stem and threaded the flower into my buttonhole. How beautiful and unattainable the old life of St Petersburg seemed at that moment!

Going out into the corridor, I saw that it was almost dark already. I walked up to the end door and knocked. Nobody answered. Opening the door, I saw the interior of a large saloon car. At its centre stood a table set with a light supper for three and two bottles of champagne; above the table candle flames flickered to and fro in time with the swaying of the train. The walls were covered with light-coloured wallpaper with a pattern of gold flowers; opposite the table there was a large window, beyond which the lights of the night slowly cut their way through the darkness.

There was a movement at my back. I started and looked round. Standing behind me was the same Bashkir whom I had seen outside the carriage. After glancing at me without the slightest expression of any kind, he wound up the gramophone with the glinting silverish horn that was standing in the corner and lowered the needle on to the record that had begun to revolve. Chaliapin’s solid cast-bronze bass began singing - it was something from Wagner, I think. Wondering for whom the third place was intended, I reached into my pocket for a papyrosa.

I was not left to wonder for very long before the door opened and I saw Chapaev. He was wearing a black velvet jacket, a white shirt and a scarlet bow-tie made of the same shimmering watered silk as the red stripes on his greatcoat. He was followed into the saloon car by a girl.

Her hair was cut very short - it could hardly even be called a style. Down across her scarcely formed breasts, clad tightly in dark velvet, there hung a string of large pearls; her shoulders were broad and strong, while her hips were a little on the narrow side. Her eyes were slightly slanted, but that only added to her charm.

Beyond the slightest doubt, she was fit to serve as a model of beauty - but a beauty which could hardly have been called womanly. Not even my uninhibited fantasy was capable of transporting that face, those eyes and shoulders to the passionate, furtive gloom of a lovers’ alcove. But it was easy to imagine her, for example, on an ice-rink. There was something sobering about her beauty, something simple and a little sad; I am not speaking of that decoratively lascivious chastity with which everyone in St Petersburg was already so thoroughly fed up even before the war. No, this was a genuine, natural, self-aware perfection, beside which mere lust becomes as boring and vulgar as the raucous patriotism of a policeman.

She glanced at me, then turned to Chapaev, and the pearls gleamed against the skin of her neck.

‘And is this our new commissar?’ she asked. The tone of her voice was slightly flat, but pleasant nonetheless.

Chapaev nodded. ‘Let me introduce you.’ he said, ‘Pyotr, Anna.’

I got up from the table, took her cold palm in my hand and would have raised it to my lips, but she prevented me, replying with a formal handshake in the manner of a St Petersburg emancipee. I retained her hand in mine for a moment.

‘She is a magnificent machine-gunner,’ said Chapaev, ‘so beware of irritating her.’

‘Could these delicate fingers really be capable of dealing death to anyone?’ I asked, releasing her hand.

‘It all depends.’ said Chapaev, ‘on what exactly you call death.’

‘Can there really be any difference of views on that account?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed.’ said Chapaev.

We sat down at the table. With suspicious facility the Bashkir opened the champagne and filled our glasses.

‘I wish to propose a toast,’ said Chapaev, resting his hypnotic gaze on me, ‘for the terrible times in which it has been our lot to be born, and for all those who even in such days as these do not cease to strive for freedom.’

His logic seemed strange to me, because our times had been made terrible precisely because of the striving, as he had put it, of ‘all those’ for their so-called ‘freedom’ - but whose freedom, and from what? Instead of objecting, however, I took a sip of champagne - this was the simple precept which I always followed when there was champagne on the table and the conversation turned to politics. I suddenly realized how hungry I was, and I set about the food with vigour.

It is hard to express what I was feeling. What was happening was so very improbable that I no longer felt its improbability; this is what happens in a dream, when the mind, cast into a whirlpool of fantastic visions, draws to itself like a magnet some detail familiar from the everyday world and focuses on it completely, transforming the most muddled of nightmares into a simulacrum of daily routine. I once dreamed that through some exasperating contingency I had become the angel on the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral and in order to protect myself against the bitterly cold wind I was struggling to fasten my jacket, but the buttons simply would not slip into the buttonholes - and what surprised me was not that I had suddenly found myself suspended high in the night sky above St Petersburg, but the fact that I was incapable of completing this familiar operation.

I was experiencing something similar now. The unreality of what was happening was somehow bracketed out of my consciousness; in itself the evening was entirely normal, and if it had not been for the gentle swaying of the carriage, I might easily have assumed that we were sitting in one of St Petersburg’s small cafes with the lamps of cabs drifting past the windows.

I ate in silence and only rarely glanced at Anna. She replied briefly to Chapaev when he spoke to her of gun-carts and machine-guns, but I was so engrossed by her that I failed to follow the thread of their conversation. I felt saddened by the absolute unattainability of her beauty; I knew that it would be as pointless to reach out to her with lustful hands as it would be to attempt to scoop up the sunset in a kitchen bucket.

When supper was finished, the Bashkir cleared the plates from the table and served coffee. Chapaev leaned back on his chair and lit a cigar. His face had acquired a benevolent and slightly sleepy expression; he looked at me and smiled.

‘Pyotr,’ he said, ‘you seem thoughtful, perhaps even - pardon me for saying so - a little absent-minded. But a commissar… He has to carry people along with him, you understand.,. He has to be absolutely sure of himself. All the time.’

‘I am entirely sure of myself.’ I said. ‘But I am not entirely sure of you.’

‘How do you mean? What can be bothering you?’

‘May I be candid with you?’

‘Certainly. Both Anna and I are absolutely counting on it.’

‘I find it hard to believe that you really are a Red commander.’

Chapaev raised his left eyebrow.

‘Indeed?’ he asked, with what seemed to me to be genuine astonishment. ‘But why?’

‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘This all reminds me very much of a masquerade.’

‘You do not believe that I sympathize with the proletariat?’