Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

Maria thought.

‘Yeah, more or less,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s why we’re drawing Aristotle. Because before him there was no substance.’ said Volodin.

‘What was there then?’

‘There was the number one heavenly automobile.’ said Volodin, ‘compared with which your Mercedes-6oo is nothing but a heap of shit. This heavenly automobile was absolutely perfect. And every single concept and image relating to automobiles was contained in it and it alone. And the so-called real automobiles that drove around the roads in ancient Greece were no more than its imperfect shadows. Projections, so to speak. Understand?’

‘Yeah. So what came next?’

‘Next came Aristotle and he said that of course the number one heavenly automobile existed, and of course all the earthly automobiles were simply its distorted reflections in the dim and crooked mirror of existence. At that time there was no way you could argue with all that. But, said Aristotle, in addition to the prototype and the reflection, there is one other thing. The material that takes the form of the automobile. Substance, possessing an existence of its own. Iron, as you called it. And it was this substance that made the world real. This entire fucking market economy started up from it. Because before then all the things on earth were merely reflections, and what reality can a reflection have, I ask you? The only reality is what makes the reflections.’

‘You know,’ I said quietly, ‘that really is quite a big question.’

Volodin ignored what I had said.

‘Understand?’ he asked Maria.

‘Yeah.’ Maria answered.

‘What do you understand?’

‘I understand that you’re a psycho all right. How could they have automobiles in ancient Greece?’

‘Ugh.’ said Volodin, ‘how petty and precisely correct. They really will discharge you soon.’

‘God willing.’ said Maria,

Serdyuk raised his head and looked attentively at Maria.

‘You know, Maria,’ he said, ‘just recently you’ve turned real bitchy. In the spiritual sense.’

‘I’ve got to get out of here, don’t you understand? I don’t want to spend all my life stuck in here. Who’s going to want me ten years from now?’

‘You’re a fool, Maria.’ Serdyuk said scornfully. ‘Can’t you understand that the love you and Arnold have can only exist in here?’

‘You watch your mouth, stork-face! Or I’ll smash this bust over your stupid head.’

‘Go on, just you try it, you berk,’ said Serdyuk, rising from his chair with a face that had turned pale. ‘Just you try it!’

‘I won’t have to try.’ answered Maria, also rising to his feet. Til just do it, that’s all. People get killed for saying things like that.’

He stepped towards the table and took hold of the bust:

What followed lasted no more than a few seconds. Volodin and I leapt up from our seats. Volodin wrapped his arms around Serdyuk, who was advancing on Maria. Maria’s face twisted in a grimace of fury; he raised the bust above his head, swung it back and stepped towards Serdyuk. I pushed Maria away and saw that Volodin had seized Serdyuk in such a way that his arms were pinned to his body, and if Maria were to strike him with the bust, he would not even be able to protect himself with his hands. I tried to pull Volodin’s hands apart where they were clasped on Serdyuk’s chest. Meanwhile Serdyuk had closed his eyes and was smiling blissfully. Suddenly I noticed that Volodin was staring aghast over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw a lifeless plaster face with dusty wall-eyes slowly descending out of a fly-spotted sky.

The bust of Aristotle was the only thing I retained in my memory when I came round, although I am far from certain that the expression ‘to come round’ is entirely appropriate. Ever since my childhood I have sensed in it a certain shame-laced ambiguity. Round what exactly? To where? And, most intriguing of all, from where? Nothing, in short, but a cheating sleight of hand, like the card-sharps on the Volga steamers. As I grew older, I came to understand that the words ‘to come round’ actually mean ‘to come round to other people’s point of view’, because no sooner is one born than these other people begin explaining just how hard one must try to force oneself to assume a form which they find acceptable.

However, that is not the point. I regard the expression as not entirely appropriate to describe my condition because when I awoke I did not do so completely - instead, I became aware of myself, so to speak, in that non-material world familiar to everyone on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness, where one’s surroundings consist of visions and thoughts which momentarily arise and dissolve in consciousness, while the person around whom they arise is entirely absent. One usually flits through this state instantaneously, but for some reason I remained stuck in it for several long seconds; my thoughts were mostly of Aristotle. They were incoherent and almost entirely meaningless; the ideological great-grandfather of Bolshevism was not the object of any particular sympathy on my part, but neither did I feel any personal hatred for him as a consequence of the previous day’s events - the concept of substance which he had invented was evidently insufficiently substantial to have inflicted upon me any truly serious damage. Curiously enough, in my half-dreaming state I was furnished with the most convincing of proofs for this - when the bust shattered into shards under the force of the blow, it proved to have been hollow all the time.

If I had been struck on the head with a bust of Plato, I thought, then the result would have been far more serious. At this point I remembered that I had a head, the final fragments of sleep scattered and evaporated, and events began to follow the normal sequence of human awakening, as it became apparent that all of these thoughts had their existence inside the head, and that the head in question was aching intolerably.

I opened my eyes cautiously.

The first thing that I saw was Anna, sitting close to my bed. She had not noticed that I had woken, probably because she was absorbed in reading - there was a volume of Knut Hamsun lying open in her hands. I watched her for some time through my eyelashes. I was unable to add anything substantial to my first impression of her, but no additions were necessary: perhaps her beauty appeared even more tormenting in its indifferent perfection. I thought with sadness that when a woman like her does fall in love with a man it is always either a commercial traveller with a moustache or some red-faced artillery major - the mechanism is the same as that by which the most beautiful schoolgirls are bound to choose ugly friends. It is not, of course, a matter of wishing to emphasize their own beauty by means of the contrast (an explanation on the level of Ivan Bunin), but of compassion.

There were some changes in her, however. Her hair seemed to be shorter and a little lighter, but that was probably a trick of the light. Instead of the previous day’s dark dress she was wearing a strange semi-military uniform - a black skirt and a loose sandy-coloured tunic, dappled now with trembling rainbow spots of colour from a ray of sunlight that was split as it passed through the carafe that stood on a table, which stood in turn in a room I had never seen before. But the most astonishing thing was that outside the window it was summer - through the pane I could see what appeared to be the silvery-green crowns of poplars soaring upwards through the noonday heat.

This room in which I was lying reminded me of a suite in an inexpensive provincial hotel; a small table, two firmly upholstered armchairs, a washbasin on the wall and a lamp with a shade. One thing it did not resemble in the slightest, however, was the compartment of the train hurtling through the winter night in which I had fallen asleep the previous evening.