Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

After a while somebody knocked.

‘Petka!’ called Chapaev’s voice. ‘Where are you?’

‘Nowhere!’ I mumbled in reply.

‘Now then!’ Chapaev roared unexpectedly. ‘That’s my lad! Tomorrow I’ll thank you formally in front of the ranks. You understand everything so well! So what were you up to, acting the fool all evening?’

‘How am I to understand you?’

‘You work it out for yourself. What can you see in front of you right now?’

‘A pillow.’ I answered, ‘but not very clearly. And please do not explain to me yet again that it is located in my consciousness.’

‘Everything that we see is located in our consciousness, Petka. Which means we can’t say that our consciousness is located anywhere. We’re nowhere for the simple reason that there is no place in which we can be said to be located. That’s why we’re nowhere. D’you remember now?’

‘Chapaev.’ I said, ‘I would like to be alone for a while.’

‘Whatever you say. Report to me in the morning, fresh as a cucumber. We advance at noon.’

He retreated along the corridor over the squeaking floorboards. For a while I pondered over what he had said - at first over this ‘nowhere’, and then over the inexplicable advance that he had set for noon the next day. Of course, I could have left my room and explained to him that it was impossible for me to advance because I was ‘nowhere’, but I did not want to do that -1 was overwhelmed by a terrible desire to sleep, and everything had begun to seem boring and unimportant. I fell asleep and dreamed of Anna’s fingers caressing the ribbed barrel of a machine-gun. I was awakened by another knock at the door.

‘Chapaev! I asked you to leave me alone! Let me get some rest before battle!’

‘It’s not Chapaev,’ said a voice outside the door. ‘It’s Kotovsky.’

I half sat up in my bed. ‘What do you want?’

‘I must talk to you.’

1 took my pistol out of my pocket and laid it on the bed, covering it with the blanket. God alone knew what he could want. I had a presentiment that it was somehow connected with Anna.

‘Come in then.’

The door opened and Kotovsky entered. He looked quite different from when I had seen him during the day - now he was wearing a dressing-gown with tassels, from beneath which protruded the striped legs of a pair of pyjama trousers. In one hand he held a candlestick with three lighted candles, and in the other he had a bottle of champagne and two glasses - when I spotted the champagne my guess that Anna had complained to him about me became a near certainty.

‘Have a seat.’ I pointed to the armchair.

Setting the champagne and the candlestick on the table, he sat down.

‘May I smoke here?’

‘By all means.’

When he had lit his cigarette, Kotovsky made a strange gesture - he ran his open hand across his bald head, as though he were pushing back an invisible lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead. I realized that I had seen the movement somewhere before, and immediately remembered where - on our first meeting, in the armoured train, Anna had smoothed down her non-existent locks in almost exactly the same way. The idea flitted through my mind that they must be members of some strange sect headed by Chapaev, and these shaven heads were connected with their rituals, but a moment later I realized that we were all members of this sect - all of us, that is, who had been obliged to suffer the consequences of Russia’s latest attack of freedom and the lice that inevitably accompanied it. I laughed.

‘What are you laughing at?’ Kotovsky asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘I was thinking about how we live nowadays. We shave our heads in order not to catch lice. Who could have imagined it five years ago? It really is incredible.’

‘Remarkable.’ said Kotovsky, ‘I was thinking about just the same thing - about what is happening to Russia. That’s why I came to see you. On a kind of impulse. I wanted to talk.’

‘About Russia?’

‘Precisely,’ he said.

‘What is there to say?’ I said. ‘Everything is abundantly clear.’

‘No, what I meant was - who is to blame?’

‘1 do not know,’ I said, ‘what do you think?’

‘The intelligentsia. Who else?’

He held out a full glass towards me.

‘Every member of the intelligentsia,’ he continued, his face showing a dark grimace, ‘especially in Russia, where he can only survive if someone else supports him, possesses one revoltingly infantile character trait. He is never afraid to attack that which subconsciously he feels to be right and lawful. Like a child who is not afraid to do his parents harm, because he knows that they may put him in the corner, but they won’t throw him out. He is more afraid of strangers. And it’s the same with this vile class.’

‘I do not quite follow you.’

‘No matter how much the intelligentsia may like to deride the basic principles of the empire from which it has sprung, it knows perfectly well that within that empire the moral law retained its vital strength.’

‘How? How does it know?’

‘From the fact that if the moral law were dead, the intelligentsia would never have dared to trample the cornerstones of the empire under foot, just recently I was rereading Dostoevsky - do you know what I thought?’

I felt one side of my face twitch.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Good is by its very nature all-forgiving. Just think, all of these butchers who are so busy killing people nowadays used to be exiled to villages in Siberia, where they spent days at a time hunting hares and hazel-hens. No, the intelligentsia is not afraid of sacrilege. There’s only one thing it is afraid of -dealing with the question of evil and its roots, because it understands, and quite rightly, that here it could get shafted with a telegraph pole.’

‘A powerful image.’

‘Toying with evil is enjoyable,’ Kotovsky continued passionately. ‘There’s no risk whatsoever and the advantages are obvious. That’s why there’s such a vast army of villainous volunteers who deliberately confuse top with bottom and right with left, don’t you see? All of these calculating pimps of the spirit, these emaciated Bolsheviks, these needle-punctured liberals, these cocaine-soaked social-revolutionaries, all these-’

‘I understand.’

Kotovsky took a sip of champagne.

‘By the way, Pyotr,’ he said casually, ‘while we’re on the subject, I heard you have some cocaine.’

‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I do. Now that the subject has come up anyway.’

I reached into my travelling bag, took out the tin and put it on the table.

‘Please help yourself.’

Kotovsky needed no further persuasion. The white tracks lie sprinkled on the surface of the table looked like two major highways under construction. He went through all the requisite manipulations and leaned back in his armchair. After waiting a minute or so, I asked out of politeness:

‘And do you often think about Russia in that manner?’

‘When I lived in Odessa, I thought about her at least three times a day,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘It was giving me nosebleeds. Then I gave it up. I didn’t want to become dependent on anything.’

‘And what happened now? Was it Dostoevsky who tempted you?’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘A certain inner drama.’

1 suddenly had an unexpected idea.

‘Tell me, Grigory, are you very fond of your trotters?’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘We could swap. Half of this tin for your carriage.’

Kotovsky gave a me a sharp glance, then he picked up the tin from the table, looked into it and said:

‘You really know how to tempt a man. Why would you want my trotters?’

‘To go driving. Why else?’