Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

‘Aha,’ said Volodin, and the red tongues of flame glinted in his spectacles. ‘You smoke dope. Doesn’t dope put ideas in your head?’

‘Sure.’

‘So if you’re president, that means you have state ideas, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what happens next. The first dope you smoke fills your head with state ideas and your internal president ends up facing internal impeachment’

‘We’ll break through,’ said Kolyan, ‘I’ll bring in the internal tanks.’

‘How are you going to bring them in? Who was it got all the ideas? You. That means you impeach your own internal president. So then who’s going to bring in the tanks?’

Kolyan thought in silence for a moment.

‘Straight away you’ll have a new president,’ said Volodin. ‘And I hate to think what the internal security service will do to the old one so they can get in with the new one. ‘

Kolyan pondered.

‘Well, what of it?’ he said uncertainly. ‘So there’s a new president. ‘

‘But you were the old one, weren’t you? So now who ends up in the inner Lubyanka for the rubber-hosepipe kidney treatment? Got no answer? You do. So now you tell me which is best - for the inner pigs to take you in for doing the old woman, or to wind up with the inner State Security Services as ex-president?’

Kolyan wrinkled up his brow and held his fingers up in a fan shape as he prepared to say something, but at that point he obviously had an unpleasant idea, because he suddenly dropped his head limply.

‘Yeah, yeah…’ he said. ‘It’s probably best not to stick your head up. It’s tricky all right…’

‘Now the inner pigs have got you,’ Volodin stated. ‘And you tell me, Nietzsche, Nietzsche… D’you know what happened to that Nietzsche of yours?’

Kolyan cleared his throat. A gob of spittle like a tiny bull terrier separated from his lips and plopped into the fire.

‘You’re a real bastard, Volodin,’ he said. ‘You’ve screwed my head up again. I just saw this film on the video, Pulp Fiction, about the American brothers. I felt so good after it! Like I knew now how to carry on livin’. But talkin’ with you’s like getting flushed down into some ditch full of shit… I’ll tell you this - I ain’t never come across none of your inner pigs. If I do, then I’ll waste them, or I’ll call in the shrink to get me off on an insanity plea.’

‘Why d’you want to waste the inner pigs?’ Shurik put in. ‘Why bother, when you can just cut them in?’

‘You mean the inner pigs are on the take too?’ Kolyan asked.

«Course they’re on the take,’ said Shurik. ‘Haven’t you seen The Godfather 3? Remember Don Corleone? To get out from under his inner pigs, he sent the Vatican six hundred million greenbacks. Got off with parole, even with all the guys he’d wasted.’

He turned to face Volodin.

‘Maybe you’re gonna tell us the inner pigs ain’t on the take?’

‘What difference does it make if they’re on the take or not?’

‘That’s right,’ said Shurik, ‘that’s not where the spiel was at. It was Kolyan started taking out the pigs. Where was we at? We was talking about the eternal high, yeah? And about some fourth guy who goes tripping on the eternal high while you’re getting things together with the internal prosecutors and briefs.’

‘That’s right. It doesn’t matter how you settle up with the inner pigs - you can take them out or cut them in or write a confession. None of the pigs or the guys who pay them off or the guys who confess actually exist. It’s just you pretending to be each of them by turns. I thought you’d understood all that.’

‘Not so very much.’

‘Remember how you and Kolyan used to work down by Red Square before democracy? When he sold hard currency and you came over with a pig’s pass and confiscated it, and took away the client? Remember how you used to say that if you didn’t believe for just a moment that you were a pig, then the client wouldn’t believe it either and he wouldn’t walk? So you used to feel like a pig.’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘And maybe you actually became one?’

‘Volodin,’ said Shurik, ‘you’re a mate of mine, but I mean it, you watch your mouth.’

‘This entire spiel’s down to me, you just listen. D’you see what we’ve got here? You yourself can believe for a while that you’re a pig. Now just imagine that you do the same thing all your life, only it’s not the client you’re fooling, it’s yourself, and all the time you believe your own show. Sometimes you’re a pig, and sometimes you’re the guy he’s fingering. Sometimes you’re the prosecutor, sometimes you’re the brief. Why d’you think I said they don’t really exist? Because when you’re the prosecutor - where’s the brief? And when you’re the brief - where’s the prosecutor? Nowhere. So it turns out like you’re dreaming them, get me?’

‘Okay, okay, I get you.’

‘And then apart from the pigs, you’ve got so many other assholes standing in line that life’s not long enough for you to be all of them. The queue waiting for you inside is longer than any of those queues for sausage under the commies. And if you want to understand the eternal high, you have to wipe out the whole queue, get me?’

Shurik thought about it for a while.

‘Ah, who needs it,’ he said at last. ‘I’d better do five grams of coke than go crazy. Maybe this eternal high won’t give me no trip anyway - just like weed don’t do nothing for me.’

‘That’s why no one knows about the eternal high,’ said Volodin. ‘That’s precisely why.’

This time the silence that followed was a long one. Volodin began breaking branches and throwing them into the fire. Shurik took a flat metal flask with an embossed image of the Statue of Liberty out of his pocket, took several large gulps from it and handed it to Kolyan. Kolyan drank too, handed it back to Shurik and began spitting into the fire at regular intervals.

The branches in the flames cracked like gunfire - sometimes single shots, sometimes short bursts. The camp-fire seemed like an entire universe in which tiny beings, whose scarcely visible shadows flickered between the tongues of flame, squirmed and struggled for a place beside the gobs of spittle falling on the hot embers, in order to escape for at least a few moments from the intolerable heat. The fate of these beings was a sad one - even if anyone were to guess at their spectral existence, how could he possibly explain to them that in actual fact they didn’t live in a fire, but in the middle of a forest filled with the coolness of the night, and if they would only stop struggling for a place by the gobs of a mobster’s spittle, then all of their sufferings would be at an end? Probably he couldn’t. Perhaps the neo-Platonist who used to live in these parts could have managed it - but then the poor man had died without even living to see the Twentieth Congress.

‘Verily,’ Volodin said sadly, ‘this world is like unto a burning house.’

‘Never mind a burning house,’ Shurik replied readily. ‘It’s a fire in a bloody brothel during a fucking flood.’

‘So what d’you do? You gotta live.’ said Kolyan. ‘Tell me, Volodin, d’you believe in the end of the world?’

‘That’s a purely individual question,’ said Volodin. ‘If some Chechen or other blows you away, that’s the end of your world.’

‘We’ll see who blows who away,’ said Kolyan. ‘What d’you reckon, is it true all the Orthodox believers are in line for pardon?’

‘When?’

‘At the Last Judgement,’ Kolyan said quickly in a half-whisper.

‘You don’t mean you believe in all that garbage?’ Shurik asked disbelievingly.

‘Dunno if I believe it or not,’ said Kolyan. ‘Once I was on my way home from this kill, I felt real miserable, I had all these doubts - you know, when you feel your spirit getting weak. And there’s this kiosk with these icons and these pamphlets and stuff. So I bought one of them - «Life Beyond the Grave» it was called. I read about what happens after you’re dead. It was all such dead familiar stuff, honest. I recognized it all straight off. Holding cell, trial, pardon, time, article. Dying’s like movin’ from jail to the camps. They send the soul off to this heavenly transit jail, tribulations it’s called. Everything done right, two armed escorts and all the whole works, punishment cell downstairs, upstairs - the good life. And while you’re in this transit jail they slap the charges on you - your own and everybody else’s too - and you gotta get yourself off on every article, one after the other. The main thing is, you gotta know the criminal code. But if the big boss feels like it, he’ll stick you in solitary anyway. ‘Cause under his criminal code you’re fitted up under half the articles from the day you’re born. For instance, there’s this article says you answer for all your spiel. Not just when you mouth off out of line, but the whole thing, every single word you ever said. You get that? No matter which way you twist it, there’s always somethin’ they can put you away for. If you got a soul, you’re in for the tribulations. But the big boss can slim your time down, especially if you call yourself a worthless heap of shit. He likes that. And he likes it when you’re afraid of him. Wants everyone to be afraid of him and feel like shit. And there he is with this big-time radiance, and these big wings fanned out wide, bodyguards, angels - the whole works. He looks down at you - what you gotta say now, you lump of shit? Get the picture now? I’m ieadin’ it and I remember - a long time ago, when I was trainin’ to be a weightlifter and it was perestroika, they printed some-thin’ like it in Ogonyok. And when I remembered it, I broke out in a sweat. Turns out life under Stalin was like life after death is now!’