Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

‘You mean everything to me.’I said with complete sincerity.

‘Very well then,’ said Anna. ‘I believe you suggested that we should go for a ride in the carriage? Into the country? Let us go.’

‘This very moment?’

‘Why not?’

I moved closer to her.

‘Anna, you can never

‘I beg you,’ she said, ‘not here.’

Driving out of the gates, I turned the carriage to the right. Anna was sitting beside me, the colour had risen in her cheeks, and she was avoiding looking at me. It began to seem to me that she already regretted what was happening. We drove to the woods in silence; as soon as the vault of green branches had closed over our heads I stopped the horses.

‘Listen, Anna.’ I said, turning towards her. ‘Believe me, I appreciate your impulse immensely, but if you have begun to regret it, then

She did not allow me to finish. She put her arms around my neck and set her lips against my mouth. It happened so quickly that I was still speaking at the moment when she began kissing me. Naturally, I did not value the phrase I was pronouncing so much as to try to stop her.

I have always found kissing to be an extremely strange form of contact between human beings. As far as I am aware, it is one of the innovations introduced by civilization; it is well known that the savages who inhabit the southern isles and the peoples of Africa who have not yet crossed that boundary beyond which the paradise originally intended for man is lost for ever, never kiss at all. Their lovemaking is simple and uncomplicated; possibly the very word ‘love’ is inappropriate for what takes place between them. In essence, love arises in solitude, when its object is absent, and it is directed less at the person whom one loves than at an image constructed by the mind which has only a weak connection with that original. The appearance of true love requires the ability to create chimeras; in kissing me Anna was really kissing the man behind the poems which had affected her so strongly, a man who had never existed. How was she to know that when I wrote the book I was also engaged in a tormented search for him, growing more convinced with each new poem that he could never be found, because he existed nowhere? The words left by him were simply an imposture, like the footsteps carved in the rock by slaves, which the Babylonians used to prove the reality of the descent to earth of some ancient deity.

This last thought was already about Anna. I felt the tender touch of her trembling tongue; between their half-closed lids, her eyes were so close that I felt I could have dived into their moist gleam and dissolved in them for ever. At last we grew short of breath and our first kiss came to an end. Her face turned to the side so that now I saw it in profile; she closed her eyes and ran her tongue across her lips, as though they were dry - all of these small mimetic gestures, which in other circumstances would not have meant a thing, now moved me with a quite unbelievable power. I realized that there was no longer anything keeping us apart, that everything was possible; my hand, from lying on her shoulder, which only a minute ago it would have seemed like sacrilege merely to touch, moved down simply and naturally to her breast. She leaned away from me slightly, but only, as I realized immediately, in order that my hand should not encounter any obstacles in its way.

‘What are you thinking of now?’ she asked. ‘Only honestly.’

‘What am I thinking of?’ I said, moving my hands together behind her neck. ‘Of the fact that progress towards the zenith of happiness is in the literal sense like the ascent of a mountain…’

‘Not like that. Unfasten the hook. No, no. Leave it, let me do it. Forgive me, I interrupted you.’

‘Yes, it is like a difficult and dangerous ascent. As long as the object of desire lies ahead, all of one’s feelings are absorbed in the process of climbing. The next stone on which to set one’s foot, a tuft of grass which one can grab hold of for support. How beautiful you are, Anna… What was it I was saying… Yes, the goal gives all of this meaning, but it is completely absent at any single point in the movement; in essence, the approach to the goal is superior to the goal itself. I believe there was a certain opportunist by the name of Bernsteen who said that movement is all and the goal is nothing

‘Not Bernsteen, but Bernstein. How does this thing undo… Where on earth did you find such a belt?’

‘My God, Anna, do you want me to go insane

‘Carry on talking,’ she said, looking up for just a second, ‘but don’t be offended if I am unable to maintain the conversation for a while.’

‘Yes,’ I continued, leaning my head back and closing my eyes, ‘but the most important thing here is that as soon as one has ascended the summit, as soon as the goal has been attained, at that very moment it disappears. In its essence, like all objects created by the mind, it is ultimately elusive. Imagine it yourself, Anna, when one dreams of the most beautiful of women, she is present in one’s imagination in all the perfection of her beauty, but when she is actually there in one’s arms, all of that disappears. What one is dealing with then is reduced to a set of the most simple and often rather crude sensations, which, moreover, one normally experiences in the dark… O-o-oh… But no matter how they may rouse the blood, the beauty which was calling to you only a minute before disappears, to be replaced by something, to strive for which was ridiculous. It means that beauty is unattainable. Or rather, it is attainable, but only in itself, while that goal which reason intoxicated by passion seeks behind it, simply does not exist. From the very beginning beauty is actually… No, I cannot go on. Come here… yes, like that. Yes. Yes. Is that comfortable? Oh, my God… What did you say was the name of the man who said that about the movement and the goal?’

‘Bernstein,’ Anna whispered in my ear.

‘Does it not seem to you that his words apply very well to love?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, gently biting the lobe of my ear. ‘The goal is nothing, but the movement is everything.’

‘Then move, move, I implore you.’

‘And you talk, talk

‘Of what exactly?’

‘Of anything at all, just talk. I want to hear your voice when it happens.’

‘By all means. To continue that idea… Imagine that everything which a beautiful woman can give one adds up to one hundred per cent.’

‘You bookkeeper…’

‘Yes, one hundred. In that case, she gives ninety per cent of that when one simply sees her, and everything else, the object of a thousand years of haggling, is no more than an insignificant remainder. Nor can that first ninety per cent be subdivided into any component fractions, because beauty is indefinable and indivisible, no matter what lies Schopenhauer may try to tell us. As for the other ten per cent, it is no more than an aggregate sum of nerve signals which would be totally without value if they were not lent support by imagination and memory. Anna, I beg you, open your eyes for a second… Yes, like that,… yes, precisely imagination and memory. You know, if I had to write a genuinely powerful erotic scene, I would merely provide a few hints and fill in the rest with an incomprehensible conversation like the… Oh, my God, Anna… Like the one which you and I are having now. Because there is nothing to depict, everything has to be tilled in by the mind. The deception, and perhaps the very greatest of a woman’s secrets… Oh, my little girl from the old estate… consists in the fact that beauty seems to be a label, behind which there lies concealed something immeasurably greater, something inexpressibly more desired than itself, to which it merely points the way, whereas in actual fact, there is nothing in particular standing behind it… A golden label on an empty bottle… A shop where everything is displayed in a magnificently arranged window-setting, but that tiny, tender, narrow little room behind it… Please, please, my darling, not so fast… Yes, that room is empty. Remember the poem I recited to those unfortunates. About the princess and the bagel… A-a-ah, Anna… No matter how temptingly it might lure one, the moment comes when one realizes that at the centre of that black bage… bagel… bagel… there is nothing but a void, voi-oid, voi-oi-oooid!’