Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

‘Very well.’ I countered, ‘then answer my question. Can you give me a simple answer to it?’

‘I can.’ he said, ‘try it again.’

‘Who are you, Chapaev?’

1 do not know.’ he replied.

Two or three bullets clattered against the planks of the walls, splinters flew up into the air, and I instinctively ducked my head. I heard quiet voices outside the door, apparently discussing something. Chapaev poured two glasses and we drank without clinking them together. After hesitating for a moment, I picked up an onion from the table.

‘I understand what you are trying to say,’ I said, biting into it, ‘but perhaps you could answer me in some other way?’

‘I could.’ said Chapaev.

‘Then who are you, Vasily Ivanovich?’

‘Who am I?’ he echoed, and raised his eyes to my face. ‘I am a reflection of the lamplight on this bottle.’

I felt as though the light reflected in his eyes had lashed me across the face; suddenly I was overwhelmed by total understanding and recall.

The blow was so powerful that for a moment I thought a shell must have exploded right there in the room, but I recovered almost immediately. I felt no need to say anything out loud, but the inertia of speech had already translated my thought into words.

‘How fascinating.’ I whispered quietly, ‘so am I.’

‘Then who is this?’ he asked, pointing at me.

‘Voyd.’ I replied.

‘And this?’ he pointed to himself.

‘Chapaev.’

‘Splendid! And this?’ he gestured around the room.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

At that very moment the window was shattered by a bullet and the bottle standing between us exploded, showering both of us with the last of the moonshine. For several seconds we gazed at each other in silence, then Chapaev rose, went over to the bench on which his tunic lay, unpinned the silver star from it and threw it across the room to me.

His movements had suddenly become swift and precise; it was hard to believe that this was the same man who had just been swaying drunkenly on his stool and gazing senselessly at the bottle. He snatched up the lamp from the table, unscrewed it rapidly, splashed the kerosene out on to the floor and tossed the burning wick into it. The kerosene flared up, followed by the spilt moonshine, and the room was illuminated by the dim glow of a fire just beginning to take hold. Deep shadows were cast across Chapaev’s face by the flames from beneath, and it suddenly seemed very ancient and strangely familiar. He overturned the table in a single gesture, then bent down and pulled open a narrow trapdoor by a metal ring.

‘Let’s get going.’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do here.’

I felt my way down a ladder into cold damp darkness. The bottom of the shaft proved to be about two yards below the level of the floor; at first I could not understand what we were going to do in this pit, and then the foot with which I was feeling for the wall suddenly swung through into emptiness. Coming down behind me, Chapaev struck my head with his boot.

‘Forward!’ he commanded. ‘At the double!’

Leading away from the staircase was a low, narrow tunnel supported by wooden props. I crawled forward, struggling to distinguish anything ahead of me in the darkness. To judge from the draught I could feel, the exit could not be very far away.

‘Stop,’ Chapaev said in a whisper. ‘We have to wait for a minute.’

He was about two yards behind me. I sat down on the ground and leaned my back against one of the props. I could hear indistinct voices and other noises; at one point I clearly heard Furmanov’s voice yelling: ‘Get back out of there, fuck you! You’ll burn to death! I tell you they’re not in there, they’ve gone! Did you catch the bald one?’ I thought of them up above, rushing about in thick clouds of smoke among the repulsive chimeras created by their collective clouded reason, and it all seemed incredibly funny.

‘Hey, Vasily Ivanovich!’ I called quietly.

‘What?’ responded Chapaev.

‘I just understood something.’ I said. ‘There is only one kind of freedom - when you are free of everything that is constructed by the mind. And this freedom is called «I do not know». You were absolutely right. You know, there is an expression, «a thought expressed is a lie», but I tell you, Chapaev, that a thought unexpressed is also a lie, because every thought already contains the element of expression.’

‘You expressed that very well, Petka.’ responded Chapaev.

‘As soon as I know,’ I continued, ‘I am no longer free. But I am absolutely free when I do not know. Freedom is the biggest mystery of all. They simply do not know how free they are. They do not know who they are in reality. They…’

‘I jabbed my finger upwards and was suddenly contorted by a spasm of irrepressible laughter - ‘they think that they are weavers

‘Quiet.’ said Chapaev. ‘Stop neighing like a mad horse. They’ll hear you.’

‘No, that’s not it.’ I gasped, choking on the words, ‘they don’t even think that they are weavers… They know it…’

‘Forward.’ he said, prodding me with his boot.

I took several deep breaths to recover my senses and began edging my way ahead again. We covered the rest of the dis tance without speaking. No doubt it was because the tunnel was so narrow and cramped that it seemed to be incredibly long. Underground there was a smell of dampness, and also, for some reason, of hay, which grew stronger the further we went. At last the hand I was holding out in front of me came up against a wall of earth. I rose to my feet and straightened up, banging my head against something made of iron. Feeling around in the darkness that surrounded me, I came to the conclusion that I was standing in a shallow pit underneath some kind of flat metal surface. There was a gap of two feet or so between the metal and the ground; I squeezed into it and crawled for a yard or two, pushing aside the hay that filled it, and then I bumped against a broad wheel of moulded rubber. I immediately remembered the huge haystack beside which the taciturn Bashkir had mounted his permanent guard, and I realized where Chapaev’s armoured car had gone to. A second later I was already standing beside it - the hay had been pulled away to one side to expose a riveted metal door, which stood slightly ajar.

The manor-house was enveloped in flames. The spectacle was magnificent and enchanting, much the same, in fact, as any large fire. About fifty yards away from us, among the trees, there was another, smaller fire - the blazing bathhouse where only recently Chapaev and I had been sitting. I thought that I could see figures moving around it, but they could easily have been the dappled shadows of the trees shifting every time the fire swayed in a gust of wind. But whether I could see them or not, there were undoubtedly people there: I could hear shouting and shooting from the direction of both conflagrations. If I had not known what was actually happening there, I might have thought it was two detachments waging a night battle.

I heard a rustling close beside me, and I pulled out my pistol.

‘Who goes there?’ I whispered nervously.

‘It’s me.’ said Anna.

She was wearing her tunic, riding breeches and boots, and in her hand she had a bent metal lever similar to the crank-handles used for starting automobile engines.

‘Thank God,’ I said, ‘You have no idea how worried I was about you. The mere thought that this drunken rabble…’

‘Please don’t breathe onion on me.’ she interrupted. ‘Where’s Chapaev?’

‘I’m here,’ he answered, crawling out from underneath the armoured car.

‘Why did you take so long?’ she asked. ‘I was beginning to get worried.’