Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

Timur Timurovich’s thick lips materialized out of the dim half-light, approached my forehead and planted a long, wet kiss on it.

‘Total catharsis,’ he said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Eight thousand two hundred miles of emptiness.’ sang a male voice trembling with feeling from the radio, ‘and still no place to spend the night… How happy I should be if not for you, Mother Russia, if not for you, my homeland…’

Volodin stood up and turned the switch. The music stopped.

‘Why’d you turn it off?’ asked Serdyuk, looking up.

‘I can’t bear listening to Grebenschikov,’ replied Volodin. Tie’s talented, of course, but he’s far too fond of over-complicated phrases. His songs are all just full of Buddhism - he doesn’t know how to use words in a straightforward way. You heard that song he was singing just now about the homeland - d’you know where it comes from? The Chinese White Lotus Sect had this mantra: «Absolute emptiness is the homeland, the mother is the unborn.» But he’s wrapped it all up in code so you could burst your brains trying to understand what he’s talking about.’

Serdyuk shrugged and went back to his work. As I kneaded my Plasticine, I looked over every now and then at his quick fingers folding paper cranes out of pages from an exercise book. He performed his task with quite incredible dexterity, without even bothering to look at what he was doing. There were paper cranes scattered all around the aesthetics therapy room; many of them were just lying on the floor, although only that morning Zherbunov and Barbolin had swept a huge pile out into the corridor. Serdyuk took no interest whatsoever in the fate of his creations; once he had pencilled a number on each crane’s wing, he just tossed it into the corner and immediately set about ripping the next page out of the exercise book.

‘How many still to go?’ asked Volodin.

‘I’ve got to get them all done by spring,’ said Serdyuk, then transferred his gaze to me. ‘Listen, I’ve just remembered another one.’

‘Go on then.’ I answered.

‘Okay, it goes like this. Petka and Vasily Ivanovich are sitting boozing, when suddenly this soldier comes dashing in and says: «The Whites are coming!» Petka says: «Vasily Ivanovich, let’s leg it quick.» But Chapaev just pours another two glasses of hooch and says: «Drink up, Petka.» So they drink up. Then the soldier comes dashing in again. «The Whites are coming!» Chapaev pours another two glasses and says: «Drink up, Petka!» The next time the soldier comes running in and says the Whites are almost at the house now. So then Chapaev says: «Petka, can you see me?» And Petka says: «No.» And Chapaev says: «I can’t see you either. We’re well camouflaged.’»

I sighed derisively and picked up a new piece of Plasticine from the table.

‘I know that one too, but with a different ending.’ said Volodin. ‘The Whites come bursting in, look round the room, and say: «Damn, they got away again.»‘

‘That one is a little closer to the truth.’ I responded, ‘but it is still very wide of the mark. All these Whites… I simply cannot understand how everything could have been distorted so grossly. Well, does anybody have another one?’

‘I remember one,’ Serdyuk answered. ‘Petka and Vasily Ivanovich are swimming across the Ural, and Chapaev’s clutching this attache case in his teeth… ‘

‘О-oh.’ I groaned, ‘Who on earth could possibly invent such nonsense?’

‘Anyway, he’s almost on the point of drowning, but he won’t dump the case. Petka shouts to him: «Vasily Ivanovich, drop the case, or you’ll drown!» But Chapaev says: «No way, Petka! I can’t. It’s got the staff maps in it.» Anyway, they barely make it to the other bank, and when they get there, Petka says: «Right then, Vasily Ivanovich, show me these maps we almost drowned for.» Chapaev opens up the case, Petka looks inside and sees it’s full of potatoes. «Vasily Ivanovich,» he says, «what kind of maps do you call these?» So Chapaev takes out two potatoes and says: «Look here, Petka. This is us - and this is the Whites.»‘

Volodin laughed.

‘That one lacks even the slightest glimmer of sense,’ I said. ‘In the first place, if, after another ten thousand lives you, Serdyuk, should have the chance to drown in the Ural, you may regard yourself as extremely fortunate. In the second place, I simply cannot understand where all these Whites keep appearing from. I suspect that the Cheka crew must have been at work there. In the third place, it was a metaphorical map of consciousness, not a plan of military positions at all. And they were not potatoes, but onions.’

‘Onions?’

‘Yes, onions. Although for a number of highly personal reasons I would have given a great deal for them to have been potatoes instead.’

Volodin and Serdyuk exchanged a protracted glance.

‘And this is the man who wants to discharge himself.’ said Volodin. ‘Ah, I’ve remembered one now. Chapaev is writing in his diary: «Sixth of June; we have driven the Whites back-’

‘He did not keep any diary.’ I interjected.

‘«Seventh of June; the Whites have driven us back. Eighth of June; the forest warden came and drove everybody out.”‘

‘I see.’ I said, ‘no doubt that one was about Baron Jungern. Only he didn’t come, unfortunately. And then, he was not actually a forest warden, he simply said that he had always wanted to be a forester. I find this all very strange, gentlemen. In some ways you are really quite well informed, and yet I keep on getting the feeling that someone who does indeed know how everything really happened has attempted to distort the truth in the most monstrous fashion possible. And I simply cannot understand the reason for it.’

Nobody broke the silence again for a while. I became absorbed in my work and started thinking through my forthcoming conversation with Timur Timurovich. The logic of his actions still remained entirely opaque to me. Maria had been discharged a week after he broke the bust of Aristotle over my head, but Volodin, who was as normal a man as any I had ever seen in my life, had recently been prescribed a new course of drug therapy. On no account, I reasoned with myself, must I think up answers in advance, because he might not ask a single one of the questions for which I might have prepared myself, and then I would be bound to throw out one of my ready-made answers at entirely the wrong moment. All that I could do was trust to chance and luck.

‘All right, then,’ Volodin eventually said. ‘Why don’t you give us an example of something that has actually been distorted? Tell us how it really happened.’

‘What exactly are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘Which of the episodes that you have mentioned?’

‘Any of them. Or we can take something else. Like this, for instance, I can’t imagine what could possibly have been distorted in this one. Kotovsky sends Chapaev some red caviar and cognac from Paris, and Chapaev writes back: «Thank you, Petka and I drank the moonshine, although it smelled of bedbugs, but we didn’t eat the cranberries - they stank of fish.»‘

I laughed despite myself.

‘Kotovsky never sent anything from Paris. But there was indeed a rather similar incident. We were sitting in a restaurant and actually drinking cognac with red caviar - I know how bad that sounds, but they had no black caviar in the place. Our conversation concerned the Christian paradigm, and therefore we began discussing its terminology. Chapaev commented on a passage from Swedenborg in which a ray of heavenly light shines down to the bottom of hell and the spirits who live there take it for a dirty, stinking puddle. I had understood this in the sense that the light itself had been transformed, but Chapaev said that the nature of light does not change, and everything depends on the subject of perception. He said that there is no power that would prevent a sinful soul from entering heaven - but it happens that it simply does not want to go there. I could not understand how this could be the case, and then he explained that one of Furmanov’s weavers, for instance, would have taken the caviar we were eating for cranberries that smelled of fish.’