Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

Standing in the doorway were Zherbunov and Barbolin - but, my God, how changed they were! They were dressed in white doctors’ coats, and Barbolin had a genuine stethoscope protruding from his pocket. This was simply too much for me, and my chest heaved abruptly with nervous laughter that erupted from my cocaine-scorched throat in an explosion of hoarse coughing. Barbolin, who was standing in front, turned to Zherbunov and said something. I suddenly stopped laughing, struck by the thought that they were going to beat me.

I should say that I was not in the least bit afraid of death. In my situation to die was every bit as natural and reasonable as to leave a theatre that has caught fire in the middle of a lacklustre performance. But I most definitely did not want my final departure to be accompanied by kicks and punches from people I hardly knew - in the depths of my soul I was clearly not sufficiently a Christian for that.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am sure you must understand that soon they will kill you too. Out of respect for death, therefore if not for mine, then at least for your own - I ask you to get it over with quickly, without any unnecessary humiliation. I shall not be able to tell you anything, in any case. I am no more than an ordinary private citizen and…’

‘That’s a bit feeble,’ Zherbunov interrupted me with a chuckle. ‘But that stuff you were giving us yesterday, that was something else. And that poetry you read! D’you remember any of that?’

There was something strangely incongruous about the way he spoke, something rather odd, and I decided that he must have been tippling his Baltic tea already that morning.

‘My memory is excellent.’ I replied, looking him straight in the face.

The emptiness in his eyes was impenetrable.

‘I don’t know why you bother talking to that asshole,’ Barbolin hissed in his thin voice. ‘Let Timurich handle it, that’s what he’s paid for.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Zherbunov, putting an end to the conversation. He came over to me and took hold of my arm.

‘Can you not at least untie my hands?’ I asked. ‘There are two of you, after all.’

‘Oh, yeah? And what if you try strangling one of us?’

I cringed as though I had been struck. They knew everything. I had an almost physical sensation of the crushing weight of Zherbunov’s words tumbling down on top of me.

Barbolin gripped me by my other arm. They easily stood me on my feet and dragged me out into the dimly lit, deserted corridor, which did actually have a vague hospital smell about it, not unlike the smell of blood. I made no attempt to resist, and a few minutes later they pushed me into a large room, sat me down on a stool at its centre and with drew.

Directly in front of me stood a large desk piled high with bureaucratic-looking files. Sitting behind the desk was a gentleman of intellectual appearance wearing a white doctor’s coat just like those of Zherbunov and Barbolin. He was listening attentively to a black ebonite telephone receiver squeezed between his ear and his shoulder, while his hands mechanically sorted through some papers on the desk; from time to time he nodded, saying nothing, and he paid not the slightest attention to me. Another man wearing a white doctor’s coat and green trousers with red stripes down their sides was sitting by the wall, on a chair placed between two tall windows over which dusty blinds had been lowered.

Something indefinite in the arrangement of the room reminded me of General HQ, which I had visited frequently in 1916, when I was trying my hopeful but inexperienced hand at patriotic journalism. But instead of a portrait of the Emperor (or at the very least of that infamous Karl who had left a trail of indelible marks across half the kingdoms of Europe), hanging on the wall above the head of the gentleman in the white coat was something so terrible that I bit my lip, drawing blood.

It was a poster, printed in the colours of the Russian flag and mounted on a large piece of cardboard, depicting a blue man with a typically Russian face. His chest had been cleaved open and the top of his skull sawn off to expose his red brain. Despite the fact that his viscera had been extracted from his abdomen and labelled with Latin numerals, the expression in his eyes seemed one of indifference, and his face appeared frozen in a calm half-smile; on the other hand, perhaps that was simply the effect created by a wide gash in his cheek, through which I could see part of his jaw and teeth as flawless is in an advertisement for German tooth powder.

‘Get on with it, then.’ the man in the white coat barked, dropping I lie receiver back into its cradle.

‘I beg your pardon.’1 said, lowering my eyes to look at him.

‘Granted, granted.’ he said, ‘bearing in mind that I already have some experience in dealing with you. Allow me to remind you that my name is Timur Timurovich.’

‘Pyotr. For obvious reasons I am not able to shake your hand.’

‘No need for that. Well, well, Pyotr, my lad. How did you manage to get yourself into such a mess?’

The eyes that watched me were friendly, even sympathetic, and the goatee beard made him look like an idealistic supporter of the liberal reform movement, but I knew a great deal about the Cheka’s cunning tricks, and my heart remained unstirred by even the slightest flickering of trust.

‘I do not believe that I have got myself into any particular mess.’ I said. ‘But if that is how you choose to put things, then I did not get into it on my own.’

‘Then with whom exactly?’

This is it, I thought, it has begun.

‘If I understand you correctly, you expect me to provide you with details of addresses and hiding places, but I am afraid I shall be obliged to disappoint you. My entire life since childhood is the story of how I have shunned all company, and in such a context one can only speak of other people in terms of a general category, if you take my meaning?’

‘Naturally,’ he said, and wrote something down on a piece of paper. ‘No doubt about that. But there is a contradiction in what you say. First you tell me you didn’t get into your present condition on your own, and then you tell me you shun other people.’

‘Oh, come now.’ I replied, crossing my legs at some risk to my immediate equilibrium, ‘that is merely the appearance of a contradiction. The harder I try to avoid other people’s company, the less successful I am. Incidentally, it was only quite recently that I realized why this is the case. I was walking past St Isaac’s and I looked up at the dome - you know how it is, a frosty night, the stars shining… and I understood.’

‘And what is the reason?’

‘If one tries to run away from other people, one involuntarily ends up actually following in their path throughout the course of one’s life. Running away does not require knowing where one is running to, only what one is running from. Which means that one constantly has to carry before one’s eyes a vision of one’s own prison.’

‘Yes,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘Yes indeed, when I think of the trouble I’m going to have with you, it terrifies me.’

I shrugged and raised my eyes to the poster above his head. Apparently it was not a brilliant metaphor after all, merely a medical teaching aid, perhaps something taken from an anatomical atlas.

‘You know,’ Timur Timurovich continued, ‘I have a lot of experience. Plenty of people pass through my hands here.’

‘Indeed, I do not doubt it,’ I said.

‘So let me tell you something. I’m less interested in the formal diagnosis than the internal event which has prised someone loose from his normal socio-psychological niche. And as far as I can see, yours is a very straightforward case. You simply will not accept the new. Can you remember how old you are?’