Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

A FAIRY-TALE CUM TRUE!

Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do gentleman. Classic sex, deep and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian Knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral and anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave Girl services. Face control. Visits by arrangement. Many things are possible. Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can . . .

A fine little kitten, I thought when I reread what I’d written. I must admit I didn’t really understand what the bandage was doing in there and why anyone would want a sakura branch up his ass. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what fisting was, either, but judging from what the other announcements said, it was either oral or vaginal, which made it the same kind of filth as all the rest. I supposed it must mean shoving in the fist? Did that mean it could be per oris too? In one of the announcements I even saw the following list: ‘fellatio, PR, cunnilingus’. What did that mean? Or ‘strap-on’? It sounded like something cosmic, from the romantic sixties of the last century. But, fortunately, I didn’t have to know what strap-on was - the only thing needed was to introduce myself to the client.

I don’t think anyone but a fox can understand how I could provide a ‘strap-on’ service without even knowing what it is. It’s not easy to explain that kind of thing, all you can do is offer analogies. I sense a client’s consciousness as a warm, spongy sphere, and in order to send the poor soul into the world of his dreams, first I have to make a little dent in the very hottest spot of that sphere with my tail, and then make the little dent smooth itself out and ripple across the surface of the sphere. That will just be a strap-on. But if I gently force the dent to fold back over on to itself so that it becomes a tender little nipple, that will be the kind of strap-on the client will remember and drool over until his mind finally drowns in the cold ocean of Alzheimer’s disease.

The same thing applies to fisting, light domination and all the rest. If, say, you want to take an elderly transvestite with higher musical education and a gold tooth in his mouth, and beat him to death with a baseball bat, even then I can assist you with your dubious project. But it’s better for me not to know everything that’s going on in someone else’s mind - it’s easier to keep my own soul pure that way.

That’s why I had no doubts about my ability to cope with the list of services advertised, no matter what they might be. But there was still something missing in the text. I thought for a moment and then, after ‘A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from well-to-do gentleman’ I wrote in:

Transsexual, versatile, penis 26x4. Always following the rules means denying yourself all the pleasures! We need to know how to commit the follies that our nature demands of us.

Ah, if only they knew what our true nature is, I sighed, and took out ‘Transsexual’. As the chef of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich used to say, before the revolution: ‘You can’t spoil gruel with butter, but you can spoil butter with gruel.’ Something else was required . . . After thinking about it for a while, I decided to replace ‘Mistress and Slave Girl services’ with ‘Mistress, Slave Girl and Ray of Light services’. That didn’t impose any additional physical exertions on me, not even imaginary ones, but it opened up wide scope for fantasy.

Fantasy . . . A courtesan I used to know in China during the Late Han period often used to say that a man’s weak spot is the fantasies that fill his mind. When she got old, she was given to a nomad leader as severance pay, and he boiled the poor woman in mare’s milk, hoping to bring back her youth. A weakness can sometimes become a terrible strength.

I could have gone on improving the text ad infinitum - everyone knows that for a real poet the process continues until the moment the publisher calls round to collect the manuscript. In this case I had to collect the manuscript from myself. And so I decided to put a full stop after the final touchingly artless couplet at the end:

Turbulent stream, pining without affection,

I promise you a passionate connection!

I’d never worked with the site whores.ru before. The procedure for posting information turned out to be the same as on other similar facilities, but there was one unpleasant difference. Posting plain text cost 150 dollars, photographs were twenty apiece. I had three of the WMZ cards that they accepted for payment on the site - a hundred, a fifty and a twenty. Obviously the whole thing was set up to suit these values. I could only post one photo - or else I would have to go to the nearest Metro station for a new supply of Internet money. I decided to make do with one picture, but to send it immediately, so that in the morning it would already be hanging out there on the wires. But I still didn’t manage to send the photograph off quickly - I spent almost an hour choosing it.

The choice proved difficult because every alternative tinted the services in my list in a different hue, illuminating the strap-on and the fisting with new nuances of meaning . . . Eventually I settled on an old black and white photograph - me in front of a set of bookshelves, with a volume of Alexander Blok in my hands. The book was The Snow Mask , and the photo itself, taken in the 1930s, had a magical, mysterious air to it, as if it had captured the final glimmering of the Silver Age of Russian literature - which was very appropriate for the final service offered in my list. It was a good thing I’d had my most precious negatives and daguerrotypes digitized.

All that left me to do was choose my artistic pseudonym. I found a suitable list through Google and chose a name from the very beginning - Adele, which reminded me of the Russian word for hell - ‘ad’.

It was a good quality photo and it took up half a megabyte. I clicked on the ‘send’ button. My little face obediently smiled, shot through the wires into the wall, was swept into the telephone cable and skipped along the electrical backbone of the street, to be intertwined with the other names and faces hurtling along from God knew where to God knew where else, as it dashed towards the distant network gateway.

The call in response to the announcement came the next morning, shortly after eleven. The client’s name was Pavel Ivanovich. His interest had been caught by the line about the Russian knout. It turned out that he had his own Russian knout, in fact not just one of them, but five - four on a special carved wooden stand and one in his tennis bag.

Let me say straight away that I would quite happily have thrown all mention of Pavel Ivanovich out of my memoirs, but without him the narrative would be incomplete. He played an important part in my life, in the same way as a filthy, slimy pedestrian underpass might if the heroine happens to walk through it on her way to the other bank of the river of fate. And so I shall have to tell you about him, and I beg your forgiveness in advance for the unappetizing details. Some computer games have a ‘Tx2’ button, and after you press it time moves twice as fast as before. So now I’ll press my little ‘Tx2’ button and try to boil him down into the least possible volume.

I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years!’