Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

I don’t like drunks, so I was acting a bit sullen. No doubt he put that down to the fact that the session was being conducted on credit, and he wasn’t particularly demanding. We got down to work in silence, like a pair of Estonian yachtsmen who have sailed together for ages: he handed me the tattered knout that he kept in the tennis bag with Boris Becker’s signature on it, got undressed, lay down on the sofa and opened a fresh copy of Expert magazine.

I guessed that what was going on had nothing to do with his disdainful attitude to my art, or even his love for the printed word. Clearly his contrition before Young Russia coexisted in his heart with other vibes about which I knew nothing, and he hadn’t revealed all of his secrets to me. But I felt no urge to penetrate his inner world beyond the depth that had been paid for, and so I didn’t ask any questions. Everything was going as usual - I was lashing his backside with an imaginary knout, thinking my own thoughts, and he was muttering quietly. Sometimes he would start to groan, sometimes to laugh. It was boring, and I felt like some odalisque in an oriental harem, waving away the flies from her master’s fat carcass with regular sweeps of a fan. Then suddenly he said:

‘Would you believe it, what a name for a lawyer - Anton Drill. How did he manage to survive with that . . . I bet the kids gave him hell in school . . . People with names like that grow up psychological deviants, it’s a fact. They all need help from a psychotherapist. Any expert can tell you that.’

Of course, I shouldn’t have got involved in the conversation - there was absolutely no point in taking the situation beyond the limitations of our professional relationship. The reason I didn’t hold back is that names are a sore point with me.

‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what name anybody has. I have a girlfriend, for instance, and she has a name that sounds very, very crude. So crude you’d laugh out loud if I told you it. It’s almost a swearword, you could say, that kind of name. But she’s a beautiful girl, clever and kind. A name’s not a prison sentence.’

‘Perhaps, my dear, you don’t know your friend very well. If her name has an obscene meaning, then it will come out in her life. Just you wait, it will manifest itself yet. Everything depends on the name. There’s a scientific hypothesis that every person’s name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. Do you understand what a suggestive command is? Do you at least have some idea about hypnotic suggestion?’

‘In general terms,’ I replied, and mentally lashed him a bit harder.

‘Ooh . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody’s psyche is programmed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said irritably. ‘No two people in the world with identical names are the same.’

‘Just as no two ants are the same. But nonetheless ants are divided into functional classes . . . No, a name is a serious thing. Some names are like time bombs.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Here’s a real-life story for you. There was a Shakespeare scholar called Shitman who worked in the Institute of World Culture. He was getting along just fine, until one day he decided to learn English so that he could read his author and benefactor in the original . . . And he wanted to go to England - “to see London and die” as he put it. He started studying. And after a few lessons he learned what “shit” means in English. Can you imagine it? If he’d been a chemistry teacher, for instance, it wouldn’t have been so awful. But for specialists in the humanities words mean a lot, Derrida pointed that out. It’s hard to serve the cause of the beautiful wearing a decoration like that in your buttonhole. He began to feel as if the people in the British Council were giving him queer looks . . . In fact, just then the British Council couldn’t care less about the local Shakespeare specialists, because they were being screwed by the tax police, but Shitman decided it was their personal attitude to him. As you can understand, my dear, when someone looks for confirmation of his paranoid ideas, he always finds it. Anyway, omitting all the sad details, he went insane in a month.’

By this point I was positively seething with rage. I felt he was trying to insult me, although there were no rational grounds for such an assumption - he couldn’t possibly know my true name. But I remembered that the most important thing was to stay in control. Which I managed to do perfectly well.

‘Really?’ I asked politely.

‘Yes. In the madhouse he wouldn’t talk to anyone, just yelled so the entire hospital could hear him. Sometimes he yelled “same shit, different day”, sometimes “same shite, different night”. He obviously hadn’t wasted his time studying English. In the end they took Shitman away in a car with military number plates - the special services needed him, let’s put it that way. And nobody knows what’s become of him now, or if they do know, they’re not telling. So much for a midsummer night’s dream, my little darling. And they say nothing depends on a name. But it does, and how. If your friend has an obscenity in her name, sooner or later her path leads to only one place. It’s the madhouse for her. And by the way, Shitman was lucky, the special forces found a use for him. You must have heard about our madhouses. You can get a blowjob for a cigarette in there . . .’

Spiritual training using a human irritant is like a game of chance in which everything is staked on the kitty. The winnings are very big. But if you can’t take the heat and you lose control, you lose absolutely everything else too. I could have put up with doing the session on credit, even with his theory of obscene names, if only he hadn’t thrown in that blowjob for a cigarette. I wasn’t prepared for that.

‘Sweetheart!’ Pavel Ivanovich screamed. ‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong? What are you doing, you snake? Militia! Anybody! Help!’

When he started calling for the militia, I came to my senses. But it was too late - Pavel Ivanovich had received three lashes that even Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been ashamed of. And even though those three lashes were only hypnotic, the blood that had started running down his back was real. Of course, I regretted what I’d done, but that always happens a second later than it ought to. And anyway, in my heart I played another cunning trick - knowing I would be overwhelmed by repentance at any moment, and adopting the inner stance of a repentant sinner, I said in a final vengeful, voluptuous whisper:

‘That’s for you from Young Russia, you stupid old fart . . .’

As I review my life now, I find many dark spots in it. But the sense of shame I feel for this is exceptionally keen.

Many shrines in Asia surprise the traveller by the contrast between the bare poverty of their empty rooms and the multilevel splendour of their roofs - with their upturned corners, precious carved dragons and scarlet tiles. The symbolic meaning here is clear: treasure should not be stored up on earth, but in heaven. The walls symbolize this world, the roof symbolizes the next. Look at the building itself and it’s a hovel. But look at the roof and it’s a palace.

I found the contrast between Pavel Ivanovich and his ‘roof’ - the modern Russian term for protection - equally fascinating, even though there was absolutely no spiritual symbolism involved. Pavel Ivanovich was merely a petty philological demon. But the roof over his head . . . But then, all in good time.