Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘A new restaurant,’ I said. ‘The Palazzo Ducale. Have you been there?’

He nodded.

‘And what are the customers like?’

‘Oh, the usual.’

‘So what do people talk about there?’

He thought for a second. Then he answered in a ludicrous woman’s voice:

‘What do you think, is Zhechkov frightened to live in the dacha where Stalin’s butcher Yezhov lived?’

Then he answered himself in an equally ludicrous bass:

‘What do you mean? It’s Stalin’s butcher Yezhov who’ll be shitting himself in his grave because Zhechkov’s living in his dacha . . .’

‘And who is this Zhechkov?’ I asked.

He glanced at me suspiciously. Apparently Zhechkov was someone I ought to know. I’m losing the context, I thought, it happens every twenty years or so.

‘I was just giving an example,’ he said. ‘The kind of thing they talk about there.’

I remembered Yezhov’s dacha as it was in the 1930s. I used to like the plaster lions with balls under their paws who guarded the entrance - their faces had a slightly guilty expression, as if they could sense they wouldn’t be able to protect their master. A thousand years earlier a lion looking almost exactly the same used to stand in front of the shrine of the Huáyán sect - only he was made of gold and on his side he had an inscription that I still remember by heart:

The cause of error by living beings is that they believe it is possible to cast aside the false and attain unto the truth. But when you attain unto yourself, the false becomes true, and there is no other truth to which one need attain after that.

What people there used to be around in those times! But nowadays is there anyone who can even understand the meaning of those words? All of them, every last one, have departed to the higher worlds. No one wishes to be born in this hellish labyrinth any more, not even out of compassion, and I’m wandering here on my own in the dark . . .

We stopped at a crossroads.

‘Tell me, Alexander, where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Do you know a good jeweller’s anywhere round here? I mean really good?’

Every time I see a girl in a boutique with an admirer buying her a brooch that costs as much as a small aeroplane, I’m convinced that human females are every bit as good at creating mirages as we are. Perhaps even better. It’s some going to pass off a reproductive mechanism as a delightful spring flower worthy of a precious setting - and to maintain that illusion, not just for minutes, as we do, but for years and decades, and all without the use of a tail. That takes real skill. Evidently women, like mobile phones, have some kind of inbuilt antenna.

This is what my internal voices say about that:

1. since a woman can pass off a reproductive mechanism as a wonderful spring flower, female nature cannot be reduced just to the bearing of children: it also includes at least the skill of brainwashing.

2. by its very nature a wonderful spring flower is exactly the same kind of mechanism for reproduction and brainwashing, only its meat is green and it brainwashes the bees.

3. apart from the woman, no one needs the precious setting, so it’s pointless to discuss whether she is worthy of it or not.

4. mobile phones with inbuilt antennas have convenient shapes, but poor reception, especially in reinforced concrete buildings.

5. mobile phones with an external antenna are inconvenient, and their reception in reinforced concrete buildings is even worse.

Woman is a peaceful creature, she only hypnotizes her own male and inflicts no harm on birds and animals. Since she does this in the name of the supreme biological goal, that is, personal survival, the deception here is pardonable, and it’s none of our foxy business to go sticking our noses in. But when a married man who lives every moment in a dream planted in his head by his wife, complete with elements of nightmare and gothic, suddenly declares over a glass of beer that woman is simply a device for bearing children, that is very, very funny. The man doesn’t even realize how comical he is when he says that. In this particular case I’m not hinting at Count Tolstoy, whom I admire tremendously, I’m speaking generally.

But I’m wandering from the point. I just wanted to say that woman’s hypnotic abilities are obvious, and anyone who has any doubts about that can easily lay them to rest by going into a shop that sells expensive trinkets.

I didn’t realize until the final moment that Alexander was choosing a present for me. I simply had no reason to think anything of the kind. I assumed he needed to buy a souvenir for some glamorous little bimbo, and I gave him perfectly serious advice. So I felt quite exceptionally stupid when he finally held out the bag containing the two small cases that he had just paid for. I wasn’t expecting it. And foxes have to foresee what a man will do - if not everything, then at least the things that affect us personally. Our survival depends on it.

The two identical small white boxes contained rings that cost 10,000 and 18,000 dollars - platinum and diamonds. The large stone was point eight of a carat, the small one point five four. Tiffany. Would you believe it - 28,000 dollars! How many times I’d have to strain my tail for that, I thought with a feeling that was almost class hatred. And the most important thing was that he didn’t want anything from me. Apart from my phone number. He said he was flying to the north and he’d call when he got back.

It wasn’t easy buying the rings. The sales assistant wasn’t prepared to put through such a substantial transaction herself. Neither was the cashier.

‘I can’t do it without the manager,’ she kept saying.

It was only when I got back home to Bitsevsky Park that I realized how tired I was - I didn’t even have the strength to check my e-mails. I slept until the middle of the next day. I had suspiciously Borgesian dreams about the defence of a fortress - something like the storming of a city during the Yellow Turban rebellion. I was one of the defenders and I was throwing heavy javelins down from the walls.

No need to explain the symbolism to me, I can’t stand that. Back in the 1920s I used to drive romantic Red Freudians crazy by telling them dreams that I invented: ‘And then our tails fell off and they told us they were lying in a coconut hanging above a waterfall.’ If I sometimes throw javelins in a dream, it doesn’t mean I don’t take in the symbolic significance of what’s going on. And even less does it mean that I do take it in. I stopped collecting that sort of garbage a long time ago. Life’s less cluttered that way.

After a rest, my head was working clearly and efficiently, and the first thing I thought about was the financial aspect of what was going on. My personal solvency index was now tinged a delicate green: the two rings had cost 28,000 in the shop, and that meant I could sell them for 18,000.

But it would be a shame to sell them - in the last hundred years I hadn’t been given such pretty baubles very often. In Soviet Russia they were very strict about that kind of thing. Even in late Brezhnev times it was like that: if a man with a string bag walked off the street into a jewellery shop and bought a brooch for 30,000 roubles, the entire central press wrote about it indignantly for a week, asking what the competent organs were doing about it. In the era of stagnation, 30,000 really was a huge amount of money. But then why did they put the brooch in the shop window? As bait? There’s really no other way to explain the indignation of the press - they laid down bait and, the fish ate it and just swam away.

At least, that was what the director of Moscow’s Grocery Store Number One, who bought me the brooch, whispered in my ear with a passionate laugh. He was a careful man, but passion had made him a romantic. The poor fellow was executed by firing squad, and I felt sorry for him, although I still couldn’t force myself to wear the brooch. It was a unique example of Soviet kitsch: diamond ears of wheat surrounding emerald cucumbers and a ruby beetroot. An eternal reminder of the only battle that Soviet Russia lost - the battle for the harvest . . .