Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

After I finished admiring the rings, I decided to check my e-mails. There was only one letter in my inbox, but it was a very welcome one - from my sister U Hu-Li, whom I hadn’t seen for an eternity.

Hi there, Red,

How are you getting on? Are you still into moral self-improvement? Searching for the exit from the labyrinths of the illusory world? I’d really like at least one of our big, ne’er-do-well family to find it.

But I’ve completely lost my way in those labyrinths. I’m still here in Thailand, although I’ve finally left Patthaya. In the last thirty years the sea has become really dirty. And apart from that, the competition from local women is so great that earning a living from the fox’s trade is getting harder all the time. Everything here has been turned inside out - in most countries in the world people are delighted when they have a son, but here they’re delighted when they have a daughter, and they say, quite literally: ‘How good it is that we have a daughter, we won’t go hungry in our old age!’ If he heard that, Confucius would hang himself with his own sleeve.

The island of Phuket, where I live now, is still clean, but in a couple of years it will be the same as Patthaya. There are too many tourists. I’ve found a place to live on Patong beach and I work in Christine’s Massage Parlour. We - the masseuses - sit on benches in a special room where the men can take a look at us, with our cheeks brightly rouged, looking like evil spirits. The pink, sunburned farangs (that’s what we call the tourists from the West) come in off the street and choose a masseuse. After that, it’s a separate room, and you know the rest. I’m regarded as a unique specialist in Thai massage, so my rates are higher than the other girls’, but even so I still have to earn a bit on the side in the bars on Bangla Road, just five minutes away from my massage parlour. I get so tired during the day, and then I have to get dolled up in bright-coloured rags and go out on the stage. It’s not even a stage really, just a counter that we walk around slowly from one pole to the other, girls with numbers on our breasts. And the farangs sit at the bar below us, drinking cold beer and take their time to choose. If I can put away fifty dollars a day working in two places, I’m doing well.

The very foundations of life have been perverted here. Thai girls are modest and as industrious as bees. Only in natural conditions bees fly from flower to flower, working hard collecting nectar. But if you tip a bucketful of sugar syrup out beside the hive, they go straight for the sugar, and none of them will fly to the flowers. That’s exactly the way the West is destroying our tropical garden with its bodily secretions, drenching it with rivers of sweet dollar syrup from the hotels beside the sea. Your Russia is as great a sexual exploiter as anyone else here, and the fact that now she is no more than a raw-material appendage of the developed countries doesn’t relieve her of her moral guilt. Although in a certain sense you could call Thailand a raw-material appendage too . . . Don’t think that I’m waxing dogmatic, it’s just that it was hot today, and I’m very tired.

By the way, about Russia. Just recently I was talking to our sister E, who came to visit us in Phuket with her new husband, Lord Cricket (the fool is perfectly happy). She told me something quite incredible. Do you remember the prophecy of the super-werewolf? She says that the place mentioned in the prophecy is Moscow. Her reasoning is certainly ingenious. The prophecy says that the super-werewolf will appear in a city where they will destroy a Temple and then restore it in its previous form. For many centuries, everybody thought that meant Jerusalem, and the coming of the super-werewolf was a prophecy that concerned the very end of time, something like the Apocalypse. But E Hu-Li is sure that we’ve simply been hypnotized by Judaeo-Christian symbolism - if there’s a Temple, then it has to be the one in Jerusalem . . .

In fact, however, there are no references to Jerusalem in the prophecy. But not so long ago in Moscow they restored the Temple of Christ the Saver (if our sister E hasn’t got the name confused), which was destroyed during the cultural revolution. And what’s more, they restored it in the form in which it was originally built - she’s relying on information she got from you there. I think you can expect her to visit you soon with her husband, who is totally obsessed with these mystical riddles.

This Lord Cricket is not only a mystic. He is well known in London as a patron and collector of art, and he deals with many art galleries. Apart from that, he was one of the leaders of an organization you have certainly heard of - the Countryside Alliance, which tried to prevent fox-hunting from being banned. I know how hard it is to let a character like that stay alive. But please remember that our little sister E hasn’t yet decided who’s going to be next. So gather your willpower up into a tight fist, just as I did. Take a detached view of what’s going on - his lordship is obsessed with the search for were-creatures absolutely everywhere, except in his own bedroom. That’s always the way with people. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. How did he come to develop such an interest in the supernatural? But then, the members of the exploiting classes often resort to occultism in the attempt to find a justification for their own parasitic existence.

I want to ask your advice. Should I move to Russia? I like the Russian tourists - they’re good-natured, they tip well and fall asleep quickly because they drink a lot. I saw a beautiful tattoo on the chest of one of them - Lenin and Marx with a hammer and sickle - and he was still very young. He took a real liking to me. He filmed me with his video-camera and then advised me to come to Russia. ‘With beauty like yours, you could make a career,’ he said. ‘And not in some massage parlour, either. Hang about with our elite for a year or two and you’ll make enough money to last a lifetime.’ He said everything is different now in Russia. There are sweeping reforms and the people have lots of money. Is that true? What is this elite that I ought to hang about with? Apart from that, he said your roubles have almost the same rate against the dollar as our bahts, so I wouldn’t suffer any great culture shock. Write and tell me what it’s like in Moscow and if there’s a place there for U Hu-Li.

Heads and tails,

U

My little sister U . . . I smiled as I remembered her - serious, solemn and very sincere. She was probably the best of us, and so she always ended up bearing the heaviest burden. She went through the entire war of liberation with Chairman Mao, she had medals from the Chinese National Liberation Army, and when capitalism was restored in China she burned her party card on Tiananmen Square and went away to Thailand. And now she wanted to come to Russia - she thought it was still the same old motherland of the October Revolution . . . The poor girl, I had to persuade her not to come. What if she really did, and ended up miserable and depressed among our northern snows? Or got involved with some kind of national bolsheviks? And when the national bolsheviks signed a contract with ‘Diesel’, she’d stay honest right to the end and then serve obscenely long sentences - it had happened to her so often already . . .

I spent a few seconds searching for an image that could reach her. Eventually I thought I’d found one. I put my hands on the keyboard.

Hello, Little Red,

You can’t possibly imagine how pleased I was to hear from you up here in our snowbound back of beyond. You say you’re fed up with Thailand? Try thinking about this: in the countries of the golden billion, people put money away for a whole year in order to come to your coconut paradise for just a couple of weeks. I understand that the life in the five-star hotels is very different from yours. But, after all, the sea and the sky are the same for all, and that’s the real reason why they come to you from their neon catacombs.