Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Heads and tails,

A.

There was a seventeenth-century Chinese comedy called Two Foxes in One Town . Moscow is a very big town, which meant there could be very big problems here. But it was not misgivings of that sort that stopped me, not at all - quite honestly, I was only thinking of my sister’s happiness. If I laid it on a bit thick in my letter, then it was only out of concern for her - let her carry on warming herself in the sun a bit longer, happiness has nothing to do with money. And what I’d written about the super-werewolf was the most important thing of all, I was quite sure of that. Next time I would have to remind her always to work with the ‘bride returns the earring’ method.

An earring . . . I suddenly had a quite delightful idea that sent me dashing to the metal box where I kept my jewellery and all sorts of valuable bits and pieces. I found what I wanted immediately - the silver earrings were lying on the very top.

I opened my old Leatherman with the tiny pliers (one of the first models, they don’t make them like that any more), carefully detached the hooks from the earrings, and soon I had something quite incredible lying on the palm of my hand. It was a pair of earrings in the form of diamond rings on silver hooks with a colour that almost merged into the platinum. The diamonds in the earrings were different, one a bit larger and one a bit smaller. I didn’t think anyone had ever made earrings like that before. When people saw it, they’d steal the idea, I thought. But what could I do about that . . .

I put the earrings on and looked at myself in the mirror. It looked great. It was clear from the first glance that what I had hanging on my ears were not earrings, but finger rings. And apart from that, it was obvious that the rings were expensive - the diamonds glittered delightfully in the dusty beam of light that illuminated my humble abode. The most stylish part of it was the way an expensive item had been mounted to express emphatic contempt for its monetary value, a combination of the ideals of the financial bourgeoisie and the values of 1968 in a single unified aesthetic object which promised that its owner would put out for Che Guevara as well as Abramovich, and even vaguely hinted that she would only put out for Abramovich on a temporary basis, until Che Guevara moved in (of course, Che Guevara doesn’t really have anything to do with the whole business, nobody’s thinking of putting out for him - it’s just that the girl thinks Abramovich is more likely to go for shiny bait like that). In a word, it was just what the doctor ordered.

But then I couldn’t give a damn for the doctor. In two thousand years, I’d seen more than enough doctors like that - they make their prescription, and time after time the human heart believes in the same old deception, dashes straight at the cliffs of the world and is smashed to pieces against them. And then it dashes at them again, and again - just like the first time. When you live by the edge of that sea and hear the roar of its waves, you think what a blessing it is that each wave only knows about itself and has no knowledge of the past.

Of course, no one gives me rings and brooches like that because of the perfection of my soul, which it is beyond modern people’s ability to perceive. The only thing they value is my physical attraction - poignant, ambivalent and overwhelming. I know its power very well - I have learned to understand it over many hundreds of years. But after the meeting with Alexander for some reason I had lost my usual self-confidence. I couldn’t remember time ever moving so slowly - the two days while I waited for his call seemed like an eternity to me. The minutes crawled by from the future into the past like snails, I sat in front of the mirror, gazing at my reflection and thinking about beauty.

A man often thinks: there’s a beautiful girl, a lovely flower, walking through the town in spring, smiling in all directions, and she’s not even aware of how lovely she is. This thought naturally develops into the intention to acquire this flower who is unaware of her own beauty for considerably less than her market value.

Nothing could be more naive. The man is aware of her beauty, but the girl, the lovely flower, is not? It’s like a collective farmer from some remote village who has sold his cow and come to Moscow to buy an old Lada walking past the Porsche sales room, seeing a young salesman in the window and thinking: ‘He’s very green . . . maybe he’ll believe that an orange Boxter is cheaper than a Lada, seeing as it’s only got two doors? I must try having a word with him, while he’s in the place on his own . . .’

A man like that is very funny, of course, and he has no chance at all of getting what he wants. But it’s not all gloom and doom. There is good news and bad news for the collective farmer who has sold his cow:

1. the bad news is that he’ll never buy anything for less than its market value. Everything’s been worked out, checked and double checked. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

2. the good news is that this market value is considerably lower than he imagines it to be in his state of hormonal intoxication, multiplied by his inferiority complex and his lack of faith in success.

There’ll be no new orange Boxter for him, of course - it will be bought by an amiable elderly gent from the Ministry of Social Development. But he might well be able to afford an old Audi. Only it’s not an Audi that he needs, it’s a tractor. The tragedy of this collective farmer, and that of all other men, is that they run after our beauty without understanding its nature. So many different things have been said about it - it’s a terrible and appalling thing, which is also going to save the world, and so forth. But none of that throws even the slightest bit of light on the subject.

What a fox has in common with the most beautiful of women is that we live off the feelings we arouse. But a woman is guided by instinct, and a fox is guided by reason, and where a woman gropes her way along in the dark, a fox strides proudly forward in the bright light of day.

But then I must admit that some women cope rather well with their role. Only even if they want to, they can’t reveal their professional secrets, since they themselves do not understand them at a rational level. But we foxes are quite consciously aware of these secrets - and now I’ll tell you about one of them, the simplest and most important.

Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of beauty should first of all ask himself: where is it located? Can we say that it is somewhere inside the woman who is considered beautiful? Can we say, for instance, that there is beauty in the features of her face? Or in her figure?

Science tells us that the brain receives a flow of information from the sense organs, in this case from the eyes, and without the interpretations imposed by the visual cortex, this is simply a chaotic sequence of coloured dots, digitized into nerve impulses by the visual tract. Any fool can understand that there is no beauty in that, so it doesn’t find its way into a man through his eyes. In technical terms, beauty is the interpretation that arises in the consciousness of the patient. As they say - in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty does not belong to a woman and it is not her specific quality - it is just that at a certain time of life her face reflects beauty, as a windowpane reflects the sun that is hidden behind the roofs of the houses. And so we cannot say that a woman’s beauty fades with time - it is simply that the sun moves on and the windows of other houses begin to reflect it. But we know that the sun is not in the windowpanes that we look at. It is in us.

What is this sun? I’m sorry, but that’s another mystery, and today I was only planning to reveal one. And in any case, from the point of view of practical magic, the nature of the sun is absolutely irrelevant. What matters are the manipulations that we perform with its light, and here lies an important difference between foxes and women. But, as in the previous case, I can only explain it by using an analogy.