Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

I’d noticed the penthouse on my first visit. Only I hadn’t guessed that it was a penthouse - from below it looked like a dark knob on the end of the huge concrete pencil. It could have been taken for the housing of the lift motors, some kind of technical premises or a boiler room. But those turquoise walls turned out to be transparent from the inside.

Before I’d even taken it all in, they started turning dark before my very eyes, until they looked like bottle glass. I’d just been squinting at the bright sunlight, and all of a sudden in just a few seconds an entire house had condensed around me. It hadn’t been visible before in the sunshine bouncing off all the mirror surfaces.

I learned later that it was an expensive technical gismo - the transparency of the walls was adjusted using special liquid-crystal membranes that were controlled by a computer system. At the time, though, what happened seemed like a miracle. Only since long, long ago the response that miracles provoke in me has been ironic, not to say contemptuous.

‘Hi, Shurik,’ I said. ‘What’s with the sideshow effects? No money for normal blinds?’

He was taken aback. But it only took him a second to recover and he laughed.

‘Shurik,’ he said. ‘I like that. Well yes. Since you’re Ada now, I suppose I’m Shurik.’

His light-grey double-breasted uniform jacket with a lieutenant general’s shoulder straps and dark-blue trousers with wide red stripes looked a little theatrical. He came up to me, removed the gauze mask from his face, squeezed his eyes shut and drew in the air through his nose. I felt like asking why he was always doing that, but I thought better of it. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on my earrings.

‘What an amusing idea,’ he said.

‘Great, isn’t it? And especially beautiful because the stones are different. Do you like it?’

‘It’s all right. Did Mikhalich give you the flower?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘And he told me I should think about the meaning of the message. But I haven’t come up with anything. Maybe you can tell me yourself?’

He scratched his head. He seemed disconcerted by my question.

‘Do you know the folktale about the little scarlet flower?’

‘Which one exactly?’ I asked.

‘I think there is only one.’

He nodded towards a desk with a computer and a silver figurine standing on it. There was a book lying beside the figurine, with bookmarks in several pages. The half-effaced red letters of the title on its cover read: Russian Fairy Tales .

‘The story was written down by Sergei Aksakov,’ he said. ‘His housekeeper Pelagia told him it.’

‘And what’s it about?’

‘About a beautiful girl and a beast.’

‘And what’s the little flower got to do with it?’

‘It was the reason everything began. Do you really not know this fairy tale?’

‘No.’

‘It’s long, but the gist is this: a beautiful girl asked her father to bring her a scarlet flower. The father found one in a magical garden a long way away and picked it. But the garden was guarded by a terrible monster. He caught the beautiful girl’s father, and she had to become the monster’s prisoner so that he would release her father. The monster was ugly, but kind. She fell in love with him, first for his kindness, and then simply in love. And when they kissed, the spell was broken and the monster turned into a prince.’

‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s about?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes? What is it about?’

‘About love conquering all.’

I laughed. He really was quite amusing. He’d probably bumped off a few heavy hoods and ordered a hit on some banker, so now, with typical human presumption, he thought he was a monster. And he also thought that love would save him.

He took me by the arm and led me across to a futuristic divan standing between two groves of dwarf bonsais with miniature arbours, bridges and even waterfalls.

‘Why are you laughing?’ he asked.

‘I can explain,’ I said, sitting down on the divan and pulling my legs up under me.

‘Okay, explain.’

He sat at the other end of the divan and crossed his legs. I noticed the edge of a holster peeping out from under his uniform jacket.

‘It’s one of those folktales that express the horror and pain of a woman’s first sexual experience,’ I said. ‘There are lots of stories like that, and the one you just told me is a classic example. It’s a metaphor of how a woman discovers the essentially bestial nature of man and becomes aware of her own power over that beast. And the little scarlet flower that her father picks is such a literal symbol of defloration, amplified by the theme of incest, that I find it hard to believe the story was told by a housekeeper. It was probably composed by some twentieth-century Viennese postgraduate to illustrate his thesis. He invented the story, and the housekeeper Pelagia, and the writer Aksakov.’

While I was talking, his expression turned noticeably gloomier.

‘Where did you pick up all that stuff?’

‘It’s all truisms. Everybody knows it.’

‘And you believe it?’

‘What?’

‘That this fairy tale is not about how love conquers everything on earth, but how defecation realizes its power over incest?’

‘Defloration,’ I corrected him.

‘It doesn’t matter. Is that what you really think?’

I thought about it.

‘I . . . I don’t think anything. That’s simply the contemporary discourse of folktales.’

‘So you’re saying that because of this discourse, when someone gives you a scarlet flower you think it’s a symbol of defecation and incest?’

‘No, don’t be like that,’ I replied, a little embarrassed. ‘When someone gives me a scarlet flower I . . . I’m simply pleased.’

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘And as for contemporary discourse, it’s high time to take an aspen stake and stuff it back up the cocaine-and-amphetamine polluted backside that produced it.’

I hadn’t expected such a sweeping generalization.

‘Why?’

‘So it won’t defile our little scarlet flower.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I understand about the cocaine. You mean Dr Freud. He did have that little peccadillo. But what have amphetamines got to do with it?’

‘I can explain,’ he said, and tucked his legs up underneath himself in a parody of my pose.

‘Okay, explain.’

‘All those French parrots who invented discourse were high on amphetamines all the time. In the evening they take barbiturates to get to sleep, and they start off the morning with amphetamines so they can generate as much discourse as possible before they start taking barbiturates to get back to sleep again. That’s all there is to discourse. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Where did you get information like that?’

‘There was a course at the FSB Academy about modern psychedelic culture. Counter-brainwashing. Oh yes, I forgot to say - they’re all queers too. In case you were going to ask what the backside had to do with anything.’

The conversation was headed in the wrong direction, and it was time to change the subject. I prefer to do that abruptly.

‘Alexander,’ I said, ‘explain to me, so I can understand, just what I’m doing here. Do you want to screw me or re-educate me?’

He shuddered, as if I’d said something terrible, leapt up off the divan and began striding backwards and forwards past the window - or rather, not the window, but a rectangle in the wall that was still transparent.

‘Are you trying to shock me?’ he asked. ‘You’re wasting your time. I know there’s a pure, vulnerable soul hiding behind your affected cynicism.’

‘Affected cynicism? You mean me?’