Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

FENRIR: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin. Fenrir is bound until Ragnarek. At Ragnarek he will kill Odin and be killed by Widar.

It wasn’t clear from the caption just how Fenrir was going to catch the sun and devour it, if he was bound until Ragnarek, and Ragnarek would start when he caught the sun and devoured it. But then, it could well be that our world had only continued to exist so far thanks to inconsistencies of that kind: it was frightening to think just how many dying gods had cursed it.

I remembered who Fenrir was. He was the most fearsome brute in the Nordic bestiary, the central character of Icelandic eschatology: the wolf who would eat the gods when the northern project was shut down. I wanted to believe that Alexander did-n’t identify too closely with this creature, that the yellow-eyed monster was simply an unattainable aesthetic ideal, something like a photo of Schwarzenegger hanging on the wall in a novice bodybuilder’s room.

Further down the pile there was a page from a book with Borges’s miniature piece ‘Ragnarek’. I knew the story, which had astounded me with its somnambulistically precise depiction of something important and terrible. The hero and his friend witness a strange procession of gods returning from centuries of exile. A wave of human adoration carries them out on to a stage in a hall. They look strange:

One was holding a branch, something out of the uncomplicated flora of dreams; another flung a clawed hand forward in a sweeping gesture: Janus’s face glanced repeatedly at Tot’s crooked beak with a certain apprehension.

A dream echo of fascism. But then something very interesting happens:

Probably roused by the applause, one of them - I don’t remember now exactly who - suddenly broke into a triumphant screeching, unbearably harsh, as if he were either whistling or clearing his throat. From that moment everything changed.

From then on the text was covered with marks and notes. Words were underlined, framed with exclamation marks and even ringed - evidently to convey the relative intensity of emotion:

It began with the suspicion (evidently exaggerated), that the Gods could not talk. Centuries of wild and nomadic life had destroyed in them all that was human: the Islamic crescent moon and the Roman cross had shown no condescension to the exiled. The low sloping foreheads, yellow teeth and thin moustaches of mulattoes or Chinese and the out-turned lips of animals spoke of the decline of the Olympic breed. Their clothing was out of keeping with their modest and honest poverty and put me in mind of the dismal chic of the gambling houses and bordellos of Bakho. A carnation bled out of a buttonhole. The outline of a knife-handle was discernible beneath a close-fitting jacket. And then we realized that !they were playing their last card!, that they were !cunning, blind and as cruel as mature, powerful beasts when they are flushed out of the bushes!, and - !IF WE GAVE WAY TO FEAR OR COMPASSION - THEY WOULD ANNIHILATE US!

And then each of us took out a heavy revolver (the revolvers appeared from somewhere in the dream) AND WE SHOT THE GODS WITH DELIGHT.

After that there were two pages from the Elder Edda - apparently from a prophecy by Velva. They had been torn out of some gift edition: the text was printed in large red script on glazed paper in a very wasteful manner:

The wind raises

Waves to the sky,

Casts them on to the land,

The sky grows dark;

The blizzard hurtles along,

Swirling furiously:

These are the portents

Of the death of the gods.

‘The death of the gods’ in the last line had been underscored with a fingernail. The message of the text on the second page was equally morose:

But there is yet to come

The most powerful of all,

I dare not speak

His name;

Few are those who know

What will come to pass

Following the battle

Between Odin and the Wolf.

All the rest was in the same vein. In one way or another most of the papers in the file related to northern myth. The one I found most depressing was a photograph of the German submarine Nagelfahr - in Scandinavian mythology that was the name of the god Loki’s ship, which was made out of the nails of the dead. A highly appropriate name for a Second World War submarine. The unshaven crew members smiling from the bridge looked perfectly likeable - they reminded me of a detachment of modern ‘greens’.

As I got closer to the end of the file, there were fewer marks on the sheets of paper: as if the person who had been leafing through them and thinking about the collection of material had rapidly lost interest or, as Borges put it in a different story ‘a certain noble impatience’ had prevented him from leafing through all the way to the end. But the guy’s pretensions had been serious, especially by the standards of our mercenary times (‘the age of swords and pole axes’ as it was described in one of the extracts in the file, ‘the time of cursed wealth and great lechery’).

The last item in the file was a lined page torn out of a school exercise book. It had been inserted into a transparent plastic envelope to protect it. The handwritten text on the page was something like a gift dedication:

To Sashka, a memento.

Transform!

WOLF-FLOW!

Colonel Lebedenko

I closed the file and put it back under Monica, then continued with my search. I wasn’t surprised when I found several CDs beside the music centre, all with various performances of the same opera:

RICHARD WAGNER

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

Götterdämmerung.

The next curious item that caught my eye was a thick, grey notebook. It was lying on the floor between the wall and the divan - as if someone had been looking through it before going to bed, fallen asleep and dropped it. On its cover was written:

‘Shitman’ Project

Top secret.

Copy No. 9

not to be removed from the building

At that moment I didn’t make any connection between this strange title and the story about the Shakespeare specialist that Pavel Ivanovich had told me. My thoughts followed a different route - I decided it was yet another proof of the power of American cultural influence. Superman, Batman, another couple of similar films, and the mind begins to stereotype reality in their image and likeness. But then, I thought, what could Russia put up against this? The Shitov Project? Who would be willing to spend nights sweating over that for low pay? That Shitov in a poor suit had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire. The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper. Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality . That’s the reason for all the disasters . . .

I didn’t even bother to open the notebook. I’d had a horror of secret documents ever since Soviet times: they did you no good and they could snow you under with problems, even if you had FSB protection.

My eye was caught by several graphic works on paper that were hanging on the walls - runes that had been roughly drawn with either a broad brush or a paw. They reminded me a bit of Chinese calligraphy - the crudest and most expressive examples. Hanging between two of these runes there was a branch of mistletoe - I learned that from the caption on the wall: to look at, it was simply a dry, pointed stick.