Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The design on the carpet was curious, it showed a battle between lions and wolves - it looked like a copy of a Roman mosaic. The books on the only bookshelf were mostly massive illustrated editions ( The Splendour of Rome , The New Revised History of the Russian Soul , The Origin of Species and Homosexuality and other, simpler titles about cars and guns). But then, I knew that the books on shelves like that had nothing to do with the taste of their owners, because they were chosen by the interior designers.

Having concluded my inspection, I went across to the glass door on to the roof. The view from there was beautiful. Down below were the dark pits of pre-Revolutionary courtyards improved by restoration work. Towering up above them were a few new buildings of the phallic architecture - an attempt had been made to insert them smoothly and gently into the historical landscape, and the result was that they looked as if they were smeared with some kind of personal lubricant. After them came the Kremlin, proudly thrusting up to the clouds its ancient dicks with the gold balls sewn into their tops.

This damned job, I thought, it’s terrible how badly it’s perverted my perception of the world. But then, has it really perverted it all that much? It’s all the same to us foxes - we pass through life and barely touch it, like a light shower of rain in Asia. But to be a human being here is hard. Take one step away from the secret national gestalt, and this country will screw you over. A theorem that has been proved by every life followed through to the end, no matter how many glamorous coverlets you spread over the daily festival of life. I should know, I’ve seen plenty of it. Why? I have my own suspicions, but I won’t go into the subject. People probably aren’t simply born here by chance, it’s no accident . . . And no one is able to help anyone else. Could that be the reason why Moscow sunsets always make me feel so sad?

‘A great view from up here, isn’t it?’

I swung round. He was standing by the door of the lift with a tightly packed plastic bag in his hand. The design on the bag was a green snake wound around a medical chalice.

‘There wasn’t any iodine,’ he said anxiously, ‘they gave me fuxidine. Said it was the same, only orange. I think that’s even better for us - it won’t stand out so much beside the tail . . .’

I felt like laughing and turned away towards the window. He walked across and stood beside me. We looked at the city for a while without speaking.

‘It’s beautiful here in summer,’ he said. ‘Put Zemfira on the player, watch and listen: ‘Goodbye, beloved city . . . I almost found a place among your annals . . . What do you think she meant - something like she’s been in deep shit for far too long?’

‘Don’t try to soft-soap me.’

‘You seem to be feeling better.’

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘But . . .’

He nodded towards the plastic bag.

‘No need, thanks. When they bring you in a wounded comrade, you’ll be able to treat him. I’m off.’

‘Mikhalich will drive you.’

‘I don’t want your Mikhalich, I’ll manage.’

I was already at the lift.

‘When can I see you?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t die, call in three days.’

After copulation, all animals are sad - so the ancient Romans used to say. Apart from foxes, I would have added. And apart from women. I knew that for certain now.

I don’t mean to say that women are animals. Quite the contrary - men are much closer to the animals in every respect: the smells they give off and the sounds they make, their type of physicality and the methods they use to fight for personal happiness (not to mention what they actually think of as happiness). But the ancient Roman who described his own mood after the act of love in metaphorical terms was evidently such an entirely organic sex-chauvinist that he simply failed to take woman into account, and that means I have to restore justice.

Generally speaking, there could be at least four explanations for this saying:

1. the Romans didn’t think woman was even an animal.

2. the Romans thought woman was an animal, but they copulated with her in a way that really did make her sad (for instance, Suetonius tells us that the law forbade the killing of virgins by strangulation, and the executioner used to ravish them before the execution - how could you help feeling sad?).

3. the Romans didn’t think woman was an animal, they assumed that only man was. For this noble view of things, the Romans could be forgiven a great deal - apart, of course, from those foul-ups of theirs with virgins and strangulation.

4. the Romans had no penchant for either woman or metaphor, but they did for livestock cattle and poultry, who did not reciprocate and were unable to conceal their feelings.

There could be an element of truth in each of these explanations - no doubt all sorts of things happened in the course of several centuries of empire. But I was a happy animal.

For the last fifteen hundred years I’d had an old maid complex - not, of course, in relation to human beings, to whose opinion I was profoundly indifferent, but within our small community of foxes. It had sometimes seemed to me that I was the butt of secret mockery. And there were good grounds for these thoughts of mine - all my sisters had lost their virginity in ancient times, in the most varied of circumstances. The most interesting story was what had happened to sister E - she had been set on a stake by a nomad leader, and she had honestly acted out her agony for three days. She had to wait until the nomads drank themselves into a stupor before making good her escape into the steppe. I suspected that this was the origin of the insatiable hatred for the aristocracy she had manifested for so many centuries in her most whimsical escapades . . .

But even so I was just a little bit sad. As the grammar-school girl Masha from Nikolaev, one of my colleagues on the game in the year 1919, said, there’s a good angel who abandons us when we lose our virginity. But the sadness I felt was radiant, and on the whole I was in an excellent mood.

There was one suspicion clouding it, though. I had the feeling that I’d been treated the same way I had been treating others all my life. Perhaps the whole thing was a suggestion that had been planted in my mind? It was pure paranoia - we foxes can’t be hypnotized. But there was a certain vague unease gnawing at my heart.

I couldn’t understand the transformation that Alexander had gone through. Foxes also undergo a supraphysical tranformation, which I will tell you about later. But it never goes so far - what Alexander had done was mind-blowing. There was an ancient mystery still alive in him, something that foxes had already forgotten, and I knew that I would keep coming back to it in my thoughts for a long time.

And I was also afraid that the loss of virginity might affect my ability to implant suggestions. I had no grounds for any such concerns, but irrational fear is always the hardest to shake off. I knew I wouldn’t calm down until I’d tested my powers. And so when the phone rang with an offer, I decided right away to go.

From his manner of speaking the client sounded to me like a bashful student from the provinces who had saved up enough money for a ritual of farewell with his childhood. But something in his voice made me check the number that lit up against the database I keep in my computer. It turned out to be the nearest militia station. Obviously the fuzz were calling me out for a subbotnik - a working Saturday in honour of the spring - the kind of event I simply couldn’t stand ever since Soviet times. But today I decided to enter the beast’s lair voluntarily.