Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

But would you believe it, I’d used the same example of a blowjob in a long-distance truck that had made me almost kill poor Pavel Ivanovich. And I couldn’t have come up with anything more stupid than my comment about prostitutes - after all, Alexander knew what I did for a living. I could only hope that it would pass for an expression of humility. Judging from his reply, it had.

We foxes have one serious shortcoming. If someone says something memorable to us, we almost always repeat it in conversation with other people, regardless of whether what was said was stupid or clever. Unfortunately, our mind is the same kind of simulator as the sack of skin under our tail that we use as a prick-catcher. It’s not a genuine ‘organ of thought’ - we have no need for that. Let human beings ‘think’ in the course of their heroic slalom from the vagina to the grave. A fox’s mind is simply a tennis racket you can use to keep bouncing the conversation from one subject to another for as long as you like. We give people back the ideas and opinions that we have borrowed from them - reflecting them from another angle, giving them a different spin, sending them into a vertical climb.

Let me remark modestly that my simulated thought almost always turns out better than the original. To continue the tennis analogy, my return improves on every hard shot. Of course, inside people’s heads every shot is a hard one. But what I can’t understand is - who serves all these shots? One of the people? Or should the server be sought in some completely different place, which isn’t even a place at all?

I’ll have to wait until I have a conversation on this subject with some intelligent person. Then we’ll see which way I drive the ball. That’s the way I’ve been discovering the truth for more than a thousand years now.

While I was finishing this thought, he had almost managed to remove my dress. I didn’t resist, I just raised the very ends of my eyebrows with a martyred air, like a little ballerina being raped yet again by a big red-necked SS man on her way to the philharmonia. What’s to be done, comrades - this is occupation . . .

Today, to be sure, the little ballerina had prepared for the encounter. I was wearing underwear - lacy white panties, in which I had cut a hole for my tail with scissors. And three identical lacy bras, size zero. The two lower ones had nothing to support, but they pressed into my body slightly and created a certain small content for themselves. Of course, I wasn’t actually trying to make any special concessions to lupine demands. It was an ironic postmodern comment on what was happening, a variation on the theme of the Beast that he had talked about so much during our last meeting.

I didn’t know if he would like my joke and I was a bit nervous. He liked it. In fact he liked it so much that he started to transform.

I wasn’t so scared this time and I studied the transformation more closely. First of all the grey, shaggy tail sprang out. It looked rather sexy - as if a spring that he couldn’t hold back inside his spine any more had suddenly straightened out. Then his body arched over and his tail and head jerked towards each other like the ends of a bow drawn together by an invisible string. And then he sprouted fur all over him.

The word ‘sprouted’ isn’t entirely appropriate here. It was more as if his tunic and trousers crumbled into fur - as if the shoulder straps and stripes were drawn in watercolour on a solid mass of wet hair that suddenly dried out and layered off into separate hairs.

At the same time, in some very natural manner, he inflated and grew. There are no wolves that large in nature, he looked more like a bear that has managed to slim a bit. But his body was real, physical and substantial - I felt its weight when he leaned his paw on my hand: it sank a long way into the divan.

‘You’ll crush me, you animal,’ I squealed, and he took his paw away.

He was obviously excited by the sensation of his own strength and my weakness. Leaning his huge, monstrous jaws down over me (his breath was hot, but fresh, like a baby’s), he bit through all three of my bras, pulling them off with his terrible hairy fingers.

My heart stopped every time his teeth clicked together so close to me. They were razor-sharp — I couldn’t think why he bothered to keep that Monica Lewinsky cigar-clipper on his desk. But then, I suppose he probably smoked cigars in his human form.

After doing the same thing with my panties, he pulled away from me and began growling, as if he was about to tear me to shreds. Then he went down on his knees in front of me and lowered his immense paws on to my fragile collarbones, like some infernal organist. This is the end, I thought.

But he avoided causing me pain. In fact, to my mind, he could have behaved a little more aggressively - I was prepared for it. But this wasn’t too bad either. I mean I’d geared myself up in advance for pain and suffering and was prepared to put up with more. However, the ordeal proved not to be as painful as I’d been expecting.

But I did things right anyway and groaned from time to time:

‘Oh, that hurts! Don’t pound so damn hard, you ugly monster. Gently, smoothly . . . That’s right.’

The letter from E Hu-Li was a long one.

Hello, Ginger,

So nice to see that you haven’t changed at all and are still trying to guide my lost soul out on to the true path.

You write that the clouds are gathering over your head. Are you serious about that? As far as I recall, the clouds have been gathering over your head for seven hundred years already; experience shows that in most cases you simply need to start thinking about something else. Maybe everything’s not so terrible this time either?

Do you seriously want to come to England? Do you think you’ll be better off here?

Understand this - the West is just one big shopping mall. From the outside it looks magical, fantastic. But you had to live in the Eastern Bloc to take its shop windows for the real thing. Perhaps that was the only meaning of your life - do you remember that Soviet song, ‘We were born to make the fairy tale reality’? That’s what you always did quite well - ‘in your head, in your head’, as the song goes. In actual fact, there are three roles you can play here - the buyer, the seller, or the product on the shelf. To be a seller is vulgar, to be a buyer is boring (and you still have to earn your living as a seller), and to be the product is repulsive. Any attempt to be anything else actually means ‘not to be’, as the market forces are quick to teach any and every Hamlet. All the rest is simply show.

Do you know what the secret horror of life here is? When you buy yourself a blouse or a car, or anything else, you have in your mind an image, implanted by advertising, of some wonderful place you will go wearing that blouse or driving that car. But there is no such wonderful place anywhere, apart from in the advertising clip, and this black hole in reality is lamented by every serious philosopher in the West. The joy of shopping cannot conceal the unbearable awareness that our entire world is one huge ski shop standing in the middle of the Sahara desert. You don’t just have to buy the skis, you have to buy the imitation snow as well. Do you understand the metaphor?

Apart from that, there is a specific difficulty for us foxes. With every year that passes it becomes harder and harder to maintain your identity and feel that you are a prostitute, so fast is everything else being prostituted all around you. If you hear an old friend’s voice speaking in confidential tones, you can be sure it is advising you to buy two bottles of anti-dandruff shampoo so that you can get the third one free. I remember a certain word that you always used to try to introduce into the conversation whether it was relevant or not - ‘uroborus’. I think it means a snake biting its own tail. When that snake’s head and tail only exist as special effects in an advertising clip, it’s no great comfort to know that the body is alive and fat. That is, maybe it is a comfort, but there’s no one to experience it.