Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘Where did you read that?’ he asked.

‘In Cosmopolitan . Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Do you mind that I have small breasts?’

‘No, I really like that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go on and on kissing them for ever.’

It seemed to me that he was talking with an effort, as if his jaws were being cramped by a yawn. That was what usually happened just before the transformation. Despite his reassuring declaration about ‘going on kissing them for ever’, we rarely got that far. But then, his hot wolf’s tongue . . . But I won’t transgress the bounds of propriety, the reader understands perfectly well without that.

He barely had time to take my knickers off before it all happened: sexual arousal triggered the mysterious mechanism of his metamorphosis. Less than a minute later, standing there in front of me was a sinister, handsome beast, whose most astounding asset was his instrument of love. Every time I found it impossible to believe that my simulacrum pouch was really capable of accommodating that hammer of the witches.

When he turned into a wolf, Alexander lost the ability to speak. But he could understand everything he heard - although, of course, I had no guarantee that his wolfish understanding was the same as his human one. His remaining communicative capabilities were inadequate for conveying the complex motions of the soul, but he could reply in the affirmative or the negative. ‘Yes’ was signified by a short, muffled roar:

‘Gr-r-r!’

And he expressed the meaning ‘no’ with a sound like something halfway between a howl and a yawn.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

I found this ‘whoo-oo-oo’ rather funny - it was more or less the way a dog whines in the heat when its masters have locked it out on the balcony. But I didn’t tell him about this observation of mine.

His hands didn’t turn into wolf’s paws, they were more like the fantastic extremities of some movie Martian. I found it impossible to believe those claws were capable of tender touching, even though I knew it from my own experience.

And so, when he set them on my bare stomach, as always, I felt a bit uneasy.

‘What do you want, beastling?’ I asked. ‘Shall I lie on my side?’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘On my tummy?’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Kneel down?’

‘Gr-r-r!’

‘All right, only be careful, okay?’

‘Gr-r-rrrrrr-r!’

I wasn’t entirely certain that last ‘grrrr’ meant ‘yes’, and not just ‘grrr’, but even so I did as he asked. And I was immediately sorry: he took hold of my tail with his paw.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘let go, you monster!’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Really, let go,’ I repeated plaintively.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

And then what I was most afraid of happened - he pulled my tail. Not very hard, but still hard enough for me suddenly to remember the Sikh from the National hotel. And when he jerked my tail a little more sharply, I felt so ashamed for the role I’d played in that man’s fate that I sobbed out loud.

Alexander hadn’t deliberately pulled my tail. He was just holding it, quite gently in fact. But the blows of his hips pushed my body forward, and the result was as if he was trying to rip my tail out of my body. I tensed all my muscles, but I just wasn’t strong enough. With every jerk my soul was inundated by waves of unbearable shame. But the most terrible thing was that the shame didn’t simply sear my heart, it also mingled into a single whole with the pleasure I was getting from what was going on.

It was something quite unimaginable - truly beyond good and evil. It was then that I finally understood the fatal abysses trodden by De Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who I had always thought absurdly pompous. No, they weren’t absurd at all - they simply hadn’t been able to find the right words to convey the true nature of their nightmares. And I knew why - there were no such words in any human language.

‘Stop,’ I whispered through my tears.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

But in heart I didn’t know what I wanted - for him to stop or to carry on.

‘Stop,’ I repeated, gasping for breath, ‘please!’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Do you want to kill me?’

‘Gr-r-r!’

I couldn’t hold back any longer and I started crying. But they were tears of pleasure, a monstrous, shameful pleasure that was too enthralling to be abandoned voluntarily. I soon lost any idea of what was happening - perhaps I even lost consciousness too. The next ting I remember is Alexander leaning down over me, already in his human form. He looked perplexed.

‘Did I hurt you?’

I nodded.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘Promise me one thing,’ I whispered. ‘Promise that you’ll never pull my tail again. Never, do you hear?’

‘My word as an officer,’ he said and set his hand on his medal ribbons. ‘Was it really bad?’

‘I felt ashamed,’ I whispered. ‘You know, I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I don’t want to remember. I’ve done a lot of harm to people . . .’

His face suddenly turned serious.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t. Not just now.’

We foxes are keen hunters of English aristocrats and chickens. We hunt English aristocrats because English aristocrats hunt us, and it’s a sort of point of honour. But we hunt chickens for our own enjoyment. Both types of hunting have their passionate supporters who will shout themselves hoarse defending their choice. The way I see things, hunting chickens has several serious advantages:

1. hunting English aristocrats is a source of bad karma, which is acquired by killing even the most useless of men. The karma from chickens is not all that serious.

2. to hunt aristocrats you have to travel to Europe (although some believe that the best place is a transatlantic cruise ship). You can hunt chickens anywhere you like.

3. while hunting English aristocrats, foxes don’t undergo any physical changes. But when we hunt chickens something happens that bears a distant similarity to a werewolf’s transformation - we come to resemble our wild relatives for a while.

I haven’t hunted English aristocrats for many decades, and I don’t regret it in the least. But to this day I’m still enthusiastic about chicken-hunting.

It’s hard to explain to an outsider what chicken-hunting really is. When you cast off your clothes and your shoes and pound furiously against the ground with three paws, clutching the chicken against your breast with the fourth, its little heart beats in unison with yours, and the speed-blurred course of your zigzag run flows freely through your empty mind. At that moment you see clearly that you, and the chicken, and even the pursuers clamouring behind you are really parts of a single incomprehensible whole that dons masks and plays hide-and-seek with itself . . . You want to believe that even the chicken realizes the same thing. And if it doesn’t, then in some life to come it very definitely will!

These are the basic principles of chicken-hunting:

1. you should approach the chicken coop in the guise of a extravagantly clad socialite - wearing an evening dress and high stiletto heels. Your clothes should restrict your movements as much as possible and provoke associations with glamorous fashion magazines.

2. you must attract the attention of the owners of the chicken coop - they have to see their elegant visitor steal a chicken.

3. you must not run away from your furious pursuers too fast, but not too slowly either - the most important aspect of the hunt is maintaining their confidence that they can overtake the thief.

4. when the pursuers have no strength left to continue the pursuit (and also in those cases when they suffer shock from seeing the transformation take place), you should erase their memory of what has happened with a special twitch of your tail and let the chicken go free.