Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

My bicycle reconnaissance trip also produced another result. On my way home I rode along a track I didn’t know and discovered a wonderful place where I’d never been before. It was a wide waste lot, actually more like a field, sloping down on one side to a small river and surrounded by the forest. The field was criss-crossed by narrow tracks, and on the slope leading down to the river there was a bike ramp for jumping - a steep embankment of earth worn smooth by numerous tyres. I didn’t dare jump, all I did was ride up it slowly, imagining how it would feel to pick up speed and go soaring into the air. But I wasn’t sure that I would be able to land.

Not far from the ramp I discovered a strange sculptural composition. A number of grey logs of various lengths had been set into the ground. Their tops had been chiselled into images of the faces of warriors. The warrior-logs stood tight against each other, and coarse, solid benches had been laid out around them. Standing at the outer perimeter, orientated towards the four points of the compass, were four simple gateways made of one log set across the tops of two others, as grey, monolithic and cracked as all the other elements. The whole thing was reminiscent of a wooden Stonehenge that had already suffered damage in its battle with eternity: the logs had been mutilated by camp-fires lit on them by the local kids. But despite the black scorch marks and a host of empty beer bottles, the site had beauty and even some vague kind of grandeur.

I sat down on one of the logs, fixed my gaze on the red disc of the sun (in Moscow you only get sunsets like that in May) and withdrew into thoughts of the past. I remembered a man I had met more than a thousand years earlier - he was called the Yellow Master, after the name of the Yellow Mountain on which his monastery stood. I only spent one night in conversation with him, but it was a conversation that I shall never forget - I only had to close my eyes and I could see the Yellow Master’s face as clearly as if he were there beside me. And yet I had encountered so many people from day to day over so many years - and they hadn’t left the slightest trace in my memory . . . My sister E knew the Yellow Master too, I thought. I wonder if she remembers him? I’ll have to ask her.

Just at that moment my mobile phone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello, Red.’

I couldn’t believe my ears.

‘Sister E? How wonderful! I was just thinking about you . . .’

‘So that’s why my tail’s itching,’ she laughed. ‘I’m already in Moscow.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In the National hotel. What are you doing tomorrow at one?’

I was afraid I’d have problems getting into the National, but none of the security men took any notice of me. Maybe that was because I was met by a young female administrator who looked like a Scharführer holding a board with the words ‘Valued guest of Lady Cricket-Taylor’. She showed me to one of the de luxe suites. All that was missing was a guard of honour with an orchestra.

E Hu-Li received me sitting on a stripy divan in the suite’s drawing room. I was bothered by the suspicion that I had once met a client in this apartment, either a businessman from South Korea or an Arab arms-dealer. But it might just have been that stripy divan, they have those in lots of the rooms there. When she saw me, my sister stood up to greet me and we embraced tenderly. A transparent plastic bag appeared in her hands.

‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘Not expensive, but elegant.’

The bag contained a T-shirt with one word on it in Russian and English:

‘They sell them in London,’ she said. ‘In all the different languages. But in Russian the effect is especially nice.’

And she laughed quietly. I couldn’t help myself and I laughed too - ‘cockney’ in Russian spells and sounds like ‘whack’ in the imperative mood; I never noticed that before.

E Hu-Li looked exactly the same as she had in 1929, when she came to Russia on business for the Comintern, which was fashionable at the time. Only now her hair seemed to be cut just a little shorter. As always, she was dressed absolutely impeccably.

E Hu-Li’s style hadn’t changed for the last thousand years - it was a kind of extreme radicalism, disguised as utilitarian minimalism. I envied her bold taste - she was always half a step ahead of the fashion. Fashion is cyclical, and over the long centuries my sister E had developed the knack of riding the crests of these cycles with all the skill of a professional surfer - in some miraculous way she was always at the precise point that all the fashion designers were desperately trying to identify.

And right now she was wearing a mind-blowing waistcoat that looked like a huge bandolier with lots of different-coloured appliqué pockets that were embroidered with tiny green Arabic script and the big words ‘Ka-Boom!’ in orange. It was a variation on the theme of the Muslim radical’s explosive belt - the way it would have been made for him by a libertine Japanese designer. At the same time it was a very convenient item - the owner of a waistcoat like that had absolutely no need for a handbag.

‘Isn’t that a little too bold for London?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t anyone wax indignant?’

‘Of course not! The English expend all their spiritual energy on hypocrisy. There’s none left over for intolerance.’

‘Is everything really as dismal as that?’

She waved her hand dismissively.

‘If I had my way, I’d introduce a new term to emphasize the scale of the problem: “Hippopocrisy”.’

I can’t stand it when someone speaks badly about entire nations. In my opinion, such a person is either a loser or has a guilty conscience. There was no way sister E was any kind of loser. But as for her conscience . . .

‘But why can’t you be the first to stop being hypocritical?’ I asked.

‘Then that would be cynicism. And who can say which is worst. All in all, the closet’s dark and damp.’

‘What closet?’

‘I mean the English soul, it reminds me of a closet. The best of the English spend all their lives trying to get out of it, but as a rule they only manage it at the moment of death.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you have to ask? I can see from the inside, I’m English myself. Well, of course, not entirely - about as much as you’re Russian. We could say that you’re Russian, couldn’t we?’

‘I suppose so,’ I agreed and sighed quietly.

‘And what is the Russian soul like?’

I thought about it.

‘Like the cab of a long-distance truck. The driver took you in so that you could give him a blowjob. And then he died, so you’re left in the cab on your own, surrounded by nothing but the boundless steppe, the sky and the road. And you have no idea how to drive.’

‘And is the driver still in the cab, or . . .?’

I shrugged.

‘That depends.’

‘Yes,’ said E Hu-Li. ‘So it’s the same thing, then.’

‘What’s the same thing?’ I asked.

‘We have a saying: “Everybody has his skeleton in the closet.” It was Lord Byron who said that. When he realized he had strangled the homosexual in himself.’

‘Poor fellow.’

‘Poor fellow?’ E Hu-Li echoed, raising her eyebrows. ‘You don’t understand anything. All his life he tormented and tortured that homosexual in himself, but he only finished him off just before he died, when he realized he was going to kick the bucket soon. But as it happens, all his verses and poems were really written by that homosexual. Two American scholars have proved that, I read it myself. That’s the kind of people there are in England! Better your dismal nightmare in the cab of a truck.’