Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘And who’s your next in line? Or haven’t you decided yet?’

‘Oh, I’m really spoilt for choice. There are some extraordinary possibilities, quite unexpected.’

‘Such as?’

E Hu-Li half-closed her eyes and sang in a high, crystal-clear voice:

‘Don’t question why she needs to be so free . . .’

‘Mick Jagger?’ I gasped. ‘How dare you even think of it?’

‘Why not?’ E Hu-Li asked impassively. ‘He’s “Sir Mick” now, after all. A legitimate target. And then, surely you don’t still find those words touching? I think they started sounding like an advert for an aircraft-carrier ages ago.’

Lord Cricket was a man of indeterminate age. And sex, I feel like adding to make the description more precise. My sister E said that he came from a family with a military tradition, but his appearance gave no indication at all of that. My first look at him even put me in mind of that politically correct expression ‘war hero or shero’ - despite his shaved head and goatee beard. His facial expression was interesting - as if in his youth his soul had aspired towards freedom and light, but failed to break through his armour of self-control and duty and ended up frozen in an interrogatory bubble, puffing out his face into a grimace of disaffected surprise.

He was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt with a wide tie in an extremely delicate shade of green. There was a small enamel badge glinting on the lapel of his jacket. It looked like the enamel images of Mao Tse-tung that people used to wear in China, only it wasn’t Mao’s face smiling out of it, but Aleister Crowley’s (I wouldn’t really have recognized the British Satanist myself - E Hu-Li told me).

Alexander and Lord Cricket reacted to each other cautiously. When he saw the military uniform, Lord Cricket smiled. It was an amazing smile, with just the faintest hint of irony that, nevertheless, you couldn’t possibly fail to notice, no matter how hard you tried. How many centuries of effort must have gone into trimming that lawn! At the sight of Lord Cricket, Alexander nervously drew in the air through his nose and closed his eyes; his face darkened, as if he’d just remembered something upsetting.

I was frightened that they would argue. But they quickly got into small talk about the Middle East, Shiite terrorism and the oil business. I must have been looking dour, because Lord Cricket asked me the classic question:

‘Why do you Russians smile so little?’

‘We don’t need to be so competitive,’ I said morosely. ‘We’re a nation of losers in any case.’

Lord Cricket raised one eyebrow.

‘Come now, you exaggerate,’ he said.

But he seemed to be satisfied by my answer and he went back to his conversation with Alexander.

Having made sure they were talking about subjects that were safe, I started getting to grips with the video projector hired from a local business centre. Of course, there was something absurd about an occult Power Point presentation. But then, the whole field of human occultism was such a profanation that not even Microsoft could do anything to debase it.

While we were fiddling with the equipment, I succumbed yet again to the temptation to inoculate my sister E with the germs of moral principle.

‘You can’t possibly imagine,’ I said quickly in a low voice, trying to squeeze as much useful information as possible into the seconds allotted to me, ‘how liberating Kant’s categorical imperative is for the soul. I felt as if I’d grown wings when I realized - yes, yes, don’t laugh now - that for us foxes man can be not just a means to achieve the aim, but the aim itself!’

E Hu-Li frowned. And then she said:

‘You’re right. As soon as I’m done with Brian, I’ll fly to Argentina for a safari. I’ve wanted to go shooting from a helicopter for a long time.’

What on earth could I do with her?

We just couldn’t get the projector hooked up to the laptop. The Bluetooth refused to work, and I’d never had anything to do with it before. For a while I became completely absorbed in technical matters and stopped paying attention to what was happening in the room. And when I finally managed to solve the problem, Lord Cricket and Alexander were already going at it hammer and tongs - about values.

‘Do you seriously believe,’ Lord Cricket was asking, ‘that there is any better way of organizing society than liberal democracy? ’

‘We don’t want any of those liberals here, thank you very much! We’ve suffered enough in ten years. We’ve only just started to draw breath again.’

I realized it was time to interfere.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, showing my fist to Alexander where Lord Cricket couldn’t see it, ‘but I think you’re misunderstanding each other. It’s purely a matter of language.’

‘How’s that?’ Lord Cricket asked.

‘There are quite a number of sound combinations that mean completely different things in different languages. For instance, the Russian word “Bog”, meaning “God”, means a swamp, a “bog” in English. And the English word “God” means a calendar year in Russian. The sounds are the same, but the meaning is completely different. It happens with people’s names too, it can be very funny sometimes. And it’s exactly the same with the word “liberal”. It’s a classical inter-linguistic homonym. For instance, in America it means someone who is in favour of firearms control, single-sex marriage and abortion and feels more sympathy for the poor than the rich. But here in Russia . . .’

‘Here in Russia,’ Alexander interrupted, ‘it means an unscrupulous weasel who hopes someone will give him a little money if he makes big round eyes and keeps repeating that twenty greasy parasites should carry on squeezing Russia by the balls, simply because at the beginning of so-called privatization, they happened to be barbecuing grills with pissed Yeltsin’s daughter!’

‘Phoo, how crude,’ I said.

‘But it’s the truth. And the tragedy of Russian liberalism is that nobody’s ever going to give the weasel any money anyway.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because ten years ago those greasy parasites were choked with greed, now they are shitting their pants in fear, and in ten years they won’t have any money at all.’

It’s a rare thing, I thought, for all three tenses in Russian to be combined in a single sentiment as hopelessly gloomy as that.

‘Do you favour a review of the results of privatization?’ asked Lord Cricket, who was listening carefully.

‘And why not?’ put in E Hu-Li. ‘If you analyse it properly, the whole of human history for the last ten thousand years is nothing but a constant revision of the results of privatization. History is hardly likely to come to an end because a small number of people have stolen a large amount of money. Not even if the small number of people hire themselves three fukuyamas apiece!’

My sister E occasionally liked to express some radical, even seditious views - it suited her predatory beauty and instantly enchanted her future victim. And now I noticed how admiringly Alexander was gaping at her.

‘Precisely!’ he said. ‘I ought to write that down. A pity, I haven’t got a pen. But what’s a fukuyama? Some sort of geisha?’

‘Pretty much,’ said E Hu-Li and turned so that Alexander could see her profile. In profile she is absolutely irresistible.

Why you toad, I thought. After you promised . . . But even so I couldn’t help admiring her: my sister E understood nothing about Russian affairs, but she sensed instinctively what to say in order to slip the noose over a man’s head at the first attempt. Alexander was gazing at her with his mouth wide open and I realized I had to rescue him in a hurry. I had to say something even more radical.