Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘What are you reading?’ I asked. ‘Another detective novel?’

‘No. This time I took a serious, intelligent book, on your advice. Do you want something to read too?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then take a look at this. So you’ll understand what you’re about to see. It’s not exactly the same case, but it’s pretty similar. I brought it especially for you.’

He put a tattered volume on my knees. The title Russian Fairy Tales was written in red letters - it was the same book I’d seen on his desk.

‘The page is marked,’ he said.

The bookmark was at the story called ‘Little Khavroshka’. It was a long time since I’d held any Russian children’s books in my hands, and I noticed one strange thing immediately - because the print was so large, I perceived the words quite differently from in adult books. As if everything they denoted was simpler and purer.

The fairy tale turned out to be rather sad. Little Khavroshka was a northern clone of Cinderella, only instead of a fairy god-mother she was helped by a brindled cow. This cow did all the impossible jobs that Khavroshka was given to do by her stepmother. The wicked sisters spied on Khavroshka to see how she managed to keep up with all her work and they told the stepmother about it. The stepmother ordered the brindled cow to be slaughtered. Khavroshka found out and told the cow. The cow asked Khavroshka not to eat her meat and to bury her bones in the garden. Then an apple tree with jingling gold leaves grew out of the bones, and the tree made Khavroshka’s fortune - she managed to pick an apple, and the reward for that was a fiancé . . . I found it interesting that the stepmother and the sisters weren’t punished, they simply didn’t get any apples, and then they were forgotten about.

I had absolutely no desire to analyse this fairy tale from the positions of the asshole-amphetamine discourse or rummage about in its ‘morphology’. I didn’t need to guess what it was really about - my heart understood. It was the eternal Russian story, the final cycle of which I had witnessed only recently, at the end of the last century. As if I personally had known the brindled cow to which children complained about their woes, who worked simple miracles for them and then quietly died under the knife, only to grow out from under the earth as a magical tree - a golden apple for every boy and girl . . .

The fairy tale contained a strange truth about the very saddest and most mysterious side of Russian life. How many times that brindled cow had been slaughtered. And how many times it had returned, either as a magic apple tree or an entire cherry orchard. Only where had all the apples gone? You couldn’t find them anywhere. Except maybe by calling the office of United Fruit . . . But no, that was nonsense. ‘United Fruit’ was last century, but now any call you made would get lost in the wires on its way to some company in Gibraltar that belonged to a firm from the Falkland Islands that was managed by a lawyer in Amsterdam in the interests of a trust with an unnamed beneficiary owner. Who, of course, is known to every dog on the Rublyovskoe Highway where the upper rat lives.

I closed the book and looked at Alexander. He was asleep. I carefully took the serious, intelligent book from his knees and opened it:

No, the Money Tree looks different from the way certain frivolous writers of the last century thought of it. It doesn’t fruit with gold ducats in the Field of Miracles, as they assumed. It sprouts through the icy crust of the permafrost in a blazing fountain of oil, a burning bush like the one that spoke with Moses. But although there are many a Moses crowding round the Money Tree today, the Lord remains significantly silent . . . The reason for his silence must be that he knows the tree will not be allowed to flutter its smoky flames in freedom for long. Calculating men will haul a slaking apparatus on to the crown of fire and force the Tree’s black trunk to grow into a cold steel pipe stretching right across the Country of Fools to the port terminals, to various Chinas and Japans - so far that soon the Tree will be unable to recall its own roots . . .

After I’d read a few more paragraphs in the same fussy, obscure style, I began to feel sleepy. I closed the book and put it back on Alexander’s knees. Then I slept through the rest of the flight.

I slept through the landing as well. When I opened my eyes, there was the snow-covered airport terminal building, looking more like a railway station, drifting past outside the window of the Gulfstream as it taxied along the runway. There was a long poster hanging on the building: ‘Welcome to Nefteperegonievsck!’ There was snow everywhere, as far as the eye could see.

At the bottom of the steps we were met by several military men in winter kit without any badges of rank. They greeted Mikhalich and Alexander like old friends, but they glanced at me, or at least I thought they did, in bewilderment. Nonetheless, when Mikhalich and Alexander each received an officer’s greatcoat, I was also issued with warm clothing - a military padded jacket with a light-blue collar of synthetic fur and a cap with ear-flaps. The jacket was too big, and I literally drowned in it.

Three cars had come to meet us. They were black Geländewagens, just like the ones in Moscow, except that they were driven by soldiers. There was hardly any conversation at all when we were met: the men limited themselves to greetings and a brief discussion of the weather. It seemed like the local men knew all about why their visitors from Moscow were there.

The town that started immediately outside the airport had a rather phantasmagorical appearance. The buildings in it reminded me of cottages for the middle class outside Moscow. There was only one difference - these cottages were raised above the ground in an absurd fashion, on stilts that were like the hut’s chicken legs in the fairy tale. That was the precise association evoked by the combination of the piles hammered into the permafrost and the red crests of the tiled roofs, and it was impossible to free myself of it: the houses became rows of chickens with their hindquarters raised high to display the black openings of the doors. Evidently I was still under the impression of the previous day’s hunt and the resultant shock.

In between the ‘eurohuts’ I could see figures of street traders selling something from pieces of oilcloth spread out directly on the snow beside their Buran snowmobiles.

‘What’s that they’re selling?’ I asked Alexander.

‘Reindeer meat. They bring it from the tundra.’

‘Don’t they ship supplies up here?’

‘Yes, of course they do. It’s just that reindeer meat’s in fashion. It’s stylish. And then, it’s an environmentally clean product.’

I was very impressed by the Calvin Klein boutique, located in one of the cottages on piles. Its very presence in this place was impressive - it was probably the most northerly outpost of lesser Calvinism in the world. And apart from that, the sign over its door fulfilled several functions at once - shop name, geographical reference point and advertising concept:

NefteperegonievsCK

I couldn’t help noticing a large children’s playground crowded with structures that looked like the frameworks of tents - the children hanging on them, swaddled in warm clothing, were like fat little sloths. The playground reminded me of an ancient hunters’ camping ground preserved amongst the snow. The entrance arch was painted with snowflakes, baby animals and red-nosed clowns, and above them there was a jolly inscription:

KUKIS-YUKIS-YUPSI-POOPS!

It was hard to understand what this was:

1. a nonsense rhyme intended to put the children in a good mood.