Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

He would either respond to my appeals to embark on some unusual journey with an embarrassed refusal or he would suggest something that was unthinkable for me. For instance, to turn ourselves into a pair of cartoon transformers who discover their attraction to each other on the roof of a Tokyo skyscraper ... How dreadful! But when I wanted to become the German major in Casablanca and take him from behind while he was the black pianist Sam playing it again, he was as horrified as if I’d been urging him to sell out the motherland.

That would have been another interesting topic for Dr Spengler: most Russian men are homophobic because the cancerous cells of the criminal code of honour are still deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. Any serious man, no matter what he does for a living, subconsciously measures himself against a prison bunk and tries to ensure that his service record doesn’t include any conspicuous violations of prison taboos that he might have to pay for with his arse in a very direct manner. This means that a Russian macho man’s life is like a permanent spiritualist seance: while the body is wallowing in luxury, the soul is doing time in the prison camps.

I happen to know why this is the way things are, and I could write a big, thick, clever book about it. Its basic idea would be as follows: Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people’s morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live - or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top criminal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Soviet ‘internal Party committee’ was dismantled, a cheap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

But no matter how sickening prison morality may be, there is no other morality left at all, only the simulacra produced either by FSB prison guards or sprintii journalists specializing in the propaganda of liberal values . . .

Oh. I deliberately won’t cross out that last sentence, let the reader admire it. There you have it, the vulpine mind. After all, we were-foxes are natural liberals, in pretty much the same way as the soul is a natural Christian. And what do I write? What do I write ? It’s terrifying. At least it’s clear where it all came from - I got the stuff about the sprintii journalists from the FSB prison guards. And the stuff about the FSB prison guards from the sprintii journalists. There’s nothing to be done: if a fox has heard an opinion, she is bound to express it in the first person. We can’t help it. We don’t have any opinions of our own on these human-related subjects (that’s the last thing we need), but we have to live among people. So we just return the serves. Yes, it’s a good thing I don’t have to write a book about Russia after all. What sort of Solzhenitsyn would I make? But I am digressing again.

I didn’t often discuss the nature of Alexander’s homophobia with him (he didn’t like to talk about it), but I was sure its roots had to be sought in the criminal catacombs of the Russian mind. His homophobia went so far that he rejected anything that was even remotely gay.

‘Why do you dislike gays so much?’ I asked him once.

‘Because they go against nature.’

‘But it was nature that created them. So how do they go against nature?’

‘I’ll tell you how,’ he said. ‘Children are hidden in sex, like the seeds in a watermelon. And gays are people fighting for the right to eat a watermelon without seeds.’

‘Who are they fighting against?’

‘The watermelon. Everybody else stopped caring a damn long since. But a watermelon can’t exist without seeds. And that’s why I say they go against nature. Will you say they don’t?’

‘A certain watermelon I used to know,’ I replied, ‘believed that the propagation of watermelons depends on their ability to implant in man’s mind the suggestion that it’s healthy to swallow the seeds. But watermelons overestimate their own hypnotic abilities. In actual fact the propagation of watermelons takes place through a process of which the watermelons are completely unaware, because they are unable to observe it. Because this process only begins where the watermelon ends.’

‘There you go tying those fancy knots again, Ginger, I can’t follow,’ he grumbled. ‘Save it. Let’s do without all this tricky queer stuff.’

Alexander particularly disliked Luchino Visconti. Any suggestion to put on something by this director (whom I consider one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century) was taken by him as a personal insult. I still have fragments of one of our arguments on tape. While the other dialogues in my journal are reproduced from memory, this one is absolutely accurate - the conversation was accidentally recorded on a dictaphone. I include it here because I would like to hear Alexander’s voice again - I can listen to it while I type.

AS: Death in Venice. This is getting tiresome, Ginger. What do you think I am, some kind of queer?

AH: Then how about Conversation Piece?

AS: No, let’s have Takeshi Kitano. Zatoichi punishes the geisha-assassin . . . And then the geisha-assassin punishes Zatoichi.

AH: I don’t want that. Let’s try Gone with the Wind again.

AS: Come off it. That staircase is too long.

AH: What staircase?

AS: The one I have to cart you up to the bedroom. And to add to the agony you make it five times longer. I was soaked in sweat last time. Seriously. Even though we never got up off the divan . . .

AH: I have to be spoiled sometimes . . . Okay, this time we’ll have a short staircase. All right?

AS: No, let’s . . . I fancy something with shooting.

AH: Then let’s have Mulholland Drive! There’s shooting in that. Oh, please!

AS: Back to the same old thing. I won’t do it, how many times do I have to tell you? Find yourself a queer out on the avenue and watch it with him.

AH: What’s that got to do with it? It’s lesbians in the film.

AS: What’s the difference?

(Here there is a pause in the recording, during which you can hear rustling and tapping as I rummage through the video discs scattered on the floor.)

AH: Listen, there’s a film from one of Steven King’s books. Dreamcatcher. Have you seen it?

AS: No.

AH: Let’s try it. We won’t be people, we’ll be aliens.

AS: What kind of aliens are they?

AH: They have a vertical mouth full of teeth running the entire length of their bodies and eyes on their sides. Imagine how bloody a kiss could be? And cunnilingus at the same time. I think that’s the way they reproduce.

AS: Darling, I get to see enough stuff like that at work. Let’s have something more romantic.

AH: Romantic . . . Romantic . . . Here’s The Matrix-2. How would you like to screw Keanu Reaves?

AS: Not a lot.

AH: Then I can screw him.

AS: Rejected. Is the third Matrix there?

AH: Yes.

AS: There could be an interesting possibility there with those machines.

AH: Which ones?

AS: You know, those humanoid robots with people sitting in them. They use them to fight off those black octopuses. Just imagine it, one of those robots has caught a black octopus, and . . . AH: Listen, how old are you, twelve?

AS: Okay, let’s forget The Matrix. (Some kind of rustling again. I think I move on to another heap of DVDs.)

AH: How about Lord of the Rings?