Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

AS: You’ll only come up with something weird again.

AH: Well I’m not going to spread my legs for a hobbit, that’s for sure. How come you’re so afraid of everything? Do you think they’ll find out at work? Your moral character?

AS: Why do think I’m afraid? I don’t want to, that’s all.

AH: Listen, there are some films in English here. An interesting selection.

AS: What have you got?

AH: Midnight Dancers . . . Sex Life in LA . . .

AS: No.

AH: Versace Murder?

AS: No.

AH: Why?

AS: Because.

AH: Do you know what the gays in Miami say instead of ‘vice versa’? ‘Vice Versace’. Just think of all those dark, convoluted meanings . . .

AS: First one of them shafts another up the backside, and then they swap places. That’s all your convoluted meanings.

AH: I’ll put it on then?

AS: I already told you. Go to the that cafe at Tverskaya, Gifts of the Sea or whatever they call it, find yourself a queer and have your fun.

AH: Listen, stop being such a reactionary. There are homosexual animals in wild nature, I’ve read about them. Sheep. Monkeys.

AS: As far as monkeys are concerned, I hardly think that’s an argument in favour of gays.

AH: Oh you’ve been well trained. No reforming you. What’s that disc you’ve got there?

AS: Romeo and Juliet.

(You can hear me snort contemptuously.)

AH: Bin it.

AS: Can’t we watch it just once more?

AH: How many times?

AS: Just one last little time. Come on! You’re a dead ringer for Juliet in that T-shirt.

AH: What can I do with you, Romeo? Go on. Only on one condition.

AS: What’s that?

AH: Afterwards it’s Mulholland Drive.

AS: Gr-r-r!

AH: Darling, really? So soon?

AS: Gr-r-r!

AH: Hang on, hang on. I’m putting it on. I’ll know this off by heart soon . . . ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean . . .’

AS: Whoo-oo-oo!

AH: I’m not criticizing your organization, you beast. Relax. That’s Shakespeare.

Love and tragedy go hand in hand. Homer and Euripides wrote about that, so did Stendhal and Oscar Wilde. And now it’s my turn.

Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.

I formed this impression from the numerous descriptions I had come across in poems and books. How was I to know that the writers were not describing love as it actually is at all, but constructing the verbal imitations that would look best on paper. I thought of myself as a professional of love, since I had been inducing the experience in others for so many centuries. But it’s one thing to pilot the B-29 flying towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.

Love turned out to be nothing like what they write about it. It was ludicrous, rather than serious - but that didn’t mean it could be dismissed out of hand. It was not like being drunk (the most popular comparison in literature) - but it was even less like being sober. My perception of the world didn’t change: I didn’t think Alexander was anything like a fairy-tale prince in his Maibach. I could see all the sinister sides of his character but, strangely enough, those things only added to his charm in my eyes. My reason even came to terms with his barbarous political views and began to discover a certain harsh northern originality in them.

Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning. But it gave meaning to everything else. It made my heart as light and empty as a balloon. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. But not because I had become more stupid - there simply was nothing to understand in what was happening. They may say that love like that doesn’t run deep. But I think that anything that is deep isn’t love, it’s deliberate calculation or schizophrenia.

I myself wouldn’t even attempt to say what love is - probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not. But apophasis would be wrong, too, because they are everything. Writers who write about love are swindlers, and the worst of them is Leo Tolstoy, clutching his programmatic bludgeon ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Although I have a lot of respect for Tolstoy.

How could I have known that our romantic adventure would prove disastrous for Alexander? Oscar Wilde said: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . .’ He was a writer who lived in an era of primitive anthropocentrism, hence the word ‘man’ (sexism was also easy to get away with then, especially for gays). But in everything else, he was spot on. I killed the beast, the Thing. Beauty killed the beast. And the murder weapon was love.

I remember how that day began. After I woke up, I lay on my back for a long time while I surfaced from the depths of a very good dream that I couldn’t remember no matter how I tried. I knew that in cases like that the thing to do was to lie without moving or opening your eyes, in the same position you woke up in, and then the dream might surface in your memory. And that was what happened - after about a minute, I remembered.

I had been dreaming of a fantastic garden, flooded with sunlight and filled with the chatter of birds. In the distance I could see a strip of white sand and the sea. Immediately in front of me there was a sheer cliff, and in the cliff there was a cave, sealed off with a slab of stone. I was supposed to move the slab, but it was too heavy, and there was no way I could possibly do it. Summoning up all my strength, I braced my feet against the ground and strained every muscle in my body as I pushed on the slab. It fell away to one side and the black hole of the entrance was revealed, belching out damp air and an old, stale stench. And then, rising up out of the darkness towards the sunny day, chickens appeared - one, two, three . . . I lost count, there were so many of them. They just kept on walking towards the light and happiness, and now nothing could stop them - they’d realized where the way out was. I saw my chicken among them - the brown one with the white patch, and I waved my paw to her (in the dream I had paws instead of hands, like during the supraphysical transformation). She didn’t even look at me, just ran straight past. But I wasn’t offended at all.

What an amazing dream, I thought, and opened my eyes.

There was a little patch of sunlight trembling on the wall. It was my own virtual place in the sun, acquired without any struggle at all - it was produced by a little mirror that cast the ray of light falling from above against the wall. I thought about Alexander and remembered our love. It was as certain as that yellow patch of sunlight quivering on the wall. Something incredible had to happen between us today, something truly miraculous. Without even thinking what I was going to say to him, I reached for the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello. I want to see you.’

‘Come on over,’ he said. ‘But there’s not much time. I’m flying north this evening. That only leaves us three hours.’

‘That’s enough for me,’ I said.

The taxi drove me slowly, the traffic lights took an eternity to change, and at every crossroads I felt my heart would leap out of my chest if I had to wait just a few more seconds.

When I got out of the lift he removed the gauze mask from his face and took a deep sniff.

‘I’ll probably never get used to the way you smell. It seems like I remember it, and yet every time it turns out the memory in my head is nothing like it. I’ll have to pull a few hairs out of your tail.’