Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘Sasha,’ I called softly.

He looked up at me and asked: ‘Do you remember the story about the Little Scarlet Flower?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ve only just realized what it really means.’

‘What?’

‘Love doesn’t transform. It simply tears away the masks. I thought I was a prince. But it turns out . . . This is what my soul is like.’

‘Don’t dare talk like that,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not true. You didn’t understand a thing. It has absolutely nothing to do with your soul. It’s . . . it’s like . . .’

‘It’s like hatching out from the egg,’ he said sadly. ‘You can’t hatch back into it.’

He had expressed my own feeling with astonishing precision. So the change really was irreversible. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to fall through the floor, then through the ground, and keep going to infinity . . . But he didn’t think it was my fault. On the contrary, he made it clear that he thought the cause of what had happened lay in him. What a noble heart he does have, really, I thought.

He stood up.

‘Now I’m going to fly north,’ he said, running his fingers tenderly over my cheek. ‘Come what may. We’ll see each other in three days.’

He appeared three days later.

I wasn’t expecting him that morning, and my instinct had given me no warning. The knock at the door sounded strangely weak. If it had been the militia, the fire inspectors, the public health inspectors, the district architect or any other bearers of the national idea, it wouldn’t have sounded like that - I knew how people knocked when they came for money. I thought it must be the old cleaning lady who cleaned the stand. She sometimes came to ask for hot water. I’d given her an electric kettle twice, but she still came anyway - probably out of loneliness.

Alexander was standing outside - deathly pale, with blue circles under his eyes and a long scratch on his left cheek. He was wearing a crumpled summer raincoat. I could smell alcohol on him - not old, stale fumes, but the way an open bottle of vodka smells. I’d never known him to drink before.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

It would have been hard to think of a more stupid question. He didn’t even bother to answer.

‘There’s no time. Can you hide me?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Come in.’

‘This place is no good. Our people know about it. Have you got somewhere else?’

‘Yes I have. Come in and we’ll talk about it.’

He shook his head.

‘Let’s go right now. Another five minutes and it will be too late.’

I realized the situation was serious.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Will we be coming back here?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Then I’ll take my bag. And my bike. Will you come in?’

‘I’ll wait here.’

A few minutes later we were already walking away from the equestrian complex along a forest path. I was pushing my bike along by the handlebars: I had an extremely heavy bag hanging over my shoulder, but Alexander didn’t make the slightest attempt to help me. That wasn’t really like him - but I sensed that he could hardly even walk.

‘Will it take much longer?’

‘About half an hour, if we don’t hurry.’

‘What sort of place is it?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘They don’t come any safer.’

I was taking him to my own personal bomb shelter.

It often happens that preparations made in case of war are actually used by a later age for a different purpose. In the eighties many people had been expecting the Cold War to end in a hot one - there were at least three portents that indicated such a development was imminent:

1. bully beef from the strategic reserves of Stalin’s time - which were assembled in case there was a third world war - appeared on the shelves in shops (the cans were easily identifiable by the lack of any markings, the distinctive yellowish tinge of the metal, a thick layer of Vaseline and their completely tasteless, almost colourless contents).

2. the American president was called Ronald Wilson Reagan. Each word in his name contained six letters, giving the apocalyptic number of the beast - ‘666’ - a fact that was frequently mentioned with alarm by the journal Communist , where many architects of the future reform worked at the time.

3. the surname Reagan was pronounced exactly like ‘ray gun’ - a fact that I noticed myself.

It became clear several years later that these signs did not portend war, but the end of the USSR: the upper rat had chickened out, thereby fulfilling the first part of its great geopolitical mission. But at that time a war had still seemed very likely, and I was thinking about what I would do when it started.

These thoughts led me to a simple decision. I was already living close to Bitsevsky Park and in its secret depths, criss-crossed with gullies, I often came across concrete pipes, shafts and service ducts. It was clear from the different sorts of concrete that these incomplete underground structures came from various periods of Soviet power. Some were elements of a drainage system, some had something to do with underground heat pipelines and cables, and some were simply unidentifiable, but looked like something military.

Most of them were in open view. But one of these boltholes proved suitable for my purposes. It was located in impassable thickets, too remote for teenage drinkers or courting couples to use as a meeting place. There were no forest tracks leading to it, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone who happened to be out walking passing that way. This is how it looked: there was a concrete pipe about a metre in diameter protruding from the earth in the side of a gully. The bottom of the opposite slope of the ravine was only a few steps away, so it was difficult to spot the pipe from above. Under the ground it branched into two small rooms. One of them had a power distribution box hanging on the wall, and even a socket for a light bulb hanging on a spike hammered into the concrete - evidently there was an underground power cable running nearby.

When I discovered this place, there were no signs of life in it, only garbage left over from the construction work and a rubber boot with a torn top. Bit by bit I brought in a lot of canned food, jars of honey, Vietnamese bamboo mats and blankets. Only instead of war, perestroika broke out, and I had no more need for a bomb shelter. But even so I still used to inspect the place from time to time, thinking of it as my ‘bunker’.

Of course, all my reserves had rotted, but the spot itself had remained undiscovered: only once in the entire democratic period did a tramp attempt to move in (he obviously must have been crawling along the bottom of the gully in a delirious state and then clambered into the pipe). I had to give him a rather severe hypnotic session - I’m afraid the poor man forgot about plenty of other things as well as the gully. After that I hung a protective talisman at the entrance, something I usually avoid doing, since sooner or later you have to pay for magic that changes the natural course of things with your own death. But in this case the intervention was minimal.

When Alexander asked me to hide him, I realized immediately that I couldn’t possibly think of any better place than this. But getting there turned out not to be so easy - he was walking slower and slower, with frequent stops to catch his breath.

Eventually we reached the gully, which was concealed by a proliferation of hazel bushes and some umbrella-shaped plants with a name I could never remember - they always grew to a monstrous size here, almost like trees, and I was concerned that the reason might be radiation or chemical pollution. Alexander scrabbled down into the gully, bent over and climbed into the pipe.