Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

We foxes have a method that we can use to transmit an illusion in all directions at once, instantly subduing a human being’s will. When we do this, we do not attune ourselves to a specific client, but become, so to speak, a large, heavy stone that falls on to the smooth mirror of the ‘here and now’, sending out in all directions ripples that make people’s heads spin. And then the disoriented human mind grasps at the very first straw offered to it. This technique is called ‘Storm above the Heavenly Palace’.

I applied it straight away - jumping up on to all fours, pulling up my robe and shaking my tail furiously above my head. It is not the tip of the tail, but its root that has to be shaken, that is, the point from which it grows, and therefore this action appears both indecorous and suggestive, especially with one’s robe pulled up. However, we foxes overcome our innate modesty because the man has no time to see anything properly.

I mean a normal man. The Yellow Master not only saw, he laughed offensively as well.

‘How very pretty you are,’ he said. ‘But do not forget that I am a monk.’

Refusing to capitulate, I strained my will to its very limit: and then, frowning as if he had a headache, he removed the hat from his head and flung it at me. The black string of the hat caught on my tail and the hat pinned it to the floor - as if it were not a simple cone of dry straw, but a massive millstone.

The Yellow Master followed that by picking up two sheets of paper covered with hieroglyphs, rolling them up and flinging them at me as well. Before I had time to think, they had pinned my wrists to the floor, like two shackles of iron. I tried to reach one of the sheets with my teeth (when we are badly frightened, the same thing happens to us as during a chicken-hunt - our human face grows longer and is transformed for a few seconds into a pretty, sharp-toothed little muzzle), but I could not. This, of course, was some sort of sorcery. I managed to read a few of the hieroglyphs written on the paper - ‘there is no old age and death . . . and also no deliverance from them . . .’

My heart felt a little lighter at that - it was the Buddhist Heart Sutra, which meant this man before me was not a Taoist. Everything might yet be all right. I stopped thrashing about and calmed down.

The Yellow Master lifted his cup of tea and took a sip from it, looking me over like an artist surveying a picture that is almost finished and pondering where a final flourish of ink is required. I realized I was lying on my back and the entire lower part of my body was indecently exposed. I even blushed at such humiliation. And then I started to feel afraid. Who could tell what was on this sorcerer’s mind? Life is terrible and pitiless. Sometimes, when people manage to catch one of my sisters, the things they do to her are so terrible, it is better not even to recall them.

‘I warn you,’ I said in a faltering voice, ‘that if you are intending to violate a virgin, the earth and the heavens will shudder at such a sin! And in your old age you will know no peace.’

He laughed so heartily that the tea splashed out of his cup on to the floor. In my unbearable shame, I turned my head away and once again I saw the hieroglyphs on the sheet of paper shackling one of my hands. This time it was the other sheet, and the hieroglyphs on it were different: ‘having taken as a support ... and there are no obstacles in the mind . . .’

‘Shall we talk?’ the Yellow Master asked.

‘I am not a singer from the bawdy quarter, I do not converse with my skirt hem pulled up,’ I retorted.

‘But you pulled it up yourself,’ he said imperturbably.

‘Perhaps I did,’ I replied, ‘but now I am unable to pull it down again.’

‘Do you promise that you will not attempt to run away?’

I mimicked an expression of agonizing internal struggle. Then I sighed and said: ‘I promise.’

The Yellow Master quietly muttered the final phrase of the Heart Sutra in Chinese. All the men of learning that I knew claimed that this mantra should only be recited in Sanskrit, since that was the way the voice of the Victorious One had first pronounced it. But nonetheless, the hoops round my wrists instantly released their grip and were transformed into two ordinary sheets of crumpled paper.

I adjusted my hem, sat up on the floor in a dignified pose and said:

‘How instructive! The gentleman uses the same sutra as the lock and the key. Or does the meaning here lie in the fact that this mantra truly does bring relief from all suffering, as the Buddha promised?’

‘Have you read the Heart Sutra?’ he asked.

‘I have read a smattering,’ I replied. ‘Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.’

‘Perhaps you even know the meaning of these words?’

I gauged the distance to the window with a glance. It was two leaps away. Well, I thought, even if he were an imperial body-guard, he would never catch me.

‘Of course I do,’ I said, gathering myself into a tense spring. ‘For instance, the fox A Hu-Li is sitting here before you. She appears to be quite genuine, she has form. But look closely, and there is no A Hu-Li before you, for she is an empty void.’

And with those words I made a sudden dash for the dark square of freedom already scattered with stars.

Anticipating later events, I should say that this was the experience that subsequently helped me to understand Kazimir Malevich’s picture Black Square . I would just have drawn in a few tiny bluish-white dots. However, Malevich, although he called himself a supremacist, remained faithful to the truth of life - for most of the time there is no light in the Russian sky. And there is nothing left for the soul to do but produce invisible stars from within itself - that is the meaning of his canvas. But these thoughts only came to me many centuries later. Just at that second I collapsed to the floor, overwhelmed by an absolutely unbelievable, unbearable sense of shame. It hurt so badly that I could not even cry out.

The Yellow Master had removed the shackles from my hands. The window was very close. But I had forgotten about the hat that was pinning my tail to the floor.

No physical or even moral pain can possibly compare with the suffering that I experienced. Everything that anchorites endure in years of repentance was packed into a single second of incredibly intense feeling - as if a flash of lightning had lit up the dark corners of my soul. I felt myself crumble like a handful of dust, and a stream of tears gushed from my eyes. There in front of my face was a crumpled page of the Heart Sutra with its indifferent hieroglyphs gazing out at me, telling me that I, my failed attempt to escape, and the inexpressible torment I was suffering at that moment were nothing but empty appearance.

The Yellow Master did not laugh, he even looked at me with an expression of something like compassion, but I could tell he was barely able to restrain his laughter. That made me feel even sorrier for myself, and I kept on and on crying, until the hieroglyphs that my tears were falling on blurred and dissolved into formless blots.

‘Is it that painful?’ the Yellow Master asked.

‘No,’ I replied through my tears, ‘I feel . . . I feel . . .’

‘What do you feel?’

‘I am not accustomed to talking frankly to people.’

‘In your trade that is hardly surprising,’ he laughed. ‘But even so, why are you crying?’

‘I feel ashamed . . .’ I whispered.

I felt so dreadful at that moment that I was not thinking of any cunning tricks, and the sympathy showed to me by the Yellow Master seemed undeserved - I knew very well what the due reward for my deeds was. If he had started skinning me alive, I believe I should not have objected greatly.