Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

I couldn’t hold back any longer - the tears gushed in a torrent down my cheeks and I cried for a long, long time, sitting on the wooden crate and looking at the white square of paper with the neat lines of his words on it. Until the very last day I had called him the grey one, afraid of hurting him. But he was strong. He didn’t need any pity.

That was it. Two lonely hearts met among the pale blossoms of the Moscow spring. One told the other she was older than the city around, the other confessed that he had claws on his dick. For a short while they twined their tails together, spoke of the highest truth and howled at the moon, then went on their way, like two ships passing at sea . . .

Je ne regrette rien . But I know that I shall never again be as happy as I was in nineteen-sixties Hong Kong on the edge of the Bitsevsky forest, with a carefree bliss in my heart and his black tail in my hand.

When this book was almost finished, I met Mikhalich while I was out riding my bike. I was tired of turning the pedals, and I’d sat down for a rest on one of the massive log benches standing in the empty lot beside the Bitsevsky forest. My eye was caught by the kids jumping off the ramp on their bikes, and I spent a long time watching them. For some reason the saddles on all their bikes were set very low. Probably special bikes for jumping, I thought. But in every other way they were ordinary mountain bikes. When I turned away from the jumpers, Mikhalich was standing beside me.

He had changed a lot since the last time we’d seen each other. Now he had a fashionable haircut, and he was no longer dressed in retro-gangster gear, but wearing a stylish black suit from Diesel’s ‘rebel shareholder’ collection. Under the jacket he had a black T-shirt with the words ‘I Fucked Andy Warhol’. A gold chain peeped out from under the T-shirt - not really thick, and not really thin, just exactly right. A simple round, steel watch, black Nike Air trainers like Mick Jagger’s on his feet. What a very long way the security services had come since those times when I used to travel to Yezhov’s dacha for the latest Nabokov . . .

‘Hi there, Mikhalich,’ I said.

‘Hello, Adele.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘With the instrument.’

‘You haven’t got any such instrument. Don’t give me that. Sasha told me.’

He sat down beside me on the bench.

‘I do have an instrument, Adele, I do, my girl. It’s just that it’s secret. And the comrade colonel general was following instructions when he spoke to you. I disobeyed those instructions when I showed it to you. And the comrade colonel general put me right afterwards, is that clear? As it happens, I’m disobeying instructions again now when I say that I do have an instrument. But the comrade colonel general always follows them very strictly.’

I couldn’t tell any longer which of them was lying.

‘And does the cleaning lady from the equestrian complex really work for you?’

‘We have many different methods,’ he said evasively. ‘We couldn’t manage otherwise. It’s a very big country.’

‘That’s true.’

We sat there in silence for a minute or two. Mikhalich observed the kids jumping off the ramp with interest.

‘And how’s Pavel Ivanovich?’ I asked, to my own surprise. ‘Still consulting?’

Mikhalich nodded.

‘He came to see us just the other day. He recommended a book, now what was it . . .’

He took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. I saw the words: Martin Wolf: Why Globalisation Works written on it in ballpoint pen.

‘He said things weren’t really all that bad after all.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Well, that’s really great. I was starting to worry. Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask this for a long time. All those well-known figures, Wolfenson from the World Bank, Wolfovitz from the Defence Department - or maybe it was the other way around - were they all, you know, as well?’

‘There are all sorts of wolves, just like people,’ Mikhalich said. ‘Only now they can’t even come close to us. Our department’s stepped up to a completely new level. There’s only one Nagual Rinpoche in the world.’

‘Who?’

‘That’s what we call the comrade colonel general.’

‘How is he, by the way?’ I couldn’t help asking.

‘Well.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He’s snowed under with work. And after work he sits in the archive. Analysing past experience.’

‘Whose experience?’

‘Comrade Sharikov’s.’

‘Ah, him. The one Bulgakov wrote about in A Dog’s Heart ?’

‘Don’t talk about things if you don’t know anything,’ Mikhalich said sternly. ‘There are all sorts of lies going round about him, slanderous rumours. But no one knows the truth. When the comrade colonel general first turned up for work in his new uniform, the oldest members of staff even shed a few tears. They hadn’t seen anything like it since nineteen fifty-nine. Not since comrade Sharikov was killed. It was after that everything fell to pieces. He was the one holding it all together.’

‘And how was he killed?’

‘He wanted to be the first to fly into space. And he went, just as soon as they made a cockpit big enough for a dog to fit into. You can’t hold someone like that back . . . The risk was immense - during the early launches every second flight crashed. But he made his mind up anyway. And then . . .’

‘The idiot,’ I said. ‘The vain nonentity.’

‘Vanity has absolutely nothing to do with it. Why did comrade Sharikov fly into space? He wanted to happen to the void before the void happened to him. But he didn’t get the chance. He was just three seconds of arc short . . .’

‘And Alexander knows about Sharikov?’ I asked.

‘He does now. I told you, he spends days at a time in the archives.’

‘And what has he said about it?’

‘The comrade colonel general has said this: even titans have their limitations.’

‘I see. And what questions do the titans have for me?’

‘None, really. I was ordered to convey a verbal communication to you.’

‘Well, convey it, then.’

‘Seems you’re putting it about that you’re the super-werewolf.’

‘Well, and what of it?’

‘I’ll tell you what. This is a unique country we live in, not like the rest of the world. Here everybody has to know who they answer to. People and werewolves.’

‘And how am I interfering with that?’

‘You’re not. But there can only be one super-werewolf. Otherwise, what kind of super-werewolf is he?’

‘That trivial kind of understanding of the word “super-werewolf”, ’ I said, ‘smacks of prison-camp Nietzcheanism. I -’

‘Listen,’ said Mikhalich, raising his open hand, ‘I wasn’t sent here to jaw. I’m here to tell you.’

‘I understand,’ I sighed. ‘And what am I supposed to do now? Hit the road?’

‘No, why? Just leave it out. Remember who’s the super-werewolf around here. And never put your foot in it again. So there’s no confusion in anybody’s mind . . . Get it?’

‘I could take issue with you,’ I said, ‘over whose minds are filled with confusion. First of all -’

‘We’re not going to argue about it,’ Mikhalich interrupted again. ‘As Nagual Rinpoche says, if you meet the Buddha, don’t kill him, but don’t let him take you for a ride.’

‘Okay then, if we’re not going to argue, we’re not. Is that all?’

‘No, there’s one more question. A personal one.’

‘What is it?’

‘Marry me.’

That was unexpected. I realized he wasn’t joking and looked him over carefully.

The man sitting in front of me was in his fifties, still in robust health, braced for his final headlong rush at life, but he still had-n’t understood (fortunately for him) just how that rush ended. I’d seen off plenty like him. They always see me as their last chance. Grown men, and they don’t understand that they themselves are their last chance. But then, they aren’t even aware what kind of chance it is. Sasha had understood something at least. But this one . . . Hardly.