The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (12 page)
Read The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Online
Authors: Victor Pelevin
Tags: #Romance, #Prostitutes, #Contemporary, #Werewolves, #Fiction, #Literary, #Fantasy, #Russia (Federation), #General, #Paranormal
I didn’t realize until the final moment that Alexander was choosing a present for me. I simply had no reason to think anything of the kind. I assumed he needed to buy a souvenir for some glamorous little bimbo, and I gave him perfectly serious advice. So I felt quite exceptionally stupid when he finally held out the bag containing the two small cases that he had just paid for. I wasn’t expecting it. And foxes have to foresee what a man will do - if not everything, then at least the things that affect us personally. Our survival depends on it.
The two identical small white boxes contained rings that cost 10,000 and 18,000 dollars - platinum and diamonds. The large stone was point eight of a carat, the small one point five four. Tiffany. Would you believe it - 28,000 dollars! How many times I’d have to strain my tail for that, I thought with a feeling that was almost class hatred. And the most important thing was that he didn’t want anything from me. Apart from my phone number. He said he was flying to the north and he’d call when he got back.
It wasn’t easy buying the rings. The sales assistant wasn’t prepared to put through such a substantial transaction herself. Neither was the cashier.
‘I can’t do it without the manager,’ she kept saying.
It was only when I got back home to Bitsevsky Park that I realized how tired I was - I didn’t even have the strength to check my e-mails. I slept until the middle of the next day. I had suspiciously Borgesian dreams about the defence of a fortress - something like the storming of a city during the Yellow Turban rebellion. I was one of the defenders and I was throwing heavy javelins down from the walls.
No need to explain the symbolism to me, I can’t stand that. Back in the 1920s I used to drive romantic Red Freudians crazy by telling them dreams that I invented: ‘And then our tails fell off and they told us they were lying in a coconut hanging above a waterfall.’ If I sometimes throw javelins in a dream, it doesn’t mean I don’t take in the symbolic significance of what’s going on. And even less does it mean that I do take it in. I stopped collecting that sort of garbage a long time ago. Life’s less cluttered that way.
After a rest, my head was working clearly and efficiently, and the first thing I thought about was the financial aspect of what was going on. My personal solvency index was now tinged a delicate green: the two rings had cost 28,000 in the shop, and that meant I could sell them for 18,000.
But it would be a shame to sell them - in the last hundred years I hadn’t been given such pretty baubles very often. In Soviet Russia they were very strict about that kind of thing. Even in late Brezhnev times it was like that: if a man with a string bag walked off the street into a jewellery shop and bought a brooch for 30,000 roubles, the entire central press wrote about it indignantly for a week, asking what the competent organs were doing about it. In the era of stagnation, 30,000 really was a huge amount of money. But then why did they put the brooch in the shop window? As bait? There’s really no other way to explain the indignation of the press - they laid down bait and, the fish ate it and just swam away.
At least, that was what the director of Moscow’s Grocery Store Number One, who bought me the brooch, whispered in my ear with a passionate laugh. He was a careful man, but passion had made him a romantic. The poor fellow was executed by firing squad, and I felt sorry for him, although I still couldn’t force myself to wear the brooch. It was a unique example of Soviet kitsch: diamond ears of wheat surrounding emerald cucumbers and a ruby beetroot. An eternal reminder of the only battle that Soviet Russia lost - the battle for the harvest . . .
After I finished admiring the rings, I decided to check my e-mails. There was only one letter in my inbox, but it was a very welcome one - from my sister U Hu-Li, whom I hadn’t seen for an eternity.
Hi there, Red,
How are you getting on? Are you still into moral self-improvement? Searching for the exit from the labyrinths of the illusory world? I’d really like at least one of our big, ne’er-do-well family to find it.
But I’ve completely lost my way in those labyrinths. I’m still here in Thailand, although I’ve finally left Patthaya. In the last thirty years the sea has become really dirty. And apart from that, the competition from local women is so great that earning a living from the fox’s trade is getting harder all the time. Everything here has been turned inside out - in most countries in the world people are delighted when they have a son, but here they’re delighted when they have a daughter, and they say, quite literally: ‘How good it is that we have a daughter, we won’t go hungry in our old age!’ If he heard that, Confucius
would hang himself with his own sleeve.
would hang himself with his own sleeve.
The island of Phuket, where I live now, is still clean, but in a couple of years it will be the same as Patthaya. There are too many tourists. I’ve found a place to live on Patong beach and I work in Christine’s Massage Parlour. We - the masseuses - sit on benches in a special room where the men can take a look at us, with our cheeks brightly rouged, looking like evil spirits. The pink, sunburned farangs (that’s what we call the tourists from the West) come in off the street and choose a masseuse. After that, it’s a separate room, and you know the rest. I’m regarded as a unique specialist in Thai massage, so my rates are higher than the other girls’, but even so I still have to earn a bit on the side in the bars on Bangla Road, just five minutes away from my massage parlour. I get so tired during the day, and then I have to get dolled up in bright-coloured rags and go out on the stage. It’s not even a stage really, just a counter that we walk around slowly from one pole to the other, girls with numbers on our breasts. And the farangs sit at the bar below us, drinking cold beer and take their time to choose. If I can put away fifty dollars a day working in two places, I’m doing well.
The very foundations of life have been perverted here. Thai girls are modest and as industrious as bees. Only in natural conditions bees fly from flower to flower, working hard collecting nectar. But if you tip a bucketful of sugar syrup out beside the hive, they go straight for the sugar, and none of them will fly to the flowers. That’s exactly the way the West is destroying our tropical garden with its bodily secretions, drenching it with rivers of sweet dollar syrup from the hotels beside the sea. Your Russia is as great a sexual exploiter as anyone else here, and the fact that now she is no more than a raw-material appendage of the developed countries doesn’t relieve her of her moral guilt. Although in a certain sense you could call Thailand a raw-material appendage too . . . Don’t think that I’m waxing
dogmatic, it’s just that it was hot today, and I’m very tired.
dogmatic, it’s just that it was hot today, and I’m very tired.
By the way, about Russia. Just recently I was talking to our sister E, who came to visit us in Phuket with her new husband, Lord Cricket (the fool is perfectly happy). She told me something quite incredible. Do you remember the prophecy of the
super-werewolf? She says that the place mentioned in the prophecy is Moscow. Her reasoning is certainly ingenious. The prophecy says that the super-werewolf will appear in a city where they will destroy a Temple and then restore it in its previous form. For many centuries, everybody thought that meant Jerusalem, and the coming of the super-werewolf was a prophecy that concerned the very end of time, something like the Apocalypse. But E Hu-Li is sure that we’ve simply been hypnotized by Judaeo-Christian symbolism - if there’s a Temple, then it has to be the one in Jerusalem . . .
super-werewolf? She says that the place mentioned in the prophecy is Moscow. Her reasoning is certainly ingenious. The prophecy says that the super-werewolf will appear in a city where they will destroy a Temple and then restore it in its previous form. For many centuries, everybody thought that meant Jerusalem, and the coming of the super-werewolf was a prophecy that concerned the very end of time, something like the Apocalypse. But E Hu-Li is sure that we’ve simply been hypnotized by Judaeo-Christian symbolism - if there’s a Temple, then it has to be the one in Jerusalem . . .
In fact, however, there are no references to Jerusalem in the prophecy. But not so long ago in Moscow they restored the Temple of Christ the Saver (if our sister E hasn’t got the name confused), which was destroyed during the cultural revolution. And what’s more, they restored it in the form in which it was originally built - she’s relying on information she got from you there. I think you can expect her to visit you soon with her husband, who is totally obsessed with these mystical riddles.
This Lord Cricket is not only a mystic. He is well known in London as a patron and collector of art, and he deals with many art galleries. Apart from that, he was one of the leaders of an organization you have certainly heard of - the Countryside Alliance, which tried to prevent fox-hunting from being banned. I know how hard it is to let a character like that stay alive. But please remember that our little sister E hasn’t yet decided who’s going to be next. So gather your willpower up into a tight fist, just as I did. Take a detached view of what’s going on - his lordship is obsessed with the search for were-creatures absolutely everywhere, except in his own bedroom. That’s always the way with people. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. How did he come to develop such an interest in the supernatural? But then, the members of the exploiting classes often resort to occultism in the attempt to find a justification for their own parasitic existence.
I want to ask your advice. Should I move to Russia? I like the Russian tourists - they’re good-natured, they tip well and fall asleep quickly because they drink a lot. I saw a beautiful tattoo on the chest of one of them - Lenin and Marx with a hammer and sickle - and he was still very young. He took a real liking to me. He filmed me with his video-camera and then advised me to come to Russia. ‘With beauty like yours, you could make a career,’ he said. ‘And not in some massage parlour, either. Hang about with our elite for a year or two and you’ll make enough money to last a lifetime.’ He said everything is different now in Russia. There are sweeping reforms and the people have lots of money. Is that true? What is this elite that I ought to hang about with? Apart from that, he said your roubles have almost the same rate against the dollar as our bahts, so I wouldn’t suffer any great culture shock. Write and tell me what it’s like in Moscow and if there’s a place there for U Hu-Li.
Heads and tails,
U
My little sister U . . . I smiled as I remembered her - serious, solemn and very sincere. She was probably the best of us, and so she always ended up bearing the heaviest burden. She went through the entire war of liberation with Chairman Mao, she had medals from the Chinese National Liberation Army, and when capitalism was restored in China she burned her party card on Tiananmen Square and went away to Thailand. And now she wanted to come to Russia - she thought it was still the same old motherland of the October Revolution . . . The poor girl, I had to persuade her not to come. What if she really did, and ended up miserable and depressed among our northern snows? Or got involved with some kind of national bolsheviks? And when the national bolsheviks signed a contract with ‘Diesel’, she’d stay honest right to the end and then serve obscenely long sentences - it had happened to her so often already . . .
I spent a few seconds searching for an image that could reach her. Eventually I thought I’d found one. I put my hands on the keyboard.
Hello, Little Red,
You can’t possibly imagine how pleased I was to hear from you up here in our snowbound back of beyond. You say you’re fed up with Thailand? Try thinking about this: in the countries of the golden billion, people put money away for a whole year in order to come to your coconut paradise for just a couple of weeks. I understand that the life in the five-star hotels is very different from yours. But, after all, the sea and the sky are the same for all, and that’s the real reason why they come to you from their neon catacombs.
You say life in Thailand is perverted because the visitors swamp the innocent natives with their poisonous dollar syrup and deprive them of the joy of simple labour. I respect your views, but try to look at things from a different angle: those same debauchers of innocence spend the whole year tearing each other’s throats out in their offices in order to save up enough of that poisonous dollar slush. It’s their lives that are really perverted, otherwise why would they come to your massage parlour, my sweet love? Low rates - yes, that is something that must be fought. But what point is there in these universal generalizations that end up with fifty million people getting killed every time?
You ask me what it’s like here. To be brief, even the most hardened of optimists are now finding that any hope that the brown sea advancing on us from all sides consists of chocolate is melting away. And, as the advert puts it so wittily, it is melting not in their hands, but in their mouths.
In Moscow they are building skyscrapers, eating sushi by the ton and bringing billion-dollar court cases. But this boom doesn’t have much to do with the economy. It’s just that the money from all over Russia flows into Moscow and moistens life here a bit before it departs for off-shore hyperspace. I remember you once saying that the fundamental contradiction of the modern age is the contradiction between money and blood. In Moscow its sharpness is blunted somewhat because as yet the blood is spilled far away, and the money always belongs to someone else. But that’s only a temporary state of affairs.
Life here is so distinctive, so unique, that it would take a clairvoyant like Oswald Spengler to grasp its true essence. From Spengler’s point of view, every culture is based on a certain mysterious principle that manifests itself in a multitude of unrelated phenomena. For instance, there is a profound underlying kinship between the round form of a coin and the wall surrounding an ancient town, and so on. I think that if Spengler were to study modern-day Russia, what he would be most interested in would be the same thing that interests you - the local elite.
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