Buddha's Little Finger

by Виктор Пелевин

  Chapaev laughed.

  ‘And ust where can human thought advance to?’ he asked.

  ‘Eh?’ I asked in confusion.

  ‘Advance from what? Where to?’

  I decided that in my absent-mindedness I must have spoken out loud.

  ‘Vasily Ivanovich, let us talk about all that when we are sober. I am no philosopher. Let us have a drink instead.’

  ‘If you were a philosopher, said Chapaev, ‘I wouldn’t trust you with anything more important than mucking out the stables. But you command one of my squadrons. At Lozovaya you understood everything just fine. What s happening to you? Too afraid, are you? Or maybe too happy?’

  ‘I do not remember anything,’ I said, once again experiencing that strange tension in all my nerves. ‘I do not remember.’

  ‘Ah, Petka.’ Chapaev sighed, filling the glasses with moonshine. ‘I just don’t know what to make of you. Understand yourself first of all.’

  We drank. Mechanically I reached for an onion and bit out a large chunk.

  ‘Perhaps we should go for a breath of air before bed?’ asked Chapaev, lighting up a papyrosa.

  ‘We could,’ I replied, replacing the onion on the table.

  There had obviously been a brief shower of rain while I was sleeping and the slope of the gully that rose towards the manor-house was damp and slippery. I discovered that I was absolutely drunk - having almost reached the top, I slipped and tumbled back down into the wet grass. My head was flung back on my neck and I saw above me the sky full of stars. It was so beautiful that for several seconds I simply lay there in silence, staring upwards. Chapaev gave me his hand and helped me to my feet. Once we had scrambled out on to level ground, I looked up again and was suddenly struck by the thought that it must have been ages since I had last seen the starry sky, although it had been there all the time right above my head, and all I had to do was look up. I laughed.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Chapaev.

  ‘Nothing special,’ I said and pointed up at the sky. ‘The sky is beautiful.’

  Chapaev looked upwards, swaying on his feet.

  ‘Beautiful?’ he queried thoughtfully. ‘What is beauty?’

  ‘Come now,’ I said. ‘What do you mean? Beauty is the most perfect objectivization of the will at the highest possible level of its cognizability.’

  Chapaev looked at the sky for another few seconds and then transferred his gaze to a large puddle which lay at our feet and spat the stub of his papyrosa into it. The Universe reflected in the smooth surface of the water suffered a momentary cataclysm as all its constellations shuddered and were transformed into a twinkling blur.

  ‘What I’ve always found astounding.’ he said, ‘is the starry sky beneath our feet and the Immanuel Kant within us.’

  ‘I find it quite incomprehensible, Vasily Ivanovich, how a man who confuses Kant with Schopenhauer could have been given the command of a division.’

  Chapaev looked at me with dull eyes and opened his mouth to say something, but at this point we heard a clatter of wheels and the whinnying of horses. Someone was driving up to the house.

  ‘It is probably Kotovsky and Anna.’ I said. ‘It would seem, Vasily Ivanovich, that your machine-gunner has a penchant for strong personalities in Russian shirts.’

  ‘So Kotovsky’s in town, is he? Why didn’t you say so?’

  He turned and walked quickly away, completely forgetting about me. I plodded slowly after him as far as the corner of the house and then stopped. The carriage stood by the porch, while Kotovsky himself was in the act of assisting Anna out of it. When he saw Chapaev approaching, Kotovsky saluted and went to meet him and they embraced. This was followed by a series of exclamations and slaps of the kind that occur at every meeting between two men who both wish to demonstrate how well they are able to keep their spirits up as they wander through the shifting sands of life. They wandered in the direction of the house, while Anna remained beside the carriage. Acting on a sudden impulse I set off towards her -on the way I almost fell again when I stumbled over an empty shell crate, and I had a brief presentiment that I would regret my impetuousness.

  ‘Anna, please! Do not go!’

  She stopped and turned her head towards me. My God, how beautiful she was at that moment!

  ‘Anna,’ I blurted out, for some reason pressing my hands to my breast as I spoke, ‘please believe me when I say… I low badly I feel just thinking about my behaviour in the restaurant. But you must admit that you did give me cause. I understand that this unremittingly self-assertive suffragism is not the real you at all, it is nothing more than conformity to a certain aesthetic formula, and that is merely the result-’

  She suddenly pushed me away.

  ‘Get away from me, Pyotr, for God’s sake,’ she said with a frown. ‘You smell of onions. I’m willing to forgive you everything, but not that.’

  I turned and rushed into the house. My face was burning so hotly that one could probably have lit a cigarette on it, and all the way to my room - I have no idea how I managed to find it in the darkness - 1 roundly cursed Chapaev with his moonshine and his onions. I flung myself on to the bed and fell into a state close to coma, no doubt similar to the state from which I had emerged that morning.

  After a while somebody knocked.

  ‘Petka!’ called Chapaev’s voice. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Nowhere!’ I mumbled in reply.

  ‘Now then!’ Chapaev roared unexpectedly. ‘That’s my lad! Tomorrow I’ll thank you formally in front of the ranks. You understand everything so well! So what were you up to, acting the fool all evening?’

  ‘How am I to understand you?’

  ‘You work it out for yourself. What can you see in front of you right now?’

  ‘A pillow.’ I answered, ‘but not very clearly. And please do not explain to me yet again that it is located in my consciousness.’

  ‘Everything that we see is located in our consciousness, Petka. Which means we can’t say that our consciousness is located anywhere. We’re nowhere for the simple reason that there is no place in which we can be said to be located. That’s why we’re nowhere. D’you remember now?’

  ‘Chapaev.’ I said, ‘I would like to be alone for a while.’

  ‘Whatever you say. Report to me in the morning, fresh as a cucumber. We advance at noon.’

  He retreated along the corridor over the squeaking floorboards. For a while I pondered over what he had said - at first over this ‘nowhere’, and then over the inexplicable advance that he had set for noon the next day. Of course, I could have left my room and explained to him that it was impossible for me to advance because I was ‘nowhere’, but I did not want to do that -1 was overwhelmed by a terrible desire to sleep, and everything had begun to seem boring and unimportant. I fell asleep and dreamed of Anna’s fingers caressing the ribbed barrel of a machine-gun. I was awakened by another knock at the door.

  ‘Chapaev! I asked you to leave me alone! Let me get some rest before battle!’

  ‘It’s not Chapaev,’ said a voice outside the door. ‘It’s Kotovsky.’

  I half sat up in my bed. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I must talk to you.’

  1 took my pistol out of my pocket and laid it on the bed, covering it with the blanket. God alone knew what he could want. I had a presentiment that it was somehow connected with Anna.

  ‘Come in then.’

  The door opened and Kotovsky entered. He looked quite different from when I had seen him during the day - now he was wearing a dressing-gown with tassels, from beneath which protruded the striped legs of a pair of pyjama trousers. In one hand he held a candlestick with three lighted candles, and in the other he had a bottle of champagne and two glasses - when I spotted the champagne my guess that Anna had complained to him about me became a near certainty.

  ‘Have a seat.’ I pointed to the armchair.

  Setting the champagne and the candlestick on the table, he sat down.

  ‘May I smoke h
ere?’

  ‘By all means.’

  When he had lit his cigarette, Kotovsky made a strange gesture - he ran his open hand across his bald head, as though he were pushing back an invisible lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead. I realized that I had seen the movement somewhere before, and immediately remembered where - on our first meeting, in the armoured train, Anna had smoothed down her non-existent locks in almost exactly the same way. The idea flitted through my mind that they must be members of some strange sect headed by Chapaev, and these shaven heads were connected with their rituals, but a moment later I realized that we were all members of this sect - all of us, that is, who had been obliged to suffer the consequences of Russia’s latest attack of freedom and the lice that inevitably accompanied it. I laughed.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Kotovsky asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I was thinking about how we live nowadays. We shave our heads in order not to catch lice. Who could have imagined it five years ago? It really is incredible.’

  ‘Remarkable.’ said Kotovsky, ‘I was thinking about just the same thing - about what is happening to Russia. That’s why I came to see you. On a kind of impulse. I wanted to talk.’

  ‘About Russia?’

  ‘Precisely,’ he said.

  ‘What is there to say?’ I said. ‘Everything is abundantly clear.’

  ‘No, what I meant was - who is to blame?’

  ‘1 do not know,’ I said, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘The intelligentsia. Who else?’

  He held out a full glass towards me.

  ‘Every member of the intelligentsia,’ he continued, his face showing a dark grimace, ‘especially in Russia, where he can only survive if someone else supports him, possesses one revoltingly infantile character trait. He is never afraid to attack that which subconsciously he feels to be right and lawful. Like a child who is not afraid to do his parents harm, because he knows that they may put him in the corner, but they won’t throw him out. He is more afraid of strangers. And it’s the same with this vile class.’

  ‘I do not quite follow you.’

  ‘No matter how much the intelligentsia may like to deride the basic principles of the empire from which it has sprung, it knows perfectly well that within that empire the moral law retained its vital strength.’

  ‘How? How does it know?’

  ‘From the fact that if the moral law were dead, the intelligentsia would never have dared to trample the cornerstones of the empire under foot, just recently I was rereading Dostoevsky - do you know what I thought?’

  I felt one side of my face twitch.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Good is by its very nature all-forgiving. Just think, all of these butchers who are so busy killing people nowadays used to be exiled to villages in Siberia, where they spent days at a time hunting hares and hazel-hens. No, the intelligentsia is not afraid of sacrilege. There’s only one thing it is afraid of -dealing with the question of evil and its roots, because it understands, and quite rightly, that here it could get shafted with a telegraph pole.’

  ‘A powerful image.’

  ‘Toying with evil is enjoyable,’ Kotovsky continued passionately. ‘There’s no risk whatsoever and the advantages are obvious. That’s why there’s such a vast army of villainous volunteers who deliberately confuse top with bottom and right with left, don’t you see? All of these calculating pimps of the spirit, these emaciated Bolsheviks, these needle-punctured liberals, these cocaine-soaked social-revolutionaries, all these-’

  ‘I understand.’

  Kotovsky took a sip of champagne.

  ‘By the way, Pyotr,’ he said casually, ‘while we’re on the subject, I heard you have some cocaine.’

  ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I do. Now that the subject has come up anyway.’

  I reached into my travelling bag, took out the tin and put it on the table.

  ‘Please help yourself.’

  Kotovsky needed no further persuasion. The white tracks lie sprinkled on the surface of the table looked like two major highways under construction. He went through all the requisite manipulations and leaned back in his armchair. After waiting a minute or so, I asked out of politeness:

  ‘And do you often think about Russia in that manner?’

  ‘When I lived in Odessa, I thought about her at least three times a day,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘It was giving me nosebleeds. Then I gave it up. I didn’t want to become dependent on anything.’

  ‘And what happened now? Was it Dostoevsky who tempted you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘A certain inner drama.’

  1 suddenly had an unexpected idea.

  ‘Tell me, Grigory, are you very fond of your trotters?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘We could swap. Half of this tin for your carriage.’

  Kotovsky gave a me a sharp glance, then he picked up the tin from the table, looked into it and said:

  ‘You really know how to tempt a man. Why would you want my trotters?’

  ‘To go driving. Why else?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Kotovsky, ‘I agree. As it happens, I have a set of chemical scales in my luggage…’

  ‘Measure it by eye,’ I said, ‘I came by it very easily.’

  Extracting a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his dressing-gown, he emptied out the papyrosas from it and then took out a penknife and used its blade to transfer part of the powder to the case.

  ‘Won’t it spill?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry, I got this cigarette case in Odessa. It’s special. The trotters are yours.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Shall we drink to our deal?’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said, raising my glass.

  Kotovsky drained his champagne, put the cigarette case in his pocket and picked up the candlestick.

  ‘Well, thank you for the conversation. Please forgive me, I beg you, for intruding during the night.’

  ‘Good night to you. Would you permit me to ask you one question? Since you have already mentioned it yourself -what is the inner drama which is eased so well by cocaine?’

  ‘In the face of the drama of Russia it dwindles to nothing,’ said Kotovsky. He nodded curtly in military fashion and left the room.

  I tried for some time to get to sleep, but was unsuccessful. At first I thought about Kotovsky - I must admit that he had made a rather pleasant impression on me, there was a sense of style to him. Then my thoughts turned back to Chapaev. I began thinking about his ‘nowhere’ and our conversation. At first glance it seemed far from complicated: he had asked me to answer the question, whether I exist because of the world, or the world exists because of me. Of course, it all amounted to nothing more than banal dialectics, but there was a rather frightening aspect to it, which he had pointed out in a masterly fashion with his questions, at first sight so idiotic, about the place where it all happens. If the entire world exists within me, then where do I exist? And if I exist within this world, then where, in what place in the world, is my consciousness located? One might say, I thought, that on the one hand the world exists in me and on the other I exist in the world, and these are simply the poles of a single semantic magnet, but the tricky thing was that there was no peg on which to hang this magnet, this dialectical dyad.

  There was nowhere for it to exist!

  Because its existence required an individual in whose consciousness it could come into being. And that individual had nowhere to exist, because any ‘where’ could only arise in a сonsciousness for which there was simply no place other than one created by itself… But then where was it before it created this place for itself? If within itself, then where?

  I suddenly felt afraid of being alone. Throwing my military jacket over my shoulders, I went out into the corridor, saw the blue radiance of the moon shining through the window on to the staircase and descended to the hallway.

  The horseless carriage was standing near the door. I walked round it a couple of t
imes, admiring its clean lines -the moonlight seemed to lend it additional charm. A horse snorted somewhere close to me. I turned round and saw Chapaev standing with a curry-comb in his hand, brushing the animal’s mane. I walked over and stood beside him; he looked at me. I wonder, I thought, what he will say if I ask him where this ‘nowhere’ of his is located. He will have to define the word in terms of itself, and will find his position in the conversation no better than my own.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ asked Chapaev.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Something is bothering me.’

  ‘What is it, never seen the void before?’

  I realized that by the word ‘void’ he meant precisely the ‘nowhere’ which I had become aware of only a few minutes earlier.

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Never.’

  Then just what have you been seeing, Petka?’ Chapaev asked gently.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ I said. ‘Where are my trotters?’

  ‘In the stable,’ said Chapaev. ‘And just how long have they been yours and not Kotovsky’s?’

  ‘About a quarter of an hour now.’

  Chapaev laughed.

  ‘You be careful with Grigory,’ he said. ‘He’s not as straightforward as he seems,’

  ‘I have already realized that,’ I replied. ‘You know, Vasily Ivanovich, I just cannot get your words out of my head. You certainly know how to drive a person into a corner.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Chapaev, forcing the curry-comb through the tangles of horsehair, ‘I do. And then I give them a good burst from the machine-gun…’

  ‘But I think,’ I said, ‘that I can do it too.’

  ‘Try it.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall also ask a sequence of questions about place.’

  ‘Ask away, ask away,’ muttered Chapaev.

  ‘Let us start at the beginning. There you stand combing a horse. But where is this horse?’

  Chapaev looked at me in amazement. ‘Petka, have you gone completely off your chump?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s right here in front of your face.’

  I said nothing for several seconds. I had not been prepared for such a turn of events. Chapaev shook his head doubtfully.