Buddha's Little Finger

by Виктор Пелевин

  ‘You know, Petka,’ he said, ‘I reckon you’d better get off to bed.’

  I smiled stupidly and wandered back towards the house. Somehow managing to reach my bed, I collapsed on to it and began tumbling down into the next nightmare; I had sensed its inevitable onset as I was still climbing the stairs.

  I did not have to wait for long. I began dreaming of a blue-eyed, blond-haired man tethered with loops to a strange-looking seat like a dentist’s chair. In the dream I knew for certain that his name was Serdyuk, and that what was happening to him now was soon going to happen to me. Coloured wires connected Serdyuk’s arms to a menacing-looking dynamolike machine standing on the floor; I was sufficiently conscious to guess that this mechanism had been added to the picture by my own mind. The handle of the machine was being turned by two men in white coats who were leaning over it. At first they turned the handle slowly, and the man in I he armchair merely trembled and bit his lip, but gradually their movements grew faster, and one after another huge shuddering movements began sweeping in waves through I he bound man’s body. At last he could no longer restrain himself from crying out.

  ‘Stop it!’ he said.

  But his tormentors only worked even faster.

  ‘Stop the dynamo,’ he roared as loudly as he could, ‘turn off the dynamo! The dynamo! The dynamo! The DY-NA-MO!!!’

  6

  ‘Next station - «Dynamo».’

  The voice from the loudspeaker brought Serdyuk to attention.

  The passenger sitting opposite, a weird-looking type with a round, pockmarked face, dressed in a dirty padded kaftan and a turban streaked with splashes of green paint, caught Serdyuk’s senseless glance, touched two fingers to his turban and said loudly:

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Hitler heil,’ Serdyuk replied politely and turned his gaze away.

  He couldn’t figure out who the man was or what he was doing riding in the metro, when an ugly mug like that should have been driving around in at least a BMW.

  Serdyuk sighed, squinted down to his right and began reading the book which lay open on the knees of his neighbour. It was a thin, tattered brochure wrapped in newsprint, on which the words ‘Japanese Militarism’ had been scrawled in ballpoint pen. The brochure was obviously some kind of semi-secret Soviet textbook: the paper was yellow with age and the typeface was peculiar, with a text made up of large numbers of Japanese words set in italics.

  ‘The concept of social duty,’ read Serdyuk, ‘is interwoven for the Japanese with a sense of natural human duty in a way that generates the emotional energy of high drama. This duty is expressed in the concepts on and giri (derived from the hieroglyphs meaning «to prick» and «to weigh down» respectively) which are still very far from being historical curiosities. On is the «debt of gratitude» owed by a child to its parents, a vassal to his suzerain, a citizen to the state. Giri is «obligation and responsibility», and requires that each individual act in accordance with his station and position in society. It is also obligation in relation to one’s own self, the preservation of the honour and dignity of one’s own person, of one’s name. Duty consists in being prepared to sacrifice oneself in the name of on and giri, which define a specific code of social, professional and human behaviour.’

  His neighbour apparently noticed that Serdyuk was reading his book, and he lifted it closer to his face, half-closing it for good measure, so that the text was completely hidden. Serdyuk closed his eyes.

  That’s why they’re able to live like normal human beings, he thought, because they never forget about their duty. Don’t spend all their time getting pissed like folks here.

  It’s not really possible to say what exactly went on in his head over the next few minutes, but when the train stopped at Pushkinskaya station and Serdyuk emerged from the carriage his own soul had become filled with the fixed desire to have a drink - in fact, to take an entire skinful of something. Initially this desire remained formless and unrecognized, acknowledged merely as a vague melancholy relating to something unattainable and seemingly lost for ever, and it only assumed its true form when Serdyuk found himself face to face with a long rank of armour-plated kiosks, from inside which identical pairs of Caucasian eyes surveyed enemy territory through narrow observation slits.

  Deciding on what exactly he wanted proved more difficult. There was a very wide, but fairly second-rate selection - more like an election than a piss-up, he thought. Serdyuk hesitated for a long time, until he finally spotted a bottle of port wine bearing the name ‘Livadia’ in one of the glass windows.

  Serdyuk’s very first glance at the bottle brought back clear memories of a certain forgotten morning in his youth; a secluded corner in the yard of the institute where he studied, stacked high with crates, the sun on the yellow leaves and a group of laughing students all from the same year, handing round a bottle of that same port wine (with a slightly different label, it was true - in those days they hadn’t started putting dots on the Russian ‘i’s yet). Serdyuk also recalled that to reach that secluded spot, secure against observation from all sides, you had to slip through between some rusty railings, usually messing up your jacket in the process. But the most important thing in all of this wasn’t the port wine or the railings, it was the fleeting reminiscence that triggered a pang of sadness in his heart -the memory of all the limitless opportunities and endless highways there used to be in the world that stretched away from that corner of the yard.

  This memory was followed rapidly by the absolutely unbearable thought that the world itself had not changed at all since those old days, it was just that he couldn’t see it any more with the same eyes as he had then: he could no longer squeeze through those railings, and there was nowhere left to squeeze into either - that little patch of emptiness behind the railings had long since been completely paved over with zinc-plated coffins of experience.

  But if he couldn’t view the world through those same eyes any more, he could at least try for a glimpse of it through the same glass, darkly. Thrusting his money in through the embrasure of the kiosk, Serdyuk scooped up the green grenade that popped out through the same opening. He crossed the street, picked his way carefully between the puddles that reflected the sky of a late spring afternoon, sat down on a bench opposite the green figure of Pushkin and pulled the plastic stopper out of the bottle with his teeth. The port wine still tasted exactly the same as it had always done - one more proof that reform had not really touched the basic foundations of Russian life, but merely swept like a hurricane across its surface.

  Serdyuk polished off the bottle in a few long gulps, then carefully tossed it into the bushes behind the low granite kerb; an intelligent-looking old woman who had been pretending to read a newspaper went after it straight away. Serdyuk slumped back against the bench.

  Intoxication is by its nature faceless and cosmopolitan. The high that hit him a few minutes later had nothing in common with the promise implied by the bottle’s label with its cypresses, antique arches and brilliant stars in a dark-blue sky. There was nothing in it to indicate that the port wine actually came from the left bank of the Crimea, and the suspicion even flashed through his mind that if it had come from the right bank, or even from Moldavia, the world around him would still have changed in the same fashion.

  The world was changed all right, and quite noticeably - it stopped feeling hostile, and the people walking past him were gradually transformed from devoted disciples of global evil into its victims, although they themselves had no inkling that was what they were. After another minute or two something happened to global evil itself - it either disappeared or simply stopped being important. The intoxication mounted to its blissful zenith, lingered for a few brief seconds at the highest point, and then the usual ballast of drunken thoughts dragged him back down into reality.

  Three schoolboys walked past Serdyuk and he heard their breaking voices repeating the words ‘you gotta problem?’ with forceful enthusiasm. Their backs receded in the direction of an amphibious Japan
ese jeep parked at the edge of the pavement with a big hoist on the front of its snout. Jutting up directly above the Jeep on the other side of Tverskaya Street he could see the McDonald’s sign, looking like the yellow merlon of some invisible fortress wall. Somehow it all left Serdyuk in no doubt as to what the future held for them.

  His thoughts moved back to the book he had read in the metro. ‘The Japanese,’ Serdyuk thought, ‘now there’s a great nation! Just think - they’ve had two atom bombs dropped on them, they’ve had their islands taken away, but they’ve survived… Why is it nobody here can see anything but America? What the hell good is America to us? It’s Japan we should be following - we’re neighbours, aren’t we? It’s the will of God. And they need to be friends with us too - between the two of us we’d polish off your America soon enough… with its atom bombs and asset managers…’

  In some imperceptible fashion, these thoughts developed into a decision to go for another bottle. Serdyuk thought for a while about what to buy. He didn’t fancy any more port wine, the right thing to follow the playful left-bank adagio seemed like a long calm andante - he wanted something simple and straightforward with no boundaries to it, like the sea in the TV programme Travellers’ Club, or the field of wheat on the share certificate he’d received in exchange for his privatization voucher. After a few minutes’ thought, Serdyuk decided to get some Dutch spirit.

  Going back to the same bench, he opened the bottle, poured out half a plastic cupful, drank it, then gulped at the air with his scorched mouth as he tore open the newspaper wrapped around the hamburger he’d bought to go with his drink. His eyes encountered a strange symbol, a red flower with asymmetrical petals set inside an oval. There was a notice below the emblem:

  The Moscow branch of the Japanese firm Taira incorporated is interviewing potential employees. Knowledge of English and computer skills essential.’

  Serdyuk cocked his head sideways. For a second he thought he’d seen a second notice printed beside the first one, decorated with a similar emblem, but when he took a closer look at the sheet of newspaper, he realized that there really were two ovals - right beside the flower inside its oval border there was a ring of onion, a wedge of dead grey flesh protruding from under the crust of bread and a bloody streak of ketchup. Serdyuk noted with satisfaction that the various levels of reality were beginning to merge into each other, carefully tore the notice out of the newspaper, licked a drop of ketchup off it, folded it in two and stuck it in his pocket.

  Everything after that went as usual.

  He was woken by a sick feeling and the grey light of morning. The major irritant, of course, was the light - as always, it seemed to have been mixed with chlorine in order to disinfect it. Looking around, Serdyuk realized he was at home, and apparently he’d had visitors the evening before - just who, he couldn’t remember. He struggled up from the floor, took off his mud-streaked jacket and cap, went out into the corridor and hung them on a hook. Then he was visited by the comforting thought that there might be some beer in the fridge - that had happened several times before in his life. But when he was only a few feet from the fridge the phone on the wall began to ring. Serdyuk took the receiver off the hook and tried to say ‘hello’, but the very effort of speaking was so painful that instead he gave out a croak that sounded something like ‘Oh-aye-aye’.

  ‘Ohae gozaimas,’ the receiver echoed cheerfully. ‘Mr Serdyuk?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk.

  ‘Hello. My name is Oda Nobunaga and I had a conversation with you yesterday evening. More precisely, last night. You were kind enough to give me a call.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk, clutching at his head with his free hand.

  ‘I have discussed your proposal with Mr Esitsune Kawabata, and he is prepared to receive you today at three o’clock for purposes of an interview.’

  Serdyuk didn’t recognize the voice in the receiver. He could tell straight away it was that of a foreigner - although he couldn’t hear any accent, the person talking to him made pauses, as though he were running through his vocabulary in search of the right word.

  ‘Much obliged,’ said Serdyuk. ‘But what proposal’s that?’

  ‘The one you made yesterday. Or today, to be precise.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Serdyuk. ‘A-a-ha!’

  ‘Write down the address,’ said Oda Nobunaga.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Serdyuk, ‘just a moment. I’ll get a pen.’

  ‘But why do you not have a notepad and a pen by the telephone?’ Nobunaga asked with obvious irritation in his voice. ‘A man of business should do so.’

  ‘I’m writing now.’

  ‘Nagornaya metro station, the exit on the right. There will be an iron fence facing you and a house, with an entrance to the yard. The precise address is Pyatikhlebny Lane, house number five. There will be a… What is it now… A plaque.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That is all from me. Sayonara, as they say,’ said Nobunaga and hung up.

  There was no beer in the fridge.

  Emerging on to the surface of the earth from Nagornaya metro station long before the appointed time, Serdyuk immediately saw a fence covered with battered and peeling tin-plate, but he didn’t believe it could be the same one mentioned by Mr Nobunaga - this fence was somehow too plain and too dirty. He walked around the area for a while, stopping the rare passers-by and asking where Pyatikhlebny Lane was. This was something nobody seemed to know, however, or perhaps they simply didn’t want to tell him - most of the people Serdyuk found to ask were old women in dark clothes plodding slowly on their way to some mysterious destination.

  It was a wild place, like the remnants of some industrial region bombed to smithereens in the distant past and now overgrown with wild grass, through which, here and there, pieces of rusty iron protruded. There was plenty of open space and sky, and he could see dark strips of forest on the horizon. But despite these banal commonplaces, this region was very unusual: if he looked to the west, where the green fence was, he saw a normal panoramic cityscape, but if he turned his gaze to the east, his field of view was entirely filled with a vast stretch of emptiness, with a few street lamps towering above it like gallows trees. It was as though Serdyuk had found his way precisely to the secret border between post-industrial Russia and primordial Rus.

  It was not one of the areas where serious foreign companies opened their offices, and Serdyuk decided this must be some two-bit firm staffed by Japanese who had failed to adjust fully to the demands of the changing world (for some reason he thought of the peasants from the film The Seven Samurai). It was clear now why they’d taken such an interest in his drunken phone call, and Serdyuk even felt a surge of sympathy and warm fellow-feeling for these slightly dull-witted foreigners who, just like himself, had not been able to find themselves a comfortable niche in life - and now, of course, the doubt that had been nagging at him all the way there, the idea that he really should have had a shave, quite simply disappeared.

  Mr Nobunaga’s direction that ‘there will be a house’ could have applied to several dozen buildings in his field of view. Serdyuk decided for no particular reason that the one he was looking for was a grey eight-storey building with a glass-fronted delicatessen on the ground floor. Remarkably enough, after he had spent about three minutes walking around the yard behind the building, he spotted a brass oblong on the wall with the inscription Taira Trading House and a tiny bell-push, at first glance invisible against the uneven surface of the wall. About a yard away from the plaque there was a crude iron door hanging on immense hinges, painted with green paint. Serdyuk looked around in consternation - apart from the door, the only other thing the plaque could possibly relate to was a cast-iron manhole cover in the asphalt. Serdyuk waited until his watch showed two minutes to three and rang the bell.

  The door opened immediately. Standing behind it was the inevitable hulk in camouflage gear, holding a rubber truncheon. Serdyuk nodded to him and opened his mouth in order to explain the reason for his visit - b
ut then his jaw dropped.

  Beyond the door there was a small hallway with a desk, a telephone and a chair, and on the wall of this hallway there was a large mural, showing a corridor extending into infinity. But on looking more closely at the mural, Serdyuk realized it wasn’t a mural at all, it was a genuine corridor, which began on the other side of a glass door. This corridor was very strange: there were lanterns hanging on its walls - he could actually see flickering flames through their thin rice-paper shades - and scattered over the floor was a thick layer of yellow sand, across the surface of which narrow mats made of slivers of split bamboo lay side by side to form a kind of carpet-runner. The same emblem that he had seen in the newspaper was drawn in bright red paint on the lanterns - a flower with four diamond-shaped petals (the side petals were longer than the others), enclosed in an oval. The corridor did not actually run off into infinity, as he’d thought at first, it simply curved smoothly to the right (it was the first time Serdyuk had seen that kind of layout in a building in Moscow), and its far end was hidden from sight.

  ‘What’yer want?’ said the security guard, breaking the silence.

  ‘I’ve a meeting with Mr Kawabata,’ said Serdyuk, pulling himself together, ‘at three o’clock.’

  ‘Ah. Come inside then, quick. They don’t like it when the door’s left open for long.’

  Serdyuk stepped inside and the guard closed the door and locked it with something that looked like a massive valve-wheel.

  ‘Take your shoes off, please,’ he said. ‘The geta are over there.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Serdyuk.

  ‘The geta. What they use for slippers. They don’t wear any other shoes inside. That’s a strict rule.’

  Serdyuk saw several pairs of wooden shoes lying on the floor.

  They looked very clumsy and uncomfortable, something like tall shoe-stretchers with a strap made out of a split string, and you could only put the shoe-stretchers on your bare feet, because the strap had to be inserted between the big toe and the second toe. Just for a second he thought the security guard was joking, but then he noticed several pairs of shiny black shoes with socks protruding from them standing in the corner. He sat down on a low bench and began removing his own shoes. When the procedure was complete, he stood up and noticed that the geta had made him three or four inches taller.