Buddha's Little Finger

by Виктор Пелевин

  The forest around them was filled with trembling, mysterious rainbow lights, and the sky above the clearing was covered with mosaics of incredible beauty, unlike anything a man encounters in his gruelling, normal everyday existence. The world around them changed, becoming far more meaningful and animated, as though it had finally become clear why the grass was growing in the clearing, why the wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling in the sky. But the metamorphosis affected more than just the world, it affected the men sitting by the fire as well.

  Kolyan seemed to recede into himself. He closed his eyes and his small square face, which normally wore an expression of gloomy annoyance, no longer bore the imprint of any feeling at all and looked more than anything like a swollen lump of old meat. The standard-issue chestnut crew cut on top of his head also seemed to have softened, so that it looked like the fur trimming of some absurd cap. In the dancing light of the camp-fire his double-breasted pink jacket resembled some ancient Tartar war costume, with the gold buttons on it like decorative plaques from a burial mound.

  Shurik had become even skinnier, more fidgety and terrifying. He was like a frame cobbled together out of rotten planks of wood, on which many years ago someone had hung out their rags to dry and then forgotten about them; in some inexplicable fashion a spark of life had been kindled in the rags, then taken such firm hold that it made life thoroughly uncomfortable for almost everyone else anywhere in the neighbourhood. He bore little resemblance to a living being, and his cashmere pea-jacket only made him look like the electrified dummy of a sailor.

  No sudden changes had taken place in Volodin. Some invisible chisel seemed to have smoothed out all the sharp corners and irregularities of his material exterior, leaving nothing but soft lines that flowed smoothly into each other. His face had become a little paler, and the lenses of his spectacles reflected rather more sparks than were flying into the air from the camp-fire. His movements had also acquired smoothness and precision - in short, it was clear from many signs that he had eaten mushrooms a good many times before.

  ‘Whoah, hea-vy,’ said Shurik, breaking the silence, ‘but heavy! Kol, how’re you doing?’

  ‘Nothin’ much,’ said Kolyan without opening his tightly glued eyelids. ‘Some kind of lights.’

  Shurik turned to Volodin and after the fluctuations produced in the ether by his sharp movement had settled down, he said:

  ‘Listen, Volodin, d’you know how to switch on to this eternal high yourself?’

  Volodin said nothing.

  ‘Nah, I’ve got it now,’ said Shurik. ‘Seems like I’ve realized why no one knows and why no one’s allowed to spiel about it. But you tell me, ah? I ain’t no lunk. I’ll just s p e n d my time quietly tripping out at the dacha, that’s all.’

  ‘Stop that,’ said Volodin.

  ‘Nan, you mean you don’t trust me, for real? Think I’ll cause trouble?’

  ‘No,’ said Volodin, ‘that’s not it. It’s just that nothing good would come of it.’

  ‘Aw, come on,’ said Shurik, ‘don’t be such a tight-wad.’

  Volodin took off his spectacles, wiped them carefully with the hem of his shirt and put them back on again.

  ‘The main thing is you’ve got to understand,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know how to explain… You remember our talk about the inner public prosecutor?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember. The guy who can put you away if you step over the line. Like Raskolnikov when he topped that dame, and he thought his inner prosecutor’d let him go on the nod, only it didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘Exactly. And who do you think the inner prosecutor is?’

  Shurik pondered the question.

  ‘I dunno… probably it’s me myself, some part of me. Who else?’

  ‘And the inner brief who gets you off?’

  ‘Probably me as well. Only it sounds a bit odd, me taking a case against myself and then getting myself off.’

  ‘Nothing odd about it. That’s the way it always is. Now try imagining this inner prosecutor of yours has arrested you, all of your inner briefs have screwed up, and you’ve been put away in your own inner lock-up. Then imagine that there’s some other guy, a fourth one, who never gets dragged off anywhere, who you can’t call a prosecutor, or the guy he’s trying to get behind bars, or a brief. Who’s never involved in any cases at all.’

  ‘Okay, I’ve imagined it.’

  ‘Right, then this fourth guy is the one that goes tripping on the eternal high. And there’s no need to explain anything to him about this high, get me?’

  ‘Who is this fourth guy, then?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Can I get to see him somehow?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Maybe not see him then, but feel him at least?’

  ‘Not that either.’

  ‘So that means he don’t really exist?’

  ‘If you really want to know,’ said Volodin, ‘all these prosecutors and briefs don’t really exist. And you really don’t exist either. If anyone really does exist, then it’s him.’

  ‘I still don’t catch your drift. Why don’t you just tell me what I have to do to switch on to this eternal high?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Volodin. ‘That’s the whole point, you don’t have to do anything. Just as soon as you start doing anything, the court’s in session, right? That’s so, isn’t it?’

  ‘Seems to make sense all right.’

  ‘You see. And once the court’s in session, that means prosecutors, briefs and the whole works.’

  Shurik fell silent and became quite motionless. The energy that lent him life passed momentarily to Kolyan, who seemed to be suddenly roused from sleep - he opened his eyes and glared with hostility at Volodin, then he bared his teeth, revealing a gleaming palladium crown.

  ‘You sold us a line, Volodin, with that inner prosecutor of yours,’ he said.

  ‘Why’s that? ‘ Volodin asked in amazement.

  ‘Because. Afterwards Vovchik Maloi gave me this book with it all laid out straight down the line. Nietzsche it was wrote it. The bastard’s tied it all up in knots so’s no normal person can suss I ‘I, but it all adds up right enough. Vovchik hired this hungry prof, special and sat him down with a young guy as talks the spiel, and in a month the two of them sorted the whole thing so’s all the brothers could read it. Translated it into normal language. Turns out all you gotta do is take out that inner pig of yours, and (hat’s it. Then no one don’t finger no one, get it?’

  ‘Ah, come on, Kolyan,’ Volodin protested gently, almost pityingly. ‘Think what you’re saying. D’you know what you’ll get for taking out the pig?’

  Kolyan laughed loudly.

  ‘Who from? The rest of the inner pigs? That’s the whole idea, you take them all out.’

  ‘Okay, let’s just suppose you’ve dropped all the inner pigs. I hat just means the inner swat team gets on your ass.’

  ‘I can see where you’re comin’ from a mile away,’ said Kolyan. ‘Next you’ll be givin’ me the inner State Security, and then the «Alpha» team, and on and on. What I’m sayin’ is you gotta take them all out and then make yourself internal president.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Volodin, ‘let’s assume you’ve made internal president. Then if you have any doubts, what do you do about it?’

  ‘No problem,’ said Kolyan. ‘Put them down and move on down the line.’

  ‘So you still need the internal pigs for putting down your doubts? And if the doubts are a bit bigger, will it be the internal State Security?’

  ‘They’ll be working for me now,’ said Kolyan. ‘I’m my own internal president. And you all ain’t shit!’

  ‘Yes, Vovchik Maloi did a good job on you. Okay, let’s assume you’ve made internal president and you’ve got your own internal pigs and a huge internal security service with all those Tibetan astrologers and the works.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Kolyan. ‘So’s no one can even get close.’

  ‘So then what’re you going t
o do?’

  ‘Whatever I wanna,’ said Kolyan.

  ‘Like for instance?’

  ‘Like for instance I take a dame and split for the Canaries. ‘

  ‘What do you do there?’

  ‘Like I said, whatever I wanna. If I feel like swimmin’ I go swimmin’, if I feel like screwin’ the dame I screw her, if I feel like it I smoke dope.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Volodin, and the red tongues of flame glinted in his spectacles. ‘You smoke dope. Doesn’t dope put ideas in your head?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So if you’re president, that means you have state ideas, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you what happens next. The first dope you smoke fills your head with state ideas and your internal president ends up facing internal impeachment’

  ‘We’ll break through,’ said Kolyan, ‘I’ll bring in the internal tanks.’

  ‘How are you going to bring them in? Who was it got all the ideas? You. That means you impeach your own internal president. So then who’s going to bring in the tanks?’

  Kolyan thought in silence for a moment.

  ‘Straight away you’ll have a new president,’ said Volodin. ‘And I hate to think what the internal security service will do to the old one so they can get in with the new one. ‘

  Kolyan pondered.

  ‘Well, what of it?’ he said uncertainly. ‘So there’s a new president. ‘

  ‘But you were the old one, weren’t you? So now who ends up in the inner Lubyanka for the rubber-hosepipe kidney treatment? Got no answer? You do. So now you tell me which is best - for the inner pigs to take you in for doing the old woman, or to wind up with the inner State Security Services as ex-president?’

  Kolyan wrinkled up his brow and held his fingers up in a fan shape as he prepared to say something, but at that point he obviously had an unpleasant idea, because he suddenly dropped his head limply.

  ‘Yeah, yeah…’ he said. ‘It’s probably best not to stick your head up. It’s tricky all right…’

  ‘Now the inner pigs have got you,’ Volodin stated. ‘And you tell me, Nietzsche, Nietzsche… D’you know what happened to that Nietzsche of yours?’

  Kolyan cleared his throat. A gob of spittle like a tiny bull terrier separated from his lips and plopped into the fire.

  ‘You’re a real bastard, Volodin,’ he said. ‘You’ve screwed my head up again. I just saw this film on the video, Pulp Fiction, about the American brothers. I felt so good after it! Like I knew now how to carry on livin’. But talkin’ with you’s like getting flushed down into some ditch full of shit… I’ll tell you this - I ain’t never come across none of your inner pigs. If I do, then I’ll waste them, or I’ll call in the shrink to get me off on an insanity plea.’

  ‘Why d’you want to waste the inner pigs?’ Shurik put in. ‘Why bother, when you can just cut them in?’

  ‘You mean the inner pigs are on the take too?’ Kolyan asked.

  «Course they’re on the take,’ said Shurik. ‘Haven’t you seen The Godfather 3? Remember Don Corleone? To get out from under his inner pigs, he sent the Vatican six hundred million greenbacks. Got off with parole, even with all the guys he’d wasted.’

  He turned to face Volodin.

  ‘Maybe you’re gonna tell us the inner pigs ain’t on the take?’

  ‘What difference does it make if they’re on the take or not?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Shurik, ‘that’s not where the spiel was at. It was Kolyan started taking out the pigs. Where was we at? We was talking about the eternal high, yeah? And about some fourth guy who goes tripping on the eternal high while you’re getting things together with the internal prosecutors and briefs.’

  ‘That’s right. It doesn’t matter how you settle up with the inner pigs - you can take them out or cut them in or write a confession. None of the pigs or the guys who pay them off or the guys who confess actually exist. It’s just you pretending to be each of them by turns. I thought you’d understood all that.’

  ‘Not so very much.’

  ‘Remember how you and Kolyan used to work down by Red Square before democracy? When he sold hard currency and you came over with a pig’s pass and confiscated it, and took away the client? Remember how you used to say that if you didn’t believe for just a moment that you were a pig, then the client wouldn’t believe it either and he wouldn’t walk? So you used to feel like a pig.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘And maybe you actually became one?’

  ‘Volodin,’ said Shurik, ‘you’re a mate of mine, but I mean it, you watch your mouth.’

  ‘This entire spiel’s down to me, you just listen. D’you see what we’ve got here? You yourself can believe for a while that you’re a pig. Now just imagine that you do the same thing all your life, only it’s not the client you’re fooling, it’s yourself, and all the time you believe your own show. Sometimes you’re a pig, and sometimes you’re the guy he’s fingering. Sometimes you’re the prosecutor, sometimes you’re the brief. Why d’you think I said they don’t really exist? Because when you’re the prosecutor - where’s the brief? And when you’re the brief - where’s the prosecutor? Nowhere. So it turns out like you’re dreaming them, get me?’

  ‘Okay, okay, I get you.’

  ‘And then apart from the pigs, you’ve got so many other assholes standing in line that life’s not long enough for you to be all of them. The queue waiting for you inside is longer than any of those queues for sausage under the commies. And if you want to understand the eternal high, you have to wipe out the whole queue, get me?’

  Shurik thought about it for a while.

  ‘Ah, who needs it,’ he said at last. ‘I’d better do five grams of coke than go crazy. Maybe this eternal high won’t give me no trip anyway - just like weed don’t do nothing for me.’

  ‘That’s why no one knows about the eternal high,’ said Volodin. ‘That’s precisely why.’

  This time the silence that followed was a long one. Volodin began breaking branches and throwing them into the fire. Shurik took a flat metal flask with an embossed image of the Statue of Liberty out of his pocket, took several large gulps from it and handed it to Kolyan. Kolyan drank too, handed it back to Shurik and began spitting into the fire at regular intervals.

  The branches in the flames cracked like gunfire - sometimes single shots, sometimes short bursts. The camp-fire seemed like an entire universe in which tiny beings, whose scarcely visible shadows flickered between the tongues of flame, squirmed and struggled for a place beside the gobs of spittle falling on the hot embers, in order to escape for at least a few moments from the intolerable heat. The fate of these beings was a sad one - even if anyone were to guess at their spectral existence, how could he possibly explain to them that in actual fact they didn’t live in a fire, but in the middle of a forest filled with the coolness of the night, and if they would only stop struggling for a place by the gobs of a mobster’s spittle, then all of their sufferings would be at an end? Probably he couldn’t. Perhaps the neo-Platonist who used to live in these parts could have managed it - but then the poor man had died without even living to see the Twentieth Congress.

  ‘Verily,’ Volodin said sadly, ‘this world is like unto a burning house.’

  ‘Never mind a burning house,’ Shurik replied readily. ‘It’s a fire in a bloody brothel during a fucking flood.’

  ‘So what d’you do? You gotta live.’ said Kolyan. ‘Tell me, Volodin, d’you believe in the end of the world?’

  ‘That’s a purely individual question,’ said Volodin. ‘If some Chechen or other blows you away, that’s the end of your world.’

  ‘We’ll see who blows who away,’ said Kolyan. ‘What d’you reckon, is it true all the Orthodox believers are in line for pardon?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the Last Judgement,’ Kolyan said quickly in a half-whisper.

  ‘You don’t mean you believe in all that garbage?’ Shurik asked dis
believingly.

  ‘Dunno if I believe it or not,’ said Kolyan. ‘Once I was on my way home from this kill, I felt real miserable, I had all these doubts - you know, when you feel your spirit getting weak. And there’s this kiosk with these icons and these pamphlets and stuff. So I bought one of them - «Life Beyond the Grave» it was called. I read about what happens after you’re dead. It was all such dead familiar stuff, honest. I recognized it all straight off. Holding cell, trial, pardon, time, article. Dying’s like movin’ from jail to the camps. They send the soul off to this heavenly transit jail, tribulations it’s called. Everything done right, two armed escorts and all the whole works, punishment cell downstairs, upstairs - the good life. And while you’re in this transit jail they slap the charges on you - your own and everybody else’s too - and you gotta get yourself off on every article, one after the other. The main thing is, you gotta know the criminal code. But if the big boss feels like it, he’ll stick you in solitary anyway. ‘Cause under his criminal code you’re fitted up under half the articles from the day you’re born. For instance, there’s this article says you answer for all your spiel. Not just when you mouth off out of line, but the whole thing, every single word you ever said. You get that? No matter which way you twist it, there’s always somethin’ they can put you away for. If you got a soul, you’re in for the tribulations. But the big boss can slim your time down, especially if you call yourself a worthless heap of shit. He likes that. And he likes it when you’re afraid of him. Wants everyone to be afraid of him and feel like shit. And there he is with this big-time radiance, and these big wings fanned out wide, bodyguards, angels - the whole works. He looks down at you - what you gotta say now, you lump of shit? Get the picture now? I’m ieadin’ it and I remember - a long time ago, when I was trainin’ to be a weightlifter and it was perestroika, they printed some-thin’ like it in Ogonyok. And when I remembered it, I broke out in a sweat. Turns out life under Stalin was like life after death is now!’

  ‘l don’t get you,’ said Shurik.

  ‘Well, look, under Stalin after death there was atheism, but now there’s religion again. And accordin’ to religion, after death everyone lives like they did under Stalin. Just you figure it the way it was. Everybody knows there’s this window lit up in the Kremlin at night, and He’s there behind it, and He loves you like a brother, and you’re shit-scared of Him, but you’re supposed to love Him with all your heart as well. It’s just like in religion. The reason I remembered Stalin is I began wonderin’ how you can be shit-scared of someone and love him with all your heart at the same time.’