Buddha's Little Finger
Page 38
‘Entry is for club members only,’ he said.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was here quite recently with two friends, remember? One of them hit you in the groin with the butt of his gun.’
The canary-yellow gentleman’s hostile face suddenly expressed weariness and revulsion.
‘You remember?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But we’ve already paid.’
‘I am not here for money,’ I replied. ‘I would just like to sit inside for a while. Believe me, I shall not be here for long.’
He gave a forced smile, then opened the metal partition to reveal a velvet curtain, which he pulled aside, and I entered a dimly lit hall.
The place had not changed very much - it still looked like a run-of-the-mill restaurant with some pretensions to chic. The public seated among the dense clouds of smoke at the small square tables was quite varied and I think someone was smoking hashish. It was all illuminated by a strange spherical chandelier which rotated slowly around its axis, and the spots of dim light it cast drifted around the hall like glimmers of moonlight. Nobody took any notice of me, and I sat at a small table not far from the entrance.
The hall was bounded on one side by a brightly lit stage on which a middle-aged man with a black, feral beard was standing behind the keyboard of a small organ and singing in a repulsive voice:
Kill no one - I have never killed.
Be faithful - I have never failed.
Thou shalt not pity - I would give the shirt from off my back.
Thou shalt not steal - That’s where I really cut myself some slack.
It was the chorus. The song appeared to be about the Christian commandments, but the treatment was rather original. The manner of singing, quite unfamiliar to me, was obviously popular among the audience - every repetition of the mysterious phrase ‘that’s where I really cut myself some slack’ was greeted with audible ripples of applause and the singer bowed slightly, without ceasing to caress his instrument with his immense hands.
I began to feel a little sad. I had always prided myself on my ability to understand the latest developments in art and recognize the eternal and unchanging elements concealed behind the unpredictable complexities of form, but in this case the rift between my customary experience and what I saw was simply too wide to be bridged. There could have been a simple explanation, of course; someone had told me that before he made Chapaev’s acquaintance, Kotovsky had been little more than a common criminal - this could well have been the reason for my inability to decipher the strange culture which had produced the manifestations that had baffled me so completely in the madhouse.
The curtain at the entrance quivered, and the man in the canary-yellow jacket stuck his head and shoulders out from behind it, still clutching the telephone receiver in one hand. He clicked his fingers and nodded towards my table. Immediately a waiter appeared in front of me, wearing a black jacket and a bow-tie, holding a leather folder with the menu,
‘What would we like to eat?’ he asked.
‘I do not wish to eat.’ I replied, ‘but I would happily drink some vodka. I am chilled.’
‘Smirnoff? Stolichnaya? Absolut?’
‘Absolute,’ I replied. ‘And I would also like - how shall I put it? - something to help me relax.’
The waiter gave me a dubious look, then he turned to the canary-yellow gentleman and made some kind of card-sharper’s gesture. The latter nodded. The waiter leaned down to my ear and whispered:
‘Amphetamines? Barbiturates? Ecstasy?’
I pondered the indecipherable hieroglyphics of these names for a moment or two.
‘I tell you what. Take ecstasy and dissolve it in Absolute, that will be just right.’
The waiter turned to the canary-yellow gentleman once again, gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders and twirled one finger in the air beside his temple. The other man frowned angrily and nodded again.
An ashtray and a vase holding paper napkins appeared on my table. The napkins were most a propos. I took the fountain pen that I had stolen from Zherbunov out of my pocket, picked up a napkin and was just about to start writing, when suddenly I noticed that the pen did not end in a nib, but in a hole that looked like the mouth of a gun barrel. I unscrewed the barrel, and a small cartridge with a black lead bullet without any casing tumbled out on to the table; it was like those they sold for Montecristo guns. This clever little invention was even more welcome - without my Browning in my trouser pocket I felt something of a charlatan. I carefully replaced the cartridge, then screwed the pen back together and gestured to the pale gentleman in the canary-yellow jacket to bring me something with which I could write.
The waiter arrived with a glass on a tray.
‘Your order.’ he said.
I drank the vodka in a single gulp, took the pen from the fingers of the canary-yellow gentleman and immediately absorbed myself in my work. At first the words simply did not come, but then the mournful sounds of the organ bore me up aloft and an appropriate text was ready in literally ten minutes.
By this time the bearded singer had disappeared. I had not noticed the moment of his departure from the stage, because the music continued to play. It was very strange - there was an entire invisible orchestra playing, ten instruments at the very least, but I could see no musicians. Moreover, it was quite clearly not the radio, to which I had grown accustomed in the clinic, nor was it a gramophone recording; the sound was very clear, and quite certainly a live performance. My confusion evaporated, however, when I guessed that it was the effect the waiter’s concoction was having on me. I began listening to the music and suddenly made out a very clear phrase in English, sung by a hoarse voice very close to my ear:
You had to stand beneath my window With your bagel and your drum While I was waiting for the miracle -For the miracle to come…
I shuddered.
This was the sign I had been waiting for - it was quite clear from the words ‘miracle’, ‘drum’ (which undoubtedly referred to Kotovsky) and ‘bagel’ (no commentary was required here). It was true that the singer did not seem to know English too well - he pronounced ‘bagel’ like ‘bugle’ - but that was not so important. I stood up and drifted towards the stage through the pulsating aquarium of the hall, swaying as I went.
The music had stopped most opportunely. Clambering up on to the stage, I leaned against the small organ, which replied with a long extended note of an unpleasant timbre, and then looked around at the tense, silent hall. The customers were a very mixed bunch, but as has always been the case throughout the history of humanity, it was pig-faced speculators and expensively dressed whores who predominated. All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility - and beyond the slightest doubt this was the face of that old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate but as alive as ever. Several young fellows looking like overdressed sailors with cheeks rosy pink from the frost appeared by the curtain that covered the entrance. The canary-yellow gentleman rattled off something to them, nodding in my direction as he did so.
Removing my elbow from the rumbling organ, I raised the napkin covered in writing to my eyes, cleared my throat and in my usual manner, using no intonation whatsoever but simply making brief pauses between the quatrains, I read:
Eternal Non-Return
Hundreds of years spent filing at the bars set in the frame And shifting form and face through flux and dissolution, A madman bearing Emptiness for his name Flees from the clutches of a model institution. He knows quite well there is no time to flee,
Nowhere to go, no path on which to go there.
But more than that, this self-same escapee
Himself cannot be found, for he is nowhere.
To say the process of the filing does exist
Or that there are no file or bars is all the same.
The madman Voyd clutches his rosary in his fist -
All answers to all questions he disclaims.
For
since the world keeps moving but we know not whither.
Better say at once both ‘No’ and ‘Yes’, but swear to neither.
At these words I raised Zherbunov’s pen and fired at the chandelier. It shattered like a toy on a Christmas tree, and a blinding electric light flashed across the ceiling. The hall was plunged into darkness, and immediately I saw the flashes of gunshots from over by the door where the canary-yellow gentleman and the ruddy-faced young fellows had been standing. I went down on all fours and slowly crawled along the edge of the stage, wincing at the intolerable racket. Someone began firing back from the opposite end of the hall, from several barrels at once, and the ricochets struck sparks into the air from the steel door. I realized that I should not be crawling along the edge of the stage, but back into the wings, and I made a turn of ninety degrees.
I heard a groan like the howl of a wounded wolf over by the steel door. A bullet knocked the small organ off its stand and it tumbled on to the floor right beside me. At last, I thought as I crawled towards the wings, at last I had managed to hit the chandelier! But - my God! - was that not always the only thing of which I had been capable, shooting at the mirror-surfaced sphere of this false world from a fountain pen? What a profound symbol, I thought, what a pity that no one sitting in the hall was capable of appreciating what they had just seen. But then, I thought, who knows?
In the wings it was just as dark as in the hall - it seemed that the electricity had failed throughout the building. At my appearance someone dashed away down the corridor, stumbling and falling. They did not get up again, but simply remained concealed in the darkness. Rising to my feet, I set off along the invisible corridor holding my hands out in front of me. It turned out that I remembered the way to the stage door very well. It was locked, but after fiddling with the lock for a minute or so, I opened it and found myself on the street.
A few gulps of frosty air restored me to my senses, but I still had to lean against the wall - the walk along the corridor had been incredibly tiring.
The main door, from which I was separated by about five yards of snow-covered asphalt, swung open and two men came dashing out, ran over to a long black automobile and opened the lid of its baggage compartment. Terrifying-looking weapons suddenly appeared in their hands, and they ran back inside without even bothering to close the lid again, as if the one thing they were most afraid of in all the world was that they might be too late to join in what was happening. They did not even spare me a glance.
New holes appeared, one by one, in the dark windows of the restaurant; the impression I had was that several machine-guns must be working in there simultaneously. I thought that in my time people were hardly any kinder, perhaps, but the times themselves were certainly less cruel. However, it was time for me to be going.
I staggered across the courtyard and out into the street.
Chapaev’s armoured car was standing exactly where I had expected to see it, and the cap of snow on its turret was just as it should have been. The motor was working, and there was a grey-blue cloud of smoke swirling in the air behind the back of the vehicle. I walked up to the door and knocked. It opened, and I climbed inside.
Chapaev had not changed in the slightest, except that his left arm was now supported by a strip of black linen. The hand was bandaged, and I could easily guess that there was empty space under the gauze where the little finger should have been.
I was quite unable to say a single word - it took all the strength I could muster to drag myself on to the divan. Chapaev immediately understood what was wrong with me. He slammed the door shut, murmured a few quiet words into the speaking-tube, and the armoured car moved off.
‘How are things?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘it is hard to make sense of the whirlwind of scales and colours of the contradictory inner life.’
‘I see.’ said Chapaev. ‘Anna sends her greetings. She asked me to give you this.’
He stooped down, reached under the seat with his sound hand and took out an empty bottle with a gold label made out of a square of metal foil. Protruding from the bottle was a yellow rose.
‘She said you would understand.’ said Chapaev. ‘And it seems that you promised her some books or other.’
I nodded, turned towards the door and set my eye against the spy-hole. At first all I could see through it were the blue spots of the street lamps slicing through the frosty air, but we kept moving faster and faster, and soon, very soon we were surrounded by the whispering sands and roaring waterfalls of my dear and so beloved Inner Mongolia.
–Kafka-Yurt 1923-1925
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