Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘A contribution to what?’

  ‘There is going to be a concert of sorts today – you know the kind of thing, the men will show each other all kinds of ee-er…acts, I suppose. Everyone who has a trick will show it off. So perhaps you could perform for them as well, and recite something revolutionary? Like that piece you gave at the “Musical Snuffbox”?’

  I was piqued.

  ‘But you must understand, I really am not sure that I shall be able to fit in with the style of such a concert. I am afraid that…’

  ‘But you just told me you are not afraid of anything,’ Chapaev interrupted. ‘And then, you should take a broader view of things. In the final analysis, you are one of my men too, and all that is required of you is to show the others what sort of tricks you can turn yourself.’

  For just an instant it seemed to me that Chapaev’s words contained an excessive element of mockery; it even occurred to me that it might be his reaction to the text he had just been reading. But then I realized that there was another possible explanation. Perhaps he simply wished to show me that, when viewed from the perspective of reality, no hierarchy remains for the activities in which people engage – and no particular difference between one of the most famous poets of St Petersburg and a bunch of crude regimental talents.

  ‘Very well then,’ I said, ‘I shall try.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Chapaev. ‘Until this evening, then.’

  He turned back to his bureau and busied himself with studying the map laid out on it. A pile of papers was encroaching upon the territory of the map, and amongst them I could make out several telegrams and two or three packages sealed with red sealing-wax. Clicking my heels (Chapaev paid not the slightest attention to the sarcasm with which I invested this act), I left the study and ran down the stairs. In the doorway I ran into Anna as she came in from the yard. She was wearing a dress of black velvet which covered her breasts and her throat and reached down almost to the floor: none of her outfits suited her so well.

  I actually ran into her in the direct sense of the word; for a brief second my arms, instinctively thrown out ahead of me, closed around her in a tight embrace, unpremeditated and clumsy, but nonetheless disturbing for that. The next instant, as through thrown off by an electric shock, I leapt backwards, stumbled over the last step of the stairway and fell flat on my back – it must all have appeared quite monstrously absurd. But Anna did not laugh – quite the opposite, her face expressed fright and concern.

  ‘Did you hit your head?’ she asked, leaning down over me solicitously and holding out her hand.

  ‘No,’ I said, taking her hand in mine and getting to my feet.

  Even after I had risen she did not withdraw her hand; for a second there was an awkward pause and then I surprised even myself by saying:

  ‘Surely you must understand that this is not the way I am in myself, that it is you, Anna, who make me the most ridiculous being in the world.’

  ‘I? But why?’

  ‘As if you could not see for yourself…You have been sent by God or the devil, I do not know which, to punish me. Before I met you, I had no idea of how hideous I was – not in myself, but in comparison with that higher, unattainable beauty which you symbolize for me. You are like a mirror in which I have suddenly glimpsed the great, unbridgeable gulf which separates me from everything that I love in this world, from everything that is dear to me, that holds any meaning or significance for me. And only you, Anna – hear me out, please – only you can bring back to my life the light and the meaning which disappeared after that first time I saw you in the train! You alone are capable of saving me.’ I uttered all of this in a single breath.

  Of course, I lied – no particular light and meaning had disappeared from my life with Anna’s appearance, because there had not been any before – but at the moment when I pronounced these words, every single one of them seemed to me to be the most sacred truth. As Anna listened in silence, an expression of mingled mistrust and incomprehension gradually stole across her face. Apparently this was the very last thing she had expected to hear from me.

  ‘But how can I save you?’ she asked, knitting her brows in a frown. ‘Believe me, I would be glad to do so, but what exactly is required of me?’

  Her hand remained in mine, and I suddenly sensed a wave of insane hope surge in my breast.

  ‘Tell me, Anna,’ I said quickly, ‘you love to go riding in a carriage, do you not? I have won the trotters from Kotovsky. Here in the manor-house would be awkward. This evening, as soon as it is dark, let us take a ride out into the countryside!’

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘But what for?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what for”? I assumed…’

  Her expression changed instantly to one of weariness and boredom.

  ‘God, what banal vulgarity!’ she said, withdrawing her hand. ‘It would be better if you simply smelled of onions, like the last time.’

  She walked past me, ran quickly up the stairs and entered Chapaev’s study without knocking. I went on standing there for some time; as soon as I had recovered control of the muscles of my face, I went out into the yard. After a long search I managed to find Furmanov in the headquarters hut, where he seemed to have settled in and made himself thoroughly at home. Standing on the table, beside an immense ink stain, was a samovar with a vaudeville boot stuck upside down over its chimney; evidently it served them as a kind of bellows for drawing the fire. Pieces of a dismembered herring were lying on rags beside the samovar. Having told Furmanov that I would recite revolutionary verse at the concert that evening, I left him to carry on drinking his tea – I was sure that there was vodka hidden under the table – in the company of two members of the weavers’ regiment. I went out through the gates of the yard and walked slowly in the direction of the forest.

  It was strange, but I scarcely gave a thought to the declaration I had just made to Anna. I did not even feel particularly angry with myself. It did occur to me, it is true, that on every occasion she teased me with the possibility of a reconciliation, and then, as soon as I took the bait, made me appear quite monstrously absurd – but even this thought evaporated without the slightest effort on my part.

  I walked uphill along the road, looking around me as I went. Soon the road surface came to an end; I walked a little further, then turned off the road, walked down the sloping grassy margin and sat down, leaning my back against a tree.

  Holding a sheet of paper on my knees, I rapidly jotted down a text which was good enough for the weavers. As Chapaev had requested, it was in the spirit of the ‘Musical Snuffbox’, a sonnet with an affected rhyme scheme and a jagged rhythm that might have been ripped and torn with sabres. When it was finished, I realized that I had not included any revolutionary imagery and rewrote the final lines.

  I was on the point of going back to the manor when I suddenly sensed that the insignificant effort I had made in writing these verses for the weavers had aroused my long-dormant creative powers; an invisible wing unfurled above my head, and everything else lost all importance. I remembered the death of the Emperor – this black news had been brought by Furmanov – and an almost pure anapaest threaded with interlinking rhymes flowed out as if of its own accord on to the paper. The form now seemed to me like some totally improbable echo of the past.

  The poem began with a description of two sailors who seemed born from a condensation of the wind and the twilight that had settled over the world. Cleaving the foliage with the dark leather of their jackets, they were leading the bound Emperor. The Emperor was tired and resigned to his fate, but his eyes noticed many things that the sailors did not see; faces in the bushes, orderlies spitting in his beard, and the astounding beauty of this final evening. In their coarse fashion, the sailors attempted to lift the Emperor’s spirits, but he remained indifferent to their words, and even to the clatter of their breech-locks. Clambering up on to a tree stump, he shouted to them:

  In the midst of this stillness and sorrow,

  In these d
ays of distrust

  Maybe all can be changed – who can tell?

  Who can tell what will come

  To replace our visions tomorrow

  And to judge our past?

  He even spoke in English, a fact, however, that did not sur prise me in the slightest. Indeed, how could he, before his death (or perhaps before something else – I did not quite understand that point myself) have expressed himself in the Russian language defiled by the decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars? I found the orderlies far more surprising – I simply could not make out what they meant. However, I had never understood my own poetry particularly well, and had long suspected that authorship is a dubious concept, and all that is required from a person who takes a pen in hand is to line up the various keyholes scattered about his soul so that a ray of sunlight can shine through on to the paper set out in front of him.

  When I returned to the manor-house the performance was already in full swing. In the corner of the yard stood the platform of an improvised stage, hastily cobbled together by the weavers from the planks of a dismantled fence. The men were sitting on benches and chairs which they had pilfered from wherever they could find them, attentively following the action. As I approached, a horse was being forcibly dragged away by its reins, to the loud laughter and ribald comments of the audience – the poor animal obviously possessed some talent which it had been forced to demonstrate. Then a thin man with a sabre hanging on his belt and the face of a village atheist appeared at the edge of the stage; I realized that he must be performing the function of master of ceremonies. He waited for the hubbub of voices to die away and then said solemnly:

  ‘A horse with two pricks is nothing compared to what we have next. Your attention please for Private Straminsky, who can pronounce the words of the Russian language with his arse, and who worked in a circus prior to the liberation of the people. He talks quietly, so please keep quiet – and no laughing.’

  A bald young man wearing spectacles appeared on the stage. I was surprised to note that, in contrast with the majority of Furmanov’s people, his features were cultured, without a trace of bestiality. He belonged to the frequently encountered type of the eternal optimist, with a face creased by frequent grimaces of suffering. He gestured for a stool, then leaned down and supported himself on it with his hands, with his side to the audience and his face turned towards them.

  ‘Great Nostradamus,’ he said, ‘tell me, do, how long will the bloody hydra of the foe continue to resist the Red Army?’

  I wondered what the name Nostradamus could mean for them – perhaps some mighty hero bestriding the dark annals of proletarian mythology? The invisible Nostradamus replied:

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘And why does the bloody hydra continue to resist?’ asked the mouth.

  ‘The Entente,’ replied its invisible interlocutor.

  During the replies the lips of the man on the stage did not move at all, but he performed rapid movements with his protruding backside. The conversation was about politics and the health of the leaders – there were rumours that Lenin was in hospital again with heart problems, and only the captain of his guard was allowed to see him; the hall fell into an entranced silence.

  I immediately realized how it was done. A long time before, in Florence, I had seen a street ventriloquist who had summoned up the spirit of Dante. The performance of the man on stage was something of the same kind, with the exception that the answers given by the ‘spirit’ obliged one to assume that Nostradamus had been the very first Marxist in Europe. It was obvious that the performer was a ventriloquist from the peculiar timbre of the replies – low, breathy and rather indistinct. The only thing that was not clear was why he needed to convince the weavers that he was uttering the sounds through his backside.

  This was a genuinely interesting question. At first I thought it might be impossible to show the Red weavers a conversation with a spirit because, according to their view of the world, spirits did not exist. But then I was suddenly struck by another explanation, and I suddenly realized that the answer lay elsewhere. The performer had instinctively understood that only something thoroughly bawdy was capable of arousing lively interest from his audience. In this regard his skill in itself was entirely neutral – as far as I understood it, ventriloquists do not even speak with their bellies, they simply pronounce the sounds of speech without opening their lips – and therefore he had to present his act as something repulsively indecent.

  Oh, how I regretted at that moment that I did not have one of the St Petersburg symbolists there with me. Could one ever possibly find a symbol deeper than this – or, perhaps I should say, wider? Such will be the fate, I thought with bitterness, of all the arts in this dead-end tunnel into which we are being dragged by the locomotive of history. If even a fairground ventriloquist has to resort to such cheap tricks to maintain his audience’s interest, then what can possibly lie ahead for the art of poetry? There will be no place at all left for it in the new world – or rather, there will, but poems will only be considered interesting if it is known on the basis of sound documentary evidence that their author has two pricks, or at the very least, that he is capable of reciting them through his arse. Why, I asked myself, why does any social cataclysm in this world always result in the most ignorant scum rising to the top and forcing everyone else to live in accordance with its own base and conspiratorially defined laws?

  In the meanwhile, the ventriloquist forecast the imminent demise of the kingdom of capital, then recited a weary, worn-out joke which no one in the audience understood, before issuing in farewell several protracted sounds of a vulgar physiological nature, which were greeted by the audience with enthusiastic laughter.

  The master of ceremonies appeared again and announced my entrance. I ascended the sagging wooden steps, assumed my stance at the edge of the stage and gazed out without speaking at the assembled public. It was a far from pretty sight. It sometimes happens that the glass eyes of a stuffed wild boar project the semblance of some expression, some feeling which might have been expressed if the animal had been alive; the impression is in turn fleshed out by the mind of the observer. Some similar effect seemed to be in evidence here, except in reverse; although the multitude of eyes staring at me were actually alive and I seemed to understand the feeling reflected in them, I knew that they did not express to even the very slightest degree what I was imagining. In reality I would never be able to decode the meaning that glittered in them; indeed, it was probably not worth the effort.

  Not everyone was looking at me. Furmanov was engaged in conversation about something with his two aides-de-camp – in their case the etymology of the term ‘aides’ could be traced back, beyond the slightest possible doubt, to the word ‘hades’. I noticed Anna sitting in one of the most distant rows. She was chewing on a straw with a smile of contempt on her face. I do not think the smile was intended for me, she was not even looking at the stage; she was wearing the same black velvet dress she had worn a couple of hours before.

  I set one foot in front of the other and folded my arms on my chest, but carried on standing there in silence, gazing at some point in the gangway. Soon the audience began murmuring restlessly, and in a few seconds the murmur had swollen to a rather loud rumble, providing a muted background for the more distinct sounds of whistles and hoots. Then, in a deliberately quiet voice, I began to speak:

  ‘Gentlemen, I feel I must beg your forgiveness for making use of my mouth in order to address you, but I have had neither the time nor the opportunity to master the accepted modes of intercourse here…’

  Nobody heard the first words I spoke, but by the end of this phrase the noise had dropped so noticeably that I could distinguish the buzzing of the multitudinous flies circling above my audience.

  ‘Comrade Furmanov has asked me to recite some poetry for you, something revolutionary,’ I continued. ‘As a commissar, there is one comment I would like to make in this regard. Comrade Lenin has warned us against excessive ent
husiasm for experimentation in the field of form. I trust that the artist who preceded me will not take offence – yes, yes, you, comrade, the one who spoke through your arse. Lenin has taught us that art is made revolutionary, not by its unusual external appearance, but by the profound inner inspiration of the proletarian idea. And by way of an example I shall recite for you a poem which speaks of the life of various princes and counts, but which is, nonetheless, a very clear example of proletarian poetry.’

  Silence had established its total and undisputed reign over the seated rows of the public. As though saluting some invisible Caesar, I raised my hand above my head, and in my usual manner, using no intonation whatsoever but merely punctuating the quatrains with short pauses, I recited:

  Princess Mescherskaya possessed a classy number, a fine little

  Tight-fitting velvet dress, black as the Spanish night.

  She wore it to receive a friend newly back from the capital,

  Who shook and trembled and fled from the sight.

  How very wearisome, the princess thought, oh what a painful bore,

  I’ll go and play some Brahms now, why should I care less?

  Meanwhile her visitor concealed his naked self behind the portiere,

  A bagel painted black a-trembling in his passionate caress.

  This story will seem no more than a joke

  To little children who will never guess

  How bloodsuckers exploited common folk,

  Oppressed the peasants and the working class.

  But now each working man can wear a bagel

  As bold as any count was ever able.

  For several seconds the silence hung in the air above the seats, and then they suddenly erupted into louder applause than I had ever managed to elicit even in ‘The Stray Dog’ in St Petersburg. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Anna had risen and was walking away along the aisle, but just at that moment it did not bother me in the least. If I am honest, I must confess that I felt genuinely flattered, even to the extent that I forgot all the bitter thoughts I had been thinking about my audience. I brandished my fist at some invisible foe, then thrust my hand into my pocket, pulled out my Browning and fired twice into the air. The response was a rumbling cannonade from the bristling forest of gun-barrels that had sprouted above the audience, followed by a roar of sheer delight. I gave a brief bow and left the stage, then skirted round a group of weavers who were still clapping, before heading for the manor-house.