Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  These sections of the catalogue – the military and the erotic – aroused my keenest interest, followed, as is invariably the case in life, by the keenest disappointment. The relevant contents in the filing cabinet itself must have been moved somewhere else. Only in three sections were there any test tubes containing liquid preparations: ‘Master Mask-Makers’, ‘Prenatal Experiences’ and ‘Literature’.

  I had no desire to learn anything more about the people who had made the masks the late Brahma had collected (they were displayed on the walls). Likewise the literature section: it contained many names familiar from the school curriculum and I still remembered the nausea they provoked during lessons. ‘Prenatal Experiences’ was the one that sparked my greatest interest.

  I assumed this must concern the experience of the foetus in the womb. I could not even imagine what it could be like. No doubt, I thought, some vague glimmers of light, muffled sounds from the surrounding environment, rumblings from the maternal bowels, pressures on the body – in short ineffable feelings like soaring weightlessly through the air or swooping up and down on a roller coaster.

  Bracing myself and selecting a test tube labelled ‘Italy-(’ I drew a few drops into the dropper, placed them in my mouth and sat down on the sofa.

  What I then experienced, in its incoherence and illogicality, was like a dream sequence. I seemed to be returning from Italy, where I had evidently failed to complete the task I had been assigned – something to do with stone-carving. I felt sad, because of having left there many things I loved. I could see their shadows: summer-houses among the vines, tiny carriages (these were children’s toys, memories of which were preserved with especial clarity), a rope swing in a garden …

  But before I knew it I was somewhere else, apparently a Moscow railway station. I had disembarked from the train and gone through an inconspicuous door into an obviously specialised building, which seemed to house a scientific institute of some kind. The building was in the process of being renovated: furniture was being moved out, the old parquet taken up from the floor. I decided I had to get out to the street, and found myself walking down a long corridor. At first it snaked along in one direction, then through a circular room to head off in another …

  After some time wandering about in the corridor I noticed a window in one wall, but when I looked through it I realised that I was nowhere near a street exit; in fact I was even further away than when I had started, for now I was several storeys above ground level. I thought I had better ask someone to tell me the way out, but annoyingly no one was within sight. I did not want to go back along the winding corridor, so began opening one door after another looking for someone to ask.

  Behind one of the doors was a cinema. It was in the process of being cleaned, the floor scrubbed. I asked the cleaning women how I could get to the street.

  ‘Down here,’ said an old biddy in a blue overall, ‘down the chute. That’s how we go.’

  She pointed to an opening in the floor and I saw a green plastic shaft like you find in an aquapark. It struck me as a modern and progressive method of transport but I held back, afraid that my jacket might snag in the tube, which seemed rather too narrow. On the other hand, the old woman who had advised me to take this route was herself pretty wide in the beam.

  ‘Is this really the way you go down?’ I asked.

  ‘Course it is,’ said the woman, leaning over it and emptying dirty water with some kind of feathers in it from the bucket she held in her hands. I did not find this at all surprising, merely thinking that now I would have to wait until the tube dried out …

  At this point the experience came to an end.

  By now I had already absorbed enough from my Discourse studies to recognise the symbolism of dream visions. I could even make a guess at interpreting the labels on the test tubes. Presumably, if the one designated ‘Italy-(’ ended, so to say, in midair, and its neighbour was ‘France-)’, logically the first would conclude with the lyrical hero’s leap into the shaft. But I did not test this supposition; the prenatal experience continued to occupy a disagreeable position in my emotional spectrum, reminding me of the feverish hallucinations induced by influenza.

  The episode brought to mind a well-known analogy of the body inside the mother’s womb as a car awaiting the soul which will come to drive it away on its journey. But what is the precise moment when the soul makes its entrance? When the construction of the car commences, or when it is completed and ready to depart? I discovered that it is possible to express this question, which currently divides adherents and opponents of abortion into two implacably opposed camps, in less adversarial formulations. Several examples of Discourse I had absorbed contained more interesting views.

  Among them was, for example, this one: there is no vehicle for the soul to enter; the life of the body resembles the trajectory of a radio-controlled drone. A more radical interpretation still was that there is not even a trajectory of the drone, but a three-dimensional film of such a journey projected in some way onto a static mirror, which is the soul … Strangely enough, this perspective appeared the most plausible to me, probably because at this time my own mirror was reflecting a great number of other people’s films while not itself moving anywhere, suggesting that it was indeed stationary. But what is this mirror? Where is it located? At this point I realised that yet again I was falling into the trap of conceptualising the soul, and my mood accordingly soured.

  A couple of days later I found in one of the drawers a stray test tube containing less liquid than the others. Its index number did not correspond to the index number of the drawer. I checked it in the catalogue and saw that the preparation was designated ‘Rudel ZOO’. The notes confirmed that it concerned the German airman Hans Ulrich Rudel. The classification, however, was in the erotic, not the military section.

  Degustation followed promptly.

  I saw nothing connected with military activities – unless one could include in that category some blurry memories of a Christmas flight over Stalingrad. There were no world-famous villains either. The material was all relentlessly everyday: Hans Ulrich Rudel was featured on his last visit to Berlin. Dressed in a black leather overcoat, with some implausible medal round his neck, he was superciliously, and with virtually no attempt at concealment, copulating in broad daylight with a high-school girl near the Berlin Zoo U-Bahn station. The girl was pale with ecstasy. In addition to the erotic element the preparation included memories of an enormous concrete ziggurat with platforms for anti-aircraft artillery. The whole structure had such a contrived air about it that I began to have doubts about the veracity of the whole proceedings. As for the rest, it resembled a somewhat style-conscious pornographic film.

  I confess that I watched it several times, certainly more than twice. Rudel’s face was that of an intelligent sheet-metalworker; the schoolgirl looked as if she had stepped out of a margarine advertisement. As I understood, intimate encounters in the vicinity of the Zoo station between people previously unacquainted with one another had become something of a tradition as the fall of the city became imminent. Eleventh-hour Aryan coupling appeared a somewhat melancholy pursuit, attributable perhaps to vitamin deficiency. I was particularly struck to learn that Rudel passed the time between aerial combat sorties by throwing the discus around the aerodrome, like a Greek athlete. Somehow I had a completely different conception of these times.

  A few days later I did after all experiment with a preparation from the literary section. The late Brahma had been a great admirer of Nabokov, as was confirmed by the portraits of him on the wall. His library contained no less than thirty preparations, all in one way or another connected with the author. Among them were such strangely labelled test tubes as, for instance, ‘Pasternak+½ Nabokov’. I could not work out what this could possibly mean. Either it concerned an unknown chapter in the personal lives of the titans, or it was an attempt to blend their talents in an alchemic retort according to specified
proportions.

  I wanted to try this preparation. But disappointment awaited me: the degustation did not result in any revelations. At first I thought the tube must contain nothing but water, but after a few minutes the skin of my fingers began to itch and I felt a strong desire to write some verse. I seized pen and paper. Ambition, however, failed to lead to my developing a poetic gift: the lines inched forward one by one but declined to shape themselves into anything consummate or harmonious. After filling up half a notepad, I found I had given birth to the following:

  For your Kant, for your cut, for your rusty kalinka,

  For your underhand tender so tenderly rigged …

  Having reached this point, inspiration found itself blocked by an impenetrable barrier. The beginning seemed to predicate a response such as ‘I would give you …’ but herein lay precisely the difficulty. What, I thought, trying to see the situation objectively through the eyes of a third party, could I conceivably be offering you for your cut of the rigged deal? Several plausible answers couched in highly unsuitable language did occur to me, but none of them could be said to enhance the poetic context.

  I came to the conclusion that my experiment with poetry had run into the sand, and got up from the divan. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by such a surge of joy welling up in my breast that nothing could prevent it from erupting and drenching all mankind with glittering foam. I took a deep breath and allowed the wave to gush tumultuously out. Then my hand wrote, in English:

  My sister, do you still recall

  The blue Khasan and Khalkhin-Gol?

  And that was all.

  It may be that the abridged result of the experiment was due to lack of emotional material in my soul. The greatest architect needs bricks, after all. As far as Nabokov was concerned, the deficiencies of my English vocabulary may also have had something to do with it.

  Nevertheless, the experiment cannot be counted a complete failure. From it I learnt that there must exist ways of ring-fencing the amount of information contained in the preparations: this one had no revelations at all about the poets’ private life.

  I decided to ask Baldur about this.

  ‘You mean you’ve been poking about in the library?’ he asked, clearly displeased.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘You shouldn’t touch anything. Don’t you have enough material to work on? I can ask Jehovah to give you a lot more …’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t do it again. But please explain how can there be only one property in a preparation? For instance, in this case, versification techniques. Without any personal images?’

  ‘It’s a distillation. There is a particular technology which is operated by a vampire-purifier. The red liquid passes through a cylindrical spiral in his helmet. He goes into a special trance and concentrates on the particular aspect of the life-experience he desires to preserve. In the process all other components of the experience are discarded in favour of the content selected by the purifier. This isolates the required spectrum of information and eliminates everything else. Human experience is harmful and destructive, and in large doses can be fatal. Why do you think people die like flies? It’s because of their life experiences.’

  ‘Then why am I gulping down these experiences by the bucketful in my lessons?’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Baldur. ‘You are being given undistilled preparations as a way of furnishing you with ballast, so to speak.’

  ‘Why do I need ballast?’

  ‘A ship with no ballast is liable to capsize and sink. But if she takes in a volume of water to the same level as the waterline outside, she acquires stability. You have to be prepared for the effects of any experience. It’s like being inoculated. Not particularly pleasant, of course, but you just have to put up with it. It’s part of any vampire’s education process.’

  Even without this proscription I would not have wanted to experiment further with Brahma’s filing cabinet. Baldur was right: I was being expected to sample a vast quantity of preparations in the course of my daily lessons, and there was something pathological about wanting to continue doing so in my leisure time.

  But there was still one question that interested me.

  From the conversation with Enlil Maratovich I had learnt that vampires regard human beings as equivalent to milch cows, specially bred to serve as sources of food. This I found difficult to believe, and not merely because humanity had been assigned too menial a role.

  The thing was, nowhere could I see anything that might be seen as the milking mechanism. The biting by which the vampire gained access to the subject’s inner world was clearly not sufficient for sustenance, it was purely a route to analysis of a blood sample. There must be another method.

  I tried to visualise what this method could look like. Perhaps, I thought, vampires consumed red liquid collected in the course of medical procedures? Or perhaps in the Third World there were plantations where people were raised specifically for the purpose?

  Similar themes were common in mass culture. I remembered a film called The Island in which ignorant, infantilised people earmarked for spare-part organ harvesting were bred in facilities deep underground. They moved along sterile corridors, dressed in white sports clothes, hoping one day to draw the lucky straw … Another film, Blade: Trinity, depicted a factory with vacuum-sealed parcels of comatose individuals producing red liquid to feed vampires without ever attaining the level of consciousness.

  Surely the answer to my question could not be anything remotely like that?

  There was another puzzle. Vampires ate normal food. On several occasions I went for a meal with Baldur and Jehovah after our lessons, and our dining had nothing remotely Gothic about it. We patronised a mediocre restaurant on the Garden Ring Road to eat sushi. Everything was quite normal. True, Jehovah did once order a glass of freshly squeezed tomato juice, and while he was drinking it, his Adam’s apple bobbing prominently up and down, I experienced such a feeling of revulsion that I seriously began to doubt my ability to become a vampire. But this was the only time the behaviour of either Baldur or Jehovah suggested even the merest hint of drinking blood.

  Could it be that red liquid was consumed in special rituals on particular days?

  I tried questioning Baldur and Jehovah on how it was done, but each time received the same answer as I had had from Enlil Maratovich: it was too early to speak of it; all in good time; I must wait for the Great Fall.

  Obviously, I thought, there must be a special initiation in store for me, following which the vampire community would accept me as one of their own and reveal its dark secrets. And then, I thought, clenching my fists, I would join in their customs … perhaps even take pleasure in them. How revolting …

  When I was a child, I use to think rissoles were revolting. Yet in time I was educated to like them.

  I hoped I might find answers to my questions somewhere in the filing cabinet. Leafing through the catalogue one more time, I did indeed find something rather curious. It was a strange note on the last page of the journal. There was one preparation on its own in a separate compartment, and it was labelled as follows:

  History: Command of the Mighty Bat

  The compartment was right at the top of the cabinet. When I opened it, instead of the usual rack of test tubes I saw a small red box like a presentation case for an expensive fountain pen. Inside was a test tube, the same as all the others, but with a red stopper. I was intrigued.

  I waited until evening before deciding on a degustation. It did not give me the answer to my most important question, but at last I found out some highly interesting information on another matter: how Brahma and Enlil Maratovich had been able to bite me without my feeling it. Originally I thought there must be some sort of anaesthetic substance which injects itself into the wound, as is the case with certain tropical bloodsucking insects. But I was wrong.

  It transpired that a mome
ntary psychic contact is established between the biter and the subject, akin to the sadomasochistic tandem ridden by the executioner and his victim, of which the latter is only dimly aware. The body feels the bite and realises what is taking place, not on the level of individual human consciousness but lower down, in the connections and valency of the animal brain. The signal is prevented from rising higher because along with the bite the victim receives a kind of shock which suppresses all normal reactions.

  The shock is brought about by a special psychic command transmitted by the vampire’s Tongue. It is known as the ‘Cry of the Mighty Bat’. The precise nature of the Cry is unclear, but to think of it as a physically uttered and audible cry is misleading. It is many millions of years old and is powerful enough to have subdued instantly a mighty dinosaur.

  Nor does it work merely by suppressing the victim’s will. It is rather the memory of a unique biological pact, refined over millions of years, according to which the subdued animal relinquishes its blood yet retains life. The Cry of the Mighty Bat arose in an era far removed from our own, but the oldest areas of our brains have retained the memory they once had of its full horror.

  Unfortunately, so meticulously purified was the preparation from the red case that it excluded all information about who might have made use of this command in antiquity. On the other hand, I was able to understand some scientific details. For instance, I learnt that the command never even reaches the higher centres of the psyche, because the entire process takes only three hundred and fifty milliseconds – below the threshold at which a human being or other large animal can register an event. Nothing whatsoever is retained in the memory of the person who has been bitten by a vampire, or if it is, the brain immediately activates a defensive reaction to eliminate it.

  What, then, do people experience when being bitten by a vampire? Reactions vary. There may be an irrational lassitude, a feeling of dread for the future, a sudden rush of weakness. The brain may be invaded by unwelcome thoughts: deceased relatives, unpaid overdue bills, missed football matches. The victim’s mind avails itself of any device to mask what has occurred – probably the most unusual of all defence mechanisms invented by evolution.