Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘All right. But one thing I don’t understand: I wasn’t able to see what had happened to you with Ishtar. How can that be?’

  ‘She has that power. Whatever occurs between Ishtar and anyone whom she bites is hidden to everyone else. I wouldn’t be able to see what you talked about with her either. Nor would even Enlil or Marduk.’

  ‘I had the impression you were frightened and upset.’

  Hera’s face darkened.

  ‘I did ask you not to talk about it. I may be able to tell you one day.’

  ‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s talk about something more life-enhancing. What did Loki look like in a dress?’

  ‘Marvellous. He’d even got hold of artificial tits. I think he really liked it.’

  ‘What did you cover in the course on love?’

  ‘Loki talked to me about statistics.’

  ‘What sort of statistics?’

  ‘Are you seriously interested?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He said’ – Hera furrowed her brow in concentration – ‘let me try to remember … “Statistically speaking, the average male’s relations with a woman are characterised by contempt and unbridled cynicism … Research has shown that seen from the perspective of male sexual morality two categories of women exist. A woman who declines to engage in the sexual act with a man is a ‘bitch’. A woman who consents is a ‘whore’. A male’s relations with a woman are not only cynical but extremely irrational. The predominant view among men – held by seventy-four per cent of those surveyed – is that the majority of young women fall into both categories simultaneously, which is of course a logical impossibility …”’

  ‘What was the conclusion?’ I asked.

  ‘That it is essential to be utterly ruthless in our dealings with men, since they deserve no other approach.’

  ‘Did Loki bring an inflatable woman for your lessons too?’

  Hera looked at me in bafflement.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘I mean, of course, an inflatable man,’ I corrected.

  ‘No. You mean you had an inflatable woman?’

  I muttered something unintelligible.

  ‘What did you do with her?’

  I gestured feebly with my hands.

  ‘Was she lovely, though?’

  I could bear no more of this.

  ‘Could we change the subject?’

  Hera shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘As you please. You brought it up.’

  A long silence followed.

  ‘This is a weird conversation we’re having,’ said Hera sadly. ‘We always seem to have to stop talking about whatever subject we get into.’

  ‘We’re vampires,’ I replied. ‘That is probably how it has to be.’

  At that moment the soup was brought in.

  The ensuing ritual took several minutes. The waiters placed on the table a grotesquely rococo soup tureen, took away the unused place settings, replaced them with new plates, then fished out from the steaming depths of the tureen a brightly painted china figurine with exaggeratedly rouged cheeks. At first I thought this must be Khodorkovsky, but the writing across her breast made it clear it was Hillary Clinton. The waiter then ceremonially placed the figure on a towel and presented it for inspection to each of us in turn, approximately as the cork of an expensive bottle of wine is presented to the nostrils of the client. It was then equally ceremonially returned to the soup. Hillary smelt of fish. Clearly there was a subtle point to all this, but once again it escaped me.

  After the waiters had left the room, we stayed sitting on the floor.

  ‘Are you going to eat something?’ enquired Hera.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of the watch.’

  ‘What watch?’

  ‘Patek Philippe,’ I replied. ‘Long story. Anyhow, what has Hillary Clinton to do with Russian fish soup? She’s American, after all. I think they’ve rather overdone this one.’

  ‘It’s always the same in these expensive places,’ said Hera. ‘A sort of epidemic. Like for instance Fallen Demon or IBAN Tsarevich. Have you ever been to the Marie Antoinette on Tverskaya Street?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘They have a guillotine there, just as you go in through the door. And the man wandering round the dining room serving desserts is the Marquis de Sade. Have you been to Akhnaten?’

  ‘No, I haven’t been there either,’ I said, feeling like a clodhopping bumpkin with straw in my hair.

  ‘This season they’ve introduced monotheism. But the patron still dresses like Osiris. Or rather, undresses like Osiris.’

  ‘Osiris?’

  ‘Yes. Although I’m not clear what the connection is. Anyhow, on 4 November, this new Day of National Unity we’ve got now, he is brought back to life five times to Glinka’s music. They bring in cypress trees specially, and keening women.’

  ‘Everyone seems to be searching for some national idea or other.’

  ‘Aha, right,’ agreed Hera. ‘But every time they let it off the hook at the last moment. The worst of it is this indiscriminate eclecticism.’

  ‘That’s not so surprising,’ I said. ‘They suck black liquid, so they can afford it. But this Osiris you were mentioning, he’s not by any chance a vampire, is he?’

  ‘Certainly not. It’s just the role he plays, not his real name. No vampire would ever run a restaurant.’

  ‘You don’t know a vampire called Osiris?’

  Hera shook her head.

  ‘Who is he?’

  For a second I hesitated, unsure whether to tell her or not. Then I decided I would.

  ‘Ishtar told me to seek him out, when she saw how interested I was in certain things she could not tell me anything about.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘For instance, the origins of the world. Or what happens when we die.’

  ‘Do you find things like that really interesting?’ asked Hera.

  ‘Don’t you?

  ‘No,’ replied Hera firmly. ‘They’re just the sort of stupid questions men always ask, the standard phallic projections of an unstable and immature intellect. I’ll find out what happens after death when I die. Why should I bother about it now?’

  ‘That’s true, too,’ I agreed, not wanting to argue. ‘All the same, since Ishtar Borisovna herself suggested it, I should try to find him.’

  ‘Ask Enlil.’

  ‘Osiris is his brother, and they’ve fallen out. I can’t ask Enlil.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hera, ‘I’ll track him down. And if you hear anything interesting from this Osiris, you will tell me, won’t you?’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  Getting up, I began walking round the room as though stretching my legs. In fact they had not gone numb at all, I simply wanted to get closer to Hera and was trying to make my manoeuvre appear more natural.

  I have to admit that all these preliminaries to the active phase of seduction have always been such an effort for me that they threatened seriously to devalue the prize. Usually at such times I behaved like a sex-obsessed idiot (which, to be honest, I was). But on this occasion I knew precisely Hera’s feelings, and was determined to exploit my advantage.

  Reaching the window in the course of my peregrinations, I turned to go back towards the door, then stopped halfway, made a right-angle turn, took two ponderous steps towards Hera, and sat down beside her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s like the old joke,’ I said. ‘One vampire sits on the rails, another comes along and says: “Couldn’t you move along a bit?”’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hera, and blushed a little. ‘I see what you mean, we are sitting on the rails.’

  She pulled over another of the rail-shaped cushions an
d placed it between us.

  I realised that my roaming manoeuvre had been too clumsy. We would have to go on talking.

  ‘Hera,’ I said, ‘do you know what I’d like to ask you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the Tongue. Do you feel it now?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Well, before, for the first six weeks or so, I could feel it all the time. Not just physically, but with my whole … well, brain I suppose. Or, if you’ll forgive the expression, with my soul. But now I’m not aware of it at all. It’s as if the Tongue has gone away; there’s no sensation of it anywhere. I’m just as I was before.’

  ‘It only seems like that,’ said Hera. ‘We are not the same as we were before. What has happened is that our memory has changed along with ourselves, so that now it appears to us as though we were always like that.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Jehovah explained it to me. What we think we remember is not how it really was. Memory is an amalgam of chemical compounds. It can accommodate any changes that are consistent with the laws of chemistry. If you take a lot of acid, the memory also acidifies, and so on. The Tongue radically changes our internal chemistry.’

  ‘That sounds rather alarming,’ I said.

  ‘Why? What is there to worry about? The Tongue won’t do us any harm. Generally speaking, it’s a minimalist. At the very beginning, when it has just found a new nest to settle into, it arranges things how it wants them, bedding itself down so to say. At that stage you may feel uncomfortable. But once it has got used to you it stops being worried about anything and sleeps most of the time, like a bear in its lair. The Tongue is immortal, you know. It only wakes up to get a feed of bablos.’

  ‘What about when there is a tasting?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to wake up for that. It doesn’t care one bit what happens to us from day to day – to it, that’s completely uninteresting. As far as the Tongue is concerned our life is like a dream that often it probably doesn’t even notice.’

  I thought about it. The description seemed to accord pretty well with my own perceptions.

  ‘Have you ever tried bablos?’ I asked.

  Hera shook her head.

  ‘We are to be given it together.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. As far as I could understand, it will come out of the blue. Ishtar decides when. Even Enlil and Marduk don’t know exactly when or how. They only have a vague idea.’

  Every time I learnt something new from Hera, I experienced a slight pang of jealousy.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I do envy you. Not only do you have a car and a driver, you always seem to get to know everything a month before I do. How do you manage it?’

  ‘You ought to be more sociable,’ smiled Hera. ‘And spend less time hanging head down in your cupboard.’

  ‘What is it then, are you always ringing them up, Marduk, Mithra, Enlil?

  ‘No. They telephone me.’

  ‘Why do they do that?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘You know, Rama, when you pretend to be a little bit thick, you’re quite irresistible.’

  For some reason I found this declaration encouraging, and put my arm round her shoulder. I can’t claim that the gesture came across as completely unforced and natural, but at least she did not remove my hand.

  ‘You know what else I don’t understand?’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve completed my studies. I’ve “done Glamour and Discourse”, as Baldur would say. I’ve been through my initiation and am now more or less a fully fledged vampire. What else do I have to do? When am I going to be given a job? Like a military posting, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well what sort of posting might it be?’

  Hera turned her face to look at me.

  ‘Is that a serious question?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘I’m naturally interested in what I am going to do with my life.’

  ‘What do you mean, what are you going to do? You’re going to suck bablos, that’s what. More precisely, the Tongue is going to suck bablos, and you are there to facilitate the process. You’ll build yourself a house near Enlil’s, where all our people live. And you will observe the crossing.’

  I remembered the stone boats in the waterfall next to Enlil Maratovich’s VIP dugout dwelling.

  ‘Observe the crossing? Is that all?’

  ‘What more do you want? To fight for the freedom of humanity?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Enlil Maratovich already explained that’s not possible. All the same I’d feel much happier getting involved in some activity …’

  ‘Why do you have to get involved in anything? You’re still thinking too much like a human.’

  I decided to let this barb pass me by.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do? Just live like a parasite?’

  ‘You are a parasite,’ replied Hera. ‘Or rather, you’re a parasite’s transport system.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘The same …’ said Hera, and sighed.

  She said this so hopelessly and quietly I was seized by a rush of sympathy for her. I felt that we were closer than we had ever been before. I drew her to me and kissed her. For the first time in my life this was an entirely spontaneous, natural development. She did not resist. Now the only thing separating us was that idiotic rail-shaped cushion behind which she had screened herself when I sat down beside her. I threw it out of the way, and Hera was in my arms.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she pleaded.

  I knew for certain she wanted it as much as I did. This gave me the strength to persist when in ordinary circumstances my courage could have failed me. I pushed her down on to the cushions.

  ‘No, truly, please don’t,’ she repeated barely audibly.

  But I had already gone too far to stop. I covered her lips with kisses, at the same fumbling with the zip at the back of her dress.

  ‘Please, I really don’t want you to,’ she whispered for the third time.

  I stopped her mouth with kisses. Kissing her was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time, like leaping into the dark. I could feel in her something strange, quite different from all other girls, and with each kiss I came nearer to the centre of the mystery. My hands roamed ever more confidently all over her body, straying in my ardour even into forbidden territories. At last she responded to my urgent caresses: raising my leg she brought my knee up to her thigh.

  At that moment time seemed to stop – I felt like a runner in the stadium of eternity, frozen at the very moment of triumph. The race was almost over and I was in the lead. I had completed the final lap, and before me now was the dazzling pinnacle of happiness from which only a couple of insignificant movements separated me.

  The next moment the light in my eyes went out and everything was black.

  Never in my life had I experienced anything approaching such pain.

  That such agony could exist was beyond my imagining – multi-coloured, jagged, throbbing in zigzags between unbearable physical convulsions and searing flashes of light.

  In an immaculately controlled movement, specially prepared for by raising my leg in order to clear the trajectory needed for maximum inhuman force, she had kicked me with her knee. The only thing I wanted was to curl up into a ball and vanish far away from anything connected, however remotely, with existence or non-existence, but this was not possible owing to the pain which with every passing second was increasing in severity. I tried to suppress the cries of agony I could hear myself making, but could not succeed entirely, lapsing into a kind of mooing.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ enquired Hera, leaning over me with an expression of distress on her face.

  ‘A-a-a-ah,’ I wailed, ‘a-a-a-ah.’

  ‘Please forgive me,’ she said. ‘It’s an automatic response. It�
��s what Loki taught me: three times you ask the man to stop, and then you strike. I’m really awfully sorry.’

  ‘Oo-oo-oo-ooh.’

  ‘Would you like some tea,’ she asked. ‘I’m afraid it’s cold now though.’

  ‘Ooh-ah-ah-ah … no thank you, no tea.’

  ‘It will pass,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hit you very hard.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. There are five levels of strike. This was the weakest – it’s called “warning”. It’s intended for men with whom one envisages continuing a relationship. It’s not damaging to their health.’

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t get the levels mixed up?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. Is it really so painful?’

  I realised that I was now just about able to move, and rolled over on to my knees. But it was still impossible to straighten up completely.

  ‘Do I infer,’ I asked, ‘that you would still like to continue our relationship?’

  She lowered her eyes apologetically.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Did Loki teach you how to kick like that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So how did you perfect the technique? You told me you didn’t have any special training equipment.’

  ‘We didn’t. Loki put on a goalkeeper’s protector box which he got from a hockey team. I bruised my knees terribly against it, even through all the padding. You can’t imagine how black and blue they were.’

  ‘What are the other strike levels, then?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Just to have some idea what to expect,’ I said, ‘when we continue our relationship.’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘They’re called “warning”, “stopping”, ‘smashing”, “retributory” and “triumphal”.’

  ‘What do they all mean?’

  ‘I should have thought they were all pretty self-explanatory. You know what “warning” is now. “Stopping” is supposed to paralyse, but not to kill on the spot. It’s so that one can leave the scene without needing assistance. The other three are more serious.’

  ‘Allow me to express my gratitude,’ I said, ‘that you refrained from giving me the serious treatment. I shall telephone you every morning to say thank you. Only don’t be surprised if my voice is rather higher than it was.’