The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  Picturing the dead Sikh to myself as accurately as I could, I recited the requiem mantra three times and went to reuters.com to find out what was going on in the world. Everything in the world was just the same as it had been for the last ten thousand years. I rejoiced briefly in the headline ‘America Ponders Mad Cow Strategy’ and then went to my mail server.

  Together with an invitation to increase the length of my sexual organ and a zip file that I didn’t open, despite the alluring subject of the message (‘Britney Blowing a Horse’), there was a quite unexpected pleasant surprise waiting for me - a letter from my sister E Hu-Li, who I hadn’t heard from for ages.

  I had known sister E since the times of the Warring Kingdoms. She was a terrible rogue. Many centuries ago she was famous throughout the whole of China as an imperial concubine by the name of Flying Swallow. As a result of watching her fly, the emperor lived for twenty years less than he could have done. After that E Hu-Li was punished by the guardian spirits, and she began keeping a low profile, specializing in rich aristocrats, whom she milked dry in the peace and quiet of their country estates, away from the eyes of the world. For the last few hundred years she’d been living in England.

  It was a very short letter:

  Hi there, Ginger,

  How are you? I hope everything’s going well. Sorry to bother you for such a trivial reason, but I need to consult you urgently about something. According to my information, in Moscow there’s a Shrine of Christ the Saver that was first demolished completely, leaving not a single stone in place, and then restored to look just the way it used to be. Is this true? What do you know about it? Please answer quickly!

  Heads and tails,

  E.

  Strange, I thought, what’s all this about? But she had asked me to reply urgently. I clicked on the ‘reply’ button.

  Hello, Carrot-Top,

  Up here in the north everything’s still the same as ever. I’ll write in more detail some time, but meanwhile here’s the answer to your question. Yes there is a Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (that’s the correct form) in Moscow. It was blown up after the revolution and restored at the end of the last century. There really wasn’t a single stone left standing - for a long time there used to be a swimming pool where it had been. But now the swimming pool has been filled in and the cathedral has been built again. The cultural significance of this event is highly ambiguous - at one of the demonstrations I saw the slogan: ‘We demand the restoration of the Moscow swimming pool, barbarously destroyed by the cleptocracy!’ Since I personally have never visited either the first or the second facility, I have no opinion of my own on this subject.

  Heads and tails,

  A.

  I sent the letter and went to the site whores.ru.

  It looked very picturesque - even most of the pop-up ads were subject-related:

  SEE PARIS AND LIVE!

  DUREX ANAL EXTRA STRONG.

  SUVs had appeared even among the condoms. The market was seeking out new approaches and niches: I came across ‘Occam’s Razor’ condoms with a portrait of the medieval scholast and the slogan: ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’ - ‘One should not multiply entities without necessity’. I used to know William of Occam personally. I remember him chasing me round his house in Munich, and two centuries after that the Reformation began - for some reason the two entirely unrelated events have fused together in my memory. But I had no time now for reminiscences - I had to compose an ad for myself quickly, and to do it I had to familiarize myself with already existing examples.

  Fortunately, there was a huge number of them. I found one feature of the genre rather amusing: many of the girls brightened up their notices with a few inserts in verse that had nothing to do with the list of services on offer - it was a kind of verbal piercing, and I decided to have a go at it as well.

  An hour later my text was ready. A demanding critic might perhaps have described it as an eclectic compilation, but I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself in literary circles. My announcement began like this:

  I’m a bright and nimble maid,

  Mistress of the intimate trade!

  Just the way you like it, a bright smile and slender waist,

  Service classical and anal, passion geared to every taste.

  The second couplet, separated from the first by an empty line, was not linked to it by rhyme or rhythm - they were like two different earrings in the lobe of one ear. It looked and sounded really authentic, just like what the other girls did. The lines of verse were set in bold script and the information followed:

  A FAIRY-TALE CUM TRUE!

  Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do gentleman. Classic sex, deep and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian Knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral and anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave Girl services. Face control. Visits by arrangement. Many things are possible. Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can . . .

  A fine little kitten, I thought when I reread what I’d written. I must admit I didn’t really understand what the bandage was doing in there and why anyone would want a sakura branch up his ass. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what fisting was, either, but judging from what the other announcements said, it was either oral or vaginal, which made it the same kind of filth as all the rest. I supposed it must mean shoving in the fist? Did that mean it could be per oris too? In one of the announcements I even saw the following list: ‘fellatio, PR, cunnilingus’. What did that mean? Or ‘strap-on’? It sounded like something cosmic, from the romantic sixties of the last century. But, fortunately, I didn’t have to know what strap-on was - the only thing needed was to introduce myself to the client.

  I don’t think anyone but a fox can understand how I could provide a ‘strap-on’ service without even knowing what it is. It’s not easy to explain that kind of thing, all you can do is offer analogies. I sense a client’s consciousness as a warm, spongy sphere, and in order to send the poor soul into the world of his dreams, first I have to make a little dent in the very hottest spot of that sphere with my tail, and then make the little dent smooth itself out and ripple across the surface of the sphere. That will just be a strap-on. But if I gently force the dent to fold back over on to itself so that it becomes a tender little nipple, that will be the kind of strap-on the client will remember and drool over until his mind finally drowns in the cold ocean of Alzheimer’s disease.

  The same thing applies to fisting, light domination and all the rest. If, say, you want to take an elderly transvestite with higher musical education and a gold tooth in his mouth, and beat him to death with a baseball bat, even then I can assist you with your dubious project. But it’s better for me not to know everything that’s going on in someone else’s mind - it’s easier to keep my own soul pure that way.

  That’s why I had no doubts about my ability to cope with the list of services advertised, no matter what they might be. But there was still something missing in the text. I thought for a moment and then, after ‘A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from well-to-do gentleman’ I wrote in:

  Transsexual, versatile, penis 26x4. Always following the rules means denying yourself all the pleasures! We need to know how to commit the follies that our nature demands of us.

  Ah, if only they knew what our true nature is, I sighed, and took out ‘Transsexual’. As the chef of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich used to say, before the revolution: ‘You can’t spoil gruel with butter, but you can spoil butter with gruel.’ Something else was required . . . After thinking about it for a while, I decided to replace ‘Mistress and Slave Girl services’ with ‘Mistress, Slave Girl and Ray of Light services’. That didn’t impose any additional physical exertions on me, not even imaginary ones, but it opened up wide scope for fantasy.r />
  Fantasy . . . A courtesan I used to know in China during the Late Han period often used to say that a man’s weak spot is the fantasies that fill his mind. When she got old, she was given to a nomad leader as severance pay, and he boiled the poor woman in mare’s milk, hoping to bring back her youth. A weakness can sometimes become a terrible strength.

  I could have gone on improving the text ad infinitum - everyone knows that for a real poet the process continues until the moment the publisher calls round to collect the manuscript. In this case I had to collect the manuscript from myself. And so I decided to put a full stop after the final touchingly artless couplet at the end:

  Turbulent stream, pining without affection,

  I promise you a passionate connection!

  I’d never worked with the site whores.ru before. The procedure for posting information turned out to be the same as on other similar facilities, but there was one unpleasant difference. Posting plain text cost 150 dollars, photographs were twenty apiece. I had three of the WMZ cards that they accepted for payment on the site - a hundred, a fifty and a twenty. Obviously the whole thing was set up to suit these values. I could only post one photo - or else I would have to go to the nearest Metro station for a new supply of Internet money. I decided to make do with one picture, but to send it immediately, so that in the morning it would already be hanging out there on the wires. But I still didn’t manage to send the photograph off quickly - I spent almost an hour choosing it.

  The choice proved difficult because every alternative tinted the services in my list in a different hue, illuminating the strap-on and the fisting with new nuances of meaning . . . Eventually I settled on an old black and white photograph - me in front of a set of bookshelves, with a volume of Alexander Blok in my hands. The book was The Snow Mask, and the photo itself, taken in the 1930s, had a magical, mysterious air to it, as if it had captured the final glimmering of the Silver Age of Russian literature - which was very appropriate for the final service offered in my list. It was a good thing I’d had my most precious negatives and daguerrotypes digitized.

  All that left me to do was choose my artistic pseudonym. I found a suitable list through Google and chose a name from the very beginning - Adele, which reminded me of the Russian word for hell - ‘ad’.

  It was a good quality photo and it took up half a megabyte. I clicked on the ‘send’ button. My little face obediently smiled, shot through the wires into the wall, was swept into the telephone cable and skipped along the electrical backbone of the street, to be intertwined with the other names and faces hurtling along from God knew where to God knew where else, as it dashed towards the distant network gateway.

  The call in response to the announcement came the next morning, shortly after eleven. The client’s name was Pavel Ivanovich. His interest had been caught by the line about the Russian knout. It turned out that he had his own Russian knout, in fact not just one of them, but five - four on a special carved wooden stand and one in his tennis bag.

  Let me say straight away that I would quite happily have thrown all mention of Pavel Ivanovich out of my memoirs, but without him the narrative would be incomplete. He played an important part in my life, in the same way as a filthy, slimy pedestrian underpass might if the heroine happens to walk through it on her way to the other bank of the river of fate. And so I shall have to tell you about him, and I beg your forgiveness in advance for the unappetizing details. Some computer games have a ‘Tx2’ button, and after you press it time moves twice as fast as before. So now I’ll press my little ‘Tx2’ button and try to boil him down into the least possible volume.

  I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years!’

  When I first read about this, I felt envious that I didn’t have any similar practice in my life. But after I met Pavel Ivanovich I realized that now I did.

  Pavel Ivanovich was an elderly scholar of the humanities who looked like a melted-down, hairy pink candle. Formerly he had been a right-wing liberal (I didn’t understand what this outrageous word-combination meant), but following the common trend he had repented to such an extent that he had assumed personal responsibility for all the woes of the motherland. In order to soothe his soul, he had to take a flogging once or twice a week from Young Russia, which he had condemned to poverty by forcing it to earn a living by flogging old perverts instead of studying in university. And so he was caught in a closed circle, which I might possibly have pondered on more deeply, if only he hadn’t masturbated during the session. That destroyed all the mystery.

  If he’d had a real sex worker from somewhere in Ukraine as his own Young Russia, she would never have agreed to be paid only 50 dollars for a one-hour session. Flogging someone is hard work, even when the procedure is merely a hypnotic suggestion. However, I began going to Pavel Ivanovich’s place not just for the sake of the money, but also because he irritated me quite incredibly, provoking uncontrollable spasms of wild fury in me. I had to summon up all my willpower to keep myself in hand. For sheer practical reasons I ought to have gone for richer sponsors, but character has to be trained during the difficult periods of life, when the meaning of doing it is not obvious. That’s when it does the most good.

  So that I could understand my part in what was going on, Pavel Ivanovich gave me a detailed account of all the reasons for his repentance. I was going to take another 50 dollars an hour for this understanding, and I was just waiting for the moment to come when I could bring up the matter of the extra charge. But it never came - Pavel Ivanovich spoke at exceptional length:

  ‘Between 1940 and 1946, my dear, the volume of industrial output in Russia fell by twenty-five per cent. And that was with all the horrors of war. But between 1990 and 1999 it slumped by over half . . . worse than Genghis Khan and Hitler taken together. And that’s not just commie propaganda and lies. It’s what Joseph Stieglitz writes - the chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel Prize winner. Have you read Globalisation and its Discontents? What a terrifying book! And America doesn’t even need the atom bomb, because it has the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund . . .’

  I actually began to forget what I was doing there in his apartment, and only the leather knout lying on the table between us reminded me of it. It soon emerged that Pavel Ivanovich’s repentance was total, embracing not only the economic aspect of the Russian reforms, but also the cultural history of the last few decades.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said, staring keenly into my eyes, ‘that the CIA actually financed the beatnik movement and the psychological revolution? The goal was to create an attractive image of the West for our youth. They wanted to pretend that America has fun. So they did - and for a while they even believed it themselves. But the funniest thing of all is that all these children of LSD generals who tried KGB and strove so hard to copy the beatniks really were doing just what the CIA wanted, that is, they were committing the very sin the Party accused them of! And they were the future intelligentsia, the nerve system of the nation . . .’

  In speaking of the intelligentsia’s debt of guilt to the nation, he kept using two terms that I thought were synonyms - ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘intellectuals’. After a while I just had to ask:

  ‘But what difference is there between a member of the intelligentsia and an intellectual?’

  ‘There’s a very big difference,’ he replied. ‘I can only try to explain it allegorically. Do you understand what that means?’

  I nodded.

  ‘When you were still very little, there were a hundred thousand people living in this city who were paid for kissing th
e ass of a loathsome red dragon - which you probably don’t even remember . . .’

  I shook my head. Once in my young days I really had seen a red dragon, but I’d already forgotten what it looked like - the only thing I could remember was my own fear. It was unlikely that Pavel Ivanovich had that incident in mind.

  ‘Of course, those hundred thousand people hated the dragon, and they dreamed of being ruled by the green toad who fought against the dragon. So, anyway, they came to an arrangement with the toad, poisoned the dragon with lipstick that they got from the CIA and started living a new life.’

  ‘But what have the intell -’

  ‘Wait,’ he said, raising his hand. ‘At first they thought that under the toad they would be doing exactly the same as before, only they’d get ten times as much money for it. But it turned out that instead of a hundred thousand ass-kissers there was only a demand for three professionals working in three eight-hour shifts to give the toad a never-ending royal blowjob. And which of the hundred thousand those three would be, would be decided by an open competition, in which candidates would not only have to demonstrate their advanced professional skills, but also the ability to smile optimistically with the corners of their mouths while they were at work . . .’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread.’

  ‘Well, this is the thread. Those hundred thousand people were called the intelligentsia. And those three are called intellectuals.’

  I have one quirk that is rather hard to explain. I can’t stand it when anyone uses the word blowjob in my presence - outside the context of work, at least. I don’t know why, but it just drives me wild. And in addition, Pavel Ivanovich’s explanation seemed like such a crude, boorish hint at my own profession that I even forgot about the additional fee I’d been planning to ask for.

  ‘Are you talking about a blowjob so that I can understand? On the basis of my experience of life?’