I realized he was conscious when I tried to take the key to the door out of his pants. When I leaned down over him, I saw he was looking at me with his eyelids half open. I jumped back immediately. I was frightened by what had happened to him after the injection - I’d never seen anything like that before, and I didn’t want to take any risks.
‘Phone,’ Mikhalich whispered.
‘What about the phone?’
‘Who . . . who . . .’
‘Who called?’ I guessed. ‘I don’t know. Some man or other.’ He groaned. Amazing. After a blow like that an ordinary man would have been more concerned about the eternal questions. But this one was thinking about telephone calls. As the Soviet poet Tikhonov wrote, ‘If we could make nails out of these men, everyone in Russia would have a happier life’ (he later changed this to ‘there would be no stronger nails in all the world’, but the rough draft was exactly that, I’ve seen it).
‘Give me the key,’ I said, ‘it’s time I was going.’
‘Wait a bit,’ Mikhalich sighed, ‘talk.’
‘I don’t talk to junkies.’
‘Don’t get clever . . .’
He spoke with an effort, leaving long pauses - as if every sentence were a high mountain he had to climb.
‘Oh, sure,’ I said in an offended tone. ‘Don’t get clever. That’s what they said to Liuska too. And then when her client died on the sakura branch, she was arrested. Her lawyer said it was peritonitis, an unfortunate accident. But the investigator stuck the rupture of the colon on her, unpremeditated murder. Bung them three grand, then it’ll be unpremeditated, otherwise you take the full rap. Give me the key, or you’ll get it again. And I don’t give a damn if you are from the FSB. Nothing will happen to me, it’s self-defence.’
And at that I picked up the bottle again.
He made a sinister sort of sound - like a water sprite laughing somewhere in the depths of his millpond. Then he tried to say something, but all that came out was:
‘Sit . . . si . . .’
‘Listen, I’m asking you nicely one last time,’ I said, ‘give me the key!’
‘Bitch,’ he said surprisingly clearly.
These officers are such boors, you know. They simply can’t talk to a girl in a civilized manner. I raised the bottle to hit him again, and at that point the door behind my back opened.
Standing there in the doorway was a tall young man wearing a dark raincoat with the collar turned up. He was unshaven, sullen and very good-looking — I noted that without any kind of personal involvement, with the cold eye of an artist.
The only thing that spoiled him a little were the arrogant, angry creases beside his lips. They didn’t actually make me dislike him, though, they just seemed to establish some distance. But even with those arrogant creases he looked very, very attractive indeed. I’d say he was just a little bit like the young Tsar Alexander Pavlovich - as I recall he also had a fierce, wolfish look during the years immediately after he ascended the throne.
I was struck by the expression of his face. I don’t know how to explain it. As if someone had been living with toothache for many years and become accustomed to taking no notice of it, even though the pain tormented him every single day. He had the kind of glance that’s hard to forget as well: those greyish-yellow eyes imprinted themselves on your retinas and looked straight down into your soul for a few seconds. But the most significant thing about this face, I thought, was that it was a face from the past. There used to be a lot of faces like that around in the old days, when people believed in love and God, and then that type almost disappeared.
We looked into each other’s eyes for a while.
‘I was going to give him some champagne,’ I said, putting the bottle on the table.
The visitor shifted his gaze to Mikhalich.
‘Brought your daughter, have you?’ he asked.
‘Nah,’ Mikhalich croaked from his armchair and even moved his arm (evidently the presence of the visitor had helped him to gather his wits). ‘Nah . . . the whore . . .’
‘Ah,’ said the visitor and looked back at me. ‘So this is the one . . . who offended our consultant?’
‘That’s her.’
‘And what happened to you?’
‘Boss,’ Mikhalich mumbled in reply, ‘the tooth, boss! Anaesthetic!’
The young man sniffed at the air and a grimace of disapproval appeared on his face.
‘So they used ketamine for your anaesthetic, did they?’
‘Boss, I . . .’
‘Or did you call the vet in to have your ears docked?’
‘Boss . . .’
‘Again? I can understand it, out on the job. But why here? Didn’t we have a talk on the subject?’
Mikhalich lowered his eyes. The young man glanced at me and it seemed to me his glance was curious.
‘Boss, I’ll explain,’ said Mikhalich. ‘Word of . . .’
I could physically feel what an effort the words were costing him.
‘No, Mikhalich, I’ll do the explaining,’ said the visitor. He picked up the bottle of champagne off the table and hit Mikhalich over the head with it with all his strength.
This time the bottle broke and a geyser of white foam washed down over Mikhalich from his head to his toes. I was quite certain that after a blow like that he would never get up out of the armchair again - I know a thing or two about human anatomy. But to my amazement, Mikhalich just shook his head from side to side, like a lush who’s had a bucket of water thrown over him. Then he raised his hand and wiped the spatters of champagne off his face. Instead of killing him, the blow had brought him round. I’d never seen anything like it before.
‘All right, then,’ said the young man, ‘take a shower, then get in a taxi and go home. They can give you light broth. Or strong tea. But really Mikhalich, to do things right you ought to go on a barbiturate drip.’
I didn’t understand what that phrase meant.
‘Yes sir,’ said Mikhalich. He struggled to his feet and staggered into the bathroom, leaving a trail of champagne drops behind him. When the door closed the young man turned to me and smiled.
‘It’s stuffy in here,’ he said. ‘Please allow me to show you out into the fresh air.’
I liked his polite manner.
We went out of the flat a different way. The steel pole I’d seen in one of the rooms turned out to lead to the ground floor. You see similar poles in fire stations and go-go bars. You can slide down a pole like that to a big beautiful fire engine and receive a medal ‘for bravery at the scene of a fire’. Or you can rub your bottom and your breasts against it erotically and receive a few moist banknotes from the audience. So many different roads through life lie before us . . .
Fortunately, today I didn’t have to do either of these things. Beside the pole there was a narrow spiral staircase - obviously for less urgent occasions. That was the way we went down, into a dark garage where there was a fantastic black car - an absolutely genuine Maibach. There couldn’t be more than a few of those in the whole of Moscow.
The young man stopped beside the car and raised his head - so that his nose was pointed at me - then took a powerful breath in. It looked weird. But after that his face assumed a blissful expression - as if he’d been really moved by something, in fact.
‘I’d like to apologize for what happened,’ he said, ‘and ask you to do me a favour.’
‘What sort of favour?’
‘I need to choose a present for a girl of about your age. I have no idea about ladies’ jewellery and I would be very grateful for some advice.’
I hesitated for a second. Generally speaking, in situations like this, you should clear out at the first opportunity - but somehow I felt I wanted to continue the acquaintance. And I was wondering what the interior of the car looked like.
‘All right,’ I said.
But the moment I got into the car I forgot all about the interior - I was so struck by the pass on the windscreen.
I’d noticed a
long time before then that the Russian authorities had a certain tendency towards kitsch: they were always attempting to issue themselves a charter of nobility and pass themselves off as the glorious descendants of empire with all its history and culture - despite the fact that they had about as much in common with the old Russia as some Lombards grazing their goats amid the ruins of the Forum had with the Flavian dynasty. The pass on the Maibach’s windscreen was a fresh example of the genre. It had a gold double-headed eagle, a three-digit number and the inscription:
Lo and behold, this sombre carriage
Can travel everywhere in this town
A. S. Pushkin
What can I say? Okay, an eagle. Okay, Pushkin. (I think it was a quotation from A Feast in the Time of Plague.) But the feeling of pride in our great country that the FSB copywriters had been counting on failed to materialize. The problem was probably a wrong choice of period for the references. They should have gone for feudal chronicles, not imperial eagles.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Ah? Me?’ I said, coming to my senses.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When you think, you wrinkle up your little nose in a very touching sort of way.’
We were already driving along the street.
‘By the way, we haven’t introduced ourselves yet,’ he said.
‘Alexander. You can call me Sasha. I’m Sasha Sery.’ That was interesting - ‘sery’ is the Russian word for ‘grey’.
‘And what’s your name?’
‘Adele.’
‘Adele?’ he asked, opening his eyes wide. ‘You’re not joking?’
I shook my head.
‘Incredible. There’s so much in my life that’s linked with that name! You can’t even imagine. Our meeting like this is fate. It’s no accident that you’ve ended up in my car . . .’
‘Do you have a fishing reel with you?’ I asked.
‘A fishing reel? What for?’
‘You can wind me on to it after you finish stringing me along.’
He laughed.
‘You don’t believe me? About Adele?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I can explain what it’s all about. If you’re interested.’
‘I am.’
And I really was interested.
‘Do you know that game on PlayStation - Final Fantasy 8?’
I shook my head.
‘I got almost all the way through it once - and that takes a long time. And then just before the end the enchantress Adele appeared. Very beautiful, a lot taller than a man. The animation’s spectacular - she wakes up and opens her eyes, and she’s covered in these rays of light, radiating out, a lot like the logo for Universal Studios, and she flies to Earth in her sarcophagus.’
‘Where does she fly from?’
‘The Moon.’
‘Aha. And how does it all end?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘That’s the point. I couldn’t defeat her. I did for all the rest, but not her, no way. So the game ended there . . .’
‘Why is this memory so important to you?’ I asked. ‘There are plenty of games.’
‘Before that I’d always succeeded at everything,’ he said.
‘Absolutely everything?’
He nodded.
‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Why not? I believe you. I can tell from the car.’
A few seconds passed in silence. I glanced out of the window. We were approaching the beginning of Tverskoi Boulevard.
‘A new restaurant,’ I said. ‘The Palazzo Ducale. Have you been there?’
He nodded.
‘And what are the customers like?’
‘Oh, the usual.’
‘So what do people talk about there?’
He thought for a second. Then he answered in a ludicrous woman’s voice:
‘What do you think, is Zhechkov frightened to live in the dacha where Stalin’s butcher Yezhov lived?’
Then he answered himself in an equally ludicrous bass:
‘What do you mean? It’s Stalin’s butcher Yezhov who’ll be shitting himself in his grave because Zhechkov’s living in his dacha . . .’
‘And who is this Zhechkov?’ I asked.
He glanced at me suspiciously. Apparently Zhechkov was someone I ought to know. I’m losing the context, I thought, it happens every twenty years or so.
‘I was just giving an example,’ he said. ‘The kind of thing they talk about there.’
I remembered Yezhov’s dacha as it was in the 1930s. I used to like the plaster lions with balls under their paws who guarded the entrance - their faces had a slightly guilty expression, as if they could sense they wouldn’t be able to protect their master. A thousand years earlier a lion looking almost exactly the same used to stand in front of the shrine of the Huáyán sect - only he was made of gold and on his side he had an inscription that I still remember by heart:
The cause of error by living beings is that they believe it is possible to cast aside the false and attain unto the truth. But when you attain unto yourself, the false becomes true, and there is no other truth to which one need attain after that.
What people there used to be around in those times! But nowadays is there anyone who can even understand the meaning of those words? All of them, every last one, have departed to the higher worlds. No one wishes to be born in this hellish labyrinth any more, not even out of compassion, and I’m wandering here on my own in the dark . . .
We stopped at a crossroads.
‘Tell me, Alexander, where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Do you know a good jeweller’s anywhere round here? I mean really good?’
Every time I see a girl in a boutique with an admirer buying her a brooch that costs as much as a small aeroplane, I’m convinced that human females are every bit as good at creating mirages as we are. Perhaps even better. It’s some going to pass off a reproductive mechanism as a delightful spring flower worthy of a precious setting - and to maintain that illusion, not just for minutes, as we do, but for years and decades, and all without the use of a tail. That takes real skill. Evidently women, like mobile phones, have some kind of inbuilt antenna.
This is what my internal voices say about that:
1. since a woman can pass off a reproductive mechanism as a wonderful spring flower, female nature cannot be reduced just to the bearing of children: it also includes at least the skill of brainwashing.
2. by its very nature a wonderful spring flower is exactly the same kind of mechanism for reproduction and brainwashing, only its meat is green and it brainwashes the bees.
3. apart from the woman, no one needs the precious setting, so it’s pointless to discuss whether she is worthy of it or not.
4. mobile phones with inbuilt antennas have convenient shapes, but poor reception, especially in reinforced concrete buildings.
5. mobile phones with an external antenna are inconvenient, and their reception in reinforced concrete buildings is even worse.
Woman is a peaceful creature, she only hypnotizes her own male and inflicts no harm on birds and animals. Since she does this in the name of the supreme biological goal, that is, personal survival, the deception here is pardonable, and it’s none of our foxy business to go sticking our noses in. But when a married man who lives every moment in a dream planted in his head by his wife, complete with elements of nightmare and gothic, suddenly declares over a glass of beer that woman is simply a device for bearing children, that is very, very funny. The man doesn’t even realize how comical he is when he says that. In this particular case I’m not hinting at Count Tolstoy, whom I admire tremendously, I’m speaking generally.
But I’m wandering from the point. I just wanted to say that woman’s hypnotic abilities are obvious, and anyone who has any doubts about that can easily lay them to rest by going into a shop that sells expensive trinkets.
I didn’t realize until the final moment that Alexande
r was choosing a present for me. I simply had no reason to think anything of the kind. I assumed he needed to buy a souvenir for some glamorous little bimbo, and I gave him perfectly serious advice. So I felt quite exceptionally stupid when he finally held out the bag containing the two small cases that he had just paid for. I wasn’t expecting it. And foxes have to foresee what a man will do - if not everything, then at least the things that affect us personally. Our survival depends on it.
The two identical small white boxes contained rings that cost 10,000 and 18,000 dollars - platinum and diamonds. The large stone was point eight of a carat, the small one point five four. Tiffany. Would you believe it - 28,000 dollars! How many times I’d have to strain my tail for that, I thought with a feeling that was almost class hatred. And the most important thing was that he didn’t want anything from me. Apart from my phone number. He said he was flying to the north and he’d call when he got back.
It wasn’t easy buying the rings. The sales assistant wasn’t prepared to put through such a substantial transaction herself. Neither was the cashier.
‘I can’t do it without the manager,’ she kept saying.
It was only when I got back home to Bitsevsky Park that I realized how tired I was - I didn’t even have the strength to check my e-mails. I slept until the middle of the next day. I had suspiciously Borgesian dreams about the defence of a fortress - something like the storming of a city during the Yellow Turban rebellion. I was one of the defenders and I was throwing heavy javelins down from the walls.
No need to explain the symbolism to me, I can’t stand that. Back in the 1920s I used to drive romantic Red Freudians crazy by telling them dreams that I invented: ‘And then our tails fell off and they told us they were lying in a coconut hanging above a waterfall.’ If I sometimes throw javelins in a dream, it doesn’t mean I don’t take in the symbolic significance of what’s going on. And even less does it mean that I do take it in. I stopped collecting that sort of garbage a long time ago. Life’s less cluttered that way.
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Page 8