‘A great view from up here, isn’t it?’
I swung round. He was standing by the door of the lift with a tightly packed plastic bag in his hand. The design on the bag was a green snake wound around a medical chalice.
‘There wasn’t any iodine,’ he said anxiously, ‘they gave me fuxidine. Said it was the same, only orange. I think that’s even better for us - it won’t stand out so much beside the tail . . .’
I felt like laughing and turned away towards the window. He walked across and stood beside me. We looked at the city for a while without speaking.
‘It’s beautiful here in summer,’ he said. ‘Put Zemfira on the player, watch and listen: ‘Goodbye, beloved city . . . I almost found a place among your annals . . . What do you think she meant - something like she’s been in deep shit for far too long?’
‘Don’t try to soft-soap me.’
‘You seem to be feeling better.’
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘But . . .’
He nodded towards the plastic bag.
‘No need, thanks. When they bring you in a wounded comrade, you’ll be able to treat him. I’m off.’
‘Mikhalich will drive you.’
‘I don’t want your Mikhalich, I’ll manage.’
I was already at the lift.
‘When can I see you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t die, call in three days.’
After copulation, all animals are sad - so the ancient Romans used to say. Apart from foxes, I would have added. And apart from women. I knew that for certain now.
I don’t mean to say that women are animals. Quite the contrary - men are much closer to the animals in every respect: the smells they give off and the sounds they make, their type of physicality and the methods they use to fight for personal happiness (not to mention what they actually think of as happiness). But the ancient Roman who described his own mood after the act of love in metaphorical terms was evidently such an entirely organic sex-chauvinist that he simply failed to take woman into account, and that means I have to restore justice.
Generally speaking, there could be at least four explanations for this saying:
1. the Romans didn’t think woman was even an animal.
2. the Romans thought woman was an animal, but they copulated with her in a way that really did make her sad (for instance, Suetonius tells us that the law forbade the killing of virgins by strangulation, and the executioner used to ravish them before the execution - how could you help feeling sad?).
3. the Romans didn’t think woman was an animal, they assumed that only man was. For this noble view of things, the Romans could be forgiven a great deal - apart, of course, from those foul-ups of theirs with virgins and strangulation.
4. the Romans had no penchant for either woman or metaphor, but they did for livestock cattle and poultry, who did not reciprocate and were unable to conceal their feelings.
There could be an element of truth in each of these explanations - no doubt all sorts of things happened in the course of several centuries of empire. But I was a happy animal.
For the last fifteen hundred years I’d had an old maid complex - not, of course, in relation to human beings, to whose opinion I was profoundly indifferent, but within our small community of foxes. It had sometimes seemed to me that I was the butt of secret mockery. And there were good grounds for these thoughts of mine - all my sisters had lost their virginity in ancient times, in the most varied of circumstances. The most interesting story was what had happened to sister E - she had been set on a stake by a nomad leader, and she had honestly acted out her agony for three days. She had to wait until the nomads drank themselves into a stupor before making good her escape into the steppe. I suspected that this was the origin of the insatiable hatred for the aristocracy she had manifested for so many centuries in her most whimsical escapades . . .
But even so I was just a little bit sad. As the grammar-school girl Masha from Nikolaev, one of my colleagues on the game in the year 1919, said, there’s a good angel who abandons us when we lose our virginity. But the sadness I felt was radiant, and on the whole I was in an excellent mood.
There was one suspicion clouding it, though. I had the feeling that I’d been treated the same way I had been treating others all my life. Perhaps the whole thing was a suggestion that had been planted in my mind? It was pure paranoia - we foxes can’t be hypnotized. But there was a certain vague unease gnawing at my heart.
I couldn’t understand the transformation that Alexander had gone through. Foxes also undergo a supraphysical tranformation, which I will tell you about later. But it never goes so far - what Alexander had done was mind-blowing. There was an ancient mystery still alive in him, something that foxes had already forgotten, and I knew that I would keep coming back to it in my thoughts for a long time.
And I was also afraid that the loss of virginity might affect my ability to implant suggestions. I had no grounds for any such concerns, but irrational fear is always the hardest to shake off. I knew I wouldn’t calm down until I’d tested my powers. And so when the phone rang with an offer, I decided right away to go.
From his manner of speaking the client sounded to me like a bashful student from the provinces who had saved up enough money for a ritual of farewell with his childhood. But something in his voice made me check the number that lit up against the database I keep in my computer. It turned out to be the nearest militia station. Obviously the fuzz were calling me out for a subbotnik - a working Saturday in honour of the spring - the kind of event I simply couldn’t stand ever since Soviet times. But today I decided to enter the beast’s lair voluntarily.
There turned out to be three cops. There was no shower-room in the station, and I had to prepare myself for battle in a toilet with a cracked toilet-bowl that reminded me vividly of the Cheka’s place in Odessa during the revolutionary years (they used to hold people’s heads down over a toilet bowl like that when they executed them - to avoid getting blood on the floor). My fears, of course, proved entirely unfounded - all the militiamen sank into a trance just as soon as I raised my tail. I could have gone back to the equestrian complex, but an interesting idea occurred to me.
Early that morning I’d been thinking about Rome and remembering Suetonius, and clearly that was the reason for my sudden flash of ingenuity. I remembered a story about Tiberius’s orgies in Capri: it mentioned the so called ‘spintrii’, who inflamed the ageing emperor’s sensuality by conjoining themselves three at a time in front of him. This story fired my imagination - in my own mind I even translated ‘Splinter Cell’ (the title of an innocent computer game about Tom Clancy) as meaning ‘The Sect of the Splintrii’. Now that I found myself in the company of three moral outsiders, I couldn’t resist trying an experiment. And I managed it perfectly! Or rather, they did. Though I must say, I failed to understand what Tiberius found so arousing in this crude spectacle - to my mind it looked more like an illustration of the first noble truth of Buddhism: life is dukha - suffering and pain. But I already knew that, without a triad of copulating militiamen.
In the station I discovered four thousand dollars, which could-n’t have come at a better time. And as well as that, I came across a scholarly large-format volume on criminal tattoos, with photographs, which I enjoyed leafing through. The tendency that this genre had followed in its evolution matched the development of world culture perfectly: religious consciousness was reclaiming the positions it had lost in the twentieth century. Naturally, the manifestations of this consciousness were not always recognizable at first sight. For instance, I didn’t immediately realize that the words ‘SWAT SWAT SWAT’ tattooed under a blue cross that looked more like a German military award than a crucifixion were not meant to be the name of the Los Angeles Police Department’s special assault force, but the Russian phrase ‘Svyat, Svyat, Svyat’ (meaning ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’) written in Latin letters.
The photograph that made the biggest impressio
n on me was a man’s back with a diptych depicting heaven and earth. Heaven was located between his shoulder-blades — the sun was shining and there were angels who looked like postal pigeons flying about. The earth level looked like the official crest of Moscow, with the dragon-killer mounted on his steed, except that instead of a lance, there was a bundle of different-coloured rays emerging from the horseman’s hand, and there were lots of little dragons - spiteful little ones, crooked squashed ones and some who looked quite nice, all crawling along an alleyway planted with trees. The whole scene was entitled ‘Saint George driving the lesbians off Tverskoi Boulevard’.
Flicking through several pages with the traditional Stalins, Hitlers, snakes, spiders and sharks (under one of them it said ‘deep is my motherland’, instead of ‘broad is my motherland’ as in the old patriotic song), I came across the religious theme again: someone’s back decorated with a panoramic view of hell with sinners in torment. I was especially impressed by Bill Gates being devoured by worms and Bin Laden blazing on a bonfire in a frivolous white T-shirt with the emblem:
The final page showed a pale, dystrophic shoulder with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, in which the cap of the mushroom had been replaced by the NIKE streak with the word NUKE in it - evidently a memory of the future.
With the groaning and panting of the spintrii in the background, all this seemed particularly dismal. Where was humanity going? Who was leading it? What was going to happen on earth in fifty years? A hundred years? My springtime mood was spoiled, despite the good haul I’d made. But at least my conscience was clear. I didn’t consider that I was stealing anything - I’d just taken payment for my services. The fuzz had got their sex, I’d got my money - and I’d never concealed the fact that my prices were high.
On the way home I thought about tattoos. I like them, but I almost never have any done. On foxes they don’t last more than twenty years. And apart from that, they often blur in the weirdest way. It’s something to do with the rather different nature of our physical being. In the whole of the last century, I only had one tattoo - two lines that the poet W. H. Auden burned into my heart for ever, and the one-eyed tattooist Slava Kosoi inscribed temporarily on my shoulder:
I am a sex machine.
And I’m super bad.
Below the words there was a large blue tear, which for some reason my clients used to take for either an onion or an enema syringe - as if the inhabitants of the shabby Soviet paradise really didn’t know what it was to be sad.
That tattoo caused me a whole heap of problems - during the struggle against the Soviet Teddy boys - the ‘stilyagi’ - I used to get stopped all the time by the fuzz and the public order squads, who wanted to know what that inscription was in the language of the supposed enemy. I had to work a few Saturday freebees a lot tougher than this one. In short, they put me right off the idea of wearing sleeveless dresses. I still avoid them, even today, although the tattoo faded away ages ago, and the supposed enemy crept up unnoticed and became a supposed ally just as soon as the dust had settled a bit.
When I got home I switched on the TV and tuned in to the BBC World Service. First I watched their review of the Internet, presented by a guy who looked like an immoral version of Bill Clinton, and then the news began. I could tell from the presenter’s dynamic expression that they had a good catch.
‘Today in London an attempt was made on the life of the Chechen essayist in exile, Aslan Udoev. A terrorist suicide bomber from a militant Shiite organization tried to blow him up. Aslan Udoev himself escaped with a minor concussion, but two of his bodyguards were killed at the scene.’
The camera showed the cramped office of a police official who carefully measured out his words into the black gun-barrel of a microphone:
‘We know that the assailant attempted to get close to Aslan Udoev when he was feeding the squirrels in St James’s Park. When Udoev’s guards spotted the terrorist, he detonated his bomb . . .’
A correspondent appeared on the screen - he was standing on a lawn, with the wind ruffling his yellow hair.
‘According to other sources, the device went off prematurely, before the suicide bomber had reached his target. The explosion took place at precisely twelve noon GMT. However, the police have so far declined to make any comment. Witnesses to the event said that before the explosion, instead of the usual “Allah u Akbar”, the suicide bomber shouted “Same Shiite, Different Fight!” But on this point the testimony of witnesses varies slightly, possibly because of the terrorist’s strong Arab accent. It was reported earlier that “Same Shiite, Different Fight” was the name of a Shiite terrorist organization which has stated that its goal is to open a second front of the jihad in Europe. In its ideology this group is close to the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Mokhtad Al-Sadr.’
The camera showed the police official squeezed into his narrow little space once again. The correspondent’s voice asked:
‘We know that the Chechens belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. And the attacker was a Shiite. In this connection, can we say, as many analysts are already doing in their commentaries, that clashes between Shiites and Sunnis are now taking place in London?’
‘We are avoiding any hasty conclusions concerning the motives for the crime and whoever is behind it,’ the police official replied. ‘The investigation has only just begun. And in addition, I should like to emphasize that at the present time we have no concrete information on the programme and goals of any terrorist group called “Same Shiite, Different Fight”, or about any militant Shiite groups in England.’
‘Is it true that the terrorist had wires embedded in his head?’
‘No comment.’
Aslan Udoev appeared on the screen. He was walking along a hospital corridor, squinting hostilely at the camera and holding his bandaged forehead in his hand.
After that they started talking about some footballer’s marriage.
I turned the television off and sat there in a state of prostration for a few minutes, trying to think. It was hard to think - I was in shock. I imagined the possible future: a special clinic, a zombification operation, a command cable installed in your head (I recalled the flesh-coloured wire in the ear of the security guard in the National hotel). And then - your mission. For instance, throw yourself under a tank with a mine on your back - like some heroic German shepherd during the Second World War . . . No, tanks were irrelevant now. Let’s say, under a yellow ‘Hummer’ on Fifth Avenue. That was a more picturesque option, but I didn’t like it much better. As they say, same shite, different Shakespeare specialist . . .
Go away? I could do that - I had a false passport for foreign travel. But where to? Thailand? London? Most likely London . . . I’d been meaning to write a letter to E Hu-Li for a long time, but never got round to it. Now I had a good reason. I sat down at the computer and focused my mind, recalling all the things I’d wanted to tell her just recently. Then I started typing:
Hello, Red,
How are you? Still the same old mischievous smile and those heaps of corpses behind your back? :))) Be careful. But then, you’re the most careful of all of us, so I have nothing to teach you there.
I recently got a letter from our sister U, whom you visited. How I envy her modest, but pure and happy life! She complains that the work makes her tired. It is probably a blissful kind of tiredness - like a peasant’s tiredness after a day’s work in the field. Tiredness like that heals spiritual wounds and helps you to forget your sorrows - it was what Leo Tolstoy was pursuing across the fields with his plough. In the city you get tired in a different way. You know, there are some horses who walk round and round a well, pumping water. If you think about it, you and I are the same kind of beast. The difference is that a well horse drives away the horseflies that feed on it with its tail, but you and I use our tails to lure the horseflies who feed us. And apart from that, the horse contributes to people’s well-being. As for us . . . Well, let’s say people contribute to ours. But I know you can’t stand moralizing
.
U Hu-Li wrote that you have a new husband, a lord. Do you at least keep count of them? I’d love to get just a brief glimpse of him while there’s still something to see :)))) From what she said, just recently you’ve been taking a serious interest in the subject of the super-werewolf. And you obviously didn’t ask me about that demolished church out of idle curiosity.
It is true that the prophecy of the super-werewolf says he will appear in a city where a church or shrine will be restored after not a single stone of it was left standing. But the prophecy is about two thousand years old, and at that time similes and metaphors were the common manner, and everything that was important was always expressed allegorically. Prophecy was written in the language of ancient alchemy - ‘city’ means a soul and ‘a shrine that is destroyed and restored’ means a heart that has fallen under the power of evil and then returned to good. Please do not seek for any other meaning in these words.
I will risk making one suggestion - only, please, do not be offended. You have lived in the West for a long time, and the Christian mythologeme has imperceptibly taken root in your mind. Think about it: you are waiting for some super-werewolf to appear, atone for the sins of the foxes and make our souls pure, as they were at the very beginning of time. Listen. No messiah will ever come to us were-creatures. But each of us can change ourselves by exceeding our own limits. That is the meaning of the expression ‘super-werewolf’ — one who has passed beyond his own boundaries, exceeded himself. The super-werewolf does not come from the East or from the West, he appears from within. And that is the atonement. There is only one path that leads to him. Yes, those same old prescriptions that make you sick:
1. compassion;
2. causing no harm to the weak of this world, animals or people - at least not when it can be avoided;
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Page 13