The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  IN CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE SAVIOUR

  A feeling rather like nausea prevented me from reading the entire article - I only had the strength to run my eyes over it diagonally, picking out the substance from under the journalistic clichés: ‘the grimace of inexpressible terror frozen on his face’, ‘the tears of the inconsolable widow’, ‘the representatives of the embassy’, ‘investigation of the circumstances’. I wasn’t concerned about what would happen to E Hu-Li- this was all business as usual for her. The investigators of the circumstances were the ones to be concerned about - in case that grimace of inexpressible terror froze on one of their faces too.

  I should have felt sorry for Lord Cricket though. I concentrated, but for some reason instead of his face, all I could recall was documentary footage of a fox hunt - a little bundle of red-brown fur dashing across a field, totally defenceless, quaking in horror and hope, and riders in their elegant caps in pursuit . . . But I recited the requiem mantra anyway.

  The next thing that caught my eye was a column heading:

  SICK PREDATOR TAKES REFUGE

  IN BITSEVSKY PARK

  This magnum opus contained one incredibly impudent paragraph that concerned me personally:

  The fox, covered with numerous bald spots or, more precisely, still covered with fur in places, inspired in those who witnessed the incident not only an intense feeling of pity, but also the suspicion that there was a radioactive waste dump somewhere nearby. Perhaps the old, sick animal had come to people, hoping for the coup de grace that would put an end to its suffering. But one cannot expect even that kind of favour for free from the hardhearted Muscovites of today. Two mounted militiaman set off in pursuit of the sick animal, but how the chase ended remains unknown.

  What a filthy liar, I thought, it’s obvious that none of the witnesses said anything about a radioactive waste dump, and he made it all up himself, just to have something to fill up his column. But then the Internet columnists write about everything in the same vile way - about politics, culture, and even the conquest of Mars. And this time about foxes. This particular rumour-monger had a special trick of his own. When he wanted to cover someone in shit from head to foot, he always mentioned an intense feeling of compassion. I had always been amazed by this ability to take the most exalted of all human feelings, and turn it into a poisonous barb.

  But then, if you just thought about it, there was nothing surprising about that. What was an Internet columnist, after all? A creature somewhat more advanced than a prison-camp guard dog, but very, very inferior to a were-fox.

  1. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a prison-camp guard dog consists in the ability to bark into a strictly defined sector of space.

  2. the difference is that a guard dog cannot guess for itself which is the correct sector to bark into, but an Internet columnist is often capable of this.

  3. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a were-fox is that both try to create mirages that human beings take for reality.

  4. the difference is that a fox is able to do this, but an Internet columnist isn’t.

  The last point is hardly surprising. Would anyone who was able to create plausible mirages work as an Internet columnist? Unlikely. An Internet columnist can’t even convince himself that his inventions are real, I thought, clenching my fists, let alone other people. That’s why he ought to sit quietly and only bark when . . .

  Then I forgot about Internet columnists and prison-camp guard dogs, as the light of truth suddenly flashed in my head.

  ‘Convince himself that his inventions are real,’ I repeated. ‘That’s it. Why, of course!’

  Quite unexpectedly for myself I had solved the riddle that had been tormenting me for ages. My mind had been creeping up on it for many days, first from one side, then from the other - and all in vain. But now something turned and clicked, and everything suddenly fell into place - as if I’d put a jigsaw together by chance.

  I realized how we foxes differ from werewolves. As is often the case, this difference was no more than a mutated similarity. Foxes and wolves were closely related - their magic was based on the manipulation of perception. But the means of manipulation were different.

  A brief theoretical digression is required here, or else I’m afraid what I say will be incomprehensible.

  People often argue about whether this world really exists, or is something like The Matrix movie. It’s a very stupid thing to argue about. All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don’t understand the words they use. Before discussing this subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with the meaning of the word ‘exist’. Then a lot of interesting things would become clear. But people are rarely capable of correct thinking.

  Of course, I don’t mean to say that all people are total idiots. There are some among them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox’s. For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley. He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception. You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the matter are like the cult of Osiris or belief in the god Mithras. In my view, this is the only true thought that has visited the Western mind in its long and funny history: all the Humes, Kants and Baudrillards are only embroidering the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch.

  But where does an object exist when we turn away and stop seeing it? After all, it doesn’t disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it? Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God. But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical demiurge, and their arguments are no worse than Berkeley’s. From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit. By the way, reading Stephen Hawking’s horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosmic photograph of Satan’s rebellion ... There is a middle way through this morass of idiocy - to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of the Devil.

  What can I say to this? From the point of view of us foxes, there never was any Big Bang, just as the Tower of Babel that Breughel painted never existed, even if there is a reproduction of the painting hanging in a room that you dream about. And God and the Devil are simply reproductions that are dreamed by some people to hang in a room of the tower on the picture hanging on the wall in a room they dream about. Berkeley assumed that perception has to have a subject, and so the coins that rolled under the cupboard and the socks that fell behind the bed were solemnly interred in the cranium of a Creator specially created for that purpose. But how do we deal with the fact that Berkeley’s God, in whose perception we exist, Himself exists mostly in the abstract thinking of certain representatives of the endangered European race? And he doesn’t exist at all in the consciousness of a Chinese peasant or a little bird which is unaware that it is God’s? How do we deal with this if ‘to exist’ really does mean ‘to be perceived’?

  We don’t, say the foxes. Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language’s inability to reflect the truth.

  But it is better to run into one of these cul de sacs in the first paragraph, rather than after forty years of searching and five thousand pages of writing. After Berkeley finally got the point, the only thing he wrote about was the wonder-working properties of the tincture of bitumen that he’d come across in North America. And as a result, ever since then he has been mocked by various philistines, who aren’t aware that in that distant time bitumen was produced in America from a plant called Jimson Weed, or Datura.

  Religious hypocrites accuse us were-creatures of addling people’s brains and distorting the Image of God. The people who say this have a rather poor idea of the Image of God, since they mould it after
their own sanctimonious mugs. In any case, talk of ‘distortion’ and ‘addling’ is too judgemental; language like that shifts the question on to the emotional plane and prevents any understanding of the real nature of the matter, which is as follows (please pay close attention to the following paragraph - I have finally reached the most important point).

  Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility, any transformation can occur by two routes - either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.

  In honour of the great Irishman, I would like to call this rule Berkeley’s Law. It is absolutely essential knowledge for all seekers of truth, gangsters and extortionists, marketing specialists and paedophiles who wish to remain at liberty. And so, in their practice, foxes and wolves exploit different aspects of Berkeley’s Law.

  We, the foxes, use transformation of perception. We influence our clients’ perception and make them see what we want them to see. The illusion we induce becomes absolutely real for them - the scars on the unforgettable Pavel Ivanovich’s back are the best possible proof of that. But we foxes continue to see the initial reality just as, according to Berkeley, God sees it. That is why we are accused of distorting the Image of God.

  This, of course, is a hypocritical accusation, based on a double standard. The transformation of perception is the basis not only of foxes’ witchcraft, but also of many marketing techniques. For instance, Ford takes the cheap F-150 pick-up truck, gives it a lovely new front grille, restyles the bodywork and calls the resultant product the ‘Lincoln Navigator’. And no one says that Ford is distorting the Image of God. I won’t say anything about politics, everything’s clear already in that area. But somehow it’s only we foxes who provoke indignation.

  Unlike us, werewolves use perception of transformation. They create an illusion, not for others, but for themselves. And they believe in it so strongly that the illusion ceases to be an illusion. There’s a passage in the Bible on that subject - ‘if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, “Move from here to there, and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you.”’ The werewolves have this mustard seed. Their transformation is a kind of alchemical chain reaction.

  First a werewolf makes himself believe that his tail is growing. And the emerging tail, which in wolves is the same kind of hypnotic organ as it is in foxes, exerts a hypnotic influence on the wolf’s own consciousness, convincing him that he really is undergoing transformation and so on until he is completely transformed into a beast. Technologists call this positive feedback.

  Alexander’s transformation always began in the same way: his body curved over, as if some invisible cable joining his tail and his cranium were being drawn taut. Now I’d realized what was happening. While foxes directed energy at other people, wolves trained it on themselves, inducing a transformation, not in others’ perception, but in their own, and only afterwards, as a consequence, in that of others.

  Can we call such a transformation real? I have never completely understood the meaning of this epithet, especially since every historical age fills it with its own meaning. For instance, in modern Russian the word ‘real’ is employed in four basic ways:

  1. as a battle cry uttered by bandits and FSB agents during the ritual change-over of the roof, or protection provider.

  2. a jargon term used by the upper rat and oligarchy in conversations about their offshore accounts.

  3. a technical term applied to immovable property.

  4. a widely used adjective with the meaning ‘having a dollar equivalent’.

  The latter meaning makes the term ‘real’ a synonym for the word ‘metaphysical’, since nowadays the dollar is an occult, mystical unit based entirely on the belief that tomorrow will be like today. And mysticism is something that should be practised not by were-creatures, but by those who are professionally obliged to do it - the PR consultants, political technologists and economists. That is why I did not wish to call the werewolf’s transformation ‘real’ - if I did, it might give the impression that it involves cheap human black magic. But two things were undoubtedly true:

  1. a wolf’s transformation was qualitatively different from a fox’s illusion, although it was based on the same effect.

  2. the lupine metamorphosis consumed an immense amount of energy - far more than we foxes expended on a client.

  That was why wolves could not remain in their bestial body for long, and folklore linked their transformation with various forms of temporal limitation - the hours of darkness, the full moon or something of that kind.

  I remembered the strange sensation I had experienced while hunting - when for the first time in my life I became aware of the relict radiation from my tail, directed at myself. But exactly what suggestion had I been implanting in my own mind? That I was a fox? But I knew that without any suggestion . . . What was going on? I felt as if I were standing on the threshold of something important, something that could change my entire life and lead me, at long last, out of the spiritual impasse in which I had spent the last five hundred years. But, to my disgrace, the first thing that I thought about was not spiritual practice at all.

  I’m ashamed to admit it, but the first thought that came into my mind was about sex. I remembered Alexander’s coarse grey tail and realized how to raise our erotic sensations to a totally new level. It was all very simple. The mechanisms for influencing consciousness employed by foxes and wolves were identical in all major respects - the only elements that differed were the intensity of suggestion and its target. I, so to speak, served my client champagne and it made him tipsy. Alexander swallowed an entire bottle of vodka all on his own, which made everyone else around horrified. But the effective substance, alcohol, was the same.

  And so, by combining our resources, we could mix lots of very different cocktails out of champagne and vodka. After all, sex is more than just the simple conjunction of certain parts of the body. It is also a connection between the energies of two beings, a joint trip. If we could learn to combine our hypnotic impulses in order to immerse ourselves in an amorous illusion together, I thought, we could set ourselves up with our own tea for two, in which every drop would be worth its weight in polonium.

  There was only one problem. First we had to agree on what we wanted to see. And not just in words - words were an unreliable prop. If we relied only on them, we could imagine the final destination of our journey very differently. Some ready-made image was required, one that would serve as the starting point for our visualization. For instance, a picture . . .

  I tried to imagine an appropriate classical canvas. But unfortunately, nothing interesting came to mind - all I could recall was Picasso’s early masterpiece An Old Jew and a Boy. Many years earlier I had used a postcard of that picture as a bookmark in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which I simply couldn’t get through, and ever since then I had remembered every detail of those two sad, dark figures.

  No, pictures were no good. They didn’t give any idea of how an object appeared in the round. Videos would be much better. And Alexander has such a big television, I thought. Surely it ought to be put to good use?

  There’s a kind of chewing gum that comes with cards showing pairs of loving couples in various humorous situations. These drawings are captioned ‘Love is . . .’ and I often used to see them stuck to the walls in lifts and cinemas. If I wanted to draw my own version of these cartoons, it would show a wolf and a fox sitting in front of a TV with their tails intertwined.

  The technology of a miracle proved to be simpler than I was expecting. It was enough to bring our hypnotic organs together in any pose that allowed us to do it. Only our tails had to touch: we had to follow what was happening on the screen, and any closer proximity was a hindrance.

  It developed into a ritual surprisingly quickly. Usually he would lie down on his side, with his legs hanging down on to the carpet, and I would sit down beside him. We set the film going and I caressed him until the transfor
mation began. Then I put my legs up on his shaggy side, we joined our antennas together, and what began then was totally insane, something that no tailless creature could ever understand. Sometimes the feelings were so intense that I had to apply a special technique to calm myself and cool off - I looked away from the screen and recited part of the ‘Heart Sutra’ to myself, a mantra as cool and deep as a well: I could dissolve any emotional upheaval in those Sanskrit syllables. I liked to look at the way our tails combined - the red and the grey. As if someone had set fire to a rotten billet and it had been engulfed by dancing flames and sparks . . . But I never shared this simile with Alexander.

  However, while the technical aspect of the whole thing proved to be elementary, the choice of a route for our outings always involved arguments. Our tastes didn’t just differ, they belonged to different universes. In his case it was hard even to speak of taste in the sense of a definite system of aesthetic guidelines. Like a schoolboy, he liked everything to be heroic and sentimental, and he made me sit for hours watching samurai dramas, westerns and something that I simply couldn’t stand - Japanese cartoons about robots. And then in our dream we played out the secondary love themes that the directors had had to use to provide at least some respite between the killing and the fighting. Actually, at first it was quite interesting. But only at first.

  As an experienced professional, I soon wearied of the standard quickies - I had induced more dreams on that subject than mankind had made porn films about itself. I liked to roam through the terra incognita of modern sexuality, to explore its border regions, the backyard of social morality and mores. But he wasn’t ready for that, and although no one in the world could have witnessed our joint hallucinations, he was always stopped dead by his internal sentry.

  He would either respond to my appeals to embark on some unusual journey with an embarrassed refusal or he would suggest something that was unthinkable for me. For instance, to turn ourselves into a pair of cartoon transformers who discover their attraction to each other on the roof of a Tokyo skyscraper ... How dreadful! But when I wanted to become the German major in Casablanca and take him from behind while he was the black pianist Sam playing it again, he was as horrified as if I’d been urging him to sell out the motherland.