The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  That would have been another interesting topic for Dr Spengler: most Russian men are homophobic because the cancerous cells of the criminal code of honour are still deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. Any serious man, no matter what he does for a living, subconsciously measures himself against a prison bunk and tries to ensure that his service record doesn’t include any conspicuous violations of prison taboos that he might have to pay for with his arse in a very direct manner. This means that a Russian macho man’s life is like a permanent spiritualist seance: while the body is wallowing in luxury, the soul is doing time in the prison camps.

  I happen to know why this is the way things are, and I could write a big, thick, clever book about it. Its basic idea would be as follows: Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people’s morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live - or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top criminal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Soviet ‘internal Party committee’ was dismantled, a cheap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

  But no matter how sickening prison morality may be, there is no other morality left at all, only the simulacra produced either by FSB prison guards or sprintii journalists specializing in the propaganda of liberal values . . .

  Oh. I deliberately won’t cross out that last sentence, let the reader admire it. There you have it, the vulpine mind. After all, we were-foxes are natural liberals, in pretty much the same way as the soul is a natural Christian. And what do I write? What do I write? It’s terrifying. At least it’s clear where it all came from - I got the stuff about the sprintii journalists from the FSB prison guards. And the stuff about the FSB prison guards from the sprintii journalists. There’s nothing to be done: if a fox has heard an opinion, she is bound to express it in the first person. We can’t help it. We don’t have any opinions of our own on these human-related subjects (that’s the last thing we need), but we have to live among people. So we just return the serves. Yes, it’s a good thing I don’t have to write a book about Russia after all. What sort of Solzhenitsyn would I make? But I am digressing again.

  I didn’t often discuss the nature of Alexander’s homophobia with him (he didn’t like to talk about it), but I was sure its roots had to be sought in the criminal catacombs of the Russian mind. His homophobia went so far that he rejected anything that was even remotely gay.

  ‘Why do you dislike gays so much?’ I asked him once.

  ‘Because they go against nature.’

  ‘But it was nature that created them. So how do they go against nature?’

  ‘I’ll tell you how,’ he said. ‘Children are hidden in sex, like the seeds in a watermelon. And gays are people fighting for the right to eat a watermelon without seeds.’

  ‘Who are they fighting against?’

  ‘The watermelon. Everybody else stopped caring a damn long since. But a watermelon can’t exist without seeds. And that’s why I say they go against nature. Will you say they don’t?’

  ‘A certain watermelon I used to know,’ I replied, ‘believed that the propagation of watermelons depends on their ability to implant in man’s mind the suggestion that it’s healthy to swallow the seeds. But watermelons overestimate their own hypnotic abilities. In actual fact the propagation of watermelons takes place through a process of which the watermelons are completely unaware, because they are unable to observe it. Because this process only begins where the watermelon ends.’

  ‘There you go tying those fancy knots again, Ginger, I can’t follow,’ he grumbled. ‘Save it. Let’s do without all this tricky queer stuff.’

  Alexander particularly disliked Luchino Visconti. Any suggestion to put on something by this director (whom I consider one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century) was taken by him as a personal insult. I still have fragments of one of our arguments on tape. While the other dialogues in my journal are reproduced from memory, this one is absolutely accurate - the conversation was accidentally recorded on a dictaphone. I include it here because I would like to hear Alexander’s voice again - I can listen to it while I type.

  AS: Death in Venice. This is getting tiresome, Ginger. What do you think I am, some kind of queer?

  AH: Then how about Conversation Piece?

  AS: No, let’s have Takeshi Kitano. Zatoichi punishes the geisha-assassin . . . And then the geisha-assassin punishes Zatoichi.

  AH: I don’t want that. Let’s try Gone with the Wind again.

  AS: Come off it. That staircase is too long.

  AH: What staircase?

  AS: The one I have to cart you up to the bedroom. And to add to the agony you make it five times longer. I was soaked in sweat last time. Seriously. Even though we never got up off the divan . . .

  AH: I have to be spoiled sometimes . . . Okay, this time we’ll have a short staircase. All right?

  AS: No, let’s . . . I fancy something with shooting.

  AH: Then let’s have Mulholland Drive! There’s shooting in that. Oh, please!

  AS: Back to the same old thing. I won’t do it, how many times do I have to tell you? Find yourself a queer out on the avenue and watch it with him.

  AH: What’s that got to do with it? It’s lesbians in the film.

  AS: What’s the difference?

  (Here there is a pause in the recording, during which you can hear rustling and tapping as I rummage through the video discs scattered on the floor.)

  AH: Listen, there’s a film from one of Steven King’s books. Dreamcatcher. Have you seen it?

  AS: No.

  AH: Let’s try it. We won’t be people, we’ll be aliens.

  AS: What kind of aliens are they?

  AH: They have a vertical mouth full of teeth running the entire length of their bodies and eyes on their sides. Imagine how bloody a kiss could be? And cunnilingus at the same time. I think that’s the way they reproduce.

  AS: Darling, I get to see enough stuff like that at work. Let’s have something more romantic.

  AH: Romantic . . . Romantic . . . Here’s The Matrix-2. How would you like to screw Keanu Reaves?

  AS: Not a lot.

  AH: Then I can screw him.

  AS: Rejected. Is the third Matrix there?

  AH: Yes.

  AS: There could be an interesting possibility there with those machines.

  AH: Which ones?

  AS: You know, those humanoid robots with people sitting in them. They use them to fight off those black octopuses. Just imagine it, one of those robots has caught a black octopus, and . . . AH: Listen, how old are you, twelve?

  AS: Okay, let’s forget The Matrix. (Some kind of rustling again. I think I move on to another heap of DVDs.)

  AH: How about Lord of the Rings?

  AS: You’ll only come up with something weird again.

  AH: Well I’m not going to spread my legs for a hobbit, that’s for sure. How come you’re so afraid of everything? Do you think they’ll find out at work? Your moral character?

  AS: Why do think I’m afraid? I don’t want to, that’s all.

  AH: Listen, there are some films in English here. An interesting selection.

  AS: What have you got?

  AH: Midnight Dancers . . . Sex Life in LA . . .

  AS: No.

  AH: Versace Murder?

  AS: No.

  AH: Why?

  AS: Because.

  AH: Do you know what the gays in Miami say instead of ‘vice versa’? ‘Vice Versace’. Just think of all those dark, convoluted meanings . . .

  AS: First one of them shafts another up the backside, and then they swap places. That’s all your convoluted meanings.

  AH: I’ll put it on then?

  AS: I already told you. Go to the that cafe at Tverskaya, Gifts of the Sea or whatever they call it, find yourself a queer and have your fun.

  AH: Lis
ten, stop being such a reactionary. There are homosexual animals in wild nature, I’ve read about them. Sheep. Monkeys.

  AS: As far as monkeys are concerned, I hardly think that’s an argument in favour of gays.

  AH: Oh you’ve been well trained. No reforming you. What’s that disc you’ve got there?

  AS: Romeo and Juliet.

  (You can hear me snort contemptuously.)

  AH: Bin it.

  AS: Can’t we watch it just once more?

  AH: How many times?

  AS: Just one last little time. Come on! You’re a dead ringer for Juliet in that T-shirt.

  AH: What can I do with you, Romeo? Go on. Only on one condition.

  AS: What’s that?

  AH: Afterwards it’s Mulholland Drive.

  AS: Gr-r-r!

  AH: Darling, really? So soon?

  AS: Gr-r-r!

  AH: Hang on, hang on. I’m putting it on. I’ll know this off by heart soon . . . ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean . . .’

  AS: Whoo-oo-oo!

  AH: I’m not criticizing your organization, you beast. Relax. That’s Shakespeare.

  Love and tragedy go hand in hand. Homer and Euripides wrote about that, so did Stendhal and Oscar Wilde. And now it’s my turn.

  Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.

  I formed this impression from the numerous descriptions I had come across in poems and books. How was I to know that the writers were not describing love as it actually is at all, but constructing the verbal imitations that would look best on paper. I thought of myself as a professional of love, since I had been inducing the experience in others for so many centuries. But it’s one thing to pilot the B-29 flying towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.

  Love turned out to be nothing like what they write about it. It was ludicrous, rather than serious - but that didn’t mean it could be dismissed out of hand. It was not like being drunk (the most popular comparison in literature) - but it was even less like being sober. My perception of the world didn’t change: I didn’t think Alexander was anything like a fairy-tale prince in his Maibach. I could see all the sinister sides of his character but, strangely enough, those things only added to his charm in my eyes. My reason even came to terms with his barbarous political views and began to discover a certain harsh northern originality in them.

  Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning. But it gave meaning to everything else. It made my heart as light and empty as a balloon. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. But not because I had become more stupid - there simply was nothing to understand in what was happening. They may say that love like that doesn’t run deep. But I think that anything that is deep isn’t love, it’s deliberate calculation or schizophrenia.

  I myself wouldn’t even attempt to say what love is - probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not. But apophasis would be wrong, too, because they are everything. Writers who write about love are swindlers, and the worst of them is Leo Tolstoy, clutching his programmatic bludgeon ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Although I have a lot of respect for Tolstoy.

  How could I have known that our romantic adventure would prove disastrous for Alexander? Oscar Wilde said: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . .’ He was a writer who lived in an era of primitive anthropocentrism, hence the word ‘man’ (sexism was also easy to get away with then, especially for gays). But in everything else, he was spot on. I killed the beast, the Thing. Beauty killed the beast. And the murder weapon was love.

  I remember how that day began. After I woke up, I lay on my back for a long time while I surfaced from the depths of a very good dream that I couldn’t remember no matter how I tried. I knew that in cases like that the thing to do was to lie without moving or opening your eyes, in the same position you woke up in, and then the dream might surface in your memory. And that was what happened - after about a minute, I remembered.

  I had been dreaming of a fantastic garden, flooded with sunlight and filled with the chatter of birds. In the distance I could see a strip of white sand and the sea. Immediately in front of me there was a sheer cliff, and in the cliff there was a cave, sealed off with a slab of stone. I was supposed to move the slab, but it was too heavy, and there was no way I could possibly do it. Summoning up all my strength, I braced my feet against the ground and strained every muscle in my body as I pushed on the slab. It fell away to one side and the black hole of the entrance was revealed, belching out damp air and an old, stale stench. And then, rising up out of the darkness towards the sunny day, chickens appeared - one, two, three . . . I lost count, there were so many of them. They just kept on walking towards the light and happiness, and now nothing could stop them - they’d realized where the way out was. I saw my chicken among them - the brown one with the white patch, and I waved my paw to her (in the dream I had paws instead of hands, like during the supraphysical transformation). She didn’t even look at me, just ran straight past. But I wasn’t offended at all.

  What an amazing dream, I thought, and opened my eyes.

  There was a little patch of sunlight trembling on the wall. It was my own virtual place in the sun, acquired without any struggle at all - it was produced by a little mirror that cast the ray of light falling from above against the wall. I thought about Alexander and remembered our love. It was as certain as that yellow patch of sunlight quivering on the wall. Something incredible had to happen between us today, something truly miraculous. Without even thinking what I was going to say to him, I reached for the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello. I want to see you.’

  ‘Come on over,’ he said. ‘But there’s not much time. I’m flying north this evening. That only leaves us three hours.’

  ‘That’s enough for me,’ I said.

  The taxi drove me slowly, the traffic lights took an eternity to change, and at every crossroads I felt my heart would leap out of my chest if I had to wait just a few more seconds.

  When I got out of the lift he removed the gauze mask from his face and took a deep sniff.

  ‘I’ll probably never get used to the way you smell. It seems like I remember it, and yet every time it turns out the memory in my head is nothing like it. I’ll have to pull a few hairs out of your tail.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘Well . . . I’ll wear them in a locket on my chest,’ he said. ‘Take them out sometimes and smell them. Like a medieval knight.’

  I smiled - his ideas about medieval knights were clearly derived from jokes. Perhaps that was the reason they were fairly close to the truth. Of course, the hairs that medieval knights carried in their medallions didn’t come from tails - who would have given them those? - but by and large the picture was accurate enough.

  I noticed an unfamiliar object beside the divan - a floor-lamp in the shape of an immense Martini glass. It was a cone studded with light bulbs, set on a tall, thin leg.

  ‘That’s a really lovely thing. Where did it come from?’

  ‘It’s a gift from the reindeer-herders,’ he said.

  ‘The reindeer-herders?’ I said, amazed.

  ‘Or rather, the reindeer-herders’ leadership. Some funny guys from London. Good, isn’t it? Like a dragonfly’s eye.’

  I wanted so badly to throw myself on him and hug him really tight that I could hardly keep still. I was afraid - if I took another step towards him there would be a shower of sparks between us. He clearly felt something too.

  ‘You’re kind of strange today. Haven’t been dropping anything, have you? Or sniffing anything?’

  ‘Afraid?’ I asked, glowering at him.

  ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen more frightening things.’

  I started walking round him slowly. He chuckled and set off in the
opposite direction round the same circle, without taking his eyes off me, as if we were a pair of fencers from one of the Japanese action movies that he liked watching so much in his lupine form, clutching on to me with his shaggy grey tail hooked over. Then we both stopped at the same moment. I took a step towards him, put my hands on his shoulder straps, pulled him towards me and, for the first time in our relationship I kissed him on the lips - the way that people kiss.

  I’d never kissed anyone like that before. I mean physically, using my mouth. It was a strange feeling - wet, warm, with a gentle knocking of teeth against teeth. I put all my love into my first kiss. And a second later the transformation began.

  At first everything looked exactly as usual - Alexander’s tail extended (or rather, tumbled) out of his spine, curled over, and an invisible thread of energy stretched between it and his head. After that he usually became a wolf in just a few moments. But this time something went wrong.

  He jerked convulsively and fell on his back, as if his tail had suddenly become so heavy that it had pulled him over. Then he began rapidly jerking his arms and legs about in a horrible way (like people with craniocerebral injuries do), and in a few seconds he was transformed into a perfectly ordinary mongrel from the street or the local rubbish tip - a dog.

  Yes, a dog. He was as big as an Alsatian, but clearly a mongrel. His plebeian proportions betrayed a mixture of numerous different breeds, and his eyes were clear and almost human in their anger, like the eyes of some wandering dogs who sleep in the entrances of the Metro with the homeless tramps. And this dog was blue-black, in fact purple-black, exactly like Aslan Udoev’s beard.

  Maybe it was the colour, maybe it was the pointed ears that seemed to be straining after some distant sound but I thought I sensed something diabolical about this dog: thoughts came into my head about crows and gallows, about demonic possession ... I realize that when a creature like me says ‘thoughts came to me about demonic possession’ it sounds rather strange, but what can I do about it, if that’s the way it was. But the most macabre thing was the groan of horror that I either imagined or really did hear from every side - as if the earth itself had groaned.