The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  Long before I came to Russia I lived for several hundred years in a Han period grave not far from the spot where the great city of Luoyang once used to stand. The grave had two spacious chambers in which various items had been preserved - beautiful gowns and shirts, a harp, a flute and lots of different kinds of dishes - basically, everything that was necessary for a home and a modest life. And people were afraid to approach the grave, since it was rumoured that a fierce and vicious demon lived there. Which, if you set aside the superfluous emotional assessment, was quite true.

  In those days I practised my spiritual exercises intensively and associated on a regular basis with a number of learned men from the villages round about (Chinese students usually lived in rural areas with their families, travelling to the city to sit their exams and later, after serving their term as an official, they returned to the family home). Several of them knew who I was and they would pester me with questions about the ancient times - were there any errors in the chronology, who had organized the palace coup three hundred years earlier, and so on. I had to strain my memory and answer them, because in return the scholars would give me old texts which I sometimes needed to check my spiritual practice.

  Others, bolder in spirit, used to visit me for a little wanton lechery among the ancient graves. The Chinese artists and poets valued a secluded rendezvous with a fox, especially in a state of intoxication. And in the morning they liked to wake up in the grass beside a mossy gravestone, jump to their feet and scream in horror as they ran to the nearest shrine with their hair fluttering loose in the wind. It was very beautiful - I used to watch from behind a tree and laugh into my sleeve . . . And a couple of days later they would come back again. What exalted, noble, subtle people there used to be then! Often I didn’t even take money from them.

  Those idyllic times flew past quickly, and they left me with the very best of memories. Wherever life cast me up after that, I always felt slightly homesick for my cosy little grave. And so for me it was a delight to move into this little nook in the forest. I thought the old days had come back. Even the floor plan of the double burrow in which we lived reminded me of my ancient refuge although, of course, the rooms were smaller and now my days were not spent in solitude, but with Alexander.

  Alexander quickly grew accustomed to the new place. His wounds healed - it was enough for him simply to turn into a dog for one night. In the morning he stayed like that and went off for a walk along the gully. I was glad he wasn’t ashamed of this body - he seemed to find it entertaining, like a new toy. What he liked was evidently not the form itself, but its permanent stability: he could only be a wolf for a short while, but now he could be a dog for just as long as he wanted.

  Apart from that, this black dog could even speak after a fashion, although the way it pronounced the words was very funny and at first I used to laugh until I cried. But Alexander didn’t take offence, and I soon got used to it. During the early days he ran around in the forest a lot, getting to know the surrounding area. I was concerned that his ambitions might lead him to mark too large a sector of the forest, but I was afraid to wound his pride by telling him so. And if anything happened, we could stand up for ourselves. ‘We’ . . . I simply couldn’t get used to that pronoun.

  It was probably because our home reminded me of the place where I had spent so many years striving for spiritual self-improvement that I felt the desire to explain to Alexander the single most important of all things that I had understood in life. I had to try at least - otherwise what was my love worth? How could I possibly abandon him alone in the glacial glamour of the progressively advancing hell that began just beyond the edge of the forest? I had to offer him my tail and my hand because, if I didn’t do it, no one else would.

  I decided to reveal the innermost essence of things to him. This required him to master several ideas that were new to him and then use them, like steps, to ascend to the higher truth. But even explaining these initial notions was difficult.

  The problem is that everybody knows the words that express the truth - and if you don’t, you can easily find them in five minutes via Google. But hardly anyone at all actually knows the truth. It’s like one of those ‘magic eye’ pictures - a chaotic jumble of coloured lines and spots that can be transformed into a three-dimensional image by focusing your vision correctly. It all seems very simple, but you can’t focus someone else’s eyes for them when they look, no matter how well-disposed you are towards them. The truth is a picture just like that. It is there right in front of everybody’s eyes, even the tailless monkeys’. But there are very few who actually see it. Although many think that they understand it. This, of course, is nonsense - the truth is like love, there is nothing to understand. And what is usually taken for the truth is some kind of intellectual dross.

  One day I noticed a tiny grey pouch hanging round Alexander’s neck on a grey string. I guessed that the colour had been chosen to match a wolf’s fur - so that the pouch would not be visible when he turned into a wolf. But now it stood out against his black fur. I decided to ask him about it that evening, when he was in a benign mood.

  He was in the habit of smoking a malodorous Cuban cigar before bed - a Montecristo III or Cohiba Siglo IV. I knew the names, because I had to go to get them. That was the best time to talk to him. In case you didn’t know, smoking triggers a discharge of dopamine into the brain - and dopamine is the substance responsible for a feeling of well-being: a smoker borrows this well-being against his own future and transforms it into problems with his health. That evening we settled down in the doorway of our home and he lit up (I wouldn’t allow him to smoke inside). I waited until his cigar was half burnt away and asked:

  ‘Tell me, what have you got in that little pouch hanging round your neck?’

  ‘A cross,’ he said.

  ‘A cross? You wear a cross?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But why hide it? It’s okay to wear them now.’

  ‘It may be okay,’ he said. ‘But it burns my chest when I transform. ’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘It doesn’t really hurt. It’s just that every time there’s a smell of scorched fur.’

  ‘If you like, I can teach you a mantra,’ I said, ‘so that no cross will ever burn you again.’

  ‘Oh, sure! I’m not going to recite your infernal mantra so my cross doesn’t burn my chest. Don’t you realize what a sin that would be?’

  I looked at him incredulously.

  ‘Hang on. So maybe you’re a believer too, are you?’

  ‘What of it,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m a believer.’

  ‘In the sense of the Orthodox Christian Cultural Heritage? Or for real?’

  ‘I don’t understand the distinction. In the Holy Writ it says:

  “Even the demons believe and tremble!” That’s about us, and that’s what I do - believe and tremble.’

  ‘But you’re a werewolf, Sasha. So according to all the Orthodox precepts your road leads straight to hell. Tell me, I’d like to know, why would you choose a faith in which you have to go to hell?’

  ‘You don’t choose your faith,’ he said morosely. ‘Just like you don’t choose your motherland.’

  ‘But the reason religion exists is to offer hope of salvation. What are you hoping for?’

  ‘That God will forgive my evil deeds.’

  ‘And what evil deeds have you got?’

  ‘That’s obvious. I’ve lost the image of God. And then there’s you ...’

  I almost choked in indignation.

  ‘So you don’t think I’m the brightest and purest thing in your entire lupine life, on the contrary, I’m an evil deed for which you’ll have to atone?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I love you, you know that. It’s not a matter of you personally. It’s just that the two of us live, you know . . .’

  ‘What do I know?’

  He released a cloud of smoke.

  ‘In sin . . .’

  My anger instantly evapor
ated. And instead I felt more like laughing than I had for a long time.

  ‘No, come on, tell me,’ I said, feeling the bubbles of laughter rising in my throat. ‘So I’m your sin, am I?’

  ‘Not you,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘it’s that . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tailechery,’ he said in a very quiet voice and lowered his eyes.

  I bit my lip. I knew that whatever I did, I mustn’t laugh - he had shared his most intimate feelings with me. And I didn’t laugh. But the effort was so great it could easily have made a new silver hair appear in my tail. So he’d even invented a term for it!

  ‘Don’t take offence,’ he said. ‘I’m being honest with you, saying what I feel. I can lie if you like. Only then there won’t be any point in talking to each other.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. It’s just that this is all rather unexpected. ’

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the tops of the prolific umbrella plants swaying in the wind.

  ‘And have you been . . . a believer for long?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s five years now.’

  ‘To be honest, I thought you were more into the Nordic gods. You know, Fafnir, Nagelfahr, Fenrir, Loki, Baldur’s dreams . . .’

  ‘That too,’ he said with a selfconscious smile. ‘Only that’s external, a shell. A sort of frame, aesthetic decoration. You know, like the sphinxes on the banks of the Neva in Petersburg.’

  ‘And how did you end up in this state?’

  ‘In my younger days I used to be keen on Castaneda. And I read in one of his books that awareness is the food of the Eagle. The way I understood it, the Eagle’s some obscure thing they have instead of God. I’m no coward, far from it. But that made me feel afraid . . . Anyway, I turned to Orthodoxy. Even though the situation was rather ambivalent. I was already a wolf then, it was three years since I’d been accepted into the pack. We still had a pack in those days. Colonel Lebedenko was still alive . . .’

  He gestured helplessly.

  ‘Awareness is the food of the Eagle?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alexander. ‘That’s what the magicians of ancient Yucatán believed.’

  What a little boy he still is, really, I thought tenderly.

  ‘Silly boy. It’s not awareness that’s the food of the Eagle. It’s the Eagle that’s the food of awareness.’

  ‘Which Eagle exactly?’

  ‘Any. And the magicians of ancient Yucatán too, with all their business seminars, workshops, videodiscs and ageing Naguals. Every last one of them is the food of awareness. Including you.’

  ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

  I took his cigar and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  ‘You see that?’

  He watched as it swirled and evolved.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you aware of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A werewolf is like that cloud of smoke. He lives, changes his form, his colour and volume. Then he disappears. But when the smoke dissipates, nothing happens to awareness. Something else just appears in it instead.’

  ‘But where does awareness go after death?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to go anywhere,’ I said. ‘You’re not going anywhere, are you? You’re sitting there, you’re smoking. And it’s the same.’

  ‘But what about heaven and hell?’

  ‘They’re smoke rings. Awareness doesn’t go anywhere. On the contrary, anything that does go anywhere immediately becomes its food. Like that smoke there. Or like your thoughts.’

  ‘But whose awareness is it?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the food of awareness as well.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand the question. Whose is it?’

  ‘And that too,’ I said patiently.

  ‘But there has to be -’

  ‘And that,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Then who . . .’

  At this point he suddenly seemed to get it - he took his chin in his hand and stopped talking.

  It’s really difficult trying to explain these things in abstract terms. You can get tangled up in the words: ‘In perception there is neither subject nor object, but only the pure experience of the transcendent nature, and this experience is everything - both physical objects and mental constructs, which include the ideas of a perceived object and a perceiving subject . . .’ After the first three words you can’t tell what it’s all about any more. But with an example it’s easy - one good puff of smoke and that’s it. So now he understood. Or almost understood.

  ‘Then what do you reckon this is, all around us?’ he asked, taking back his cigar. ‘Is it like The Matrix?’

  ‘Almost, but not quite.’

  ‘So what’s the difference?’

  ‘In The Matrix there’s an objective reality - a warehouse outside town with the bodies of the people stacked in it. Otherwise the portfolio investors wouldn’t have put up the money for the film, they’re very strict about that sort of thing. But in fact everything’s like in The Matrix, only without that warehouse.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There’s a dream, but there isn’t anybody dreaming it. That is, they’re part of the dream too. Some say the dream dreams itself. But strictly speaking there isn’t any “itself”.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘In The Matrix everybody was connected by wires to something real. But in actual fact everybody’s connected to the same kind of pipedream as they are themselves. And since all the dreamers see more or less the same, this pipedream is also a joint dream, and that’s why people call it real. The dream only lasts for as long as the connection continues. But once it stops, there’s no hardware left behind for the court bailiffs to inventorize. Or any body for them to bury.’

  ‘Now that’s where you’re wrong,’ he said with a grin. ‘More often than not, that’s exactly what does happen.’

  ‘You know what they say - leave the virtuals to bury their virtuals. The buriers and the buried are only real in relation to each other.’

  ‘How can that be possible?’

  ‘Take a look around.’

  He thought for a while without saying anything. Then he nodded sullenly.

  ‘A pity you weren’t around to explain that. And what good is it now . . . It’s too late to change my life now.’

  ‘Yes, you’re really stuck, you poor sod,’ I sighed. ‘Why don’t you try moving your assemblage point in the position of holy life?’

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ he asked. ‘Well laugh, Ginger, go on. It’s stupid, I don’t deny it. Do you believe in God yourself?’

  I was really taken aback by that.

  ‘Do you believe?’ he repeated.

  ‘Foxes respect the religion of Adonai,’ I replied diplomatically.

  ‘Respect isn’t where it’s at. Can you tell me if you believe or not?’

  ‘Foxes have their own faith.’

  ‘And what do they believe in?’

  ‘The super-werewolf.’

  ‘The one Lord Cricket talked about?’

  ‘Lord Cricket was way off beam. He didn’t have a clue about the super-werewolf.’

  ‘But who is the super-werewolf?’

  ‘There are several levels of understanding. At the most primitive one, he is the messiah who will come and tell all the were-creatures what the score is. This interpretation has been influenced by human religion, and the central profane symbol corresponding to it was also taken from people.’

  ‘And what is this central profane symbol?’

  ‘An inverted five-pointed star. The humans don’t understand it correctly. They draw a goat’s head into it with the horns at the top. They like to see the devil everywhere, except in the mirror and on TV.’

  ‘So what does this star really mean?’

  ‘It’s the vulpine crucifix. Something like the St Andrew’s Cross with a crossbar for the tail. Of course, we have no intention of crucifying anyone, we’re not people. All this signifies
a symbolic atonement for the sins of foxes, of which the most important is ignorance.’

  ‘And how is the super-werewolf going to atone for the sins of foxes?’

  ‘He will give foxes the Sacred Book of Werewolf.’

  ‘What kind of book is that?’

  ‘The general belief is that it will reveal the central mystery of all were-creatures. Every were-creature who reads it will be able to comprehend this mystery five times.’

  ‘And what’s this book going to be called?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody does. They say its title will be a magical pentagrammaton, a spell that annihilates all obstacles. But all this is no more than legend. The concept of the super-werewolf has a true meaning that has nothing to do with all these fairy tales.’

  I was expecting him to ask about this true meaning, but instead he asked about something else.

  ‘What does that mean - you’ll “be able to comprehend this mystery five times”. Once you’ve understood something, why do you need to understand it another four times? You’re already in the know, aren’t you?’

  ‘On the contrary. In most cases, if you’ve already comprehended something, you’ll never be able to comprehend it again, precisely because you think that you know everything already. But in the truth there isn’t anything that can be understood once and for all. Since we don’t see it with our eyes but with our minds, we say “I understand”. But when we think we’ve understood it, we’ve already lost it. In order to possess the truth, you have to see it constantly - or, in other words, comprehend it over and over again, second after second, continuously. And that’s a very rare ability.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it in two days’ time. You’ll be left with the dead husks of words, and you’ll think there’s still something wrapped up in them. That’s what all the humans think. They seriously believe that they possess spiritual treasures and sacred texts.’