‘We do,’ I said. ‘More than that, we create God too.’
‘That’s taking things a bit far, Ginger,’ he chuckled. ‘You’ll do anything to get by without God. What do we create the world with? Our tails?’
I froze on the spot.
It’s hard to describe that second. All the surmises and insights of recent months, all my chaotic thoughts, all my presentiments - they all suddenly came together into a blindingly clear picture of the truth. I still didn’t understand all the consequences of this epiphany, but I already knew that now the mystery was mine. I was so excited, my head started spinning. I must have turned pale.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘Are you feeling unwell?’
‘No,’ I said, and forced myself to smile. ‘I just need to be alone for a while. Right now. Please don’t distract me. It’s very, very important.’
The world works in a mysterious and incomprehensible fashion. Wishing to protect frogs from children’s cruelty, adults tell children not to crush them because that will make it rain - and the result is that it rains all summer because the children crush frogs one after another. And sometimes it happens that you try with all your might to explain the truth to someone else, and suddenly you understand it yourself.
But then, for foxes the latter case is probably the rule rather than the exception. As I’ve already said, in order to understand something we foxes have to explain it to someone. This results from the specific qualities of our intellect, which is specifically designed to imitate human personalities, and is capable of mimicking the features of any culture. To put it more simply, it is our essential nature to constantly pretend. When we explain something to others, we are pretending that we have already understood it all. And since we are very clever creatures, we usually really do have to understand it, whether we wish to or not. They say that’s what makes the silver hairs appear in our tails.
When I pretend, I am always acting in a perfectly natural manner. And so I always pretend - that way everything turns out far more plausibly than if I suddenly start behaving sincerely. After all, what does behaving sincerely mean? It means expressing your essential nature directly in your behaviour. And if it is my essential nature to simulate, then for me the only path to genuine sincerity lies through simulation. I don’t mean to say by this that I never behave spontaneously. On the contrary, I simulate spontaneity with all the sincerity that I have in my heart. But words are proving tricky again - I am talking about something very simple, but it makes me seem like a dishonest creature with a double bottom. But it’s not like that. I actually don’t have any bottom at all.
Since a fox can pretend to be anything at all, she attains to the highest truth at the very moment when she pretends she has attained to it. And the best way to do this is in discussion with a less-developed being. But when I was talking to Alexander, I was not thinking about myself at all. I really was trying as hard as I could to help him. But as it turned out, he helped me. What an astonishing, incomprehensible paradox . . . But this paradox is the principal law of life.
I had approached the truth gradually:
1. as I observed Alexander, I realized that a werewolf directs his hypnotic impulse at his own mind. The werewolf suggests to himself that he is turning into a wolf, and after that he really does turn into one.
2. during the chicken hunt I noticed that my tail was directing its fluence at me. But I did not understand exactly what I was suggesting to myself: I thought it might be some kind of feedback loop that made me into a fox. I was already only two steps away from the truth, but I still couldn’t see it.
3. in the course of my explanations, I told Alexander that he and this world were one and the same thing. I had everything I needed for final enlightenment. But I still needed Alexander to speak out and call things by their real names. It was only then that I attained to the truth.
I and the world are one and the same thing . . . What was it that I was suggesting to myself with my tail? That I was a fox? No, I realized in one blinding second, I was suggesting this entire world!
When I was left alone, I sat in the lotus position and withdrew into a state of profound concentration. I don’t know how much time passed - perhaps several days. In a state like that there is no particular difference between a day and an hour. Now that I had seen the way things were, I understood why I had failed to spot this uroborus before (how apt that I had repeated that word all the time). I had not seen the truth because I was not seeing anything but the truth. The hypnotic impulse that my tail was directing at my mind was the entire world. Or rather, I had taken this impulse for the world.
I had always suspected that Stephen Hawking did not understand the words ‘relict radiation’ that occur on every second page of his books. Relict radiation is not a radio signal that can be captured using complex and expensive equipment. Relict radiation is the whole world that we see around us, no matter who we are, were-creatures or human beings.
Now that I had understood exactly how I was creating the world, I had to learn to control this effect somehow. But no matter how hard I focused my spiritual energy, I got nowhere. I ran through all the techniques that I knew - from the shamanic visualizations that are current among the mountain barbarians of Tibet to the sacred fire of the microcosmic orbit practised by the followers of the Tao. Nothing worked - it was like trying to move a mountain by pushing against it with my shoulder.
And then I remembered about the key. Yes indeed, the Yellow Master had mentioned a key . . . I had always thought that it was simply a metaphor for the correct understanding of the hidden nature of things. But if I’d blundered so terribly concerning the most essential point, I could have been mistaken here as well, couldn’t I? What could it be, this key? I didn’t know. So I still didn’t understand anything, then?
My concentration was disrupted and my thoughts started to wander. I remembered about Alexander, who was waiting patiently in the next room - during my meditation he hadn’t made a single sound, apprehensive of disturbing me. As always, the thought of him provoked a warm wave of love.
And then at last I understood what was absolutely the most vital point:
1. there was nothing in me that was stronger than this love - and since I was creating the world with my tail, there was nothing stronger in the entire world.
2. in the stream of energy that radiated from my tail, and which my mind took for the world, love was totally absent - and that was why the world appeared to me in the way that it was.
3. love was the key that I had been unable to find.
How had I failed to understand that immediately? Love was the only force capable of displacing my tail’s relict radiation from my mind. I concentrated once again, visualized my love in the form of a little red, blazing heart and began slowly lowering it towards my tail. When I had lowered the heart of fire almost as far as its base, suddenly . . .
Suddenly something incredible happened. Inside my head, somewhere between the eyes, a shimmering rainbow of colour appeared. I did not perceive it with my physical vision - it was more like a dream that I had managed to smuggle in to the waking state. The shimmering was like a stream in the sunshine of spring. It sparkled with every possible shade of colour, and I could step into the caress of that kindly light. In order for the shimmering rainbow to engulf everything around me, I had to lower the flaming heart of love further, taking it beyond the point of the Great Limit that is located just three inches from the base of a fox’s tail. I could have done it. But I sensed that afterwards, among those streaming torrents of rainbow light, I would never again be able to find this tiny city and Alexander who had been left behind in it. We had to leave this place together - otherwise what was our love worth? After all, he was the one who had given me the key to a new universe - without even knowing it . . .
I decided to tell him everything immediately. But it wasn’t easy to get up - while I was sitting in the lotus position, my legs had become numb. I waited until the circulation was restore
d, struggled to my feet and walked towards the other room. It was dark in there.
‘Sashenka,’ I called. ‘Hey! Sasha! Where are you?’
Nobody answered. I walked in and turned on the light. The room was empty. There was a sheet of paper lying on the wooden crate that served us as a table. I picked it up and, screwing up my eyes against the harsh electric light, I read this:
Adele!
I took no notice of the fact that you were concealing your age, although recently I’d begun to suspect you were more than seventeen - you’re far too smart. So what, I thought, maybe you were just well preserved and really you were already twenty-five or even almost thirty, and you had a complex about it, like most girls. I was prepared for you to be a little more than thirty. I could probably even have come to terms with forty. But one thousand two hundred years! It’s best if I just tell you straight out - I can never have sex with you again. Forgive me. And I’ll forgive you for that blind dog thing. Maybe I am blind compared to you. But we can’t help the way we are.
I’m going back to work tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll regret this decision. Or not even have time to regret it. But if everything goes the way I intend, the first thing I’ll do is clarify a few issues that have come up in our department. And then I’ll start clarifying the issues that have come up in all the other places. I shall devote the glorious power you have inadvertently helped me to obtain to the service of my country. Thank you for that - from me and our entire organization, against which you are so unjustly prejudiced. And thank you for all the amazing things that you have helped me to understand - although probably not completely and not for long. Time will show who the real superwerewolf is. Goodbye for ever. And thank you for calling me Grey One to the very end.
Sasha the Black
I remember that second. There was no confusion. I had always understood I couldn’t keep him near me for ever, that this moment would come. But I hadn’t thought it would be so painful.
My little moonchild . . . Play then, play your games, I thought in tender resignation. Some day you’ll come to your senses all the same. But what a shame you will never learn the most important mystery from me. Although . . . Perhaps I should leave you a note? It will be longer than yours, and when you read it to the end you’ll understand exactly what it was I didn’t get a chance to tell you before you left. How else can I possibly repay you for the freedom that you have unwittingly given me.
Right then, I thought. I’ll write a book, and sooner or later it’s bound to reach you. You’ll learn from it how to liberate yourself from icy gloom in which the oligarchs and the public prosecutors, the liberals and conservatives, the queers and straights, the Internet communists, werewolves in shoulder-straps and portfolio investors wail and gnash their teeth. And perhaps not just you, but other noble beings who have a heart and a tail will be able to learn something useful from this book . . . But in the meantime, thank you for revealing to me what the real score is. Thank you for love . . .
I couldn’t hold back any longer - the tears gushed in a torrent down my cheeks and I cried for a long, long time, sitting on the wooden crate and looking at the white square of paper with the neat lines of his words on it. Until the very last day I had called him the grey one, afraid of hurting him. But he was strong. He didn’t need any pity.
That was it. Two lonely hearts met among the pale blossoms of the Moscow spring. One told the other she was older than the city around, the other confessed that he had claws on his dick. For a short while they twined their tails together, spoke of the highest truth and howled at the moon, then went on their way, like two ships passing at sea . . .
Je ne regrette rien. But I know that I shall never again be as happy as I was in nineteen-sixties Hong Kong on the edge of the Bitsevsky forest, with a carefree bliss in my heart and his black tail in my hand.
When this book was almost finished, I met Mikhalich while I was out riding my bike. I was tired of turning the pedals, and I’d sat down for a rest on one of the massive log benches standing in the empty lot beside the Bitsevsky forest. My eye was caught by the kids jumping off the ramp on their bikes, and I spent a long time watching them. For some reason the saddles on all their bikes were set very low. Probably special bikes for jumping, I thought. But in every other way they were ordinary mountain bikes. When I turned away from the jumpers, Mikhalich was standing beside me.
He had changed a lot since the last time we’d seen each other. Now he had a fashionable haircut, and he was no longer dressed in retro-gangster gear, but wearing a stylish black suit from Diesel’s ‘rebel shareholder’ collection. Under the jacket he had a black T-shirt with the words ‘I Fucked Andy Warhol’. A gold chain peeped out from under the T-shirt - not really thick, and not really thin, just exactly right. A simple round, steel watch, black Nike Air trainers like Mick Jagger’s on his feet. What a very long way the security services had come since those times when I used to travel to Yezhov’s dacha for the latest Nabokov . . .
‘Hi there, Mikhalich,’ I said.
‘Hello, Adele.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘With the instrument.’
‘You haven’t got any such instrument. Don’t give me that. Sasha told me.’
He sat down beside me on the bench.
‘I do have an instrument, Adele, I do, my girl. It’s just that it’s secret. And the comrade colonel general was following instructions when he spoke to you. I disobeyed those instructions when I showed it to you. And the comrade colonel general put me right afterwards, is that clear? As it happens, I’m disobeying instructions again now when I say that I do have an instrument. But the comrade colonel general always follows them very strictly.’
I couldn’t tell any longer which of them was lying.
‘And does the cleaning lady from the equestrian complex really work for you?’
‘We have many different methods,’ he said evasively. ‘We couldn’t manage otherwise. It’s a very big country.’
‘That’s true.’
We sat there in silence for a minute or two. Mikhalich observed the kids jumping off the ramp with interest.
‘And how’s Pavel Ivanovich?’ I asked, to my own surprise. ‘Still consulting?’
Mikhalich nodded.
‘He came to see us just the other day. He recommended a book, now what was it . . .’
He took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. I saw the words: Martin Wolf: Why Globalisation Works written on it in ballpoint pen.
‘He said things weren’t really all that bad after all.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Well, that’s really great. I was starting to worry. Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask this for a long time. All those well-known figures, Wolfenson from the World Bank, Wolfovitz from the Defence Department - or maybe it was the other way around - were they all, you know, as well?’
‘There are all sorts of wolves, just like people,’ Mikhalich said. ‘Only now they can’t even come close to us. Our department’s stepped up to a completely new level. There’s only one Nagual Rinpoche in the world.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s what we call the comrade colonel general.’
‘How is he, by the way?’ I couldn’t help asking.
‘Well.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s snowed under with work. And after work he sits in the archive. Analysing past experience.’
‘Whose experience?’
‘Comrade Sharikov’s.’
‘Ah, him. The one Bulgakov wrote about in A Dog’s Heart?’
‘Don’t talk about things if you don’t know anything,’ Mikhalich said sternly. ‘There are all sorts of lies going round about him, slanderous rumours. But no one knows the truth. When the comrade colonel general first turned up for work in his new uniform, the oldest members of staff even shed a few tears. They hadn’t seen anything like it since nineteen fifty-nine. Not since comrade Sharikov was killed. It was after that everythin
g fell to pieces. He was the one holding it all together.’
‘And how was he killed?’
‘He wanted to be the first to fly into space. And he went, just as soon as they made a cockpit big enough for a dog to fit into. You can’t hold someone like that back . . . The risk was immense - during the early launches every second flight crashed. But he made his mind up anyway. And then . . .’
‘The idiot,’ I said. ‘The vain nonentity.’
‘Vanity has absolutely nothing to do with it. Why did comrade Sharikov fly into space? He wanted to happen to the void before the void happened to him. But he didn’t get the chance. He was just three seconds of arc short . . .’
‘And Alexander knows about Sharikov?’ I asked.
‘He does now. I told you, he spends days at a time in the archives.’
‘And what has he said about it?’
‘The comrade colonel general has said this: even titans have their limitations.’
‘I see. And what questions do the titans have for me?’
‘None, really. I was ordered to convey a verbal communication to you.’
‘Well, convey it, then.’
‘Seems you’re putting it about that you’re the super-werewolf.’
‘Well, and what of it?’
‘I’ll tell you what. This is a unique country we live in, not like the rest of the world. Here everybody has to know who they answer to. People and werewolves.’
‘And how am I interfering with that?’
‘You’re not. But there can only be one super-werewolf. Otherwise, what kind of super-werewolf is he?’
‘That trivial kind of understanding of the word “super-werewolf”, ’ I said, ‘smacks of prison-camp Nietzcheanism. I -’
‘Listen,’ said Mikhalich, raising his open hand, ‘I wasn’t sent here to jaw. I’m here to tell you.’
‘I understand,’ I sighed. ‘And what am I supposed to do now? Hit the road?’
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Page 32