A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  As soon as Nikolai’s front paws and gaping jaws rose into the air, Sasha instantly thought through several possible courses of action, and his racing thoughts were entirely calm. He jumped to one side, first giving his body the command, then flying up from the earth into the dense gray air, making way for the heavy gray carcass as it fell. Sasha realized he had the advantage of being lighter and more agile. But his opponent was more experienced and stronger and was sure to know some special tricks—that was what Sasha had to watch out for.

  When he landed he saw that Nikolai was standing sideways next to him, half-squatting and turning his muzzle in Sasha’s direction. Nikolai’s flank seemed to be exposed, and Sasha leapt, reaching with his open jaws for the patch of light fur which he somehow knew was the most vulnerable spot. Nikolai leapt as well, but in a strange way, twisting in the air. Sasha couldn’t understand what was happening—Nikolai’s entire hindquarters were exposed, he seemed to be laying himself open to Sasha’s fangs. When he realized, it was too late—a tail like a whip of iron lashed across his eyes and nose, blinding him and depriving him of his sense of smell. The pain was unbearable, but Sasha knew that nothing serious had happened to him. The danger was that the second’s blindness might be enough for his enemy to make another, decisive leap.

  As he fell onto his outstretched paws, feeling that he was already defeated, Sasha suddenly realized that his enemy must once again be standing side on to him, and instead of jumping aside as instinct and pain prompted, he darted forwards, still unable to see, with the same feeling of fear he’d had during his first leap as a wolf—that leap from the clearing into the darkness among the trees. For a moment he hung in the air, and then his numbed nose rammed into something warm and yielding, and he closed his jaws as hard as he could.

  The next second they were standing facing each other as they had at the beginning of the fight. Time had accelerated once again to its normal speed. Sasha shook his head as he recovered from the terrible blow of Nikolai’s tail. He was waiting for his enemy to make another leap, but suddenly he noticed that Nikolai’s front paws were trembling and his tongue was hanging out. A few more seconds passed, then Nikolai slumped over on to his side and a dark stain began to spread over the ground beside his throat. Sasha took a quick step forward, but he caught the leader’s eye and stopped.

  He looked at the dying werewolf. Nikolai shuddered a few times, then lay still. His eyes closed. Then his body began to tremble, but in a different way this time—Sasha could sense very clearly that the body was already dead, and the sight was terrifying. The outline of the recumbent figure began to blur, the stain beside the throat disappeared, and a fat man in his underpants and vest appeared on the trampled surface of the earth. He was snoring loudly, lying on his belly. His snores suddenly broke off, he turned on his side and made a movement with his hand as though he was straightening his pillow. The hand closed on emptiness, and the surprise was enough to wake him. He opened his eyes, looked around, and closed them again. A second later he opened them again and instantly burst into a wail so piercing that Sasha thought you could tune the most ear-rending police siren to it. He leapt to his feet, jumped clumsily over the nearest wolf and ran off into the distance along the dark street, all the while howling on the same note. When he eventually disappeared around the bend his wailing finally ceased.

  The pack laughed wildly. Sasha glanced at his shadow and instead of the long silhouette of a muzzle he saw the outline of a rounded head and two protruding ears—his own, human ears. When he looked up he saw the leader staring directly at him.

  “Do you understand?” the leader asked.

  “I think so,” said Sasha. “Will he remember anything?”

  “No. For the rest of his life—if, of course, you can call it a life—he will think that he had a terrible nightmare,” the leader replied and turned to the others: “Let’s go.”

  Sasha retained no memory of their journey back. They went a different way, straight through the forest—it was shorter, but it took just as long because they had to run more slowly than on the highway. In the clearing the final embers of the fire were fading. The woman with the beads was dozing behind the windshield of a car: when the wolves appeared she opened her eyes, waved, and smiled. But she didn’t get out of the car.

  Sasha was sad. He felt rather sorry for the old wolf whom his bite had turned back into a human being. When he remembered the exchange of insults, and especially the change that had come over Nikolai a minute before the fight began, he almost felt a liking for him. He tried not to think about what had happened, and after a while he managed to forget it. His nose was still stinging from the blow. He lay down on the grass to think.

  For a while he lay there with his eyes closed. Then he sensed how heavy the silence was and raised his muzzle—on every side the wolves were staring at him without speaking. They seemed to be waiting for something. “Shall I tell them?” Sasha thought.

  He decided he would. Rising on to his paws, he set off around the circle as he had in Konkovo, but this time there was no opponent walking ahead of him. The only thing moving with him was his shadow—a human shadow like that of every member of the pack.

  “I want to confess everything,” he howled softly. “I have deceived you.” The pack said nothing.

  “I didn’t hear any call. I don’t even know what it is. I ended up here entirely by accident.”

  He closed his eyes and waited for a response. There was a moment’s silence, followed by an explosion of barking, howling laughter. He opened his eyes.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  The reply was another eruption of laughter. Eventually the wolves calmed down and the leader asked him:

  “How did you get here?”

  “I lost my way in the forest.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Try to remember why you came to Konkovo.”

  “No special reason. I like trips to the country.”

  “But why here?”

  “Why? Let me think—That’s it.—I saw a photograph that I liked; it was a very beautiful view. And the caption said it was the village of Konkovo near Moscow. Only everything here turned out quite different...”

  “And where did you see the photograph?”

  “In a children’s encyclopedia.”

  This time they all laughed even longer.

  “All right,” said the leader, “and what were you looking for in there?”

  “I...” Sasha suddenly remembered, and it was like a blinding flash of light inside his skull. “I was looking for a photograph of a wolf! Yes, I’d just woken up and I wanted to see a photograph of a wolf! I searched through all my books. I wanted to check something—and then I forgot—so that was the call?”

  “Precisely,” replied the leader.

  Sasha looked at Lena, who had hidden her muzzle in her paws and was shaking with laughter.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “What for?” asked the old wolf, maintaining a calm expression among the general merriment. “Hearing the call’s not the most important thing. That doesn’t make you a werewolf. Do you know when you really became one?”

  “When?”

  “When you agreed to fight with Nikolai, believing that you had no chance of winning. That was when your shadow changed.”

  “Yes. Yes. That’s right,” several voices barked in unison. Sasha said nothing for a while. His thoughts were a confused turmoil. Then he raised his muzzle and asked:

  “But what was that elixir we drank?”

  The wolves laughed so loudly that the woman in the car wound down the window and stuck her head out. The leader could hardly control himself—his muzzle twisted into a crooked smile.

  “He liked it,” he said, “give him some more elixir!”

  Then he began to laugh as well. A small bottle fell on the ground by Sasha’s paws. Straining his eyes, he read: Forest Joy. Elixir for the Teeth. Price: 92 kopecks.

  “That was just a joke,” said
the leader. “But if you could have seen the way you looked when you were drinking it—Remember, a werewolf changes into a human being and back again as he wishes, at any time and in any place.”

  “But what about the cows?” Sasha asked, this time ignoring the howls of laughter. “You said we were running over to Konkovo to...”

  He didn’t finish the sentence and simply waved his paw in the air. Laughing, the wolves scattered over the clearing and lay down in the tall grass. The old wolf stayed sitting opposite Sasha.

  “There’s another thing I have to tell you,” he said. “You must always remember that only werewolves are real people. If you look at your shadow you’ll see that it’s human. But if you look at people’s shadows with your wolf’s eyes, you’ll see the shadows of pigs, cocks, toads...”

  “And spiders, flies, and bats, too,” said Ivan Sergeievich, who had stopped beside them.

  “That’s right. And then there are the monkeys, the rabbits, and the goats. Not to mention...”

  “Don’t frighten the boy,” growled Ivan Sergeievich. “You’re just making it all up as you go along. Don’t you listen to him, Sasha.” The two old wolves looked at each other and laughed.

  “I might be making it up as I go along,” said the leader, “but it’s still true.”

  He turned to go, but stopped when he saw Sasha’s inquiring gaze.

  “Did you want to ask something?”

  “What are werewolves, really?”

  The leader looked him in the eye and bared his teeth slightly.

  “What are people, really?”

  Left on his own, Sasha lay down in the grass to think again. Lena came across and settled down beside him.

  “The moon’s about to reach its zenith,” she said.

  Sasha looked up.

  “Surely that’s not the zenith?”

  “This is a special zenith, you have to listen to the moon, not watch it. Try it.”

  He pricked up his ears. At first all he could hear was the wind stirring the leaves on the trees and the buzzing of nighttime insects, and then another sound appeared, something like the sound of singing or music in the distance, when you can’t tell whether it’s an instrument or a voice. Once he’d picked up the sound, Sasha separated it out from all the others and it began growing stronger, until after a while he could listen to it without any strain. The melody seemed to be coming straight from the moon and it sounded like the music that had been played in the clearing before their transformation. It had sounded dark and menacing then, but now it was soothing. It was beautiful, but there were annoying gaps in it, empty patches. Suddenly he realized that he could fill them in with his own voice, and he began howling, quietly at first, then louder, raising his muzzle to the sky and forgetting everything else—and just then the melody blended with his howling and became perfect. Other voices sprang up beside his. All of them were quite different, but they didn’t clash at all.

  Soon the entire pack was howling. Sasha could understand the feelings expressed in every voice and the meaning of the whole business. Every voice howled its own theme: Lena was howling about something light and gentle like a drop of rain falling on a ringing tin roof; the leader’s deep bass was howling about the immeasurably deep abysses he had crossed in great soaring leaps; the descant howling of the cubs was about their joy at being alive, the fact that morning came in the morning and evening came in the evening, and about a strange sadness that is like a joy. And all together they were howling about the incomprehensible beauty of the world, the center of which lay in the grass of the clearing. The music became louder and louder, the moon swam towards Sasha’s eyes, covering the entire sky, and then came tumbling down on him—or perhaps he floated up from the earth and fell on to its advancing surface.

  When he came around, he could feel a gentle jolting and hear the sound of an engine. He opened his eyes and discovered that he was half-slumped on the back seat of a car. His backpack lay at his feet, Lena was sleeping beside him with her head on his shoulder, and the leader of the pack, Colonel Lebedenko, was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Sasha was about to say something, but he saw the Colonel press his finger to his lips in the rearview mirror. Sasha turned toward the window. A long line of cars was racing along the highway. It was early in the morning, the sun had only just appeared, and the surface of the road ahead looked like an endless pink ribbon. On the horizon he could see the tiny doll’s houses of the approaching city.

  Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream

  Here we see that solipsism, strictly thought through, coincides with pure realism.

  —Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Perestroika erupted into the public lavatory on Tverskoy Boulevard from several directions at once. The clients began squatting in their cubicles longer, reluctant to part with the new sense of boldness they discovered in their scraps of newspaper. The spring light illuminating the stony faces of the gays jostling in the small tiled entranceway brought the intimation of long-awaited freedom, distant, as yet, but already certain: those sections of obscene monologues in which the leaders of the Party and the government were coupled with the Lord God grew louder; the water and the electricity were cut off more often.

  Nobody caught up in all of this could make any real sense of his involvement—nobody, that is, except Vera, the cleaning lady in the men’s toilet, a being of indeterminate age, and entirely sexless like all the rest of her colleagues. The changes that had set in came as something of a surprise to Vera as well, but only to the extent of the precise date at which they began and the precise form in which they manifested themselves, because she herself was their source and origin.

  It all began on that afternoon when Vera thought for the first time, not of the meaning of existence, as she usually did, but of its mystery. This resulted in her dropping her rag into the bucket of murky, sudsy water and emitting a sound something like a rather quiet “ah.” The thought was quite unexpected and unbearable, and most remarkable of all, quite unconnected with anything in her surroundings. It simply manifested itself in a head into which nobody had invited it, leading to the conclusion that the long years of spiritual endeavor spent in the search for meaning had been wasted—because meaning was itself concealed within mystery. Vera nonetheless somehow managed to calm herself down and go on washing the floor.

  When ten minutes had passed and she had already worked her way across a substantial portion of the tiles, a new consideration suddenly occurred to her, which was that this same idea could well occur to other people engaged in intellectual activity, and must, in fact have occurred to them, especially the older and more experienced ones. Vera began figuring out which members of her circle that might be, and quickly reached the certain conclusion that she did not have to look very far and could talk about it with Manyasha, the cleaner from the toilet next door, which was just like this one, only for women.

  Manyasha was a little older, a skinny woman also of indeterminate but decidedly advanced age. For some reason, perhaps because Manyasha always wove her hair into a gray plait at the back of her head, the sight of her always reminded Vera of the phrase “Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg.” Manyasha was Vera’s oldest friend: they often exchanged photocopies of Blavatskaya and Ramacharaka, whose real name, according to Manyasha, was Silberstein. They went to the Illusion cinema to see Fassbinder and Bergman, but they hardly ever spoke about serious matters. Manyasha’s mentorship of Vera’s intellectual life was exercised in a quite unobtrusive and tangential fashion, and Vera never really felt aware of it.

  No sooner had Vera recalled Manyasha, than the small employees’ door between the two toilets opened (they had separate entrances from the street) and Manyasha herself appeared. Vera immediately launched into a confused explanation of her problem, and Manyasha listened without interrupting.

  “So it turns out,” Vera was saying, “that the search for the meaning of life is itself the only meaning of life. No, that’s not it, it turns out that knowledge of the mystery of life, as
distinct from an understanding of its meaning, makes it possible to control existence, that is, actually to put an end to an old life and begin a new one. Once the mystery has been mastered, no problem remains with the meaning.”

  “That’s not exactly right,” Manyasha interrupted, after listening attentively for a long time. “Or more precisely, it is absolutely right in every respect except that you fail to take into account the nature of the human spirit. Do you seriously believe that if you discovered this mystery you could solve every problem that arises?”

  “Of course. I’m sure of it. But how can I discover it?” Manyasha thought for a second, then she seemed to come to some decision and said:

  “There’s a rule involved here. If someone knows this mystery and you ask them about it, then they have to reveal it to you.”

  “Then why doesn’t anyone know it?”

  “Why do you think that? Some people do know it, and the others, obviously, never think to ask. Have you, for instance, ever asked anybody?”

  “Well, let’s say that I’m asking you now,” Vera replied quickly.

  “Then put your hand on the floor,” Manyasha said, “so that you will bear the full responsibility for what is about to happen.”

  “Couldn’t we do it without any of this playacting?” Vera grumbled, leaning down to the floor and placing her palm on a cold, square tile.

  “Well, then?”

  Manyasha beckoned Vera to come closer, then she took her head in her hands, tilted it so that Vera’s ear was directly opposite her mouth, and whispered briefly into it. At that very moment there was a loud booming sound outside the walls of the lavatory.