A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  “So what?” Vera asked, puzzled. “What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?”

  “Well, this,” said Manyasha. “You tell me that the stink has disappeared. But it hasn’t really disappeared at all. You’re going to come up against it again.”

  Since they had transferred the men’s toilet to Manyasha’s side and combined it with the women’s, Manyasha had changed a great deal—she spoke less and she came visiting less often too. She herself explained this by the fact that she had achieved equilibrium between Yin and Yang, but in her heart of hearts Vera believed her heavy work load and her envy of Vera’s new lifestyle were really to blame—an envy that was merely masked by her philosophical attitude.

  Through all of this, Vera gave not a single thought to the person who had taught her everything required to achieve this metamorphosis. Manyasha sensed Vera’s changed attitude toward her, but she took it calmly, as though that was the way things ought to be—and she simply came to visit less often. Vera soon came to realize that Manyasha was right, and it happened like this: one day as she was straightening up after wiping down the glass counter, she noticed something strange out of the corner of her eye—a man smeared all over with shit. He was carrying himself with great dignity as the crowd parted before him on his way to the electronics counter. Vera shuddered and even dropped her feather duster, but when she turned her head for a better look at the man, it turned out to be nothing but a trick of the light—he was actually wearing a russet-brown leather jacket.

  After that first instance, however, tricks of the light began to happen more and more often. Vera would see crumpled pieces of paper on the glass surface of the counter, and she would have to stare hard for a few seconds before she could see them as anything else. She began to feel it was no accident that the expensive decorative bottles with the fairy tale names—each of them costing three or four Soviet monthly salaries—stood on the long shelf behind the salesgirl in exactly the same spot where the urinals used to gurgle so boisterously. Even the very name “toiletries” scrawled on cardboard with a red felt tip pen suddenly became a mere euphemism. Behind the walls now there was something rumbling quietly but menacingly almost all the time, like a whispering giant; although the sound was not loud, it conveyed a sense of incredible power.

  Vera began looking carefully at customers as they came in. The first thing she noticed were certain oddities in their dress: certain things they wore simply insisted on resembling shit, or just the opposite, the shit daubed on them simply insisted on resembling certain things. Many of their faces were smeared with shit in the form of dark glasses; it covered their shoulders in the form of leather jackets and encased their legs in the form of jeans. They were all smeared with it to a greater or lesser degree: three or four of them were completely covered from head to toe, and one had several layers; the crowd showed him very particular respect.

  There were lots of children running around. One boy reminded Vera very much of her brother, who drowned at a Young Pioneer Camp, and she watched very carefully to see what would happen to him. At first he simply used to tell the customers what they could buy from each of the shit-smeared individuals, and he would even run up to customers as they came in and ask them:

  “What do you want?”

  Soon he was selling trinkets himself, and then one day, as Vera was shifting her bucket across the floor toward the counter with the huge black lumps of shit with serious-sounding Japanese names, she looked up and saw his face beaming with happiness. Looking down, she saw that his feet, which had been wearing shoes, were now thickly plastered with the same substance that covered most of the people standing around him. In a purely instinctive response she ran her duster over the boy, and the next moment he shoved her away rudely.

  “Watch where you’re going, you old fool,” he said, brandishing the finger he had taken out of his pocket, and then, after a second’s thought, transforming the gesture into a fist. Vera suddenly realized that while she was ruling the universe, old age had overtaken her, and now all that lay ahead was death.

  Vera had not seen Manyasha for a long time. Recently their relationship had become a lot cooler, and the door in the wall that led to Manyasha’s half of the premises remained locked for long periods. Vera began trying to recall the circumstances under which Manyasha usually appeared, and discovered that she could say nothing on that score except that sometimes she simply did.

  Vera began recounting the history of their acquaintance to herself, and the longer she spent remembering, the more convinced she became that Manyasha was to blame for everything. Just exactly what this “everything” was she would hardly have been able to say, but she decided to take her revenge anyway, and began preparing a treat for the next meeting with Manyasha—that was how she thought of this thing she was preparing, a “treat,” not even calling things by their real names to herself, as though behind the wall Manyasha might be frightened by reading her thoughts and decide not to come.

  Manyasha evidently didn’t read anything from behind the wall, because one evening she turned up. She seemed tired and unsociable, which Vera automatically explained by the fact that she had so much work to do. Forgetting about her plans for the moment, Vera told Manyasha about her hallucinations, and Manyasha livened up a bit.

  “That’s natural enough,” she said. “After all, you understand the mystery of life, which means you can perceive the metaphysical function of objects. But since you don’t know the meaning of life, you can’t distinguish their metaphysical essence. And so you think that what you see is a hallucination. Have you tried explaining it for yourself?”

  “No,” said Vera, after a moment’s thought. “It’s very difficult to understand. Probably there’s something that turns things into shit. It affects some things and it doesn’t affect others—no—A-ha—I think I’ve got it now. The things themselves are not actually shit. It’s when they find their way in here that they—or not even that—the shit that we live in becomes visible when it gets onto them...”

  “That’s a bit nearer the mark,” said Manyasha.

  “Oh, my God—There was I thinking about pictures and music, and all the time this place was just a toilet; what music could there possibly be in here. But whose fault is it? As far as the shit’s concerned, it’s clear enough, it was the Communists who opened the valve.”

  “In what sense?” Manyasha asked.

  “In both senses. No, if there’s anyone to blame, Manyasha, then it’s you,” Vera concluded unexpectedly, and gave her former friend an unfriendly look, such a very unfriendly look that Manyasha took a small step backwards.

  “Why me? On the contrary, how many times have I told you that all these mysteries would do you no good unless you came to grips with their meaning? Vera, what are you doing?”

  Looking down and off to the side somewhere, Vera advanced on Manyasha, and Manyasha backed away, until they came to the narrow, awkward door leading to Manyasha’s half of the premises. Manyasha stopped and lifted her eyes to Vera’s face.

  “Vera, what have you decided to do?”

  “I want to smash your head in with an ax,” Vera replied in a crazed voice, and from under her overall coat she pulled out her terrible treat, with a projection for extracting nails sprouting from its heel.

  “Right across the braid, just like in Dostoyevsky.”

  “Well, of course, you can do that,” Manyasha said nervously, “but I warn you, if you do, you’ll never see me again.”

  “That much I can work out for myself, I’m not a total idiot,” Vera whispered exaltedly as she swung her arm and brought down the ax with all her strength on Manyasha’s gray head. There was a ringing and a rumbling, and Vera fainted.

  When she came to she found herself lying in the changing room clutching the ax in her hands, with a tall mirror almost the height of a man, towering over her, and in it a gaping hole with the contours of an immense snowflake.

  “Yesenin,” thought Vera.

  What frightened
her most of all was that there was no door in the wall, and now she had no idea what to do with all those memories which involved the door. But even this ceased to be important when Vera suddenly realized that she herself had changed. It was as though part of her soul had disappeared, a part that she had only just become aware of, in the same way that some people are tormented by pain in amputated limbs. Everything still seemed to be in the right place, but the most important thing, which lent meaning to all the rest, had disappeared. Vera felt as though it had been replaced by a two-dimensional drawing on paper, and her two-dimensional soul generated a two-dimensional hatred for the two-dimensional world around her.

  “Just you wait,” she whispered to no one in particular, “I’ll show you.”

  Her hatred was reflected in her surroundings: there was something shuddering behind the wall, and the customers in the shop, or the toilet, or the subterranean niche where she had spent her entire life—Vera was no longer sure of anything—would sometimes break off their inspection of the shit plastered along the shelves and look around in startled anxiety.

  Some tremendous force was pressing against the walls from the outside; there was something trembling and quivering behind the thin surface as it flexed inwards—as though some immense fist was squeezing a paper cup on the bottom of which Vera’s tiny figure was sitting, surrounded by counters and changing rooms, squeezing it only gently as yet, but capable at any moment of totally crushing Vera’s entire reality. One day, at precisely 19:40 (the exact moment when Vera thought the green figures on the three identical lumps of shit on the shelf were showing the year of her birth), this moment came.

  Vera was standing holding her bucket, facing the long counter with the clothes—where the sheepskin coats, leather rain slickers, and obscene pink blouses hung jumbled together—looking absentmindedly at the customers as they fingered the sleeves and collars that were so close and yet so far beyond their reach, when she felt a sudden jab of piercing pain in her heart. Instantly, the rumbling outside became unbearably loud. The walls began to tremble; they bulged inwards, then cracked open. And flowing out of the crack, overturning the counter with the clothes as it advanced on the terrified shrieking people, came a repulsive black-brown flood tide.

  “Aagh!” Vera just had time to sigh before she was lifted from the floor, whirled around, and flung hard against the wall. The last memory retained by her consciousness was the word “Karma” written in large black letters on a white background in the same typeface as the title of the newspaper Pravda. She was brought back to her senses by another blow, this time a weak one, as she came into contact with some twigs. The twigs proved to be on the branches of a tall old oak tree, and for a moment Vera was at a loss to understand how, from her position on a tiled floor she knew every inch of, she could have been thrown up against any branches. It turned out that she was floating along Tverskoy Boulevard on a foul-smelling, black-brown flood which was already lapping at the windows on the second and third stories of the buildings. Glancing around, she caught sight of something that looked like a hill rising up above the surface of the slurry, formed by a fountain that sprang from the very spot where her underground passage had been.

  The current carried Vera on in the direction of Tverskaya Street. The surface of the slurry was rising at a fantastic speed, the two- and three-story houses at the side of the road were no longer visible, and the huge ugly theater next to them resembled an island of gray granite. Standing on the brink of its towering shoreline were three women in white muslin dresses and an officer of the White Guards who was shading his eyes as he gazed into the distance. Vera realized they must have been performing The Three Sisters.

  She was borne on further and further. A stroller drifted past her, carrying a baby dressed in a blue cap with a big red star, who stared around in wide-eyed astonishment. Then she found herself at the corner of a house crowned by a round columned turret, on which two fat soldiers in peaked caps with blue bands were hastily readying a machine gun for firing. Finally the current carried her out onto Tverskaya Street, which was almost totally submerged, and off in the direction of the somber distant peaks with their summits crowned by barely visible ruby-red pentagrams.

  The flood tide was flowing faster now. Behind her to the right, above the roofs protruding from the brownish black lava, she could see an immense rumbling geyser that obscured half the sky; its rumbling mingled with the barely distinguishable chatter of a machine gun.

  “Blessed is he who has visited this world,” Vera whispered, “in its fateful moments...”

  She saw a globe of the earth floating alongside her, and realized that it must have come from the wall of the Central Telegraph Building. She rowed it over to her and grabbed hold of Scandinavia. The electric motor that turned the globe had obviously also been ripped from the wall of the Central Telegraph, and it lent the entire structure stability—on her second attempt Vera managed to scramble up onto its blue dome, seat herself on the red highlighted surface of the workers’ state, and look around her.

  Away in the distance she could see the television tower at Ostankino, some roofs still visible as islands, and ahead a red star seemed to be drifting toward her over the surface of the water; when Vera drew level with it, its lower points were already below the surface. She grabbed hold of one of its cold glass ribs and brought her globe to a standstill. Alongside her on the surface of the slurry there were two soldier’s caps and a soaked tie, blue with small white polka dots—they weren’t moving, which suggested that the current here was weak.

  Vera took another look around and was amazed for a moment at the ease with which a centuries-old city had disappeared, until the thought came to her that all changes in history, when they happen, take place exactly like that: as though they are entirely natural. She didn’t want to think at all; she wanted to sleep, and stretched out on the convex surface of the USSR, resting her head on her mop-callused hand.

  When she woke, the world consisted of two parts—the early evening sky and an infinite smooth surface, which had turned quite black in the dim light. There was nothing else to be seen, the ruby-red stars had long ago sunk out of sight and God only knew what depth they were at now. Vera thought of Atlantis, then about the Moon and its ninety-six laws, but all of these comfortable, familiar old thoughts, inside which only yesterday her soul could nestle and curl up into a tight ball, were out of place now, and Vera dozed off again. Through her drowsiness she suddenly noticed how quiet it was—she noticed because she heard a gentle splashing coming from the direction where the magnificent red hill of the sunset rose up above the horizon.

  An inflatable dinghy was moving towards her, with a tall, broad-shouldered figure in a peaked cap standing in it, holding a long oar. Vera pushed herself up with her hands, thinking as she looked at the approaching figure that on her globe she must look like an allegorical figure; she even realized what the allegory was—it was an allegory of herself, drifting on a globe with a dubious history across the boundless ocean of existence. Or of nonexistence—but that made no difference at all. The boat drew close, and Vera recognized the man standing in it. It was Marshal Pot Mir Soup.

  “Vera,” he said, with a strong Eastern accent, “do you know who I am?”

  There was something unnatural about his voice.

  “I know,” answered Vera, “I’ve read a bit. I realized everything a long time ago, only there was a tunnel through what I read. There has to be to be some kind of tunnel.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  Vera felt the surface of the globe she was riding open inward, and she tumbled into the gap. It happened very quickly. She managed to get a grip on the edge of the breach, and began flailing her feet to find some support, but there was nothing beneath her but black emptiness into which the wind blew. Above her head there remained a patch of the mournful evening sky, shaped exactly like the outline of the USSR (her fingers were straining with all their might against the southern border). The familiar silhouette—which all her
life had reminded her of a beef carcass hanging on the wall of the meat department in her local food store—suddenly seemed the most beautiful thing it was possible to imagine. And apart from it there was nothing else left at all.

  From out of the fleeting world, Vera heard a splash, and a heavy oar struck her right, and then her left hand. The bright silhouette of the motherland swirled away and disappeared into the distance far below. Vera felt herself floating in a strange space—it couldn’t really be called falling because there was no air, and even more importantly, because she herself was not actually there. She tried to catch a glimpse of at least some part of her body and failed, although she was staring at her arms and legs.

  There was nothing left but this looking, and it didn’t see anything even though the looking, as Vera realized with a fright, was in all directions at once, and there was no need at all to try and look in any particular direction. Then Vera noticed that she could hear voices—but not with her ears, she was simply aware of someone else’s distant conversation. It concerned herself.

  “There’s one here with third degree solipsism,” said what seemed to be a low and rumbling voice. “What do we recommend for that?”

  “Solipsism?” broke in what might have been another voice, thin and high pitched. “That’s not very pleasant at all. Eternal confinement in the prose of socialist realism. As a character.”

  “There’s no vacancies left,” said the low voice.

  “What about Sholokhov’s Cossacks?” the high voice asked hopefully.

  “Full up.”

  “Then what about that, what do they call it...” the high voice began enthusiastically, “war prose? Maybe some two-paragraph Lieutenant in the NKVD? Does nothing but appear around the corner, wiping the sweat from her brow, and gazing piercingly at the bystanders? Nothing there at all except a cap, sweat, and a piercing gaze? For the rest of eternity, eh?”