A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  Sitting at a round table in the center of the room were a group of about fifteen men, all in suits and ties and all rather similar to each other—balding, aging, with the shadow of the same inexpressible thought on their faces. They paid no attention to Nikita.

  “Beyond a shadow of doubt!” said the one who was addressing the others. “We have to tell the whole truth. People are fed up.”

  “Why not? Of course!” responded several cheerful voices, and everyone began speaking at once; there was nothing but confused hubbub until the one who happened to be speaking smacked the table really hard with a file bearing the inscription “Far East Fish”—Nikita realized that the words were not on the file at all, but on the tin of seaweed from his other dream. The full surface of the file hit the table, and though the sound was not loud, it was very solid and prolonged, like the sound of a church bell with a muffler. Silence fell.

  “Clearly,” said the one who had struck the table, “we first have to find out what will come of all this. Let’s try setting up a commission, say with three members.”

  “What for?” asked a girl in a white gown.

  Nikita realized she was there because of him, and he held out the money for his five cans of seaweed. The girl’s mouth gave out a sound like the rattling and buzzing of a cash register, but she didn’t even glance at Nikita.

  “In order,” the man answered her—even though Nikita had moved on past the cash register and was already on his way towards the supermarket doors, “in order that the members of the commission can first try telling each other the whole truth.”

  Agreement was quickly reached on the membership of the committee—it was made up of the speaker himself and two men in light blue three-piece suits and horn-rimmed glasses, who looked like brothers: both of them even had dandruff on their left shoulder. (Nikita was perfectly well aware, of course, that neither the dandruff on the shoulders nor their simple way of speaking was genuine, but were simply elements of the accepted aesthetics in dreams of this kind.) The others went out into the corridor, where the sun was shining, the wind was blowing, and car motors were roaring, and while Nikita was walking down the steps into the pedestrian passageway, they locked the door of the room, and to make sure nobody could peep in, they filled the keyhole with caviar from a sandwich.

  They waited. Nikita walked past the monument to the anti-tank gun and the tobacco shop, and had reached the huge obscene inscription on the wall of the concrete slab Palace of Weddings—which meant that he had only five more minutes to walk before he was home—when suddenly from inside the room, where so far he had heard only a hubbub of indistinguishable voices, there came a gurgling and crackling, which was followed by total silence. The whole truth had apparently been told. Someone knocked at the door.

  “Comrades! How are things going?”

  There was no reply. The people in the small crowd at the door began exchanging glances, and a suntanned European-looking man exchanged glances with Nikita by mistake, but immediately averted his eyes and muttered something in irritation.

  “We’ll break in!” they finally agreed in the corridor.

  The door gave way at the fifth or sixth blow, just at the moment when Nikita was entering the hallway of his house, and he and the door-breakers found themselves in a completely empty room with a large puddle covering most of the floor. At first Nikita thought that it was the puddle he’d seen in the elevator, but when he compared their outlines, he decided it wasn’t. Although the long tongues of urine were still creeping toward the walls, there was nobody there, not under the table or behind the curtains, and three empty suits that were left dangling on the chairs were all hunched over and scorched on the inside. A pair of cracked horn-rimmed glasses gleamed beside the leg of an overturned chair.

  “That’s the truth for you,” someone whispered behind his back. Nikita was already thoroughly fed up with this dream, which showed no sign of coming to an end, and he reached into his pocket for his pin. Trust his bad luck, it wasn’t there. He went into the apartment, threw the bag with the cans onto the floor, opened his wardrobe, and began going through the pockets of all the trousers hanging there. In the meantime all the others went out into the corridor and started whispering in alarm; the suntanned guy almost whispered something to Nikita again, but stopped himself in time. They decided they had to phone somewhere urgently, and the suntanned guy, who was given the responsibility of phoning, was already on his way to the telephone, when suddenly all of them began howling triumphantly—the vanished trio had appeared right there in the corridor in front of them. They were wearing light blue shorts and runners and looked ruddy and cheerful, as though they’d just come from the bath house.

  “There!” shouted the one who had been speaking at the very beginning of the dream, gesturing with his arm. “It’s a joke, of course, but we wanted to show certain impatient comrades...”

  In his fury Nikita jabbed himself several times with the pin, harder than necessary, and he never knew what happened after that. He picked up the bag and carried it into the kitchen, and then went over to the window. Outside there was a summer wind, people were walking along talking happily, and it was just as though each of the passersby really was walking under Nikita’s windows, and not actually in some dimension known only to him.

  As he gazed at the tiny human figures, Nikita thought gloomily that he still didn’t know the content of their dreams, or the relationship between sleeping and waking in their lives. He had nobody to complain to about his recurrent nightmares or to tell about the dreams that pleased him. He suddenly wanted very badly to go out into the street and start talking to someone—it didn’t matter in the slightest who it was—about everything that he had come to understand. And no matter how crazy the idea might be, today he was going to do it.

  About forty minutes later he was already striding away from one of the outlying subway stations up an empty street that rose towards the horizon. It was like an avenue of lime trees that had been sawed in half—where the second row of trees should have been there was a broad paved road. He had come out this way because there were quiet places here, places the militia patrols hardly ever visited. That was important—Nikita knew that you can only run away from a sleeping militiaman in a dream, and adrenaline in the blood is a very poor soporific. Nikita walked up the slope, pricking his leg with the pin and admiring the immense lime trees, like frozen fountains of green ink: he was so absorbed in them that he almost missed his first client.

  He was an old man with several different colored badges hanging on a decrepit brown jacket, probably out for his usual evening stroll. He darted out of the bushes, squinted at Nikita, and set off up the hill. Nikita caught up with him and started walking beside him. From time to time the old man would raise his hand and move his thumb through the air with a forceful gesture.

  “What’s that you’re doing?” Nikita asked after a while.

  “Bedbugs,” replied the old man.

  “What bedbugs?” Nikita was puzzled.

  “Ordinary ones,” the old man said, and sighed. “From the apartment above. All the walls here are full of holes.”

  “You need Desinsectal,” said Nikita.

  “No need. In one night I’ll squash more with my thumb than all your chemicals. You know the way Utyosov sings it: ‘Our enemies...’”

  Then he fell silent, and Nikita never did find out about the bedbugs and Utyosov. They walked on for several yards without speaking.

  “Splat,” the old man suddenly said, “splat.”

  “Is that the bedbugs cracking?” Nikita asked, hazarding a guess.

  “No,” said the old man with a smile, “bedbugs die quiet. That’s the caviar.”

  “What caviar?”

  “Well, just think about it,” said the old man, livening up, his eyes beginning to gleam with the crazed cunning of a Suvorov, “d’you see that kiosk?”

  Standing on the corner there was a newspaper and magazine kiosk.

  “Yes,” said Nikita.r />
  “Good. Well now, imagine there’s a crooked little hut standing right there, and they sell caviar there. You’ve never seen caviar like it and you never will—every grain the size of a grape, unnerstand? And then the woman serving, that great lazy creature, when she’s weighing you out half a kilo she just grabs it out of the barrel with her scoop and slaps it onto the scales. By the time she’s ladled out half a kilo for you she’s dropped as much on the ground—splat! Unnerstand?”

  The old man’s eyes stopped gleaming. He looked around, spat, and went across the road, sometimes stepping around something invisible—perhaps the heaps of caviar lying on the asphalt in his dream.

  “All right,” Nikita decided, “I have to ask directly. Otherwise you can’t tell what anybody’s talking about. If they call the militia, I’ll run for it.”

  It was already quite dark on the street. The street lamps were on, but only half of them were working, and most of those gave off a weak purple glow which colored the pavement and the trees rather than illuminating them, making the street look like some harsh scene from the afterlife. Nikita sat on a bench under the lime trees and froze into immobility. A few minutes later something that squeaked and squealed and consisted of a dark spot and a light spot appeared on the edge of the hemisphere of visibility that was bounded by twilight. It came closer, its movement interrupted by brief pauses during which it rocked to and fro, giving out an insincerely reassuring whisper.

  When he looked more closely, Nikita could make out a woman of about thirty in a dark jacket, pushing a light-colored perambulator in front of her. It was quite obvious that the woman was asleep: every now and then she adjusted an invisible pillow under her head, pretending through the force of habitual female hypocrisy that she was tidying her piebald hair. Nikita got up off his bench. The woman trembled but didn’t wake up.

  “Excuse me,” Nikita began, angry at his own embarrassment, “may I ask you a personal question?”

  The woman drew her plucked eyebrows up onto her forehead and stretched her thick lips from ear to ear, which Nikita took to indicate polite incomprehension.

  “A question?” she asked in a low voice. “All right.”

  “What is it you’re dreaming about at the moment?”

  Nikita made an idiotic gesture, gesturing at everything around them with his hand, and lapsed into final and utter confusion when he realized that his words had had an entirely inappropriate suggestive note to them. The woman laughed like a pigeon cooing.

  “You silly thing,” she said tenderly, “I don’t like that type.”

  “What type then?”

  “With Alsatians, you silly. With big Alsatians.”

  “She’s making fun of me,” thought Nikita.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I realize that I’m stepping out of bounds, so to speak.”

  The woman shrieked quietly, turned her eyes away from him, and began walking quickly.

  “You see,” Nikita continued, becoming excited. “I know that normal people don’t talk about it. Perhaps I’m not normal. But surely you must have wanted to talk about it with someone sometime?”

  “Talk about what?” the woman asked, as though she was playing for time in a conversation with a lunatic. She was almost running now, peering intensely ahead into the gloom: the stroller was bouncing over the surface of the asphalt, and something in it was beating against its oilcloth sides.

  “I’ll tell you what about,” Nikita answered, breaking into a trot, “take today for instance. I switch on the television, and there it is—I don’t know which is more frightening, the audience or the presidium. I watched for a whole hour and I didn’t see anything new, except perhaps for a couple of unfamiliar poses. One person sleeping in a tractor, another sleeping in an orbital space station, one talking about sports in his sleep, and even the ones jumping from the springboard—they were all asleep. And it turns out I have nobody to talk to.”

  The woman frantically adjusted her pillow and began running quite openly. Nikita ran alongside, trying to get his breath back after the effort of speaking, and the green star of a traffic light loomed rapidly towards them.

  “For instance, take you and me. I’ll tell you what, let me stick a pin in you! Why didn’t I think of that before? Shall I?”

  The woman flew out into the intersection and then stopped so sharply that something in the stroller shifted bodily and almost broke through the front of it, and before he could stop himself he had flown on several yards beyond her.

  “Help!” shouted the woman.

  As luck would have it, standing about twenty feet away in an alley there were two men with armbands on their sleeves, both wearing identical white jackets which made them look like angels. Their first response was to back away, but when they saw Nikita standing under the traffic light and not displaying any signs of hostility, they grew bolder and slowly came closer. One of them started talking to the woman, who was wailing and moaning and waving her arms about and kept repeating the words ‘pester’ and ‘maniac,’ and the second man came over to Nikita.

  “Out for a walk?” he asked in a friendly voice.

  “Something like that,” answered Nikita.

  The volunteer militiaman was a head shorter than Nikita and was wearing dark glasses—Nikita had noticed a long time ago that some people found it hard to sleep in the light with their eyes open. The patrolman turned to his partner, who was nodding sympathetically to the woman and writing something down on a sheet of paper. At last the woman finished what she was saying, glanced triumphantly at Nikita, adjusted her pillow, turned her stroller around, and pushed it off up the street. The other volunteer came over. He was a man of about forty with a thick mustache and a cap pulled right down over his ears to prevent his hair from being ruffled during the night, and a bag slung over his shoulder.

  “On the money,” he said to his partner. “It was her.”

  “I realized it right away,” said the one in glasses, and turning to Nikita, he said, “and what’s your name?”

  Nikita introduced himself.

  “I’m Gavrila,” said the one in glasses, “and this is Mikhail. Don’t you be alarmed, she’s the local idiot. They mention her at all our briefings. When she was little two border guards raped her in the middle of a cinema, during the film Here, Mukhtar! and she’s been touched ever since. She’s got a bust of Dzerzhinsky wrapped in diapers in the stroller. Every evening she phones the station and complains they’re trying to screw her, and she pesters the dog catchers, trying to get them to let an Alsatian loose on her...”

  “I did notice,” Nikita said, “that she was a bit strange.”

  “Never mind her. You drinking?”

  Nikita thought for a moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  They sat down on the very same bench where Nikita had been sitting only a few minutes earlier. Mikhail took a bottle of Moscow Special export vodka out of his bag, separated the bronzed cap from its fixing ring with a key ring charm shaped like a small sword, and twisted it off with a single complicated movement of his wrist. He was obviously one of those natural talents you can still meet in Russia who open bottles of beer on their eye socket and with a single firm slap of the hand can knock the cork halfway out of a bottle of dry Bulgarian wine, so that it can easily be grasped in their firm white teeth.

  “Perhaps I should ask them?” Nikita thought, as he took the heavy paper cup and the seaweed sandwich. “But I’m afraid to. There are two of them, after all, and that Mikhail’s a big guy.” Nikita breathed out heavily and fixed his gaze on the complex interwoven pattern of shadows on the asphalt under his feet. The pattern changed with every gust of the warm evening wind: at first there were clear images of horns and banners, then suddenly there was the outline of South America, or three Adidas stripes from the wires hanging under the tree, or else it all looked like nothing more than the shadows cast by light shining through leaves. Nikita raised his cup to his lips. The liquid that was intended to represen
t his country in foreign parts slipped down with remarkable gentleness and tact, no doubt in the belief that the action was taking place somewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

  “By the way, where are we right now?” Nikita asked.

  “Route number three,” replied Gavrila in the glasses, downing a cupful.

  “You blockhead,” laughed Mikhail. “Just because some pig writes something down on the map does that mean it really is ‘route number three’? It’s Stenka Razin Boulevard.”

  Gavrila toyed with the empty cup, then for some reason he prodded Nikita with his finger and asked:

  “Shall we finish it?”

  “What do you think?” Mikhail asked Nikita seriously, tossing the cap up and down on his palm.

  “All the same to me,” said Nikita.

  “Well, in that case...”

  The cup made its second round in silence.

  “That’s it,” Mikhail said thoughtfully. “Nothing else for the workers to look forward to for the time being.”

  He swung back his arm and was about to toss the bottle into the bushes, but Nikita managed to grab his sleeve.

  “Let me have a look,” he said.

  As Mikhail handed him the bottle Nikita noticed a tattoo on his wrist—it looked like a man on horseback thrusting his lance into something under the hooves of his horse—but Mikhail immediately hid his hand away in his pocket, and it would have been awkward to ask specially to look at the tattoo. Nikita looked closely at the bottle. The label was exactly the same as on Moscow Special for the domestic market, except that the writing was in Latin characters and the Special Limited Extra Export Product emblem—a stylized globe with “SLEEP” inscribed on it in big letters—gazed out from the white background like an eye.

  “Time to go,” Mikhail said suddenly, glancing at his watch.

  “Time to go,” Gavrila repeated like an echo.