A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin

  “Time to go,” Nikita repeated for some reason.

  “Put on your armband,” said Mikhail, “or else the captain’ll raise hell.”

  Nikita reached down into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled armband and slipped it over his arm; the tapes were already tied. The word ‘patrolman’ was back to front, but Nikita made no effort to fix it. “It won’t be for long anyway,” he thought to himself.

  When he got up off the bench, he felt really unsteady and he was even afraid for a second that he’d be spotted at the base, but then he remembered what state the captain himself was in at the end of the last shift, and felt calmer.

  The three of them walked in silence as far as the traffic light and turned on to a side street, in the direction of the base, which was ten minutes’ walk away. Perhaps it was the vodka, perhaps something else, but it was a long time since Nikita had felt such a lightness in every part of his body—he felt as though he wasn’t walking but soaring straight up into the sky, borne aloft on currents of air. Mikhail and Gavrila walked on each side of him, surveying the street with drunken severity. Every now and then they encountered groups of people. First there were some empty-headed girls, one of whom winked at Nikita, then a pair of obvious criminals, then some people eating a cake right there on the street, and various other rather dubious individuals.

  “It’s a good thing,” Nikita thought, “there’s three of us. Or else they’d tear us to pieces—just look at their ugly mugs.”

  Thinking was hard. Inside his head the words of a children’s song kept flaring up like bright neon lights—with words about how the best thing on earth was to step out side by side across the open country and sing together. Nikita didn’t understand the meaning of the words, but that didn’t worry him.

  Back at the station they found that everyone had already gone home. The duty officer said they could have come in an hour earlier. While Nikita looked for his bag in the dark room where they usually held the briefings and assigned people their routes, Mikhail and Gavrila left—otherwise they would have missed their train. Once he’d handed in his armband, Nikita pretended that he was in a hurry too. The last thing he felt like doing was walking to the subway with the captain and talking about Yeltsin. Once he was out on the street, he felt that his good mood had totally evaporated.

  Turning up his collar, he set off towards the subway, thinking about the next day. The grocery order with the two sticks of salami, the phone call to Urengoi, a liter of vodka for the holidays (he should have asked his colleagues where they got the Special, but it was too late now), collect little Anna from the kindergarten, because the wife was going to the gynecologist—the stupid cow, even down there she had something wrong with her—put it all together and he’d have to take a half day off from German Parmenych for taking today off. He was sitting inside the subway car now, opposite a pregnant woman who was staring hard at him from under her head scarf, drilling holes in his bald patch; he just kept on looking at his newspaper until the bastards tapped him on the shoulder, and then he had to get up and give her his seat, but they were already approaching his station. He went over to the doors and looked at his tired, wrinkled face in the glass with the entwined electrical snakes rushing past outside it. Suddenly his face disappeared and its place was taken by a black void with lights in the distance: the tunnel had come to an end and the train had emerged on to the bridge across the frozen river. He could see a sign, “GLORY TO SOVIET MAN,” on the roof of a tall building, lit up by crossed beams of blue light.

  A minute later the train dived back into the tunnel and the glass was filled with gesticulating alcoholics, a girl with needles who was finishing knitting something blue under the subway map, a schoolboy with a pale face, daydreaming over the photographs in a history textbook, an army colonel in a tall astrakhan hat, invincibly clutching a briefcase with a combination lock, and there on the other side of the glass somebody had traced out the word ‘YES’ in block capitals.

  Then a long and empty street covered in snow appeared in front of him. There was a sharp pain in his leg. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a pin with a big round green head that had gotten in there somehow. He tossed it into a snowdrift and looked upward. In the gap between the houses the sky was very high and clear, and he was surprised to make out the dipper shape of the Great Bear among the fine sprinkling of stars—for some reason he’d been sure it could only be seen in summer.

  Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese Folk Tale)

  As everyone knows, our universe is located in the teapot of a certain Lui Dunbin who sells trinkets at the bazaar in Chanyan. The strange thing is, however, that Chanyan ceased to exist several centuries ago. For many ages already there has been no Lui Dunbin sitting in the bazaar, and long, long ago his teapot was melted down or squashed as flat as a pancake by the weight of the earth above it. In my opinion there is only one rational explanation which may be offered for this strange contradiction in terms—that the universe continues to exist, while its location has already perished: while Lui Dun-bin was still dozing at his stall in the bazaar, in his teapot they were already excavating the ruins of ancient Chanyan, the grass was growing thick above his grave and people were launching rockets into space, winning and losing wars, building telescopes and tank factories... Stop... This is where we shall start. In his childhood, Ch’an the Seventh was called the Little Red Star. Then he grew up and went to work in the commune.

  What is the life of a peasant? This is something we all know. Like others, Ch’an lost heart and took to drinking without restraint. He even lost track of time. He got drunk in the morning and hid in the empty rice barn in the yard of his own house, so that the chairman Fu Yuishi, nicknamed “the Bronze Engels” for his great political understanding and physical strength, would not notice him. Ch’an hid because the Bronze Engels often accused drunks of certain incomprehensible offenses—of conformism or degeneracy—and forced them to work without pay. People were afraid to argue with him because he called that a declaration of counterrevolutionary views and sabotage, and counterrevolutionary saboteurs were supposed to be sent to the city.

  That morning, as usual, Ch’an and the others were lying around drunk in their barns and the Bronze Engels was riding around the empty streets on a donkey, looking for someone he could send to work. Ch’an was in a really bad way, and he lay with his belly to the ground and his head covered with an empty rice sack. There were several ants crawling across his face, and one even crawled into his ear, but Ch’an was in no state to raise his hand to crush them, his hangover was too bad. Suddenly from far away, from the Party yamen itself, where there was a loudspeaker, he heard the time signal on the radio. Seven times the gong sounded, and then...

  Either Ch’an imagined it, or a long black limousine actually did draw up at the barn. It was a mystery how it could ever have gotten in through the gate. Out of it emerged two fat bureaucrats in dark clothing with square ears and little badges in the form of red flags, while a third person with a gold star on his chest and a prawnlike mustache, remained sitting in the depths of the car, fanning himself with a red file for papers. The first two waved their hands and came into the barn. Ch’an threw the sack off his head and stared at his visitors in total incomprehension. One of them came over to Ch’an, kissed him three times on the lips and said:

  “We have come to you from the distant land of the USSR. Our Son of Bread has heard much of your great talents and sense of justice and he invites you to visit him.”

  Ch’an had never even heard of such a country. “Maybe,” he thought, “the Bronze Engels has informed against me, and they’re taking me in for sabotage? They say they like to play the fool when they do that...”

  In his fear Ch’an broke into a fierce sweat.

  “And who are you?” he asked.

  “We are P.A.’s,” the strangers replied, then they took Ch’an by his shirt and pants, threw him onto the back seat, and sat on each side of him. Ch’an made as though to leap out again, but he received s
uch a blow to the ribs that he quickly changed his mind and submitted. The driver started the engine, and the car moved off.

  It was a strange journey. At first they appeared to be driving along the familiar road, then suddenly they turned off into the forest and seemed to dive down into a pit. The car was jolted hard, and Ch’an squeezed his eyes tight shut. When he opened them again, he saw that they were driving along a broad highway flanked by small houses with aerials on their roofs. There were cows wandering about and tall posters with pictures of the fleshy faces of ancient rulers and inscriptions in an ancient tadpole script. All of this seemed to come together over their heads, and it was as though the road was passing through an immense empty pipe. “It’s like inside the barrel of a cannon,” Ch’an thought for some reason.

  It was amazing. He’d spent all of his life in the village and never even suspected that there were places like this nearby. It was clear now that they weren’t going to the city and Ch’an felt calmer. The journey proved to be a long one. After a couple of hours Ch’an began to nod off, and then he fell asleep altogether. He dreamed that the Bronze Engels had lost his Party Card and he, Ch’an, had been appointed chairman of the commune in his place and now he was walking along the deserted dusty street looking for someone he could send to work. As he came up to his own house, he thought:

  “Right then, Ch’an the Seventh is probably lying drunk in the barn—I’ll just glance inside and see.” He seemed to remember that he was the Ch’an the Seventh himself, but he still had this thought. Ch’an was quite amazed at this, even in his dream, but he decided that if he’d been made chairman, he must first have studied the art of Party vigilance, and this was it. He walked up to the barn, opened the door and there, sure enough, he saw himself sleeping in the corner, with a sack over his head. “Just you wait,” thought Ch’an, and he picked up the half-empty bottle of beer from the floor and poured the contents straight onto the back of the head under the sack.

  Suddenly there was a whirring and screeching and knocking sound above his head and Ch’an waved his arms in the air and woke up. It turned out they’d switched on some gadget on the roof of the car that whirled around and blinked and howled. Now all the cars and people ahead of them began to give way, and the constables with striped batons saluted. Ch’an’s two companions flushed in pleasure. Ch’an dozed off again, and when he woke it was already dark, the car was standing on a beautiful square in a strange city and there were crowds of people all around, but a line of constables in black caps prevented them from coming close.

  “Perhaps you should go out to the workers?” one of Ch’an’s traveling companions said with a smile. Ch’an had noticed that the further they left his village behind them, the more politely the pair of them treated him.

  “Where are we?” Ch’an asked.

  “This is Pushkin Square in the city of Moscow,” one of the P.A.’s answered and pointed to a heavy metal figure that was clearly visible in the beams of the searchlights beside a column of water that glittered as it scattered in drops into the air.

  Above the monument and the fountain words of fire blazed across the sky. Ch’an got out of the car. Several searchlights illuminated the crowd, and above their heads he could see immense banners: “GREETINGS TO COMRADE SALAMI FROM THE WORKERS OF MOSCOW!”

  Also floating above the heads of the crowd were portraits of himself on long poles. Ch’an suddenly realized that he could read the tadpole script without any difficulty, and he couldn’t even understand why it was called tadpole, but before he could come to terms with his surprise a small group of people squeezed through the police cordon and came towards him: there were two women in red sarafans reaching down to the asphalt with semicircles of tin on their heads and two men in military uniform with sawn-off balalaikas. Ch’an realized that these must be the workers. They were carrying something held out in front of them, something small, dark, and round, like the front wheel of a Shanghai tractor. One of the P.A.’s whispered in Ch’an’s ear that this was the so-called bread and salt greeting. Following his instructions, Ch’an tossed a piece of the bread into his mouth and kissed one of the girls on her rouged cheek, scraping his forehead on the tin kokoshnik in the process.

  Then the police orchestra rumbled into life, playing on strangely shaped tsins and yuahs, and the crowded square yelled as one: “Hoo-rr-aaah!”

  Actually, some of them were shouting that they should beat someone called yids, but Ch’an was not acquainted with the local customs, and so he decided not to ask about that.

  “Who is Comrade Salami?” he inquired, when they had left the square behind them.

  “You are Comrade Salami now,” the P.A. replied.

  “Why am I?”

  “The Son of Bread has decided,” replied the P.A. “The country is short of meat, and our ruler believes that if his deputy has a name like that, the workers will be calmer.”

  “But what happened to his old deputy?” Ch’an asked.

  “The previous deputy,” the P.A. replied, “looked like a pig; they often used to show him on the television, and for a while the workers would forget that there wasn’t enough meat. But then the Son of Bread learned that his deputy was concealing the fact that his head had been cut off a long time ago, and he was employing the services of a sorcerer.

  “But then how could they show him on television if his head had been cut off?” asked Ch’an.

  “That was precisely what offended the workers most,” the P.A. said, and then fell silent.

  Ch’an wanted to ask what happened after that and why the P.A. always called the people workers, but he decided not to, in case he put his foot in it somehow. Soon the car came to a stop at a large brick house.

  “This is where you are going to live, Comrade Salami,” said one of the P.A.’s.

  Ch’an was shown into his apartment, which was decorated in an expensively luxurious style, but which gave him a bad feeling—as if the rooms were spacious and the windows were big and the furniture was beautiful, but somehow it was all unreal; there was something dark and devilish about it, as though you only had to clap your hands hard and it would all disappear. But then the P.A.’s took off their jackets, vodka and meat hors d’oeuvres appeared on the table, and a few minutes later Ch’an could have looked the devil in the eye and spat at him. The P.A.’s rolled up their sleeves, one of them picked up a guitar and began to play, and the other began to sing in a pleasant voice:

  We are children of the Cosmos

  But first of all

  We are your children, Mother Earth!

  Ch’an couldn’t quite grasp whose children they were, but he was beginning to like them more and more. They juggled and tumbled very skillfully, and when Ch’an clapped and applauded, they recited freedom-loving verse and sang beautiful songs about strong male friendship and the beauty of little girls. And there was a song about something incomprehensible that wrung Ch’an’s heart when he listened to it.

  When Ch’an woke, it was morning. One of the P.A.’s was shaking him by the shoulder. Ch’an felt ashamed when he saw what condition he had slept in, especially since the P.A.’s were neat and freshly washed.

  “The First Deputy has arrived!” one of them said.

  Ch’an noticed that his patched blue jacket had disappeared, and in its place on the chair hung a gray jacket with a little red flag on the lapel. He began dressing hurriedly, and had just finished tying the knot in his tie when a smallish man sporting noble gray locks was led into the room.

  “Comrade Salami!” he announced, “the foundation of the wheel is the spoke; the foundation of order in the Empire is personnel; the reliability of the wheel depends on the space between the spokes, and personnel decide everything. The Son of Bread knows of you as a noble and enlightened man and he wishes to elevate you to high office.”

  “How could I dare to dream of such an honor?” responded Ch’an, barely managing to suppress his hiccuping.

  The First Deputy invited him to follow. They went downs
tairs, got into a black car, and set off along the street, which was called Great Armory Street. Then they found themselves in front of a house like the one where Ch’an had spent the night, only several times larger. The house was surrounded by a large park. The First Deputy went ahead along the narrow pathway. Ch’an followed him, listening to the P.A. hurrying along behind playing a small flute in the form of a fountain pen.

  The moon was shining. Black swans of amazing beauty were swimming in a pond, and Ch’an was informed that they were all actually enchanted KGB agents. There were paratroopers disguised as marines lurking behind the poplars and willows. There were marines lying in the bushes, disguised as paratroopers. At the entrance to the house several old women sitting on a bench ordered them in men’s voices to halt and lie on the ground with their hands on the back of their heads. Only the First Deputy and Ch’an were admitted. They walked for a long time through corridors and up staircases on which happy smartly-dressed children played, and finally they approached a pair of tall inlaid and encrusted doors at which two cosmonauts with flamethrowers stood on guard.

  Ch’an was alarmed and crushed by such magnificence. The First Deputy pushed open a ponderous door and said to Ch’an: “After you.”

  Ch’an heard gentle music and he tiptoed inside, where he found himself in a bright spacious room with windows wide open to the sky. In the very center, seated at a white grand piano, was the Son of Bread, covered in ears of corn and gold stars. He could see right away that this was no ordinary man. He was connected by several pipes to a large metal cabinet beside him which was gurgling quietly. The Son of Bread glanced at the new arrivals, but did not seem to see them; the wind came in at the windows and ruffled his gray hair. In fact he had seen everything, and a minute later he raised his hands from the piano, smiled graciously and spoke:

  “In order to strengthen...”