It is genuinely unique. You have been misinformed: no one has yet become any richer by ‘hanging about’ with those folks. You can only end up with less money than ever after putting yourself through that, otherwise the elite would not be the elite.
In ancient times in the Middle Kingdom every official strove to do good on the Great Way of Things. But here they all set up their own toll bars across the road and only raise them for money. And the essence of the social contract lies precisely in them raising their booms for each other.
The elite here is divided into two branches, which are called ‘the oligarchy’ (derived from the words ‘oil’ and ‘gargle’) and ‘the apparat’ (from the phrase ‘upper rat’). ‘The oligarchy’ is the business community, which grovels to the authorities, who can close down any business at any moment, since business here is inseparable from theft. And ‘the upper rat’ consists of the authorities, who feed on the kickbacks from business. The way it works is that the former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve. Just think about the kind of people who have managed to create such a spellbinding formation in the middle of empty space. At the same time, there are no clear boundaries between these two branches of power - one merges smoothly into the other, forming a single immense, fat rat trying to swallow itself. Do you really want to hang about with this perpetually champing uroborus? That is what the alchemical symbol of the snake biting its own tail is called - but in our case the connotations are more urological in nature.
The reforms that you have heard about are by no means new. They have been going on here constantly for as long as I can remember. What they essentially come down to is the choice, from all the possible versions of the future, of the one that is the most disgusting. Every time the reforms begin with the declaration that a fish rots from the head, then the reformers eat up the healthy body, and the rotten head swims on. And so everything that was rotten under Ivan the Terrible is still alive today, and everything that was healthy five years ago has already been gobbled up. Instead of a bear, the ‘apparat’ or ‘upper rat’ here could have used a fish head on its banners.
Although a bear is a witty choice too: it is the international symbol of economic stagnation, and there is also the Russian expression ‘greasing the paw’. The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.
But Russians still love their country anyway, and their writers and poets traditionally compare this order of things to a weight attached to the foot of a giant - otherwise, they say, he would start rushing along too fast . . . Oh, but I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen any signs of a giant for a long time, just an oil pipeline with a fat rat hanging over it, giving itself a royal autocephalic uroborus. It sometimes seems to me that the only goal of Russian life is to drag this rat across the snowy wastes, trying to make some geopolitical sense of all this and inspire the minor nations with it.
If you analyse another two interconnected aspects of the local culture - the strictly taboo vocabulary employed for daily communication between people here, and laws under which the generally accepted way of life is a crime (which means that the face of every citizen bears the indelible imprint of sin) - you have a brief description of the ‘gestalt’ that you are intending to visit. And this list could easily be extended indefinitely: it would include the metal doors with security locks on flats, metaphysical blockbusters in which good allows evil to feed, because evil allows good to feed, and so on. But enough of that.
Let me share with you my professional views on the prospects for a working girl here. There is a game played in the local prisons that the intelligentsia calls ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and the intellectuals call ‘Ultima Thule’. What it consists of is the following: a man sits down in a tub of water so that only the head of his penis is visible on the surface. Then he takes out of a matchbox a fly whose wings have been pulled off in advance
and releases it on to that little island. The essential content of this northern amusement is watching the aimless wanderings of the unfortunate insect across the foreskin (hence the name of the game). It is a meditation on the hopelessness of existence, loneliness and death. Catharsis is achieved here through the stimulation of the head of the male member produced by the rapid movements of the fly’s feet. There is a version of this game that the intelligentsia calls ‘Atlantis’, and the intellectuals call ‘Kitezh of the spirit’ (after the sacred underwater city in the Russian folktale). But the details of that are so sombre that I’d rather not spoil your sleep by mentioning them.
Believe me, my sister, if you come here, you will feel like a wingless fly wandering over the islands of an archipelago, about which everything important that there is to say has already been said to mankind by Solzhenitsyn. Is it worth exchanging your sea and sun for such a hard life? Yes, there is more money here. But believe me, the local inhabitants all spend it on pretending to move a bit closer, if only in a state of heroin-and-alcohol-induced stupor, to that torrent of happiness and joy in which your life is spent.
And one last thing, since you have already mentioned the
super-werewolf. I’m absolutely certain that all the legends about him should be understood metaphorically. The super-werewolf is what any of us can become as a result of moral
self-improvement and the development of our abilities to the greatest possible extent. You are him already, in potential terms. Therefore, to seek him somewhere outside of yourself is to err. I would not waste my time trying to convince E Hu-Li of this, or her husband (it would be interesting to get a look at him while it’s still possible). But you, my little sister, with your clear mind and truthful heart, should understand this.
Heads and tails,
A.
There was a seventeenth-century Chinese comedy called
Two Foxes in One Town
. Moscow is a very big town, which meant there could be very big problems here. But it was not misgivings of that sort that stopped me, not at all - quite honestly, I was only thinking of my sister’s happiness. If I laid it on a bit thick in my letter, then it was only out of concern for her - let her carry on warming herself in the sun a bit longer, happiness has nothing to do with money. And what I’d written about the super-werewolf was the most important thing of all, I was quite sure of that. Next time I would have to remind her always to work with the ‘bride returns the earring’ method.
An earring . . . I suddenly had a quite delightful idea that sent me dashing to the metal box where I kept my jewellery and all sorts of valuable bits and pieces. I found what I wanted immediately - the silver earrings were lying on the very top.
I opened my old Leatherman with the tiny pliers (one of the first models, they don’t make them like that any more), carefully detached the hooks from the earrings, and soon I had something quite incredible lying on the palm of my hand. It was a pair of earrings in the form of diamond rings on silver hooks with a colour that almost merged into the platinum. The diamonds in the earrings were different, one a bit larger and one a bit smaller. I didn’t think anyone had ever made earrings like that before. When people saw it, they’d steal the idea, I thought. But what could I do about that . . .
I put the earrings on and looked at myself in the mirror. It looked great. It was clear from the first glance that what I had hanging on my ears were not earrings, but finger rings. And apart from that, it was obvious that the rings were expensive - the diamonds glittered delightfully in the dusty beam of light that illuminated my humble abode. The most stylish part of it was the way an expensive item had been mounted to express emphatic contempt for its monetary value, a combination of the ideals of the financial bourgeoisie and the values of 1968 in a single unified aesthetic object which promised that its owner would put out for Che Guevara as well as Abramovich, and even vaguely hinted that she would only put out for Abramovich on a temporary basis, until Che Guevara moved in (of course, Che Guevara doesn’t really have anything to do with the whole business, nobody’s thinking of putting out for him - it’s just that the girl thinks Abramovich is more likely to go for shiny bait like that). In a word, it was just what the doctor ordered.
But then I couldn’t give a damn for the doctor. In two thousand years, I’d seen more than enough doctors like that - they make their prescription, and time after time the human heart believes in the same old deception, dashes straight at the cliffs of the world and is smashed to pieces against them. And then it dashes at them again, and again - just like the first time. When you live by the edge of that sea and hear the roar of its waves, you think what a blessing it is that each wave only knows about itself and has no knowledge of the past.
Of course, no one gives me rings and brooches like that because of the perfection of my soul, which it is beyond modern people’s ability to perceive. The only thing they value is my physical attraction - poignant, ambivalent and overwhelming. I know its power very well - I have learned to understand it over many hundreds of years. But after the meeting with Alexander for some reason I had lost my usual self-confidence. I couldn’t remember time ever moving so slowly - the two days while I waited for his call seemed like an eternity to me. The minutes crawled by from the future into the past like snails, I sat in front of the mirror, gazing at my reflection and thinking about beauty.
A man often thinks: there’s a beautiful girl, a lovely flower, walking through the town in spring, smiling in all directions, and she’s not even aware of how lovely she is. This thought naturally develops into the intention to acquire this flower who is unaware of her own beauty for considerably less than her market value.
Nothing could be more naive. The man is aware of her beauty, but the girl, the lovely flower, is not? It’s like a collective farmer from some remote village who has sold his cow and come to Moscow to buy an old Lada walking past the Porsche sales room, seeing a young salesman in the window and thinking: ‘He’s very green . . . maybe he’ll believe that an orange Boxter is cheaper than a Lada, seeing as it’s only got two doors? I must try having a word with him, while he’s in the place on his own . . .’
A man like that is very funny, of course, and he has no chance at all of getting what he wants. But it’s not all gloom and doom. There is good news and bad news for the collective farmer who has sold his cow:
1. the bad news is that he’ll never buy anything for less than its market value. Everything’s been worked out, checked and double checked. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
2. the good news is that this market value is considerably lower than he imagines it to be in his state of hormonal intoxication, multiplied by his inferiority complex and his lack of faith in success.
There’ll be no new orange Boxter for him, of course - it will be bought by an amiable elderly gent from the Ministry of Social Development. But he might well be able to afford an old Audi. Only it’s not an Audi that he needs, it’s a tractor. The tragedy of this collective farmer, and that of all other men, is that they run after our beauty without understanding its nature. So many different things have been said about it - it’s a terrible and appalling thing, which is also going to save the world, and so forth. But none of that throws even the slightest bit of light on the subject.
What a fox has in common with the most beautiful of women is that we live off the feelings we arouse. But a woman is guided by instinct, and a fox is guided by reason, and where a woman gropes her way along in the dark, a fox strides proudly forward in the bright light of day.
But then I must admit that some women cope rather well with their role. Only even if they want to, they can’t reveal their professional secrets, since they themselves do not understand them at a rational level. But we foxes are quite consciously aware of these secrets - and now I’ll tell you about one of them, the simplest and most important.
Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of beauty should first of all ask himself: where is it located? Can we say that it is somewhere inside the woman who is considered beautiful? Can we say, for instance, that there is beauty in the features of her face? Or in her figure?
Science tells us that the brain receives a flow of information from the sense organs, in this case from the eyes, and without the interpretations imposed by the visual cortex, this is simply a chaotic sequence of coloured dots, digitized into nerve impulses by the visual tract. Any fool can understand that there is no beauty in that, so it doesn’t find its way into a man through his eyes. In technical terms, beauty is the interpretation that arises in the consciousness of the patient. As they say - in the eye of the beholder.
Beauty does not belong to a woman and it is not her specific quality - it is just that at a certain time of life her face reflects beauty, as a windowpane reflects the sun that is hidden behind the roofs of the houses. And so we cannot say that a woman’s beauty fades with time - it is simply that the sun moves on and the windows of other houses begin to reflect it. But we know that the sun is not in the windowpanes that we look at. It is in us.
What is this sun? I’m sorry, but that’s another mystery, and today I was only planning to reveal one. And in any case, from the point of view of practical magic, the nature of the sun is absolutely irrelevant. What matters are the manipulations that we perform with its light, and here lies an important difference between foxes and women. But, as in the previous case, I can only explain it by using an analogy.