There is a kind of lamp that people wear on their foreheads, on a special strap. They are popular with cyclists and potholers. It’s very convenient - whichever way you turn your head, that’s where the beam of light shines. I use one myself when I ride my bike at night in the Bitsevsky Park - it has three tiny, pointed bulbs that throw a spot of blue-white light on the asphalt surface of the path. Well then, beauty is the effect that arises in a person’s consciousness when the light of the lamp on his head is reflected off something and back into his eyes.
In every woman there is a mirror, set from birth at a specific angle, and - no matter what the beauty industry might tell us - that angle cannot be changed. But we foxes can adjust the angle of our mirror across a very wide range. We can adapt to suit almost any cyclist. In this process hypnosis works hand-in-hand with flirting: the tail stays under our clothes and we only use it just a little bit to help ourselves. But every fox knows that ‘little bit’ is the key.
Especially for these notes I translated an excerpt from the memoirs of the Comte de Chermandois, a well-known eighteenth-century adventurer, in which he depicted my sister E Hu-Li for posterity. Chermandois met her in London, where he was taking refuge from the horrors of revolution. They started an affair, but it had an unfortunate ending - the comte died of a heart attack in strange circumstances. But here is how Chermandois describes the moment when a fox adjusts her mirror to direct the beam of reflected light straight into the eyes of her victim:
I cannot say that she was especially good-looking. On those occasions when I saw her after a long separation, I was amazed at how this skinny little creature with such fierce eyes could have become everything for me - love, life, death, the salvation of my soul. But she only had to meet my glance, and everything changed. First of all a startled doubt that she was loved would appear in those green eyes. At that moment it was obvious that there was nothing to love her for, and every time I experienced a wave of pity, merging into tenderness. But she soaked up those feelings like a sponge soaking up wine, and immediately blossomed into a tormenting beauty that could drive a man insane. A brief exchange of glances changed everything. A moment before it, I was not able to understand how this essentially unlovely woman could have enthralled me, and afterwards I could not grasp how I could have doubted even for a minute the magical power of her features. And the longer I gazed into her eyes, the stronger this feeling became, rousing me to ecstasy, to a state of physical pain - as if she had thrust a knife into a crack in the wall behind which I was trying to hide and, with a few swift movements of the blade, had loosened the brickwork so much that the wall had collapsed and I was left standing before her once again, as naked and defenceless as a child. I have studied this metamorphosis through and through, but I have still not learned to understand the nature of the fire that has seared my soul and reduced it to ashes.
Alas it is true: beauty is like fire, it burns and consumes, driving you insane with its heat, promising that in the place to which it drives its victim there will be calm, cool shade and new life - but that is a deception. Or rather, it is all true - but not for the victim, only for the new life that will take the victim’s place, and then also be consumed by this pitiless demon.
I should know what I’m talking about. The demon has served me for more than two thousand years, and although he and I have a long-established working relationship, I am a little afraid of him. The demon of beauty is the most powerful of all the demons of the mind. He is like death, but he serves life. And he does not dwell within me - I only release him from the lamp on the forehead of the beholder, like Aladdin releasing the genie, and when the genie returns to his prison, I pillage the field of battle. It is a hard lot, and the Buddha of the Western Paradise would hardly approve of what I do. But what’s to be done about it? Such is the fate of foxes.
Not only is it our fate, it is also the fate of our little sister, woman. But only an insensitive and stupid male chauvinist could reproach her for that. After all, woman was not created from Adam’s rib at all, that’s simply a mistake the scribe made when the weather was too hot. Woman was created from the wound through which the rib was extracted from Adam. Every woman knows this, but I can only remember two who have ever admitted as much - the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (‘from friends - for you, the lowdown on the mystery of Eve from the tree - here it is: I am no more than an animal wounded in the belly’) and the Empress Tsy See, who was incredibly irritated by her own membership of the weaker sex (I won’t cite her utterance, firstly because it is obscene and secondly because it is highly idiomatic and difficult to translate). But they gave Adam his rib back, and ever since then he keeps trying to stick it back into the wound - in the hope that everything will heal up and knit back together. No chance. That wound will never heal.
The Comte de Chermandois’s remark about the knife blade and the wall is a very telling image. We foxes actually do something of the kind - we feel for a man’s secret heartstrings, and when we find them, we try to play the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on them, and that brings down the entire edifice of the personality. In fact, nowadays that’s not so very terrible. The edifice of the modern personality is more like a dugout than anything else - there’s nothing in it to collapse, and its conquest hardly requires any effort at all.
But then the spoils of conquest are insignificant too - the feelings of modern eye-blinkers, as Nietzsche called them
,
are shallow, and the barrel organs of their souls only play the ‘Dog’s Waltz’. Summon up in a man like that the most powerful hurricane that he is capable of containing, and the wind is only strong enough to blow a few hundred-dollar bills your way. And you still have to check to make sure they’re not fake, torn or - God forbid! - issued before 1980. That’s the way things are.
Alexander rang two days later, as he had promised. I was still asleep when I picked up the phone, but I had absolutely no doubt that it was him.
‘Hello.’
‘Ada,’ he said, ‘is that you?’
‘Ada?’
I was quite sure I’d never called myself that.
‘I’m going to call you Ada,’ he said. ‘We can take it as a diminutive from Adele, can’t we?’
In Russian there could have been two polar opposite meanings concealed in the name Ada - ‘ad A’ (i.e. ‘hell A’) or ‘A da’ (i.e. ‘Ah yes’). That was worrying. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘call me that, if you like.’
‘I want to see you,’ he said.
‘When?’
‘Right now.’
‘Er . . .’
‘My car’s waiting for you.’
‘Where?’
‘By the stands at the track.’
‘By the stands? But how did you find out where I . . .’
‘That’s not difficult,’ he laughed. ‘Mikhalich will drive you.’
There was a loud knock at the door.
‘There,’ said Alexander’s voice in the phone, ‘that’s him. I’m waiting for you, my little flower.’
He hung up. My little flower, I thought; well, well, he thinks I’m a plant. There was another knock at the door, more insistent this time. Consideration like that was almost insulting.
‘Adele,’ a familiar voice called from the other side of the door. ‘Are you there? I can see from the reading I have that you are. Hey!’
He knocked again.
‘You’ve got a sign here that says “No entry. Danger of death.” So maybe you went in anyway and got killed? Are you alive? Answer! Or I’ll break the door down!’
Idiot, I thought, then all the people will come running. But no, they won’t, it’s still too early . . . Even so, it was better not to risk it. I went to the door and said:
‘Vladimir Mikhailovich, quiet! I’ll open up in a moment, just let me get dressed.’
‘I’m waiting.’
I got dressed quickly and glanced round my residence - I did-n’t think there was anything compromising in open view. But how had he managed to find me? Had he trailed me, or what?
‘I’m opening up . . .’
Mikhalich came in and blinked for a few seconds as he got used to the darkness. Then he looked round.
‘You mean to say this is where you live?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘What, in a gas-pipe junction?’
‘It’s not a gas-pipe junction. That sign at the door is just so that people won’t start asking questions.’
‘What’s it supposed to be then?’ he asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, every place has a function. What kind of premises is it?’
‘I dislike premises,’ I said. ‘And I don’t like it when people apply their own premises to me. It’s an empty space under the stands. At first there was a storage space in here. Then they boarded everything off, built a transformer substation behind the wall and forgot about this part. Well, they didn’t just happen to forget. Of course, I had to help them along a bit . . .’
I shuffled my fingers to make my point clear. Of course, what I should have done was wave my tail, but I wasn’t about to initiate Mikhalich into all the details of my difficult fate.
‘Do you have heating at least?’ he asked. ‘Aha, I see the radiators over there. But where’s the toilet?’
‘Why, do you want to go?’
‘No, I’m just curious.’
‘You have to go along the corridor. There’s a shower there too.’
‘You really live in this kennel?’
‘Why is it a kennel?’ I said. ‘Its layout’s more like a loft, the kind lawyers and political technologists have. Lofts are very fashionable. The ceiling’s slanting, because the stand runs overhead. It’s romantic.’
‘But how do you manage without any light?’
‘See that little pane of glass just below the ceiling? That’s a window. When the sun rises, a very beautiful beam of light shines straight in here. And anyway, I can see pretty well in the dark.’
He cast another glance round my residence.
‘Is that your junk in those sacks?’
‘You could say that.’
‘And the bike’s yours too?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a good bike. Disc brakes, and the fork’s made of carbon fibre.’
‘Is the computer made of carbon fibre too?’
‘Don’t joke, you already guessed. It’s a rare model, they only make them for Japan. One of the lightest laptops in the world.’
‘I get it. So that’s why it’s standing on a cardboard box, is it? Instead of a table? Aren’t you ashamed when you have visitors?’
His tone had begun to get under my skin.
‘You know, Vladimir Mikhailovich,’ I answered, ‘to be quite honest, I couldn’t really say what I care less about, the appearance of the things around me or the opinions of the people I meet. Both of them are over and done with far too quickly for me to be bothered.’
‘A dump, that’s what it is,’ he summed up. ‘Does the local militia know about this tramp’s hideaway?’
‘Are you going to tip them off?’
‘I’ll see how you behave. Right, let’s go.’
We walked to the car in silence, apart from two occasions when Mikhalich swore - the first time when he had to squeeze through the narrow gap between two sheets of plywood, and the second time when he had to duck under a low partition.
‘Please don’t swear,’ I said.
‘I tore my sleeve. How do you drag your bicycle through here?’
‘Easy. In summer I leave it outside. Who’s going to bother climbing in here?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s true enough.’
The car was standing outside the gates of the equestrian complex. That meant there was a chance that Mikhalich’s visit would go unnoticed. But what difference did it make now? The local militia could carry on without noticing anything for another hundred years, but Mikhalich and his crowd knew everything. They’d never get off my back. I’ll have to look for a new place to live, I thought, yet again . . .
After we’d driven away from the race track, Mikhalich suddenly handed me a scarlet rose with a long stem. I didn’t even notice where he got it from, it was so unexpected. The rose had only just opened and there was still dew glistening on it.
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking the flower. ‘I’m touched. But I ought to say straight away that the chances of anything between us aren’t . . .’
‘It’s not from me,’ he interrupted. ‘The boss asked me to give it to you. He said you should think about what it means on the way.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll think about it. What was that device you could see me on?’
He stuck one hand into his jacket pocket and took out a small object like a cigarette case with a little screen. There were a few buttons on the cigarette case, but overall it looked pretty unimpressive.
‘It’s a locator.’
‘And what does it locate?’
‘Signals,’ said Mikhalich. ‘Give me your handbag.’
I held out my bag. At the next traffic light he took hold of the strap, turned it over and showed me a little circle of dark foil smaller than a kopeck coin. It was very thin and held in place by a layer of glue. I would never have noticed it - or I’d have thought it was some kind of label.