I remembered who Fenrir was. He was the most fearsome brute in the Nordic bestiary, the central character of Icelandic eschatology: the wolf who would eat the gods when the northern project was shut down. I wanted to believe that Alexander did-n’t identify too closely with this creature, that the yellow-eyed monster was simply an unattainable aesthetic ideal, something like a photo of Schwarzenegger hanging on the wall in a novice bodybuilder’s room.
Further down the pile there was a page from a book with Borges’s miniature piece ‘Ragnarek’. I knew the story, which had astounded me with its somnambulistically precise depiction of something important and terrible. The hero and his friend witness a strange procession of gods returning from centuries of exile. A wave of human adoration carries them out on to a stage in a hall. They look strange:
One was holding a branch, something out of the uncomplicated flora of dreams; another flung a clawed hand forward in a sweeping gesture: Janus’s face glanced repeatedly at Tot’s crooked beak with a certain apprehension.
A dream echo of fascism. But then something very interesting happens:
Probably roused by the applause, one of them - I don’t remember now exactly who - suddenly broke into a triumphant screeching, unbearably harsh, as if he were either whistling or clearing his throat. From that moment everything changed.
From then on the text was covered with marks and notes. Words were underlined, framed with exclamation marks and even ringed - evidently to convey the relative intensity of emotion:
It began with the suspicion (evidently exaggerated), that the Gods could not talk. Centuries of wild and nomadic life had
destroyed in them all that was human: the Islamic crescent moon and the Roman cross
had shown no condescension to the exiled. The low sloping foreheads, yellow teeth and thin moustaches of mulattoes or Chinese and the out-turned lips of animals spoke of the
decline of the Olympic breed
. Their clothing was out of keeping with their modest and honest poverty and put me in mind of the dismal chic of the gambling houses and bordellos of Bakho. A carnation bled out of a buttonhole. The outline of a knife-handle was discernible beneath a close-fitting jacket. And then we realized that !
they were playing their last card!
, that they were !
cunning, blind and as cruel as mature, powerful beasts when they are flushed out of
the bushes!,
and - !
IF WE GAVE WAY TO FEAR OR COMPASSION - THEY WOULD ANNIHILATE US!
And then each of us
took out a heavy revolver
(the revolvers appeared from somewhere in the dream)
AND WE SHOT THE GODS WITH DELIGHT.
After that there were two pages from the Elder Edda - apparently from a prophecy by Velva. They had been torn out of some gift edition: the text was printed in large red script on glazed paper in a very wasteful manner:
The wind raises
Waves to the sky,
Casts them on to the land,
The sky grows dark;
The blizzard hurtles along,
Swirling furiously:
These are the portents
Of
the death of the gods
.
‘The death of the gods’ in the last line had been underscored with a fingernail. The message of the text on the second page was equally morose:
But there is yet to come
The most powerful of all
,
I dare not speak
His name;
Few are those who know
What will come to pass
Following the battle
Between Odin and the Wolf
.
All the rest was in the same vein. In one way or another most of the papers in the file related to northern myth. The one I found most depressing was a photograph of the German submarine
Nagelfahr
- in Scandinavian mythology that was the name of the god Loki’s ship, which was made out of the nails of the dead. A highly appropriate name for a Second World War submarine. The unshaven crew members smiling from the bridge looked perfectly likeable - they reminded me of a detachment of modern ‘greens’.
As I got closer to the end of the file, there were fewer marks on the sheets of paper: as if the person who had been leafing through them and thinking about the collection of material had rapidly lost interest or, as Borges put it in a different story ‘a certain noble impatience’ had prevented him from leafing through all the way to the end. But the guy’s pretensions had been serious, especially by the standards of our mercenary times (‘the age of swords and pole axes’ as it was described in one of the extracts in the file, ‘the time of cursed wealth and great lechery’).
The last item in the file was a lined page torn out of a school exercise book. It had been inserted into a transparent plastic envelope to protect it. The handwritten text on the page was something like a gift dedication:
To Sashka, a memento
.
Transform!
WOLF-FLOW!
Colonel Lebedenko
I closed the file and put it back under Monica, then continued with my search. I wasn’t surprised when I found several CDs beside the music centre, all with various performances of the same opera:
RICHARD WAGNER
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
Götterdämmerung.
The next curious item that caught my eye was a thick, grey notebook. It was lying on the floor between the wall and the divan - as if someone had been looking through it before going to bed, fallen asleep and dropped it. On its cover was written:
‘Shitman’ Project
Top secret.
Copy No. 9
not to be removed from the building
At that moment I didn’t make any connection between this strange title and the story about the Shakespeare specialist that Pavel Ivanovich had told me. My thoughts followed a different route - I decided it was yet another proof of the power of American cultural influence. Superman, Batman, another couple of similar films, and the mind begins to stereotype reality in their image and likeness. But then, I thought, what could Russia put up against this? The Shitov Project? Who would be willing to spend nights sweating over that for low pay? That Shitov in a poor suit had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire. The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper. Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs
spirituality
. That’s the reason for all the disasters . . .
I didn’t even bother to open the notebook. I’d had a horror of secret documents ever since Soviet times: they did you no good and they could snow you under with problems, even if you had FSB protection.
My eye was caught by several graphic works on paper that were hanging on the walls - runes that had been roughly drawn with either a broad brush or a paw. They reminded me a bit of Chinese calligraphy - the crudest and most expressive examples. Hanging between two of these runes there was a branch of mistletoe - I learned that from the caption on the wall: to look at, it was simply a dry, pointed stick.
The design on the carpet was curious, it showed a battle between lions and wolves - it looked like a copy of a Roman mosaic. The books on the only bookshelf were mostly massive illustrated editions (
The Splendour of Rome
,
The New Revised History of the Russian Soul
,
The Origin of Species and Homosexuality
and other, simpler titles about cars and guns). But then, I knew that the books on shelves like that had nothing to do with the taste of their owners, because they were chosen by the interior designers.
Having concluded my inspection, I went across to the glass door on to the roof. The view from there was beautiful. Down below were the dark pits of pre-Revolutionary courtyards improved by restoration work. Towering up above them were a few new buildings of the phallic architecture - an attempt had been made to insert them smoothly and gently into the historical landscape, and the result was that they looked as if they were smeared with some kind of personal lubricant. After them came the Kremlin, proudly thrusting up to the clouds its ancient dicks with the gold balls sewn into their tops.
This damned job, I thought, it’s terrible how badly it’s perverted my perception of the world. But then, has it really perverted it all that much? It’s all the same to us foxes - we pass through life and barely touch it, like a light shower of rain in Asia. But to be a human being here is hard. Take one step away from the secret national gestalt, and this country will screw you over. A theorem that has been proved by every life followed through to the end, no matter how many glamorous coverlets you spread over the daily festival of life. I should know, I’ve seen plenty of it. Why? I have my own suspicions, but I won’t go into the subject. People probably aren’t simply born here by chance, it’s no accident . . . And no one is able to help anyone else. Could that be the reason why Moscow sunsets always make me feel so sad?
‘A great view from up here, isn’t it?’
I swung round. He was standing by the door of the lift with a tightly packed plastic bag in his hand. The design on the bag was a green snake wound around a medical chalice.
‘There wasn’t any iodine,’ he said anxiously, ‘they gave me fuxidine. Said it was the same, only orange. I think that’s even better for us - it won’t stand out so much beside the tail . . .’
I felt like laughing and turned away towards the window. He walked across and stood beside me. We looked at the city for a while without speaking.
‘It’s beautiful here in summer,’ he said. ‘Put Zemfira on the player, watch and listen: ‘Goodbye, beloved city . . . I almost found a place among your annals . . . What do you think she meant - something like she’s been in deep shit for far too long?’
‘Don’t try to soft-soap me.’
‘You seem to be feeling better.’
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘But . . .’
He nodded towards the plastic bag.
‘No need, thanks. When they bring you in a wounded comrade, you’ll be able to treat him. I’m off.’
‘Mikhalich will drive you.’
‘I don’t want your Mikhalich, I’ll manage.’
I was already at the lift.
‘When can I see you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t die, call in three days.’
After copulation, all animals are sad
- so the ancient Romans used to say. Apart from foxes, I would have added. And apart from women. I knew that for certain now.
I don’t mean to say that women are animals. Quite the contrary - men are much closer to the animals in every respect: the smells they give off and the sounds they make, their type of physicality and the methods they use to fight for personal happiness (not to mention what they actually think of as happiness). But the ancient Roman who described his own mood after the act of love in metaphorical terms was evidently such an entirely organic sex-chauvinist that he simply failed to take woman into account, and that means I have to restore justice.
Generally speaking, there could be at least four explanations for this saying:
1. the Romans didn’t think woman was
even
an animal.
2. the Romans thought woman was an animal, but they copulated with her in a way that really did make her sad (for instance, Suetonius tells us that the law forbade the killing of virgins by strangulation, and the executioner used to ravish them before the execution - how could you help feeling sad?).
3. the Romans didn’t think woman was an animal, they assumed that only man was. For this noble view of things, the Romans could be forgiven a great deal - apart, of course, from those foul-ups of theirs with virgins and strangulation.
4. the Romans had no penchant for either woman or metaphor, but they did for livestock cattle and poultry, who did not reciprocate and were unable to conceal their feelings.
There could be an element of truth in each of these explanations - no doubt all sorts of things happened in the course of several centuries of empire. But I was a happy animal.
For the last fifteen hundred years I’d had an old maid complex - not, of course, in relation to human beings, to whose opinion I was profoundly indifferent, but within our small community of foxes. It had sometimes seemed to me that I was the butt of secret mockery. And there were good grounds for these thoughts of mine - all my sisters had lost their virginity in ancient times, in the most varied of circumstances. The most interesting story was what had happened to sister E - she had been set on a stake by a nomad leader, and she had honestly acted out her agony for three days. She had to wait until the nomads drank themselves into a stupor before making good her escape into the steppe. I suspected that this was the origin of the insatiable hatred for the aristocracy she had manifested for so many centuries in her most whimsical escapades . . .