Not everything here is as simple as it seems. In actual fact ‘contemplation of the heart’ cannot be separated from ‘contemplation of the mind’, because the correct performance of the techniques requires consciousness to be layered off into three independent streams:
1. the first stream of consciousness is the mind which remembers all its dark deeds from time immemorial.
2. the second stream of consciousness is the mind which spontaneously and unexpectedly makes the fox tug her own tail.
3. the third stream of consciousness is the mind as the abstract observer of the first two streams and itself.
Speaking very approximately, this third stream of consciousness is also the very essence of the technique ‘contemplating the mind’. All of these practices are preliminary - you have to perform them for a thousand years before moving on to the most important, which is called ‘tail of the void’ or ‘artlessness’. This is a secret practice that is not entirely clear even to foxes like me, who have completed the thousand-years preliminary cycle a long time ago.
And so, I sat in the lotus position, placing my left hand on my knee and my right hand on my tail. I concentrated and began remembering my past - the layers of it that are usually concealed from me by the stream of everyday thoughts. And suddenly, entirely out of the blue, my right hand jerked and tugged. I felt a pain in the base of my spine. But that pain was nothing compared with the stream of repentance, horror and shame for what I had done that flooded over me with such great power that tears sprang to my eyes.
The faces of those who had not survived their encounter with me floated past in front of my face, like yellow leaves drifting past a window in an autumn storm. They emerged from non-existence for only a second, but that second was long enough for each pair of eyes to sear me with a glance full of bewilderment and pain. I watched them, remembering the past, with the tears pouring down my cheeks in two great streams as repentance tore my heart apart.
At the same time I was serenely aware that what was taking place was simply the insubstantial play of reflections, the rippling of thoughts that is raised by the habitual draughts of the mind, and that when these ripples settled down, it would be clear that there were no draughts and no reflections, and no mind itself - nothing but that clear, eternal, all-penetrating gaze in the face of which nothing is real.
That is the way I have been practising for about twelve centuries.
From the very beginning Alexander and I had an unspoken agreement not to pester each other with questions. I wasn’t supposed to ask about things that he couldn’t talk about because of the non-disclosure agreements he’d signed and all the other FSB garbage. And he didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, because my answers might have placed him in an ambiguous position - for instance, what if I suddenly turned out to be a Chinese spy? Things could quite easily have been made to look that way, after all, I didn’t even have an internal passport, and only a fake one for foreign travel.
I wasn’t really happy with this situation: there were lots of things I wanted to find out about him. And I could see he was consumed by curiosity too. But we were getting to know each other gradually, groping our way along - the information was provided in homeopathic doses.
I liked to kiss him on the cheek before he transformed into a beast (I could never bring myself to kiss him on the lips, and that was strange, considering the extent of our intimacy). But then, the caresses didn’t last for long - a few touches were enough to trigger the transformation, and after that kissing became impossible.
For so many centuries a kiss had been simply one element of hypnotic suggestion to me, but now
I myself
was kissing, even if it was in a childish fashion . . . There was something dreamlike about that. His face was often hidden by a gauze mask, and I had to move it aside. One day I couldn’t stand it any more, I tugged on the lace of the mask that had slipped off his face and said:
‘Maybe you could not put it on when we’re together? Who do you think you are, Michael Jackson?’
‘It’s because of the smell,’ he said. ‘It has a special chemical that doesn’t let smells through.’
‘And what can you smell up here?’ I asked, surprised.
We were sitting by the door to the roof, which was open (he avoided going out of his mirror-walled birdhouse, because he was worried about snipers, or photographers, or avenging lightning from the heavens). Apart from a very faint whiff of exhaust fumes from the street, I couldn’t detect any smells at all.
‘I can smell everything in the world up here,’ he said with a frown.
‘Such as?’
He looked at my white blouse and drew in a deep breath through his nose.
‘That blouse of yours,’ he said. ‘Before you, it was worn by a middle-aged woman who used home-made eau-de-cologne made from Egyptian lotus extract . . .’
I sniffed my blouse. It didn’t smell of anything.
‘Seriously?’ I queried. ‘I bought it in a second-hand shop, I liked the embroidered pattern.’
He drew in another breath of air.
‘And what’s more, she diluted the extract with fake vodka. There’s a lot of fusel oil.’
‘What are you saying?’ I asked, nonplussed. ‘I feel like taking the blouse off and throwing it away . . . So what else can you smell?’
He turned towards the open door.
‘There’s a terrible smell of petrol. Bad enough to give you a splitting headache. And there’s a smell of asphalt, rubber, tobacco smoke . . . And of toilets, human sweat, beer, baking, coffee, popcorn, dust, paint, nail varnish, doughnuts, newsprint . . . I could go on and on with the list.’
‘But don’t these smells get mixed up together?’
He shook his head in reply.
‘It’s more as if they’re layered over each other and contained in each other, like a letter in an envelope that’s lying in the pocket of a coat that’s hanging in a wardrobe, and so on. The worst thing by far is that very often you find out lots of things you absolutely didn’t want to know. For instance, they give you a document to sign, and you can tell that yesterday there was a sandwich with stale salami lying on it. And that’s not all, the smell of the sweat from the hand that gave you the document makes it clear that what it says in the document isn’t true . . .
And so on.’
‘And why does this happen to you?’
‘It’s just the usual lupine sense of smell. It often stays with me even in the human phase. It’s tough. But I suppose it saves me from lots of bad habits.’
‘For instance?’
‘For instance, I can’t smoke hash. And definitely not snort cocaine.’
‘Why?’
‘Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on his way from Colombo to Minsk. And that’s nothing, I even know how many times that ass of his was . . .’
‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t go on. I’d already got the idea.’
‘And the worst thing is, I never know when it’s suddenly going to overwhelm me. It’s as unpredictable as a migraine.’
‘You poor thing,’ I sighed. ‘What a pain.’
‘Well, it’s not always a pain,’ he said. ‘There are some things about it I really enjoy. For instance, I like the way you smell.’
I was embarrassed. A fox’s body really does have a very faint aroma, but people usually take it for perfume.
‘And what do I smell of?’
‘I can’t really say . . . Mountains, moonlight. Spring. Flowers. Deception. But not a wily kind of deception, more as if you’re having a joke. I really love the way you smell. I think I could breathe that smell in all my life and still keep finding something new in it.’
‘Well that’s nice,’ I said. ‘I felt very awkward when you said that about my blouse. I’ll never buy anything in second-hand shops again.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But I would be grateful if you’d take it off.’
‘Is the smell that strong?’
‘No, it’s very weak. It’s just that I like you better without any blouse.’
I thought for a moment and then pulled the blouse off over my head.
‘You’re not wearing any bras today,’ he laughed.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I read that when a girl goes to see her young man and something is supposed to happen . . . You know, if she is ready for something to happen . . . Then she doesn’t put one on. It’s a kind of etiquette.’
‘Where did you read that?’ he asked.
‘In
Cosmopolitan
. Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Do you mind that I have small breasts?’
‘No, I really like that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go on and on kissing them for ever.’
It seemed to me that he was talking with an effort, as if his jaws were being cramped by a yawn. That was what usually happened just before the transformation. Despite his reassuring declaration about ‘going on kissing them for ever’, we rarely got that far. But then, his hot wolf’s tongue . . . But I won’t transgress the bounds of propriety, the reader understands perfectly well without that.
He barely had time to take my knickers off before it all happened: sexual arousal triggered the mysterious mechanism of his metamorphosis. Less than a minute later, standing there in front of me was a sinister, handsome beast, whose most astounding asset was his instrument of love. Every time I found it impossible to believe that my simulacrum pouch was really capable of accommodating that hammer of the witches.
When he turned into a wolf, Alexander lost the ability to speak. But he could understand everything he heard - although, of course, I had no guarantee that his wolfish understanding was the same as his human one. His remaining communicative capabilities were inadequate for conveying the complex motions of the soul, but he could reply in the affirmative or the negative. ‘Yes’ was signified by a short, muffled roar:
‘Gr-r-r!’
And he expressed the meaning ‘no’ with a sound like something halfway between a howl and a yawn.
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
I found this ‘whoo-oo-oo’ rather funny - it was more or less the way a dog whines in the heat when its masters have locked it out on the balcony. But I didn’t tell him about this observation of mine.
His hands didn’t turn into wolf’s paws, they were more like the fantastic extremities of some movie Martian. I found it impossible to believe those claws were capable of tender touching, even though I knew it from my own experience.
And so, when he set them on my bare stomach, as always, I felt a bit uneasy.
‘What do you want, beastling?’ I asked. ‘Shall I lie on my side?’
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
‘On my tummy?’
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
‘Kneel down?’
‘Gr-r-r!’
‘All right, only be careful, okay?’
‘Gr-r-rrrrrr-r!’
I wasn’t entirely certain that last ‘grrrr’ meant ‘yes’, and not just ‘grrr’, but even so I did as he asked. And I was immediately sorry: he took hold of my tail with his paw.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘let go, you monster!’
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
‘Really, let go,’ I repeated plaintively.
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
And then what I was most afraid of happened - he pulled my tail. Not very hard, but still hard enough for me suddenly to remember the Sikh from the National hotel. And when he jerked my tail a little more sharply, I felt so ashamed for the role I’d played in that man’s fate that I sobbed out loud.
Alexander hadn’t deliberately pulled my tail. He was just holding it, quite gently in fact. But the blows of his hips pushed my body forward, and the result was as if he was trying to rip my tail out of my body. I tensed all my muscles, but I just wasn’t strong enough. With every jerk my soul was inundated by waves of unbearable shame. But the most terrible thing was that the shame didn’t simply sear my heart, it also mingled into a single whole with the pleasure I was getting from what was going on.
It was something quite unimaginable - truly beyond good and evil. It was then that I finally understood the fatal abysses trodden by De Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who I had always thought absurdly pompous. No, they weren’t absurd at all - they simply hadn’t been able to find the right words to convey the true nature of their nightmares. And I knew why - there were no such words in any human language.
‘Stop,’ I whispered through my tears.
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
But in heart I didn’t know what I wanted - for him to stop or to carry on.
‘Stop,’ I repeated, gasping for breath, ‘please!’
‘Whoo-oo-oo!’
‘Do you want to kill me?’
‘Gr-r-r!’
I couldn’t hold back any longer and I started crying. But they were tears of pleasure, a monstrous, shameful pleasure that was too enthralling to be abandoned voluntarily. I soon lost any idea of what was happening - perhaps I even lost consciousness too. The next ting I remember is Alexander leaning down over me, already in his human form. He looked perplexed.