I realized it was time to interfere.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, showing my fist to Alexander where Lord Cricket couldn’t see it, ‘but I think you’re misunderstanding each other. It’s purely a matter of language.’
‘How’s that?’ Lord Cricket asked.
‘There are quite a number of sound combinations that mean completely different things in different languages. For instance, the Russian word “Bog”, meaning “God”, means a swamp, a “bog” in English. And the English word “God” means a calendar year in Russian. The sounds are the same, but the meaning is completely different. It happens with people’s names too, it can be very funny sometimes. And it’s exactly the same with the word “liberal”. It’s a classical inter-linguistic homonym. For instance, in America it means someone who is in favour of firearms control, single-sex marriage and abortion and feels more sympathy for the poor than the rich. But here in Russia . . .’
‘Here in Russia,’ Alexander interrupted, ‘it means an unscrupulous weasel who hopes someone will give him a little money if he makes big round eyes and keeps repeating that twenty greasy parasites should carry on squeezing Russia by the balls, simply because at the beginning of so-called privatization, they happened to be barbecuing grills with pissed Yeltsin’s daughter!’
‘Phoo, how crude,’ I said.
‘But it’s the truth. And the tragedy of Russian liberalism is that nobody’s ever going to give the weasel any money anyway.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because ten years ago those greasy parasites were choked with greed, now they are shitting their pants in fear, and in ten years they won’t have any money at all.’
It’s a rare thing, I thought, for all three tenses in Russian to be combined in a single sentiment as hopelessly gloomy as that.
‘Do you favour a review of the results of privatization?’ asked Lord Cricket, who was listening carefully.
‘And why not?’ put in E Hu-Li. ‘If you analyse it properly, the whole of human history for the last ten thousand years is nothing but a constant revision of the results of privatization. History is hardly likely to come to an end because a small number of people have stolen a large amount of money. Not even if the small number of people hire themselves three fukuyamas apiece!’
My sister E occasionally liked to express some radical, even seditious views - it suited her predatory beauty and instantly enchanted her future victim. And now I noticed how admiringly Alexander was gaping at her.
‘Precisely!’ he said. ‘I ought to write that down. A pity, I haven’t got a pen. But what’s a fukuyama? Some sort of geisha?’
‘Pretty much,’ said E Hu-Li and turned so that Alexander could see her profile. In profile she is absolutely irresistible.
Why you toad, I thought. After you promised . . . But even so I couldn’t help admiring her: my sister E understood nothing about Russian affairs, but she sensed instinctively what to say in order to slip the noose over a man’s head at the first attempt. Alexander was gazing at her with his mouth wide open and I realized I had to rescue him in a hurry. I had to say something even more radical.
‘And so all these arguments about liberalism,’ I said, as if I were closing the subject, ‘are simply a case of linguistic confusion. And although we greatly respect liberal democracy as a principle, in Russian the words will give off a bad stink for another hundred years or so!’
Alexander switched his adoring gaze from E Hu-Li to me. Then back to E Hu-Li. Then back to me again. The boy’s having a real feast today, I thought.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right about the words. It’s so easy to hide behind them. One of those offshore fat cats arrives in America, says he’s a liberal, and the oppressed blacks think he’s in favour of legalizing cannabis . . .’
‘Tell me, is your professional activity not hindered by such an emotional attitude to the subject?’ Lord Cricket asked.
Alexander didn’t appreciate the irony.
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to say that democracy is bad. It’s good. What’s bad is when villains and swindlers try to exploit it. So democracy has to be helped to move in the right direction. That’s what we think.’
‘That’s no longer democracy,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘It’s in the essence of democracy that no one helps it, it helps itself.’
‘No one helps it? In translation that means we sit on our backsides and watch while we’re shafted in every orifice by various beneficiary owners with double chins and triple citizenships. We watched for twenty years. They’d already drawn up the plans to divide Russia into three parts and started to train the Russian-speaking staff, we know, we know . . . We’ve read the instructions. Do you think we started tightening the screws just for the love of it? If so, you’re mistaken. It’s just that if we had-n’t, we’d have been gobbled in three years.’
‘Who would have gobbled you up?’ Lord Cricket asked in surprise. ‘Democracy? Liberalism?’
‘Democracy, liberalism - those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it’s taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything’s fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it - the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society - why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhoea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on. And we were only given two choices - either to run out completely once and for all through some unidentified asshole, or take antibiotics for ages and ages, then slowly and carefully start all over again. But differently.’
‘Well, you’ve never had any shortage of antibiotics in your country,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘The question is - who’s going to prescribe them?’
‘People will be found,’ said Alexander. ‘And none of your World Bank or IMF, who first prescribe salmonella and then set the basin under your backside - we don’t need any consultants. We’ve been through that already. Soar boldly over the edge of the cliff, they say, come down smack on to the ground as hard as you can, and then you’ll hear the polite applause of the international community. Maybe we’d be better off without the applause or the cliff? After all, for a thousand years Russia decided for itself how to live, and it worked quite well, you only have to look at the map to see that. And now they say it’s time for us to go into the melting pot. We’ll see whose turn it is for the melting-pot. If someone wants to melt us down that badly, maybe we’ll be the ones to send him up in black smoke. We still have the means, and we will for a long time yet!’
Alexander smashed his fist down deafeningly on the desk, making the projector and the laptop bounce into the air. And then silence fell and I could hear a fly that had lost its way fluttering between the windowpane and the blind.
There were times when I myself couldn’t understand what roused the greatest turmoil in my heart - the monstrously huge instrument of love that I had to deal with when he changed into a wolf, or these wild, genuinely wolf-like views on life that he expressed when he was a man. Perhaps I found the latter just as fascinating as, as . . . I didn’t pursue my thought to the end - it was too frightening.
Especially since there was nothing to be fascinated by. For all his apparent radicalism, he only ever talked about the consequences and didn’t even mention the cause - the ‘upper rat’, engaged in slobbering self-satisfaction (that’s why I hate the word ‘blowjob’, I thought, there you have it - the psychopathology of everyday life). In fact, Alexander probably understood everything, but he was just being cunning, the way a werewolf is supposed to be: you can only live in Saudi Arabia and not notice the sand for big money, and he certainly had that. Or perhaps he wasn’t being cunning . . . After all, I’d only really understood everything about the ‘upper rat’ and the ‘oligarchy’ when I tried to explain it all in a letter to my sister U. And I still didn’t know how a wolf’s mind worked.
The first to recover his composure was Lord Cricket. His face assumed an expression of sincere sadness (of course, I didn’t actually think that it was sincere - it was simply that the British aristocrat’s mimetic skill required that precise word). He looked at his watch and said:
‘I can understand your feelings to some extent. But, to be honest, I find it boring to pursue the path along which your mind is moving. It’s such a barren desert! People spend their entire lives engaged in arguments like that. And then they simply die.’
‘So,’ said Alexander, ‘do you have other options to suggest?’
‘Yes I do,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘Take my word for it, I do. There are creatures living among us who are of a different nature. I understand that you take a keen interest in them.’
‘That’s right,’ said Alexander. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘First of all,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘I know that they are not occupied with the petty matters of which you speak with such fervour. They simply do not notice the mirages that make us turn crimson and hammer our fists on the table . . .’
Alexander lowered his head.
‘It is unlikely that you could even explain to them,’ Lord Cricket continued, ‘exactly what it is that makes you feel so bitter. As Thoreau put it, they march to the sound of a different drummer . . . Or perhaps it is better to say that they don’t march at all. They have no ideology, but that does not mean their lives are diminished. On the contrary. Their lives are far more real than those of human beings. For, after all, what you were just talking about is no more than a bad dream. Take a fifty-year-old newspaper and read it. The truncated, silly-looking letters, the paltry ambitions of dead men who don’t yet know that they are dead men . . . Everything that you are so concerned about now is in no way different from what set minds seething then - except, perhaps, that the order of the words in the headlines has changed. Wake up!’
Alexander’s head had sunk right down into his shoulders now - he was totally embarrassed. Lord Cricket apparently knew how to go for the jugular.
‘Surely you would like to find out who these beings of a different nature are? And understand how they differ from human beings?’
‘Yes, I would,’ Alexander muttered.
‘Then forget all this nonsense, and let’s get down to business. Today I’m going to tell you about what lies concealed behind the ability of certain people to transform themselves into animals - an ability that is real, not metaphorical. Anthy, is everything working? Then turn off the light, please . . .’
‘What you are about to hear,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘is normally regarded as esoteric knowledge. Therefore I ask you to keep what you hear secret. The information I intend to share with you originates from the Pink Sunset Lodge, or, more precisely, from Aleister Crowley, Aldous Huxley and their line of secret transmission. The condition of secrecy that I have mentioned is essential, not so much for the sake of the lodge, as for your own personal safety. Do you accept this condition?’
Alexander and I exchanged glances.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Alexander repeated, after a brief pause.
Lord Cricket touched one of the keys on his laptop. A diagram appeared on the wall - a man sitting in the lotus position, with a vertical line drawn along his spine. Set along this line were symbols marked with Sanskrit characters, looking like different-coloured cogwheels with various numbers of teeth.
‘No doubt you are aware that a human being is not merely a physical body with a nervous system, restricted to the perception of the physical world. On the subtle plane a human being is a psycho-energetic structure consisting of three channels of energy and seven psychic centres called chakras.’
Lord Cricket ran his finger down something rather like a bicycle chain connecting the cogwheels on the spine.
‘This subtle structure not only regulates a human being’s spiritual life. It is also responsible for the way in which he or she perceives the surrounding world. Each chakra is related to a specific set of psychic manifestations, which I won’t go into just now. What is important for us is that, according to the traditional occult view, spiritual progress consists in the ascent along the central energy channel of a force known as “kundalini”, or “snake energy”.’
A part of the previous diagram appeared on the screen, showing an inverted triangle at the very base of the spine.
‘In its coiled state, Kundalini slumbers in this triangular bone called the “sacrum”. The sacrum is located at the base of the spine - in fact, it is its first bone. Or its last, depending on your point of view. In traditional occultism it is believed that the gradual charging of the chakras with the kundalini force is the essential aspect of the journey from a philistine who is indifferent to spiritual matters, to a saint who has achieved unity with the godhead . . .’