I’ll follow the sun
Till the end of time
No more pain and no more tears for me.
Naturally, when I heard the end of time mentioned, I recalled the caption under the picture of a wolf that I’d seen at Alexander’s place:
FENRIR
: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin.
That changed the picture somewhat . . . What a child he is after all, I thought with a tenderness that I was still not consciously aware of, what a funny little boy.
Soon it started getting dark. In the moonlight the landscape outside the car window had an unearthly look - it seemed strange that people should fly to other planets, when they had places like this right here beside them. The ground only a metre away from the invisible road might well never have been touched by the foot of man, or any foot or paw, come to that, and we would be the first . . .
When we reached our destination, it was already completely dark. Outside the car there were no buildings, no lights, no people, nothing - just the night, the snow, the moon and the stars. The only thing interrupting the monotony of the landscape was a nearby hill.
‘Out we get,’ said Alexander.
It was cold outside. I raised the collar of my padded jacket and tugged the fur cap further down over my ears. Nature had not designed me for life in these parts. What would I have done there, anyway? The reindeer herders don’t seek amorous adventures among the snows, and even if they did, I doubt if I would be able to spread my tail in frost like that. It would probably freeze immediately and snap off, like an icicle.
The cars lined up so that their powerful headlights lit up the entire hill. Men began bustling about in the pool of light, unpacking the equipment they had brought with them - instruments of some kind that were a mystery to me. One man in the same kind of padded military jacket I was wearing, with a black bag in his hands, came up to Alexander and asked:
‘Can I set it up?’
Alexander nodded.
‘Let’s go together,’ he said, and turned towards me. ‘And you come with us too. The view’s beautiful from up there, you’ll see.’
We set off towards the top of the hill.
‘When did the pressure fall?’ Alexander asked.
‘Yesterday evening,’ one of the officers replied.
‘Have you tried pumping in water?’
The officer waved his hand dismissively, as if that wasn’t even worth mentioning.
‘How many times is it that the pressure’s fallen in this well?’
‘Five,’ said the officer. ‘That’s it, we’ve squeezed it dry. The reservoir, and the whole of Russia.’
He swore quietly.
‘We’ll soon see about the whole of Russia,’ said Alexander. ‘And watch your tongue, we have a lady with us, after all.’
‘Oh, a new member of the team?’
‘Something of the sort.’
‘That’s good. We can’t expect much from Mikhalich . . .’
We reached the top. I saw low buildings in the distance, pinpoints of blue and yellow electric light, latticework metal structures, smoke or steam rising in some places. The moon lit up a labyrinth of pipes extending across the surface of the ground - some of them plunged into the snow, others stretched all the way to the horizon. But all this was too far away for me to make out any details. I didn’t notice any people anywhere.
‘Are they on the line?’ Alexander asked.
‘Yes,’ the officer replied. ‘If anything happens, they’ll let us know. What are the chances?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Alexander. ‘What point is there in guessing? Let’s get ready.’
The officer put his bag down on the snow and opened it. Inside there was a plastic case about the same size and shape as a large melon. Catches clicked, the melon opened and I saw a cow’s skull that looked very old lying on red velvet. In some places it was cracked and held together by metal plates. The bottom of the skull was set in a metal frame.
The officer took a black cylinder out of the bag and opened it up to form something like one of those telescopic sticks for trekking. It had a round flange at one end. He took a swing and thrust the pointed end of the stick in the snow, then checked to make certain it was secure. It was, very. Then he picked up the skull, set its metal base over the flange on the end of the stick and connected them with a faint click.
‘All set?’ asked Alexander.
He hadn’t been following the manipulations, he was watching the distant lights and the pipelines, like a general surveying the site of an imminent battle. The officer turned the empty eye sockets of the skull towards the oilfield. I couldn’t understand what he was intending to film with this weird camera.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Alexander.
We walked down the hill towards the men waiting for us by the cars.
‘Well then, Mikhalich,’ said Alexander, ‘why don’t you go first? Give it a try. And I’ll back you up if need be.’
‘Straight away,’ said Mikhalich. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes, I’ll just pop into the car to make sure I don’t freeze my ass off.’
‘You mean you can’t manage at all without ketamine?’
‘Whatever you say, comrade lieutenant general,’ said Mikhalich. ‘Only I’d like to do it according to my own system. And I’ve already switched to injecting into the muscle.’
‘Well, do it your way then,’ Alexander muttered in annoyance. ‘Go on. We’ll see. It’s time you learned to walk without crutches, Mikhalich. Have faith in yourself! Let it all out! Wolf-flow! Wolf-flow! What will you do if your dealer gets banged up? Is the whole country going to pay the price?’
Mikhalich cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything and walked round behind the cars. As he walked by, he winked at me. I pretended not to notice.
‘One minute to go,’ said a loud voice amplified by a megaphone. ‘Everybody withdraw behind the perimeter.’
The cluster of men in the light of the headlights walked quickly away into the darkness behind the cars. The only one left standing with us was the officer who had helped Alexander install the skull on the hilltop. I didn’t know if the command meant me as well and I looked enquiringly at Alexander.
‘Have a seat,’ he said, pointing to a folding chair nearby. ‘Mikhalich is going to perform now. Just be sure not to laugh, he’s sensitive. Especially when he’s taken a shot.’
‘I remember,’ I said and sat down.
Alexander settled down on the chair next to mine and handed me a pair of field binoculars. The metal casing was searingly cold to the touch.
‘Which way do I look?’ I asked.
He nodded in the direction of the pole with the skull, which was clearly visible in the headlights.
‘Fifteen . . .’ said the megaphone behind the cars. ‘Ten . . . Five ...Start!’
For a few seconds nothing happened, then I heard a dull growl and a wolf appeared in the pool of light.
He was very different from the beast that Alexander changed into. So different, in fact, that he seemed to belong to a different biological species. He was smaller, with short legs, and entirely lacking in the dangerous charm of a deadly predator. The elongated barrel-shaped trunk of his body was too cumbersome for life in the natural wilderness, especially under conditions of natural selection. This corpulent body put me in mind of ancient outrages, of Christian martyrs and Roman emperors feeding their enemies to a wild beast. What he looked most like . . . Yes, most of all, he resembled a huge overfed dachshund with a wolf’s skin transplanted on to it. I felt frightened I wouldn’t be able to stop myself laughing. And that made everything seem even funnier. But fortunately I managed to restrain myself.
Mikhalich trudged up the hill and stopped beside the skull on the pole. He paused deliberately, then raised his face towards the moon and started howling, wagging his stiff tail like a conductor’s baton.
I got the same feeling as I did when Alexander transformed: as if the wolf’s body was a false appearance, or at best merely an empty resonator, like the body of a violin, and the mystery lay in the sound produced by an invisible string stretched between the tail and the face. The only real thing was this string and its appalling appassionato, everything else was an illusion . . . I felt my kinship with this creature: Mikhalich was doing something close to what foxes do, and his tail was helping him to do it in exactly the same way.
His howling roused a poignantly meaningful echo, first at the base of my own tail, and then in my conscious mind. There was meaning in the sound, and I understood it. But it was hard to express this meaning in human language - it resonated with such an immense number of words, that it wasn’t clear which I should choose. Very approximately, and without any claims to accuracy, I would have expressed it as follows:
Brindled cow! Do you hear, brindled cow? It is I, the vile old wolf Mikhalich, I am whispering in your ear. Do you know why I am here, brindled cow? My life has become so dark and terrible that I have abandoned the Image of God and become a pseudo-wolf. And now I howl at the moon, the sky and the earth, at your skull and all that exists, so that the earth may take pity, open up and give me oil. You have no reason to pity me, I know. But even so, have pity on me, brindled cow. If you do not have pity on me, no one in the world will. And you, earth, look on me, shudder in horror and give me oil, for which I will receive a little money. Because to lose the Image of God, become a wolf and not have money is unbearable and unthinkable, and the Lord, whom I have denied, would not allow such a thing . . .
The call was full of a strange, enchanting power and sincerity. I felt no pity for Mikhalich, but his plaint sounded perfectly justified in terms of all the central concepts of Russian life. If I can put it that way, he was not demanding anything excessive from the world, everything was logical and well within the bounds of the modern metaphysical proprieties. But nothing happened to the skull, which I was watching through the binoculars.
Mikhalich howled for another ten minutes or so, in pretty much the same vein. Sometimes his howling was pitiful, sometimes menacing - I even felt a bit afraid. But then I didn’t know what was supposed to happen, if anything - I was waiting for it, because Alexander had told me to watch the skull. But from the brief comments exchanged by Alexander and the officer, it was clear that Mikhalich had been unsuccessful.
Perhaps the reason for that was a certain unnatural, chemical tone in his howling. It wasn’t noticeable at first, but the longer he howled, the more clearly I sensed it, and by the end of his performance it was so strong that I felt an unpleasant lump low down in my throat.
The howling broke off, I lowered the binoculars and saw there was no wolf on the hill any longer. Instead, there was Mikhalich, down on all fours. He was clearly visible in the headlights - right down to the last crease in his greatcoat. Despite the cold, his face was covered with large beads of sweat. He stood up and trudged down the hill.
‘Well?’ he asked when he reached us.
The officer held a walkie-talkie to his ear, listened for a while and lowered it again.
‘No change,’ he said.
‘Because this is the fifth time we’ve worked this deposit already,’ said Mikhalich. ‘The second time round I always make it work. And the third time almost always. But the fifth . . . It’s kind of hard to think of what to howl about.’
‘Guys, we have to think of something,’ the officer said, concerned. ‘Almost all the wells in the sector are on their fourth cycle. If we don’t get the fifth moving, then NATO will cut us in three pieces in two years, the maths are as simple as that. Any ideas, Alexander?’
Alexander got up off his chair.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ he said. He stood there, looking at the skull through narrowed eyes and estimating the distance. Then he set off up the hill. Halfway to the skull he tossed the greatcoat off his shoulders and it fell in the snow with its arms outstretched.
‘Like Pushkin walking to his last duel,’ I thought, then looked at the greatcoat and thought: ‘or like Dantes . . .’
The military uniform made the second seem more accurate. I suddenly understood that Pushkin was killed by a homonimic shadow of Dante - though the coincidence of names wasn’t complete, it still looked eerie. As if one poet served another as a guide to the beyond again, I thought, this time with full board accommodation . . . But I had no time to reflect on this insight properly before Alexander reached the pole.
He cautiously set his hands on the skull and turned it through a hundred and eighty degrees so that it was staring directly at me - through the binoculars I could clearly see empty eye sockets and a metal cleat holding together a crack above one of them.
Alexander started down the hill. When he reached his greatcoat he stopped, raised his face to the sky and howled.
He started to howl when he was still a man, but the howling transformed him into a wolf faster than amorous arousal. He arched in a bow and tumbled over on to his back. The tranformation occurred so rapidly that he was almost completely a wolf when his back touched the greatcoat. Without stopping its howling even for a second, the wolf floundered in the snow for a few moments, raising a white cloud all around itself, and then got up on to its legs.