After the barrel-shaped, flabby Mikhalich, it was particularly striking just how handsome Alexander was. He was a noble and terrible beast, one that the northern gods might really be afraid of. But his howling wasn’t fearsome, like Mikhalich’s. It sounded quieter and seemed sad, rather than menacing:
Brindled cow! Do you hear, brindled cow? I know I must have lost all sense of shame to ask you for oil yet again. I do not ask for it. We do not deserve it. I know what you think of us - no matter how much you give them, Little Khavroshka won’t get a single drop, it will all be gobbled up by all these kukis-yukises,
yupsi-poopses and the other locusts who obscure the very light of day. You are right, brindled cow, that is how it will be. Only, let me tell you something . . . I know who you are. You are everyone who lived here before us. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and before that, and before that . . . You are the soul of all those who died believing in the happiness that would come in the future. And now see, it has come. The future in which people do not live for something else, but for themselves. And do you know how we feel swallowing sashimi that smell of oil and pretending not to notice the final ice-floes melting under our feet? Pretending this is the destination towards which the people have striven for a thousand years, ending with us? It turns out that in reality only you have lived, brindled cow. You had someone to live for, but we do not . . . You had us, but we have nobody apart from ourselves. But now you feel as miserable as we do, because you can no longer grow apples for your Little Khavroshka. You can only give oil to ignominious wolves, so that kukis-yukis-yupsi-poops can shell out to its lawyer and the lawyer can give the head of security a kick-back, the head of security can grease his hairdresser’s palm, the hairdresser can grease the cook’s, the cook can grease the driver’s, and the driver can hire your Little Khavroshka for an hour for a hundred and fifty bucks . . . And when your Little Khavroshka sleeps off the anal sex and pays off all her cops and bandits, maybe she’ll have enough left over for the apple that you wanted so much to become for her, brindled cow . . .
I felt as if the cow was looking at me with its empty eye sockets. And then, through the binoculars, I saw a tear well up on the edge of one of those sockets. It ran down across the skull and fell off into the snow, and then a second one appeared, and then a third . . .
Alexander carried on howling, but I couldn’t make out the meaning any more. Perhaps there no longer was any - the howling had turned into weeping. I started to weep too. We were all weeping . . . And then I realized we were howling rather than weeping - Mikhalich, the officer who had set up the pole on the hill, the men in the darkness behind the cars - we were all howling, with our faces turned to the moon, howling and weeping for ourselves and for our impossible country, for our pitiful life, stupid death and sacred hundred dollars a barrel . . .
‘Hey,’ I heard someone say, ‘wake up!’
‘Ah?’
I opened my eyes. Alexander and the officer were standing beside my chair.
‘That’s it,’ said the officer. ‘The oil’s flowing.’
‘How you howled!’ said Alexander. ‘We were simply spell-bound. ’
‘Yes,’ said Mikhalich, ‘the girl came in useful all right. I didn’t understand why you brought her at first, comrade lieutenant general.’
Alexander didn’t answer - one of the men who had stood behind the cars during the performance had come up to him. He was dressed in a military uniform without any badges of rank - just like all the others.
‘This is for you,’ he said and handed Alexander a little box. ‘The medal for Services to the Motherland. I know you have a lot of these things. We just want you to remember how highly the country values you.’
‘Thank you,’ Alexander said indifferently, putting the little box in his pocket. ‘Glad to serve.’
He took me by the arm and led me towards the car. When we’d moved away from the others, I whispered:
‘Tell me honestly, wolf to fox. Or if you prefer, were-creature to were-creature. Do you really think kukis-yukis is to blame for Little Khavroshka not getting an apple, and not that rotten fish-head that sometimes pretends to be a bull and sometimes a bear?’
He was flabbergasted.
‘What kukis? What fish-head?
It was only then I realized just how crazy what I’d just said sounded. Yes, it was stress - I’d stopped feeling the difference between the world and what I was thinking about it. Alexander hadn’t actually said anything - he had simply howled at the cow’s skull, and all the rest had been my personal interpretation.
‘And you threw in a bear too,’ he muttered.
Yes, indeed, it was really stupid of me. I hadn’t even discussed the bear and the fish-head with him.
‘It’s the fairy tales that did it,’ I said guiltily. ‘The ones I was reading in the plane.’
‘Ah. That explains it.’
However, there was one question I could ask without being afraid it would sound crazy. This time I gauged the impression my words might make in advance, before I opened my mouth:
‘You know, I have the feeling that you showed me to the skull as Little Khavroshka. Am I right?’
He laughed.
‘And why not? You’re so touching.’
‘Take a good look at me,’ I said. ‘What sort of Little Khavroshka am I?’
‘You could be Mary Magdalene,’ he said. ‘What difference does it make? It’s my job to get the oil flowing. And for that, the skull has to cry. What’s to be done if it doesn’t cry for Mikhalich any longer, even when he injects five cc’s of ketamine?’
‘But then it . . . It was a lie,’ I said, bewildered.
He chortled.
‘So you think art should be the truth?’
The only answer I gave was to blink several times. The absurd thing was that I really did think that. Suddenly I could no longer tell which of us really was the cynical manipulator of other minds.
‘You know what,’ he said, ‘you try selling that concept to the Saatchi gallery. Maybe they’ll put it on show beside the pickled shark. Or maybe Brian will buy it. The guy who offered me a thousand pounds.’
Alas, Brian couldn’t buy anything any longer . . . But then, that commonplace about someone who is dead is outmoded nowadays. Sometimes a client dies and his brokers carry on playing the stock market. And when the sad news finally reaches them, a computer program everyone has forgotten about carries speculating for a long time in cyberspace, buying and selling the pound and the yen when they reach the threshold levels . . . But Brian probably really couldn’t buy anything from me. And certainly not the idea that art should be the truth.
Moscow greeted me with the sad news. The article on the rumours.ru site, whose address had mysteriously written itself back into my home page, had the following headline:
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT FOUND DEAD
IN CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE SAVIOUR
A feeling rather like nausea prevented me from reading the entire article - I only had the strength to run my eyes over it diagonally, picking out the substance from under the journalistic clichés: ‘the grimace of inexpressible terror frozen on his face’, ‘the tears of the inconsolable widow’, ‘the representatives of the embassy’, ‘investigation of the circumstances’. I wasn’t concerned about what would happen to E Hu-Li- this was all business as usual for her. The investigators of the circumstances were the ones to be concerned about - in case that grimace of inexpressible terror froze on one of their faces too.
I should have felt sorry for Lord Cricket though. I concentrated, but for some reason instead of his face, all I could recall was documentary footage of a fox hunt - a little bundle of red-brown fur dashing across a field, totally defenceless, quaking in horror and hope, and riders in their elegant caps in pursuit . . . But I recited the requiem mantra anyway.
The next thing that caught my eye was a column heading:
SICK PREDATOR TAKES REFUGE
IN BITSEVSKY PARK
This magnum opus contained one incredibly impudent paragraph that concerned me personally:
The fox, covered with numerous bald spots or, more precisely, still covered with fur in places, inspired in those who witnessed the incident not only an intense feeling of pity, but also the suspicion that there was a radioactive waste dump somewhere nearby. Perhaps the old, sick animal had come to people, hoping for the coup de grace that would put an end to its suffering. But one cannot expect even that kind of favour for free from the hardhearted Muscovites of today. Two mounted militiaman set off in pursuit of the sick animal, but how the chase ended remains unknown.
What a filthy liar, I thought, it’s obvious that none of the witnesses said anything about a radioactive waste dump, and he made it all up himself, just to have something to fill up his column. But then the Internet columnists write about everything in the same vile way - about politics, culture, and even the conquest of Mars. And this time about foxes. This particular rumour-monger had a special trick of his own. When he wanted to cover someone in shit from head to foot, he always mentioned an intense feeling of compassion. I had always been amazed by this ability to take the most exalted of all human feelings, and turn it into a poisonous barb.
But then, if you just thought about it, there was nothing surprising about that. What was an Internet columnist, after all? A creature somewhat more advanced than a prison-camp guard dog, but very, very inferior to a were-fox.
1. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a prison-camp guard dog consists in the ability to bark into a strictly defined sector of space.
2. the difference is that a guard dog cannot guess for itself which is the correct sector to bark into, but an Internet columnist is often capable of this.
3. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a were-fox is that both try to create mirages that human beings take for reality.
4. the difference is that a fox is able to do this, but an Internet columnist isn’t.
The last point is hardly surprising. Would anyone who was able to create plausible mirages work as an Internet columnist? Unlikely. An Internet columnist can’t even convince himself that his inventions are real, I thought, clenching my fists, let alone other people. That’s why he ought to sit quietly and only bark when . . .
Then I forgot about Internet columnists and prison-camp guard dogs, as the light of truth suddenly flashed in my head.
‘Convince himself that his inventions are real,’ I repeated. ‘That’s it. Why, of course!’
Quite unexpectedly for myself I had solved the riddle that had been tormenting me for ages. My mind had been creeping up on it for many days, first from one side, then from the other - and all in vain. But now something turned and clicked, and everything suddenly fell into place - as if I’d put a jigsaw together by chance.
I realized how we foxes differ from werewolves. As is often the case, this difference was no more than a mutated similarity. Foxes and wolves were closely related - their magic was based on the manipulation of perception. But the means of manipulation were different.
A brief theoretical digression is required here, or else I’m afraid what I say will be incomprehensible.
People often argue about whether this world really exists, or is something like
The Matrix
movie. It’s a very stupid thing to argue about. All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don’t understand the words they use. Before discussing this subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with the meaning of the word ‘exist’. Then a lot of interesting things would become clear. But people are rarely capable of correct thinking.
Of course, I don’t mean to say that all people are total idiots. There are some among them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox’s. For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley. He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception. You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the matter are like the cult of Osiris or belief in the god Mithras. In my view, this is the only true thought that has visited the Western mind in its long and funny history: all the Humes, Kants and Baudrillards are only embroidering the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch.
But where does an object exist when we turn away and stop seeing it? After all, it doesn’t disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it? Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God. But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical demiurge, and their arguments are no worse than Berkeley’s. From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit. By the way, reading Stephen Hawking’s horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosmic photograph of Satan’s rebellion ... There is a middle way through this morass of idiocy - to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of the Devil.