‘Just don’t, that’s all. Think about something you enjoy instead.’
‘And where do I get that from?’
The taxi-driver squinted at me in the mirror.
‘Isn’t there anything you enjoy in your life?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘All nothing but suffering, is it?’
‘Yes, and so’s yours.’
‘Well, now,’ the taxi-driver laughed, ‘you can’t know about that.’
‘Yes, I can,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise.’
‘Why?’
‘I could explain. Only I don’t know if you’d understand.’
‘Well, get you!’ the driver snorted. ‘Do you think I’m more stupid than you are? I reckon I ought to be able to understand, if you can.’
‘All right. Do you understand that suffering is the material out of which the world was created?’
‘Why?’
‘That can only be explained with an example.’
‘Well, give me an example then.’
‘Do you know the story of Baron Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of a bog by his own hair?’
‘I do,’ said the driver, ‘I’ve even seen the film.’
‘The foundations underlying the reality of this world are very similar. Only you have to imagine Münchhausen suspended in a total void, squeezing his own balls as hard as he can and screaming in unbearable pain. Look at it one way and you feel kind of sorry for him. But look at it a different way, and he only has to let go of his own balls and he’ll immediately disappear, because by his very nature he is simply a vessel of pain with a grey ponytail, and if the pain disappears, then he’ll disappear as well.’
‘Did you learn that at school?’ the driver asked. ‘Or at home?’
‘Neither,’ I said. ‘It was on the way home from school. It’s a long journey, I get to see and hear all sorts of things. Did you understand the example?’
‘Sure I did,’ he replied. ‘I’m not stupid. So why’s your Münchhausen afraid to let go of his balls?’
‘I told you, then he’ll disappear.’
‘Maybe it would be better if he did? Who the hell needs a life like that?’
‘A good point. And that’s precisely why the social contract exists.’
‘Social contract? What social contract?’
‘Every individual Münchhausen can decide to let go of his own balls, but . . .’
I remembered the Sikh’s crayfish eyes and stopped. One of my sisters used to say that when a client slips off the tail during an unsuccessful session, for a few seconds he sees the truth. And for a man this truth is so unbearable that the first thing he wants to do is kill the fox responsible for revealing it to him, and then he wants to kill himself . . . But other foxes say that in that brief second the man realizes that physical life is a stupid and shameful mistake. And the first thing he tries to do is to thank the fox who has opened his eyes. And after that he corrects the error of his own existence. It’s all nonsense, of course. But it’s clear enough how these rumours get started.
‘But what?’ the driver asked.
I remembered where I was.
‘But when there are six billion Münchhausens holding each others’ balls arm over arm, the world is in no danger.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s very simple. Münchhausen can let go of himself, as you so correctly observed. But the more someone else hurts him, the more he hurts the two that he’s holding on to. And so on for six billion times. Do you understand?’
‘Shee-it,’ he said and spat, ‘only a woman could come up something like that.’
‘I have to disagree with you again,’ I said. ‘It’s an extremely male picture of the universe. I’d even call it chauvinistic. There’s no place in it for a woman at all.’
‘Why?’
‘Because women don’t have any balls.’
We drove on in silence.
No point in denying it, sometimes it happens that you lay something heavy on someone, and your own heart feels lighter for it. Why is that? It’s a mystery. Never mind, let him think a bit, it’s never done anyone any harm.
The next morning the business with the Sikh was in the news. It wasn’t what I went onto the net for, but some lousy worm had set my home page to ‘rumours.ru’ and I’d never got around to changing it. I forced myself to read the article right through to the end:
BUSINESSMAN FROM INDIA KILLS HIMSELF IN FRONT OF SECURITY GUARDS
The public will soon start thinking of the National hotel as a high-risk zone. With the terrorist attack that took place right outside its door still fresh in the memories of Muscovites, another alarming incident has just taken place: yesterday a forty-year-old businessman from the Indian state of Punjab killed himself by jumping from a fifth floor window. At least that’s the story of the two security guards employed by the hotel who were with him at the time the tragedy occurred. They claim that the guest from India summoned them by pulling the special alarm cord, and then when they entered the room, for no apparent reason he took a run and jumped out of the window. He was killed instantly when he hit the surface of the road. It has been established that shortly before his death the businessman had received a visit from a female denizen of the demi-monde.
Why the fifth floor, I wondered, when his suite was number 319? Ah yes, they had that swanky European way of numbering the rooms - the first two floors didn’t count, so number three nineteen was on the fifth floor . . .
Then my thoughts moved on to that mysterious French word ‘demi-monde’ - the ‘half-world’. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it the quarter-world? If you followed that method of word formation, consistently you could define the precise depths to which a woman had fallen. After two thousand years my denominator would probably have been pretty impressive . . .
And then suddenly, at long last, I started to feel ashamed of my own insensitivity. A man with whom I had, in a certain sense, been intimate, had died, and here I was counting floors and doing fractions. The intimacy may have been arbitrary, hallucinatory and temporary, but it was still appropriate to feel some compassion, even if it was as insubstantial as our intimacy had been. Yet I didn’t feel any at all - my heart flatly refused to generate it. Instead I started thinking again about the reasons for the previous day’s outrageous events:
1. The reason could lie in the astral background of the hotel National, where the dancer Isadora Duncan and the KGB’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky hung side by side in the photo-gallery of ‘honoured guests’.
2. What had happened could have been a karmic echo of one of those bloody business rituals they’re so fond of in Asia.
3. It was an indirect consequence of India’s recoil from the teaching of the Buddha in the Middle Ages.
4. The Sikh had been a worshipper of the goddess Kali after all - why else would he have shouted ‘kali ma’ as he threw himself out of the window?
I have to explain that sometimes I have as many as five inner voices, with each of them conducting its own inner dialogue: and as well as that, they can start to argue with each other over anything at all. I don’t get involved in the argument, I just listen and wait for a hint at the right answer. These voices don’t have any names, though. In that sense I’m a simple soul - some foxes have as many as forty of these voices with very long and beautiful names.
The old foxes say these voices belong to the souls that we consumed during the primordial chaos: according to legend, these souls made their home in our inner space by entering into a kind of symbiosis with our own essential nature. But that’s probably all just fairy tales, because every one of the voices is mine, although they’re all different. And if you follow the old foxes’ logic, you could say I myself am a soul that someone else consumed some time in the depths of ancient antiquity. All this is no more than pointless juggling with the various summands, it makes no difference to the sum total that is A Hu-Li.
These voices mean that foxes don’t think in the same way as people: the difference is that several thought processes develop in our minds instead of just one. The mind follows several different paths at the same time, keeping an eye open to see which will lead to the light of truth first. In order to convey this peculiarity of my inner life, I designate the various levels of my inner dialogue as 1), 2), 3) and so on.
These thought processes don’t intersect with each other in any way - they’re absolutely autonomous - but my consciousness is involved in each one of them. Some circus performers juggle a large number of objects at the same time. What they do with their bodies, I do with my mind, that’s all. This peculiarity means I have a tendency to draw up lists and break everything down into points and sub-points, even when, from the human point of view, there’s no real need for it. Please accept my apologies if you come across such lists broken down into points in these pages - it’s exactly the way everything happens inside my head.
Picturing the dead Sikh to myself as accurately as I could, I recited the requiem mantra three times and went to
reuters.com
to find out what was going on in the world. Everything in the world was just the same as it had been for the last ten thousand years. I rejoiced briefly in the headline ‘America Ponders Mad Cow Strategy’ and then went to my mail server.
Together with an invitation to increase the length of my sexual organ and a zip file that I didn’t open, despite the alluring subject of the message (‘Britney Blowing a Horse’), there was a quite unexpected pleasant surprise waiting for me - a letter from my sister E Hu-Li, who I hadn’t heard from for ages.
I had known sister E since the times of the Warring Kingdoms. She was a terrible rogue. Many centuries ago she was famous throughout the whole of China as an imperial concubine by the name of Flying Swallow. As a result of watching her fly, the emperor lived for twenty years less than he could have done. After that E Hu-Li was punished by the guardian spirits, and she began keeping a low profile, specializing in rich aristocrats, whom she milked dry in the peace and quiet of their country estates, away from the eyes of the world. For the last few hundred years she’d been living in England.
It was a very short letter:
Hi there, Ginger,
How are you? I hope everything’s going well. Sorry to bother you for such a trivial reason, but I need to consult you urgently about something. According to my information, in Moscow there’s a Shrine of Christ the Saver that was first demolished completely, leaving not a single stone in place, and then restored to look just the way it used to be. Is this true? What do you know about it? Please answer quickly!
Heads and tails,
E.
Strange, I thought, what’s all this about? But she had asked me to reply urgently. I clicked on the ‘reply’ button.
Hello, Carrot-Top,
Up here in the north everything’s still the same as ever. I’ll write in more detail some time, but meanwhile here’s the answer to your question. Yes there is a Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (that’s the correct form) in Moscow. It was blown up after the revolution and restored at the end of the last century. There really wasn’t a single stone left standing - for a long time there used to be a swimming pool where it had been. But now the swimming pool has been filled in and the cathedral has been built again. The cultural significance of this event is highly ambiguous - at one of the demonstrations I saw the slogan:
‘We demand the restoration of the Moscow swimming pool, barbarously destroyed by the cleptocracy!’ Since I personally have never visited either the first or the second facility, I have no opinion of my own on this subject.
Heads and tails,
A.
I sent the letter and went to the site whores.ru.
It looked very picturesque - even most of the pop-up ads were subject-related:
SEE PARIS AND LIVE!
DUREX ANAL EXTRA STRONG.
SUVs had appeared even among the condoms. The market was seeking out new approaches and niches: I came across ‘Occam’s Razor’ condoms with a portrait of the medieval scholast and the slogan: ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’ - ‘One should not multiply entities without necessity’. I used to know William of Occam personally. I remember him chasing me round his house in Munich, and two centuries after that the Reformation began - for some reason the two entirely unrelated events have fused together in my memory. But I had no time now for reminiscences - I had to compose an ad for myself quickly, and to do it I had to familiarize myself with already existing examples.
Fortunately, there was a huge number of them. I found one feature of the genre rather amusing: many of the girls brightened up their notices with a few inserts in verse that had nothing to do with the list of services on offer - it was a kind of verbal piercing, and I decided to have a go at it as well.