Buddha's Little Finger

10

‘Eight thousand two hundred miles of emptiness.’ sang a male voice trembling with feeling from the radio, ‘and still no place to spend the night… How happy I should be if not for you, Mother Russia, if not for you, my homeland…’

Volodin stood up and turned the switch. The music stopped.

‘Why’d you turn it off?’ asked Serdyuk, looking up.

‘I can’t bear listening to Grebenschikov,’ replied Volodin. Tie’s talented, of course, but he’s far too fond of over-complicated phrases. His songs are all just full of Buddhism - he doesn’t know how to use words in a straightforward way. You heard that song he was singing just now about the homeland - d’you know where it comes from? The Chinese White Lotus Sect had this mantra: «Absolute emptiness is the homeland, the mother is the unborn.» But he’s wrapped it all up in code so you could burst your brains trying to understand what he’s talking about.’

Serdyuk shrugged and went back to his work. As I kneaded my Plasticine, I looked over every now and then at his quick fingers folding paper cranes out of pages from an exercise book. He performed his task with quite incredible dexterity, without even bothering to look at what he was doing. There were paper cranes scattered all around the aesthetics therapy room; many of them were just lying on the floor, although only that morning Zherbunov and Barbolin had swept a huge pile out into the corridor. Serdyuk took no interest whatsoever in the fate of his creations; once he had pencilled a number on each crane’s wing, he just tossed it into the corner and immediately set about ripping the next page out of the exercise book.

‘How many still to go?’ asked Volodin.

‘I’ve got to get them all done by spring,’ said Serdyuk, then transferred his gaze to me. ‘Listen, I’ve just remembered another one.’

‘Go on then.’ I answered.

‘Okay, it goes like this. Petka and Vasily Ivanovich are sitting boozing, when suddenly this soldier comes dashing in and says: «The Whites are coming!» Petka says: «Vasily Ivanovich, let’s leg it quick.» But Chapaev just pours another two glasses of hooch and says: «Drink up, Petka.» So they drink up. Then the soldier comes dashing in again. «The Whites are coming!» Chapaev pours another two glasses and says: «Drink up, Petka!» The next time the soldier comes running in and says the Whites are almost at the house now. So then Chapaev says: «Petka, can you see me?» And Petka says: «No.» And Chapaev says: «I can’t see you either. We’re well camouflaged.’»

I sighed derisively and picked up a new piece of Plasticine from the table.

‘I know that one too, but with a different ending.’ said Volodin. ‘The Whites come bursting in, look round the room, and say: «Damn, they got away again.»‘

‘That one is a little closer to the truth.’ I responded, ‘but it is still very wide of the mark. All these Whites… I simply cannot understand how everything could have been distorted so grossly. Well, does anybody have another one?’

‘I remember one,’ Serdyuk answered. ‘Petka and Vasily Ivanovich are swimming across the Ural, and Chapaev’s clutching this attache case in his teeth… ‘

‘О-oh.’ I groaned, ‘Who on earth could possibly invent such nonsense?’

‘Anyway, he’s almost on the point of drowning, but he won’t dump the case. Petka shouts to him: «Vasily Ivanovich, drop the case, or you’ll drown!» But Chapaev says: «No way, Petka! I can’t. It’s got the staff maps in it.» Anyway, they barely make it to the other bank, and when they get there, Petka says: «Right then, Vasily Ivanovich, show me these maps we almost drowned for.» Chapaev opens up the case, Petka looks inside and sees it’s full of potatoes. «Vasily Ivanovich,» he says, «what kind of maps do you call these?» So Chapaev takes out two potatoes and says: «Look here, Petka. This is us - and this is the Whites.»‘

Volodin laughed.

‘That one lacks even the slightest glimmer of sense,’ I said. ‘In the first place, if, after another ten thousand lives you, Serdyuk, should have the chance to drown in the Ural, you may regard yourself as extremely fortunate. In the second place, I simply cannot understand where all these Whites keep appearing from. I suspect that the Cheka crew must have been at work there. In the third place, it was a metaphorical map of consciousness, not a plan of military positions at all. And they were not potatoes, but onions.’

‘Onions?’

‘Yes, onions. Although for a number of highly personal reasons I would have given a great deal for them to have been potatoes instead.’

Volodin and Serdyuk exchanged a protracted glance.

‘And this is the man who wants to discharge himself.’ said Volodin. ‘Ah, I’ve remembered one now. Chapaev is writing in his diary: «Sixth of June; we have driven the Whites back-’

‘He did not keep any diary.’ I interjected.

‘«Seventh of June; the Whites have driven us back. Eighth of June; the forest warden came and drove everybody out.”‘

‘I see.’ I said, ‘no doubt that one was about Baron Jungern. Only he didn’t come, unfortunately. And then, he was not actually a forest warden, he simply said that he had always wanted to be a forester. I find this all very strange, gentlemen. In some ways you are really quite well informed, and yet I keep on getting the feeling that someone who does indeed know how everything really happened has attempted to distort the truth in the most monstrous fashion possible. And I simply cannot understand the reason for it.’

Nobody broke the silence again for a while. I became absorbed in my work and started thinking through my forthcoming conversation with Timur Timurovich. The logic of his actions still remained entirely opaque to me. Maria had been discharged a week after he broke the bust of Aristotle over my head, but Volodin, who was as normal a man as any I had ever seen in my life, had recently been prescribed a new course of drug therapy. On no account, I reasoned with myself, must I think up answers in advance, because he might not ask a single one of the questions for which I might have prepared myself, and then I would be bound to throw out one of my ready-made answers at entirely the wrong moment. All that I could do was trust to chance and luck.

‘All right, then,’ Volodin eventually said. ‘Why don’t you give us an example of something that has actually been distorted? Tell us how it really happened.’

‘What exactly are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘Which of the episodes that you have mentioned?’

‘Any of them. Or we can take something else. Like this, for instance, I can’t imagine what could possibly have been distorted in this one. Kotovsky sends Chapaev some red caviar and cognac from Paris, and Chapaev writes back: «Thank you, Petka and I drank the moonshine, although it smelled of bedbugs, but we didn’t eat the cranberries - they stank of fish.»‘

I laughed despite myself.

‘Kotovsky never sent anything from Paris. But there was indeed a rather similar incident. We were sitting in a restaurant and actually drinking cognac with red caviar - I know how bad that sounds, but they had no black caviar in the place. Our conversation concerned the Christian paradigm, and therefore we began discussing its terminology. Chapaev commented on a passage from Swedenborg in which a ray of heavenly light shines down to the bottom of hell and the spirits who live there take it for a dirty, stinking puddle. I had understood this in the sense that the light itself had been transformed, but Chapaev said that the nature of light does not change, and everything depends on the subject of perception. He said that there is no power that would prevent a sinful soul from entering heaven - but it happens that it simply does not want to go there. I could not understand how this could be the case, and then he explained that one of Furmanov’s weavers, for instance, would have taken the caviar we were eating for cranberries that smelled of fish.’

‘I see,’ said Volodin, who for some reason had turned rather pale.

I was struck by an unexpected idea.

‘Just a moment now,’ I said, ‘where did you say the cognac came from?’

Volodin did not answer.

‘What difference does it make?’ asked Serdyuk.

‘Never mind,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘but now at last I seem to have some idea of who could be responsible for all this. It is rather strange, of course, and it does seem quite unlike him, but all the other explanations are so completely absurd…’

‘Listen, I’ve remembered another one,’ said Serdyuk. ‘Chapaev comes to see Anka, and she’s sitting there naked…’

‘My dear sirs,’ I interrupted, ‘are you not taking things just a little too far?’

‘It wasn’t me that made it up,’ Serdyuk replied insolently, tossing another paper crane into the corner of the room. ‘So anyway, he asks her: «Why haven’t you got any clothes on, Anka?» And she says to him: «I haven’t got any dresses to wear.» So he opens the wardrobe, looks inside and says: «What’s all this then? One dress. Two dresses. Hi there, Petka. Three dresses. Four dresses.’»

‘Really,’ I said, ‘I ought to just punch you in the face for saying such things - but somehow instead it brings back a deep feeling of melancholy. In actual fact it was all quite different. It was Anna’s birthday, and we had gone out for a picnic. Kotovsky immediately got drunk and fell asleep, and Chapaev began explaining to Anna that a human personality is like a wardrobe filled with sets of clothes which are taken out by turns, and the less real the person actually is, the more sets there are in the wardrobe. That was his present to Anna on her birthday - not a set of dresses, but his explanation. Anna was stubborn and she refused to agree with him. She attempted to prove that what he said was all very well in theory, but it did not apply to her, because she always remained herself and never wore any masks. But Chapaev simply answered everything she said by saying: «One dress… Two dresses…» and so on. Do you understand? Then Anna asked, if that was the case, who was it that put on the dresses, and Chapaev replied that there was nobody to put them on. That was when Anna understood. She said nothing for a few seconds, then she nodded and looked up at him, and Chapaev smiled and said, «Hello there, Anna!» That is one of my most precious memories,. But why am I telling you all this?’

I had suddenly been overwhelmed by a veritable whirlwind of thoughts and ideas. I remembered Kotovsky’s strange smile at our parting. I do not understand, I thought, he could have heard about the map of consciousness, but how would he know about the camouflage? He had left just before that… Then I suddenly remembered what Chapaev had said about Kotovsky’s fate.

In an instant everything became absolutely clear. Kotovsky, however, had failed to take one important factor into account, I thought, feeling the malice seething within me, he had forgotten that I could do exactly the same thing that he had done. And if that cocaine-riddled lover of trotters and secret freedom had condemned me to the madhouse, then…

‘Now I would like to tell a joke,’ I said.

The feelings that had taken possession of me must have been visible in the expression on my face, because Serdyuk and Volodin glanced at me in genuine alarm; Volodin even shifted his chair a little further away from me.

Serdyuk said, ‘Just don’t get yourself upset, all right?’

‘Are you going to listen or not?’ I asked. ‘Right, then. Now… Aha, I have it. Some savages have captured Kotovsky and they say to him: «We are going to eat you, and then make a drum out of your bald scalp. But now you can have one last wish.» Kotovsky thought for a moment and said: «Bring me an awl.» They gave him an awl, and he took it and jabbed it into the top of his head over and over again. Then he yelled: «So much for your drum, you bastards!»‘

I laughed ferociously, and at that very moment the door opened and the moustachioed face of Zherbunov appeared. He glanced warily round the room until his gaze came to rest on me. I cleared my throat and straightened the collar of my dressing-gown.

‘Timur Timurovich wants to see you.’

‘Straight away,’ I replied, getting up from my chair and carefully placing the unfinished bagel of black Plasticine on the table that was cluttered with Serdyuk’s toy cranes.

Timur Timurovich was in an excellent mood.

‘I hope, Pyotr, that you understood why I called what happened to you at the last session total catharsis?’

I shrugged non-committally.

‘Well then, consider this,’ he said. ‘I explained to you once that misdirected psychic energy may take on the form of any kind of mania or phobia. To put it in rather crude terms, my method consists in approaching such a mania or phobia in terms of its own inner logic. For instance, you say you are Napoleon.’

‘I do not say anything of the sort.’

‘Let us assume that you do. Well then, instead of trying to prove to you that you are mistaken, or administering an insulin shock, my answer is: «Very well, you are Napoleon. But what are you going to do now? Land in Egypt? Declare a continental blockade? Or perhaps you will abdicate the throne and simply go back home to your Corsican Lane?» And then, depending on how you reply to my question, all the rest will follow. Consider your colleague Serdyuk, for instance. That Japanese who supposedly forced him to slit open his belly is quite the most vital element in his psychological world. Nothing ever happens to him, not even when Serdyuk himself suffers symbolic death, in fact in his imagination he even remains alive after Serdyuk is dead. And when he comes round again, he can think of nothing better to do than make all those little aeroplanes. I am sure they advised him to do it in some new hallucination. In other words, the illness has affected such extensive areas of his psyche that sometimes I even contemplate the possibility of surgical intervention.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I only mention Serdyuk for purposes of comparison. But now consider what has happened to you. I regard it as a genuine triumph for my method. The entire morbidly detailed world that your clouded consciousness had constructed has simply disappeared.’dissolved into itself, and not under any pressure from a doctor, but apparently by following its inner own laws. Your psychosis has exhausted itself. The stray psychic energy has been integrated with the remaining part of the psyche. If my theory is correct - and I would like to believe that it is - you are now perfectly well.’

‘I am sure that it is correct.’ I said. ‘Of course, I do not understand it in all of its profundity-’

‘There is no need for you to understand it.’ Timur Timurovich answered. ‘It is quite sufficient that today you yourself represent its very clearest confirmation. Thank you very much, Pyotr, for describing your hallucinations in such detail, not many patients are capable of doing that. I hope you will not object if I make use of excerpts from your notes in my monograph?’

‘I should regard it as a signal honour.’

Timur Timurovich patted me on the shoulder affectionately.

‘Come now, no need to be so formal. I’m your friend.’

He picked up a rather thick file of papers from his desk.

‘I just want to ask you to fill in this questionnaire, and to take the job seriously.’

‘A questionnaire?’

‘A pure formality,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘They’re always thinking up something or other in the Ministry of Health - they have so many people there with nothing to do all day long. This is what they call a test for the assessment of social adequacy. There are all sorts of questions in it, with different possible answers provided for each. One of the answers is correct, the others are absurd. Any normal person will catch on immediately.’

He leafed through the questionnaire. There must have been twenty or thirty pages of it.

‘Sheer bureaucracy, of course, but we get the official circulars here the same as everywhere else. This is required for discharge. And since I can’t see any reason for keeping you here any longer, here’s a pen, and off you go.’

I took the questionnaire from him and sat down at the desk. Timur Timurovich tactfully turned away to face the bookshelves and took down a thick, heavy volume.

There were a number of sections in the questionnaire: ‘Culture’, ‘History’, ‘Politics’ and a few others. I opened the section on ‘Culture’ at random and read:

32. At the end of which of the following films does the hero drive out the villains, waving a heavy cross above his head?

a) Alexander Nevsky

b) Jesus of Nazareth

c) The Death of the Gods

33. Which of the names below symbolizes the all-conquering power of good?

a) Arnold Schwarzenegger

b) Sylvester Stallone

c) Jean-Claude Van Damm

Struggling not to betray my confusion, I turned over several pages at once to a point somewhere in the centre of the history section:

74. What was the target at which the cruiser Aurora fired?

a) the Reichstag

b) the battleship Potyomkin

c) the White House

d) the firing started from the White House

I suddenly recalled that terrible black night in October 1917 when the Aurora sailed into the estuary of the Neva. I had raised my collar as I stood on the bridge, smoking nervously, staring at the distant black silhouette of the cruiser. There was not a single light to be seen on it, but a vague electrical radiance trembled at the ends of its slim masts. Two people out for a late stroll halted beside me, an astonishingly beautiful young schoolgirl and a fat governess chaperoning her, who looked like one of those stout columns intended for displaying posters in the street.

‘Look at it, Miss Brown!’ the young girl exclaimed in English, pointing towards the black ship. ‘This is St Elmo’s fires!’

‘You are mistaken, Katya.’ the governess replied quietly. ‘There is nothing saintly about this ship.’

She peered sideways at me.

‘Let’s go.’ she said. ‘Standing here could be dangerous.’

I shook my head to drive away the memory and turned over a few more pages: 102. Who created the Universe?

a) God

b) the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers

c) I did

d) Kotovsky

I carefully closed the questionnaire and looked out of the window. I could see the snow-covered crown of a poplar, with a crow perched on it. It was hopping from one foot to the other, and snow was sprinkling down through the air from the branch on which it was sitting. Down below an engine of some kind roared into life and startled the bird. Flapping its wings ponderously, it took off from the branch and flew away from the hospital - I watched it go until it was reduced to an almost invisible black speck. Then I slowly raised my eyes to Timur Timurovich, meeting his own attentive gaze.

‘Tell me, what is this questionnaire needed for? Why did they invent it?’

‘I don’t know that myself,’ he replied. ‘Although, of course, there is a certain logic to it. Some patients are so cunning that they can wind even the most experienced doctor round their little finger. So this is just in case Napoleon decides for the time being to admit that he is mad, in order to obtain permission to leave the hospital and inaugurate the One Hundred Days…’

A sudden startled thought glinted momentarily in his eyes, but he extinguished it immediately with a flick of his eyelids.

‘But then,’ he said, walking over quickly to me, ‘you’re perfectly right. I’ve only just realized I’ve been treating you as though you’re still a patient. As though I didn’t trust you myself. It’s terribly silly, but it’s just my professional reflex response.’

He pulled the questionnaire from my grasp, tore it in half and threw it into the waste-paper basket.

‘Go and get ready,’ he said, turning towards the window. ‘Your documents have already been prepared. Zherbunov will show you to the station. And here is my telephone number, just in case you need it.’

The blue cotton trousers and the black sweater that Zherbunov issued to me smelled of dusty broom cupboards. I was extremely displeased that the trousers were crumpled and stained, but as Zherbunov explained, the domestic services unit had no iron.

‘This isn’t a laundry, you know,’ he said caustically, ‘nor the bleeding Ministry of Culture neither.’

I put on the high boots with the patterned soles, the round fur cap and the grey woollen coat, which would actually have been rather elegant if not for a hole with scorched edges in the back.

‘Got plastered, probably, and one of your mates burnt you with his fag,’ Zherbunov commented as he donned a poisonous-green jacket with a hood.

It was interesting to note that I did not feel in the least bit offended by these boorish outbursts, which he had never permitted himself in the ward. Quite the contrary, they were like music to my ears, because they were a sign of my freedom. In actual fact he was not even being rude, this was merely his usual manner of speaking to people. Since I had ceased to be a patient, and he had ceased to be an orderly, the rules of professional ethics no longer applied to me; everything that had bound us together had been left hanging on that nail crookedly beaten into the wall, together with his white hospital coat.

‘And the travelling bag?’ I asked.

His eyes opened wide in feigned astonishment.

‘There wasn’t any travelling bag,’ he said. ‘You can take that up with Timur Timurovich if you like. Here’s your purse, there were twenty roubles in it, and that’s what’s in it now.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘So there is no way to get at the truth?’

‘Well, what did you expect?’

I made no attempt to argue any more. It was stupid of me even to have mentioned it. I limited my response to the stealthy extraction of the fountain pen from the side pocket of his jacket.

The doors of freedom swung open in such a banal, everyday fashion that I actually felt slightly disappointed. Beyond them was an empty, snow-covered yard surrounded by a concrete wall; a pair of large green gates, oddly decorated with red stars, stood directly opposite us, and beside them a small lodge with pale smoke rising from its chimney. In any case, I had already seen all of this many times from the window. I went down the steps from the porch and glanced back at the faceless white building of the hospital.

‘Tell me, Zherbunov, where is the window of our ward?’

‘Third floor, second from the end.’ answered Zherbunov. ‘There, you see, they’re waving to you.’

I caught a glimpse of two dark silhouettes in the window. One of them raised his open hand and pressed the palm against the glass. I waved to them in reply and Zherbunov tugged rather rudely at my sleeve.

‘Let’s get going. You’ll miss the train.’

I turned and followed him towards the gates.

It was cramped and hot in the lodge. An attendant in a green peaked cap with two crossed rifles on the cockade was sitting behind a small window; in front of it the passage was blocked by a boom made of painted iron piping. He took a long time to study the documents which Zherbunov passed over to him, several times looking up from the photograph at my face and then down again, and exchanging a few quiet comments with Zherbunov. Finally the boom was raised.

‘See what a serious guy he is,’ said Zherbunov, when we emerged. ‘He used to work in a Top-Secret Facility.’

‘I see.’ I answered. ‘Interesting. And did Timur Timurovich cure him as well?’

Zherbunov gave me a sideways glance, but he said nothing.

A narrow snow-covered path led away from the gates of the hospital. At first it wound its way through a sparse birch wood, and then for ten minutes it led along the edge of the wood before plunging back into the trees. There were no traces of civilization to be seen anywhere, apart from the thick cables sagging down between identical metal masts that looked like the skeletons of immense Red Army men in their helmets. Suddenly the forest came to an end, and we found ourselves beside a set of wooden steps leading up to a railway platform.

The only structure on the platform was a brick shed with a feebly smoking chimney that bore a remarkable similarity to the, gate-lodge at the hospital. The thought even occurred to me that this might be the dominant form of architecture in this unfamiliar world - but of course, I still had too little experience to make such broad generalizations. Zherbunov went over to a little window in the hut and bought me a ticket.

‘Okay then,’ he said, ‘here’s your train coming. Fifteen minutes to Yaroslavl Station.’

‘Splendid,’ I replied.

‘Looking forward to the ladies, then?’ he sneered.

I was only a little shocked by the directness of the question. From my long experience of associating with soldiers, I knew that among the lower classes the shameless discussion of the intimate side of life fulfils approximately the same function as conversation about the weather for the upper classes.

I shrugged. ‘I cannot say that I have pined too badly for what you call ladies, Zherbunov.’

‘Why’s that?’ Zherbunov asked.

‘Because.’ I replied, ‘ail women suck.’

‘That’s true enough,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But all the same, what are you going to do? You’ve got to work somewhere, haven’t you?’

‘I do not know.’ I replied. ‘I can write poetry, I can command a cavalry squadron. Something will turn up.’

The electric train came to a halt, and its doors opened with a hiss.

‘That’s it, then,’ said Zherbunov, proffering me a crablike hand. ‘Be seeing you.’

‘Goodbye.’ I said. ‘And please give my very best wishes to my wardmates.’

As I shook his hand, I suddenly noticed a tattoo which I had not seen before on his wrist. It was a blurred blue anchor, and above it I could just make out the letters ‘baltflot’ - they were very pale and indistinct, as though someone had tried to erase them.

Entering the carriage, I sat down on a hard wooden bench. The train set off and Zherbunov’s stocky figure drifted past the window and disappeared for ever into non-existence. At the very end of the platform, protruding above the barrier on two metal poles I saw a board bearing the inscription: ‘LOZOVAYA JUNCTION’.

Tverskoi Boulevard appeared exactly as it had been when I last saw it - once again it was February, with snowdrifts everywhere and that peculiar gloom which somehow manages to infiltrate the very daylight. The same old women were perched motionless on the benches, watching over brightly dressed children engaged in protracted warfare among the snowdrifts; above them, beyond the black latticework of the wires, the sky hung down close to the earth as though it were trying to touch it. Some tilings, however, were different, as I noticed when I reached the end of the boulevard. The bronze Pushkin had disappeared, but the gaping void that had appeared where he used to stand somehow seemed like the best of all possible monuments. Where the Strastnoi Monastery had been, there was now an empty space, with a sparse scattering of consumptive trees and tasteless street lamps.

I sat on a bench opposite the invisible statue and lit a cigarette with a short yellow tip which had been kindly given to me by an officer wearing a uniform that looked as though it belonged in some operetta. The cigarette burnt away as quickly as a Bickford fuse, leaving me with a vague taste of saltpetre in my mouth.

There were several crumpled bills in my pocket - in appearance they differed little from the rainbow-coloured hundred-rouble Duma notes which I remembered so well, although they were rather smaller in size. Zherbunov had told me at the station that this would be enough for a single lunch at an inexpensive restaurant. I sat there on the bench for quite a long time, pondering what I should do. It was already beginning to get dark, and on the roofs of the familiar buildings huge electrified signs lit up with messages in some barbarous artificial language - ‘Samsung’, ‘oca-co a’, ‘olbI’. In this entire city I had absolutely nowhere to go: I felt like a Persian who for some inexplicable reason has run the distance from Marathon to Athens.

‘And have you any idea what it is like, my dear sir, when you have nowhere left to go?’ I murmured to myself, gazing at the words burning in the sky, and I laughed as I remembered the Marmeladov-woman from the ‘Musical Snuffbox’.

Suddenly I understood exactly what I had to do next. Getting up from the bench, I walked across the road and held out one hand in order to hail an automobile. Almost immediately a rattling old vehicle shaped like a drop of water and splattered all over with dirty slush pulled up alongside me. Sitting at the wheel was a bearded gentleman who reminded me vaguely of Count Tolstoy, except that his beard was rather shorter and thinner.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I am afraid I cannot remember the precise address, but I need a place called «The Musical Snuffbox». A cafe. Somewhere not far from here - down along the boulevard and to the left. Quite close to Nikitsky Square.’

‘You mean on Herzen Street?’

I shrugged.

‘I’ve never heard of such a cafe,’ said the bearded gentleman. ‘I suppose it only opened recently.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘quite a while ago, actually.’

‘Ten roubles. Money up front.’

I opened the door and sat beside him. The automobile set off and I stole a glance at his face: he was wearing a strange-looking jacket cut in a manner reminiscent of the military tunics so beloved by the Bolshevik leadership, but made of material patterned in a liberal check design.

‘You have a fine automobile,’ I said.

He was obviously flattered by my remark.

‘It’s old now,’ he replied, ‘but after the war, there was no finer car in the world than the «Pobeda».’

‘After the war?’ I asked.

‘Well, of course, just after the war. But for five years at least. But now they’ve completely screwed everything up. You just wait and see, and the communists will come to power.’

‘Please do not talk about politics,’ I said, ‘I understand absolutely nothing about it and I always get confused.’

He gave me a quick look.

‘That, young man, is precisely the reason why everything has fallen apart the way it has, because you and people like you understand absolutely nothing about it. What’s politics about anyway? It’s about how we can carry on with our lives. If everyone thought about how we could sort things out in Russia, then they wouldn’t need any sorting out. And that, if you’ll pardon the expression, is the dialectic.’

‘And just where do you intend to hang this dialectic?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

We stopped at the beginning of the boulevard. There was a long queue of vehicles ahead of us - there were horns sounding and orange and red lights flashing. The bearded gentleman said nothing, and I thought he might have found my words a little unfriendly. I felt I wanted to smooth over the awkwardness.

‘You know.’ I said, ‘if history teaches us anything, then it is that everybody who has tried to sort things out in Russia has ended up being sorted out by Russia instead.’

‘That’s right,’ said the gentleman. ‘That’s precisely why we have to think about how to sort things out here - so that it won’t happen again.’

‘As far as I am concerned, I have no need to think about it,’ I replied. ‘I know perfectly well how to sort things out in Russia.’

‘Oh yes? And how’s that?’

‘It is all quite simple. Every time the concept and the image of Russia appears in your conscious mind, you have to let it dissolve away in its own inner nature. And since the concept and the image of Russia has no inner nature of its own, the result is that everything is sorted out most satisfactorily.’

He looked at me carefully.

‘I see.’ he said. ‘That’s just what the American Zionists want to hear. That’s exactly how they poisoned the minds of your entire generation.’

The automobile began to move again and turned on to Nikitskaya Street.

‘I do not entirely understand what you are talking about,’ I said, ‘but in that case all that has to be done is to take all the American Zionists and sort them out as well.’

‘And just how would you go about sorting them out, I wonder?’

‘In precisely the same way,’ I replied. ‘And America should be sorted out as well. But then, why bother going into every particular case? If one is going to sort things out, one might as well sort out the entire world at once.’

‘Then why don’t you go ahead and do so?’

‘That is exactly what I intend to do today,’ I said.

The gentleman wagged his beard up and down condescendingly.

‘Of course, it’s stupid of me to try to talk to you seriously, but I should point out that you are not the first person ever to talk such drivel. Pretending that you doubt the reality of the world is the most cowardly form of escape from that very reality. Squalid intellectual poverty, if you want my opinion. Despite all its seeming absurdity, cruelty and senselessness this world nonetheless exists, doesn’t it? And all the problems in it exist as well, don’t they?’

I said nothing.

‘Therefore talk of the non-reality of the world does not signify a highly developed spirituality, but quite the opposite. In not accepting the creation, you also fail to accept the Creator.’

‘I do not entirely understand what «spirituality» is,’ I said. ‘But as for the creator of this world, I am rather briefly acquainted with him.’

‘And how’s that?’

‘Oh, yes. His name is Grigory Kotovsky and he lives in Paris, and judging from everything that we can see through the windows of your remarkable automobile, he is still using cocaine.’

‘And is that all you have to say about him?’

‘I think I can also tell you that his head is presently covered with sticking-plaster.’

‘I see. And would you mind me asking exactly which psychiatric hospital you escaped from?’

I thought for a moment.

‘I think it was number seventeen. Yes, there was a big blue board hanging by the door, with the number seventeen on it. And it also said that it was a model hospital.’

The automobile came to a halt.

I looked out of the window and saw the building of the Conservatory. We were somewhere close to the ‘Snuffbox’ already.

‘Listen, we should try asking someone the way.’

‘I won’t take you any further,’ the gentleman said. ‘Get out of the car and go to the devil.’

I shrugged, opened the door and got out, while the automobile shot off in the direction of the Kremlin. It was rather upsetting that my attempts to speak honestly and sincerely had met with such a reception. But then, by the time I reached the corner of the Conservatory, I had already completely sorted out the bearded gentleman and his devil as well.

I glanced around me on all sides - the street was definitely familiar. I walked along it for about fifty yards and saw a turn to the right and, almost immediately, the familiar gateway in the wall where Vorblei’s automobile had stopped on that memorable winter’s night. It was exactly the same as it had been, except that I think the colour of the house had changed, and standing on the road in front of the gateway were a great many automobiles of various different shapes and styles.

Quickly crossing the inexpressibly depressing courtyard, I found myself facing a door surmounted by a futuristic-looking canopy of glass and steel. A small signboard in English had been hung on the canopy:

JOHN BULL: Pubis International

Light was showing through the pink blinds drawn halfway down several windows beside the door. From behind them I could hear the mechanically plaintive note of some obscure musical instrument.

I tugged the door open, revealing behind it a short corridor hung with heavy fur coats and men’s overcoats, ending in an unexpectedly crude metal partition. A man in a canary-yellow jacket with gold buttons who looked like a convict rose from a stool to meet me; in one hand he had a strange-looking telephone receiver with the wire broken off to leave a stump no more than an inch long. I could have sworn that only a second before he got up he had been talking into it - moreover, he had been holding it incorrectly, with the broken-off wire sticking upwards. This touchingly childlike ability to become totally immersed in a fantasy world, so unusual in such a thug, inspired me with a feeling close to sympathy for him.

‘Entry is for club members only,’ he said.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was here quite recently with two friends, remember? One of them hit you in the groin with the butt of his gun.’

The canary-yellow gentleman’s hostile face suddenly expressed weariness and revulsion.

‘You remember?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But we’ve already paid.’

‘I am not here for money,’ I replied. ‘I would just like to sit inside for a while. Believe me, I shall not be here for long.’

He gave a forced smile, then opened the metal partition to reveal a velvet curtain, which he pulled aside, and I entered a dimly lit hall.

The place had not changed very much - it still looked like a run-of-the-mill restaurant with some pretensions to chic. The public seated among the dense clouds of smoke at the small square tables was quite varied and I think someone was smoking hashish. It was all illuminated by a strange spherical chandelier which rotated slowly around its axis, and the spots of dim light it cast drifted around the hall like glimmers of moonlight. Nobody took any notice of me, and I sat at a small table not far from the entrance.

The hall was bounded on one side by a brightly lit stage on which a middle-aged man with a black, feral beard was standing behind the keyboard of a small organ and singing in a repulsive voice:

It was the chorus. The song appeared to be about the Christian commandments, but the treatment was rather original. The manner of singing, quite unfamiliar to me, was obviously popular among the audience - every repetition of the mysterious phrase ‘that’s where I really cut myself some slack’ was greeted with audible ripples of applause and the singer bowed slightly, without ceasing to caress his instrument with his immense hands.

I began to feel a little sad. I had always prided myself on my ability to understand the latest developments in art and recognize the eternal and unchanging elements concealed behind the unpredictable complexities of form, but in this case the rift between my customary experience and what I saw was simply too wide to be bridged. There could have been a simple explanation, of course; someone had told me that before he made Chapaev’s acquaintance, Kotovsky had been little more than a common criminal - this could well have been the reason for my inability to decipher the strange culture which had produced the manifestations that had baffled me so completely in the madhouse.

The curtain at the entrance quivered, and the man in the canary-yellow jacket stuck his head and shoulders out from behind it, still clutching the telephone receiver in one hand. He clicked his fingers and nodded towards my table. Immediately a waiter appeared in front of me, wearing a black jacket and a bow-tie, holding a leather folder with the menu,

‘What would we like to eat?’ he asked.

‘I do not wish to eat.’ I replied, ‘but I would happily drink some vodka. I am chilled.’

‘Smirnoff? Stolichnaya? Absolut?’

‘Absolute,’ I replied. ‘And I would also like - how shall I put it? - something to help me relax.’

The waiter gave me a dubious look, then he turned to the canary-yellow gentleman and made some kind of card-sharper’s gesture. The latter nodded. The waiter leaned down to my ear and whispered:

‘Amphetamines? Barbiturates? Ecstasy?’

I pondered the indecipherable hieroglyphics of these names for a moment or two.

‘I tell you what. Take ecstasy and dissolve it in Absolute, that will be just right.’

The waiter turned to the canary-yellow gentleman once again, gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders and twirled one finger in the air beside his temple. The other man frowned angrily and nodded again.

An ashtray and a vase holding paper napkins appeared on my table. The napkins were most a propos. I took the fountain pen that I had stolen from Zherbunov out of my pocket, picked up a napkin and was just about to start writing, when suddenly I noticed that the pen did not end in a nib, but in a hole that looked like the mouth of a gun barrel. I unscrewed the barrel, and a small cartridge with a black lead bullet without any casing tumbled out on to the table; it was like those they sold for Montecristo guns. This clever little invention was even more welcome - without my Browning in my trouser pocket I felt something of a charlatan. I carefully replaced the cartridge, then screwed the pen back together and gestured to the pale gentleman in the canary-yellow jacket to bring me something with which I could write.

The waiter arrived with a glass on a tray.

‘Your order.’ he said.

I drank the vodka in a single gulp, took the pen from the fingers of the canary-yellow gentleman and immediately absorbed myself in my work. At first the words simply did not come, but then the mournful sounds of the organ bore me up aloft and an appropriate text was ready in literally ten minutes.

By this time the bearded singer had disappeared. I had not noticed the moment of his departure from the stage, because the music continued to play. It was very strange - there was an entire invisible orchestra playing, ten instruments at the very least, but I could see no musicians. Moreover, it was quite clearly not the radio, to which I had grown accustomed in the clinic, nor was it a gramophone recording; the sound was very clear, and quite certainly a live performance. My confusion evaporated, however, when I guessed that it was the effect the waiter’s concoction was having on me. I began listening to the music and suddenly made out a very clear phrase in English, sung by a hoarse voice very close to my ear:

You had to stand beneath my window With your bagel and your drum While I was waiting for the miracle -For the miracle to come…

I shuddered.

This was the sign I had been waiting for - it was quite clear from the words ‘miracle’, ‘drum’ (which undoubtedly referred to Kotovsky) and ‘bagel’ (no commentary was required here). It was true that the singer did not seem to know English too well - he pronounced ‘bagel’ like ‘bugle’ - but that was not so important. I stood up and drifted towards the stage through the pulsating aquarium of the hall, swaying as I went.

The music had stopped most opportunely. Clambering up on to the stage, I leaned against the small organ, which replied with a long extended note of an unpleasant timbre, and then looked around at the tense, silent hall. The customers were a very mixed bunch, but as has always been the case throughout the history of humanity, it was pig-faced speculators and expensively dressed whores who predominated. All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility - and beyond the slightest doubt this was the face of that old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate but as alive as ever. Several young fellows looking like overdressed sailors with cheeks rosy pink from the frost appeared by the curtain that covered the entrance. The canary-yellow gentleman rattled off something to them, nodding in my direction as he did so.

Removing my elbow from the rumbling organ, I raised the napkin covered in writing to my eyes, cleared my throat and in my usual manner, using no intonation whatsoever but simply making brief pauses between the quatrains, I read:

Eternal Non-Return

Hundreds of years spent filing at the bars set in the frame And shifting form and face through flux and dissolution, A madman bearing Emptiness for his name Flees from the clutches of a model institution. He knows quite well there is no time to flee,

At these words I raised Zherbunov’s pen and fired at the chandelier. It shattered like a toy on a Christmas tree, and a blinding electric light flashed across the ceiling. The hall was plunged into darkness, and immediately I saw the flashes of gunshots from over by the door where the canary-yellow gentleman and the ruddy-faced young fellows had been standing. I went down on all fours and slowly crawled along the edge of the stage, wincing at the intolerable racket. Someone began firing back from the opposite end of the hall, from several barrels at once, and the ricochets struck sparks into the air from the steel door. I realized that I should not be crawling along the edge of the stage, but back into the wings, and I made a turn of ninety degrees.

I heard a groan like the howl of a wounded wolf over by the steel door. A bullet knocked the small organ off its stand and it tumbled on to the floor right beside me. At last, I thought as I crawled towards the wings, at last I had managed to hit the chandelier! But - my God! - was that not always the only thing of which I had been capable, shooting at the mirror-surfaced sphere of this false world from a fountain pen? What a profound symbol, I thought, what a pity that no one sitting in the hall was capable of appreciating what they had just seen. But then, I thought, who knows?

In the wings it was just as dark as in the hall - it seemed that the electricity had failed throughout the building. At my appearance someone dashed away down the corridor, stumbling and falling. They did not get up again, but simply remained concealed in the darkness. Rising to my feet, I set off along the invisible corridor holding my hands out in front of me. It turned out that I remembered the way to the stage door very well. It was locked, but after fiddling with the lock for a minute or so, I opened it and found myself on the street.

A few gulps of frosty air restored me to my senses, but I still had to lean against the wall - the walk along the corridor had been incredibly tiring.

The main door, from which I was separated by about five yards of snow-covered asphalt, swung open and two men came dashing out, ran over to a long black automobile and opened the lid of its baggage compartment. Terrifying-looking weapons suddenly appeared in their hands, and they ran back inside without even bothering to close the lid again, as if the one thing they were most afraid of in all the world was that they might be too late to join in what was happening. They did not even spare me a glance.

New holes appeared, one by one, in the dark windows of the restaurant; the impression I had was that several machine-guns must be working in there simultaneously. I thought that in my time people were hardly any kinder, perhaps, but the times themselves were certainly less cruel. However, it was time for me to be going.

I staggered across the courtyard and out into the street.

Chapaev’s armoured car was standing exactly where I had expected to see it, and the cap of snow on its turret was just as it should have been. The motor was working, and there was a grey-blue cloud of smoke swirling in the air behind the back of the vehicle. I walked up to the door and knocked. It opened, and I climbed inside.

Chapaev had not changed in the slightest, except that his left arm was now supported by a strip of black linen. The hand was bandaged, and I could easily guess that there was empty space under the gauze where the little finger should have been.

I was quite unable to say a single word - it took all the strength I could muster to drag myself on to the divan. Chapaev immediately understood what was wrong with me. He slammed the door shut, murmured a few quiet words into the speaking-tube, and the armoured car moved off.

‘How are things?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘it is hard to make sense of the whirlwind of scales and colours of the contradictory inner life.’

‘I see.’ said Chapaev. ‘Anna sends her greetings. She asked me to give you this.’

He stooped down, reached under the seat with his sound hand and took out an empty bottle with a gold label made out of a square of metal foil. Protruding from the bottle was a yellow rose.

‘She said you would understand.’ said Chapaev. ‘And it seems that you promised her some books or other.’

I nodded, turned towards the door and set my eye against the spy-hole. At first all I could see through it were the blue spots of the street lamps slicing through the frosty air, but we kept moving faster and faster, and soon, very soon we were surrounded by the whispering sands and roaring waterfalls of my dear and so beloved Inner Mongolia.

–Kafka-Yurt 1923-1925