Buddha's Little Finger

2

To be more precise, the railings were not simply close to the window, but were part of it; in fact, it appeared that they were bars across a small window through which a narrow beam of sunshine was falling directly on to my face. I tried to turn away from it, but that proved impossible. When I attempted to press one hand against the floor in order to turn from my stomach on to my back, I found that my hands had been secured behind me: I was dressed in a garment resembling a shroud, the long sleeves of which were tied behind my back.

I felt no particular doubt as to what had happened to me. The sailors must have noticed something suspicious in my behaviour, and while I was asleep in the car they had taken me to the Cheka. By wriggling and squirming, I managed to get up on to my knees and then sit down by the wall. My cell had a rather strange appearance; up under the ceiling there was a small barred window - the point of entry for the ray of sunlight that had woken me - while the walls, the door, the floor and ceiling itself were all concealed beneath a thick layer of padding, which meant that romantic suicide in the spirit of Dumas (‘one more step, milord, and I dash my brains out against the wall’) was quite out of the question. The Chekists had obviously built cells like this for their specially honoured guests, and I must confess that for a second I was flattered at the thought.

A few minutes went by as I gazed at the wall, recalling the frightening details of the previous day, and then the door swung open.

Standing in the doorway were Zherbunov and Barbolin - but, my God, how changed they were! They were dressed in white doctors’ coats, and Barbolin had a genuine stethoscope protruding from his pocket. This was simply too much for me, and my chest heaved abruptly with nervous laughter that erupted from my cocaine-scorched throat in an explosion of hoarse coughing. Barbolin, who was standing in front, turned to Zherbunov and said something. I suddenly stopped laughing, struck by the thought that they were going to beat me.

I should say that I was not in the least bit afraid of death. In my situation to die was every bit as natural and reasonable as to leave a theatre that has caught fire in the middle of a lacklustre performance. But I most definitely did not want my final departure to be accompanied by kicks and punches from people I hardly knew - in the depths of my soul I was clearly not sufficiently a Christian for that.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am sure you must understand that soon they will kill you too. Out of respect for death, therefore if not for mine, then at least for your own - I ask you to get it over with quickly, without any unnecessary humiliation. I shall not be able to tell you anything, in any case. I am no more than an ordinary private citizen and…’

‘That’s a bit feeble,’ Zherbunov interrupted me with a chuckle. ‘But that stuff you were giving us yesterday, that was something else. And that poetry you read! D’you remember any of that?’

There was something strangely incongruous about the way he spoke, something rather odd, and I decided that he must have been tippling his Baltic tea already that morning.

‘My memory is excellent.’ I replied, looking him straight in the face.

The emptiness in his eyes was impenetrable.

‘I don’t know why you bother talking to that asshole,’ Barbolin hissed in his thin voice. ‘Let Timurich handle it, that’s what he’s paid for.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Zherbunov, putting an end to the conversation. He came over to me and took hold of my arm.

‘Can you not at least untie my hands?’ I asked. ‘There are two of you, after all.’

‘Oh, yeah? And what if you try strangling one of us?’

I cringed as though I had been struck. They knew everything. I had an almost physical sensation of the crushing weight of Zherbunov’s words tumbling down on top of me.

Barbolin gripped me by my other arm. They easily stood me on my feet and dragged me out into the dimly lit, deserted corridor, which did actually have a vague hospital smell about it, not unlike the smell of blood. I made no attempt to resist, and a few minutes later they pushed me into a large room, sat me down on a stool at its centre and with drew.

Directly in front of me stood a large desk piled high with bureaucratic-looking files. Sitting behind the desk was a gentleman of intellectual appearance wearing a white doctor’s coat just like those of Zherbunov and Barbolin. He was listening attentively to a black ebonite telephone receiver squeezed between his ear and his shoulder, while his hands mechanically sorted through some papers on the desk; from time to time he nodded, saying nothing, and he paid not the slightest attention to me. Another man wearing a white doctor’s coat and green trousers with red stripes down their sides was sitting by the wall, on a chair placed between two tall windows over which dusty blinds had been lowered.

Something indefinite in the arrangement of the room reminded me of General HQ, which I had visited frequently in 1916, when I was trying my hopeful but inexperienced hand at patriotic journalism. But instead of a portrait of the Emperor (or at the very least of that infamous Karl who had left a trail of indelible marks across half the kingdoms of Europe), hanging on the wall above the head of the gentleman in the white coat was something so terrible that I bit my lip, drawing blood.

It was a poster, printed in the colours of the Russian flag and mounted on a large piece of cardboard, depicting a blue man with a typically Russian face. His chest had been cleaved open and the top of his skull sawn off to expose his red brain. Despite the fact that his viscera had been extracted from his abdomen and labelled with Latin numerals, the expression in his eyes seemed one of indifference, and his face appeared frozen in a calm half-smile; on the other hand, perhaps that was simply the effect created by a wide gash in his cheek, through which I could see part of his jaw and teeth as flawless is in an advertisement for German tooth powder.

‘Get on with it, then.’ the man in the white coat barked, dropping I lie receiver back into its cradle.

‘I beg your pardon.’1 said, lowering my eyes to look at him.

‘Granted, granted.’ he said, ‘bearing in mind that I already have some experience in dealing with you. Allow me to remind you that my name is Timur Timurovich.’

‘Pyotr. For obvious reasons I am not able to shake your hand.’

‘No need for that. Well, well, Pyotr, my lad. How did you manage to get yourself into such a mess?’

The eyes that watched me were friendly, even sympathetic, and the goatee beard made him look like an idealistic supporter of the liberal reform movement, but I knew a great deal about the Cheka’s cunning tricks, and my heart remained unstirred by even the slightest flickering of trust.

‘I do not believe that I have got myself into any particular mess.’ I said. ‘But if that is how you choose to put things, then I did not get into it on my own.’

‘Then with whom exactly?’

This is it, I thought, it has begun.

‘If I understand you correctly, you expect me to provide you with details of addresses and hiding places, but I am afraid I shall be obliged to disappoint you. My entire life since childhood is the story of how I have shunned all company, and in such a context one can only speak of other people in terms of a general category, if you take my meaning?’

‘Naturally,’ he said, and wrote something down on a piece of paper. ‘No doubt about that. But there is a contradiction in what you say. First you tell me you didn’t get into your present condition on your own, and then you tell me you shun other people.’

‘Oh, come now.’ I replied, crossing my legs at some risk to my immediate equilibrium, ‘that is merely the appearance of a contradiction. The harder I try to avoid other people’s company, the less successful I am. Incidentally, it was only quite recently that I realized why this is the case. I was walking past St Isaac’s and I looked up at the dome - you know how it is, a frosty night, the stars shining… and I understood.’

‘And what is the reason?’

‘If one tries to run away from other people, one involuntarily ends up actually following in their path throughout the course of one’s life. Running away does not require knowing where one is running to, only what one is running from. Which means that one constantly has to carry before one’s eyes a vision of one’s own prison.’

‘Yes,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘Yes indeed, when I think of the trouble I’m going to have with you, it terrifies me.’

I shrugged and raised my eyes to the poster above his head. Apparently it was not a brilliant metaphor after all, merely a medical teaching aid, perhaps something taken from an anatomical atlas.

‘You know,’ Timur Timurovich continued, ‘I have a lot of experience. Plenty of people pass through my hands here.’

‘Indeed, I do not doubt it,’ I said.

‘So let me tell you something. I’m less interested in the formal diagnosis than the internal event which has prised someone loose from his normal socio-psychological niche. And as far as I can see, yours is a very straightforward case. You simply will not accept the new. Can you remember how old you are?’

‘Of course. Twenty-six.’

‘There you are, you see. You belong to the very generation that was programmed for life in one socio-cultural paradigm, but has found itself living in a quite different one. Do you follow what I’m saying?’

‘Most definitely,’ I replied.

‘So what we have is a prima facie internal conflict. But let me reassure you straight away that you’re not the only one struggling with this difficulty. I have a similar problem myself.

‘Oh, really?’ I exclaimed in a rather mocking tone. ‘And just how do you deal with it?’

‘We can talk about me later,’ he said, ‘let’s try sorting you out first. As I’ve already said, nowadays almost everyone suffers from the same subconscious conflict. What I want you to do is to recognize its nature. You know, the world around us is reflected in our consciousness and then it becomes the object of our mental activity. When established connections in the real world collapse, the same thing happens in the human psyche. And this is accompanied by the release of a colossal amount of psychic energy within the enclosed space of your ego. It’s like a small atomic explosion. But what really matters is how the energy is channelled after the explosion.’

The conversation was taking a curious turn.

‘And what channels, if I may ask, are available?’

‘If we keep it simple, there are two. Psychic energy can move outwards, so to speak, into the external world, striving towards objects like… well, shall we say, a leather jacket or a luxury automobile. Many of your contemporaries…’

I remembered Vorblei and shuddered. ‘I understand. Please do not continue.’

‘Excellent. In the other case, for one reason or another, this energy remains within. This is the less favourable course of events. Imagine a bull locked inside a museum…’

‘An excellent image.’

‘Thank you. Well then, this museum, with its fragile and possibly beautiful exhibits, is your personality, your inner world. And the bull rushing about inside it is the release of psychic energy that you are unable to cope with. The reason why you are here.’

Me really is very clever, I thought - but what an utter scoundrel!

‘I can tell you more,’ continued Timur Timurovich. ‘I’ve given a great deal of thought as to why some people have the strength to start a new life - for want of a better term, we can call them the «New Russians», although I detest that expression…’

‘Indeed, it is quite repulsive. And also inaccurate; if you are quoting the revolutionary democrats of the last century, then I believe that they called them the new people.’

‘Possibly. But the question remains the same: why do some people actively strive, as it were, towards the new, while others persist in their attempts to clarify their non-existent relations with the shadows of a vanished world?’

‘Now that really is magnificent. You’re a genuine poet.’

‘Thank you once again. The answer, in my view, is very simple - I’m afraid you might even find it rather primitive. Let me build up to it. The life of a man, a country, a culture and so on, is a series of constant metamorphoses. Sometimes they extend over a period of time and so are imperceptible, sometimes they assume acute forms, as in the present case. And it is precisely the attitude to these metamorphoses that determines the fundamental difference between cultures. For instance, China, the culture you are so crazy about…’

‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, feeling my tightly bound hands clench into fists behind my back.

‘Your case history,’ said Timur Timurovich, picking up the very fattest of the files on his desk. ‘I was just leafing through it.’

He threw the file back down again. ‘Yes, China. As you may recall, their entire world view is constructed on the principle that the world is constantly degenerating as it moves from a golden age towards darkness and stagnation. For them, absolute standards have been left far behind in the past, and all that is new is evil insofar as it leads the world still further away from those standards.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘but this is a typical aspect of human culture in general. It is even present in language itself. In English, for instance, we are the descendants of the past. The word signifies movement downwards, not upwards. We are not ascendants.’

‘Possibly,’ Timur Timurovich answered. ‘I don’t know any foreign languages except Latin. But that’s not the point here. When this type of consciousness is embodied in an individual personality, then the person concerned begins to regard his childhood as a lost paradise. Take Nabokov. His endless musings on the early years of his life are a classic example of what I’m talking about. And the classic example of recovery, of the reorientation of consciousness to the real world is the contra-sublimation, as I would call it, that he achieved in such a masterly fashion by transforming his longing for an unattainable paradise which may never have existed at all into a simple, earthly and somewhat illegitimate passion for a little girl, a child. Although at first-’

‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted, ‘but which Nabokov are you talking about? The leader of the Constitutional Democrats?’

Timur Timurovich smiled with emphatic politeness. ‘No,’ he said, ‘his son,’

‘Little Vovka from the Tenishevsky school? You mean you have picked him up as well? But he’s in the Crimea! And what kind of nonsense is all this about little girls?’

‘Very well, very well. He’s in the Crimea,’ Timur Timurovich replied briskly. ‘In the Crimea. But we were talking about China. And the fact that for the classic Chinese mentality, any advance is bound to mean degeneration. But there is another path, the one followed by Europe throughout its history, no matter what you might tell me about language. The path that Russia has been struggling to follow for so many years, as it enters again and again into its ill-fated alchemical wedlock with the West.’

‘Remarkable.’

‘Thank you. In this case the ideal is conceived not as something left behind in the past, but as something potentially existing in the future. Do you understand me? This is the idea of development, progress, movement from the less perfect to the more perfect. The same thing occurs at the level of the individual personality, even if individual progress takes such petty forms as redecorating an apartment or changing an old car for a new one. It makes it possible to carry on living - but you don’t want to pay for any of this. The metaphorical bull we were talking about rushes about in your soul, trampling everything in its path, precisely because you are not prepared to submit to reality. You don’t want to let the bull out. You despise the positions that the times require us to adopt. And precisely this is the cause of your tragedy.’

‘What you say is interesting, of course, but far too complicated.’ I said, casting a sideways glance at the man in military trousers over by the wall. ‘And now my hands have gone numb. As for progress, I can easily provide you with a brief explanation of what that is.’

‘Please do so.’

‘It is very simple. If we put everything that you were saying in a nutshell, then we are left with the simple fact that some people adapt themselves to change more quickly than others. But have you ever asked yourself why these changes take place at all?’

Timur Timurovich shrugged.

‘Then let me tell you. You would not, I trust, deny that the more cunning and dishonourable a man is, the easier his life is?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘And his life is easier precisely because he adapts more rapidly to change?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Well then, there exists a level of dishonourable cunning, my dear sir, at which a man anticipates the outcome of change even before it is completed, and as a result he is able to adapt far more rapidly than everyone else. But far worse than that, the most sensitive of scoundrels actually adapt to change before it has even begun.’

‘What of it?’

‘In actual fact, all the changes that happen in the world only take place because of such highly sensitive scoundrels. Because, in reality, they do not anticipate the future at all, but shape it, by creeping across to occupy the quarter from which they think the wind will blow. Following which, the wind has no option but to blow from that very quarter.’

‘Why is that?’

‘It is obvious, surely. As I told you, I am speaking of the most villainous, sly and shameless of scoundrels. Surely you can believe them capable of persuading everyone else that the wind is blowing from the precise quarter in which they have established themselves? Especially since this wind we are talking about blows only within this idiom of ours… But now I am talking too much. In all honesty, I had intended to keep silent right up to the final shot.’

The officer sitting by the wall grunted suddenly and gave Timur Timurovich a meaningful glance.

‘I haven’t introduced you,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘This is Major Smirnov, a military psychiatrist. He is here for other reasons, but your case has attracted his interest.’

‘I am flattered, Major,’ I said, inclining my head in his direction.

Timur Timurovich leaned over his telephone and pressed a button. ‘Sonya, four cc’s as usual, please,’ he spoke into the receiver. ‘Here in my office, while he’s in the jacket. Yes, and then straight into the ward.’

Turning to me, Timur Timurovich sighed sadly and scratched his beard.

‘We’ll have to continue the course of medication for the time being.’ he said. ‘I tell you honestly, I regard it as a defeat. A small one, but nonetheless a defeat. I believe that a good psychiatrist should avoid using medication, it’s - how can I explain it to you? - it’s cosmetic. It doesn’t solve any of the problems, it merely conceals them from view. But in your case I can’t think of anything better. You’ll have to help me. If you want to save a drowning man, it’s not enough just to reach out to him, he has to offer his hand too.’

The door opened behind me and I heard quiet footsteps, then gentle woman’s hands grasped me by the shoulder and I felt the small cold sting of a needle piercing my skin through the cloth of the strait-jacket.

‘By the way.’ said Timur Timurovich, rubbing his hands as though to warm them, ‘one small comment; in madhouse slang the term «final shot» isn’t used for what we’re injecting you with, that is, an ordinary mixture of aminazine and perevitine. It’s reserved for the so-called sulphazine cross, that is, four injections in… But then, I hope we’re never going to reach that stage.’

I did not turn my head to look at the woman who had given me the injection. I looked at the dismembered red-white-and-blue man on the poster, and when he began looking back at me, smiling and winking, I heard Timur Timurovich’s voice coming from somewhere very far away:

‘Yes, straight to the ward. No, he won’t cause any problems. There may be at least some effect… He’ll be going through the same procedure himself soon enough.’

Somebody’s hands (I think they belonged to Zherbunov and Barbolin again) pulled the shirt off my body, picked me up by the arms and dumped me like a sack of sand on to some kind of stretcher. Then the door-frame flashed past my eyes and we

My unfeeling body floated past tall white doors with numbers on them, and behind me I could hear the distorted voices and laughter of the sailors in doctors’ coats, who appeared to be conducting a scurrilous conversation about women. Then I saw Timur Timurovich’s face peering down at me - apparently he had been walking along beside me.

‘We’ve decided to put you back in the Third Section,’ he said. ‘At present there are four others in there, so you’ll make five. Do you know anything about Kanashnikov group therapy? My group therapy, that is?’

‘No,’ I mumbled with difficulty.

The flickering of the doors as they passed me had become quite unbearable, and I closed my eyes.

‘To put it simply, it means patients pooling their efforts in the struggle for recovery. Imagine that for a time your problems become the collective problems, that for a certain time everyone taking part in a session shares your condition. They all identify with you, so to speak. What do you think the result of that would be?’ I did not answer.

‘It’s very simple,’ Timur Timurovich went on. ‘When the session comes to an end, a reaction sets in as the participants withdraw from the state that they have been experiencing as reality; you could call it exploiting man’s innate herd instinct in the service of medicine. Your ideas and your mood might infect the others taking part in the session for a certain time, but as soon as the session comes to an end, they return to their own manic obsessions, leaving you isolated. And at that moment - provided the pathological psychic material has been driven up to the surface by the process of catharsis - the patient can become aware of the arbitrary subjectivity of his own morbid notions and can cease to identify with them. And from that point recovery is only a short step away.’

I did not follow the meaning of his words very clearly, assuming, that is, that there was any. But nonetheless, something stuck in my mind. The effect of the injection was growing stronger and stronger. I could no longer see anything around me, my body had become almost totally insensitive, and my spirit was immersed in a dull, heavy indifference. The most unpleasant thing about this mood was that it did not seem to have taken possession of me, but of some other person - the person into whom the injected substance had transformed me. I was horrified to sense that this other person actually could be cured.

‘Of course you can recover,’ Timur Timurovich confirmed. ‘And we will cure you, have no doubt about it. Just forget the very notion of a madhouse. Treat it all as an interesting adventure. Especially since you’re a literary man. I sometimes encounter things here that are just begging to be written down. What’s coming up now, for instance - we’re due for an absolutely fascinating event in your ward, a group session with Maria. You do remember who I’m talking about?’

I shook my head.

‘No, of course not, of course not. But it’s an extremely interesting case. I’d call it a psychodrama of genuinely Shakespearean proportions, the clash of such apparently diverse objects of consciousness as a Mexican soap opera, a Hollywood blockbuster and our own young, rootless Russian democracy. Do you know the Mexican television serial Just Maria? So you don’t remember that either. I see. Well, in a word, the patient has taken on the role of the heroine, Maria herself. It would be a quite banal case, if not for the subconscious identification with Russia, plus the Agamemnon complex with the anal dynamics. In short, it’s exactly my field, a split false identity.’

Oh, God, I thought, how long the corridors here are.

‘Of course, you won’t be in any fit state to take a proper part in the proceedings,’ Timur Timurovich’s voice continued, ‘so you can sleep. But don’t forget that soon it will be your turn to tell your own story.’

I think we must have entered a room - a door squeaked and I caught a fragment of interrupted conversation. Timur Timurovich spoke a word of greeting to the surrounding darkness and several voices answered him. Meanwhile I was transferred to an invisible bed, a pillow was tucked under my head and a blanket thrown over me. For a while I paid attention to the disembodied phrases that reached my ears -Timur Timurovich was explaining to somebody why I had been absent for so long; then I lost contact with what was happening, being visited instead by a quite momentous hallucination of an intimately personal character.

1 do not know quite how long I spent alone with my conscience, but at some point my attention was caught again by the monotonous voice of Timur Timurovich.

‘Watch the ball closely, Maria. You are quite calm. If your mouth feels dry, it’s only because of the injection you were given - it will soon pass. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ came the reply, in what seemed to me more like a high male voice than a low female one.

‘Who are you?’

‘Maria,’ answered the voice.

‘What’s your surname?’

‘Just Maria,’

‘How old are you?’

‘They say I look eighteen.’ replied the voice.

‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Yes. In a hospital.’

‘And what brought you here?’

‘It was the crash, what else? I don’t understand how I survived at all. I couldn’t possibly have guessed he was that kind of man.’

‘What did you crash into?’

‘The Ostankino television tower.’

‘I see. And how did it happen?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘That’s all right.’ Timur Timurovich said kindly, ‘we’re not in any hurry, we have time to listen. How did it all begin?’

‘It began when I went for a walk along the embankment.’

‘And where were you before that?’

‘I wasn’t anywhere before that.’

‘All right, carry on.’

‘Well then, I’m walking, you know, just walking along, and all around me there’s some kind of smoke. And the further I go, the more there is…’

I suddenly realized that the longer I tried to listen to the words, the harder it was to make out their meaning. It felt as though the meaning were attached to them by pieces of string, which kept getting longer and longer. I found myself unable to keep up with the conversation, but that was not important, because at the same time I began to see the wavering outline of a picture - a river embankment enveloped in clouds of smoke and a woman with broad muscular shoulders walking along it, looking more like a man dressed in women’s clothes. I knew that she was called Maria and I could see her, and see the world through her eyes at the same time. A moment later I realized that in some way I was perceiving everything that she was thinking and feeling: she was thinking that however hard she tried, this walk was never going to lead to anything; the sunny morning at the beginning of which she had arrived in this world of suffering had given way to this unholy mess, and it had happened so smoothly that she had not even noticed.

At first there was a smell of burning in the air, and Maria thought that someone somewhere must be burning fallen leaves. Then the first smell became mingled with that of scorched rubber, and soon she was swamped by a fog-like smoke that grew thicker and thicker until it hid everything from sight apart from the iron railings along the embankment and the few yards of space immediately around her.

Soon Maria felt as though she were walking through a long hall in an art gallery: in their trite ordinariness the segments of the surrounding world which appeared from time to time out of the all-enveloping gloom looked very much like bizarrely fashioned works of modern art. Drifting out of the gloom towards her came signboards bearing the words ‘Bureau de Change’, benches scored all over by penknives and a vast quantity of empty cans, bearing witness to the fact that the generation next still chooses beer.

Groups of agitated men carrying automatic rifles emerged from the mist and then disappeared back into it. They pretended not to notice Maria and she reacted in the same way. She already had more than enough people to remember her and think of her. How many was it - millions? Tens of millions? Maria didn’t know the exact number of them, but she was sure that if all the hearts in which fate had inscribed her name were to beat in unison, then their combined beating would be much louder than the deafening explosions she could hear from the other side of the river.

Maria looked round and screwed up her radiant eyes as she tried to understand what was going on.

Every now and then from somewhere close by - because of the smoke she couldn’t see exactly where - there was a thunderous crash; the booming sound was followed immediately by the barking of dogs and the roaring of a multitude of voices, like the noise from the crowd when a goal is scored at the stadium, Maria didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps they were shooting a film near the White House on the other bank of the river, or perhaps some new Russians were squabbling about which of them was the newest. I wish they’d get on with it and finish dividing everything up, she thought. How many more of our handsome young men must we see fall on the roadway and spill out their heart’s blood on the asphalt?

Maria began thinking about how she could lighten the unbearable burden of this life for everyone who was writhing, God knows for what reason, in the grip of these black coils of smoke that obscured the sky and the sun. Her head was filled with clear, bright, uncomplicated images - there she was in a simple dress, entering a modest flat tidied specially for the occasion by its occupants. And there they were, sitting at the table with the samovar and gazing at her lovingly, and she knew that she didn’t have to say anything, all she had to do was sit opposite them and gaze tenderly back, paying as little attention as she could to the whirring of the camera. And there was a hospital ward full of people all bandaged up and lying on uncomfortable beds, and there was her image hanging on the wall in a place where everyone could see it. They gazed at her from their beds and for a while they forgot all about their woes, their aches and pains…

This was all wonderful, but she vaguely realized that it was not enough. No, what the world needed was a strong hand, stern and unrelenting, capable of resisting evil whenever the need arose. But where was this strength to be found? And what would it look like? These were questions Maria couldn’t answer, but she sensed that they were the very reason why she was walking along this embankment in this city that was expiring in its suffering.

For a second a puff of wind dispersed the smoke surrounding Maria and a ray of sunshine fell on her. Shielding her face with her hand, she suddenly understood where she should seek the answer. Of course, it lay in those innumerable hearts and minds that had summoned her and incarnated her here, on this smoky embankment. Through the millions of pairs of eyes staring at their television screens, they were fused into a single oceanic consciousness, and this entire ocean lay open to her gaze. She looked across it, at first seeing nothing that might help her. But no, of course there was an image of all-conquering power reflected in this consciousness, and in most cases its form was much the same: the figure of a young man with a small head and wide shoulders, wearing a double-breasted crimson sports jacket and standing beside a long, low-slung automobile with his feet planted wide apart. The image of the automobile was a little bit vague and somehow blurred, because all the people whose souls Maria could see imagined it in different ways. The young man’s face was much the same, it was a very generalized face, and only the hairstyle, a slightly curly chestnut-brown crew cut, was rather more clearly defined. The jacket, however, was drawn with quite remarkable precision, and with a little effort Maria could even have managed to read the words on its gold buttons. But she didn’t try. it didn’t matter what was written on the buttons, what mattered was how this all-conquering power could be united with her own meek and gentle love.

Maria stopped and leaned on one of the low granite posts that punctuated the iron railings of the fence. Once again she had to seek an answer in the minds and hearts that had placed their trust in her, but this time - Maria was quite certain of this - the lowest common denominators of thought would not do. What was needed…

There must be at least one intelligent woman out there, she thought.

And the intelligent woman appeared almost immediately. Maria didn’t know who she was, or even what she looked like, she just caught a glimpse of tall bookshelves, a desk with heaps of papers and a typewriter, and a photograph hanging over the desk showing a man with an enormous curling moustache and intense, moody eyes. It was all in flickering, hazy black and white, as though Maria were viewing it from inside an ancient television with a screen the size of a cigarette packet that was standing somewhere off in the corner of the room. But the images disappeared too quickly for Maria to reflect on what she had seen, and then they were replaced by thoughts.

Maria understood almost nothing at all in the swirling vortex of ideas that appeared before her; apart from anything else, it was somehow musty and oppressive, like the cloud that appears when you disturb the dust of a long-forgotten lumber room. Maria decided she must be dealing with a consciousness that was extremely cluttered and not entirely normal, and she felt very relieved when it was all over. The catch netted by the pink void of her soul consisted of words whose meanings were not entirely clear-there was a brief glimpse of the word ‘Bridegroom’ (for some reason, with a capital letter), and then the word ‘Visitor’ (another capital letter), followed by the incomprehensible words ‘Alchemical Wedlock’ and after that the totally obscure phrase, sounding like a snatch of Silver Age poetry: ‘all repose is vain, I knock at the gates’. With this the thoughts ended, and then there was another brief glimpse of the man with the ecstatic eyes and the long, droopy moustache which looked like a beard growing from right under his nose.

She looked around her in bewilderment. Still more or less surrounded by smoke, she thought that perhaps somewhere close by there might be a gate she was supposed to knock at, and she took several timid steps through the murk. Immediately she was enveloped by total darkness on every side, and felt so afraid that she scurried back on to the embankment, where at least a little light remained.

And if I do knock, she thought, will anybody actually open the gate? Hardly.

Behind her Maria heard the quiet growling of a car engine. She pressed herself against the railings of the embankment and waited apprehensively to see what would emerge from the smoke. Several seconds went by, and then a long black automobile slowly swam past her, a ‘Chaika’ decorated with ribbons of various colours - she realized it was a wedding car. It was full of silent, serious-looking people; the barrels of several automatic rifles protruded from the windows and on the roof there were two gleaming yellow rings, one larger and one smaller.

Maria watched the ‘Chaika’ as it drove away, then suddenly slapped herself on the forehead. But of course, now she understood. Yes - that was it. Two interlinked rings - Bridegroom, Visitor, Sponsor. She still couldn’t understand what alchemical wedlock was supposed to be, but if anything untoward happened, she had a good lawyer. Maria shook her head and smiled. It was so simple, how could she have failed to see the most important thing of all for so long? What could she have been thinking of?

She looked around, orientating herself approximately by the sun, and held out her arms towards the West - somehow it seemed clear that the Bridegroom would appear from that direction.

‘Come!’ she prayed in a whisper, and immediately she could sense that a new presence had appeared in the world.

Now all she had to do was wait for the meeting to take place. She ran on joyfully, sensing the distance between herself and the Bridegroom diminishing. Like her, he already knew, he was walking towards her along this very embankment - but unlike her he wasn’t hurrying, because it wasn’t in his nature to hurry.

Miraculously managing to leap across an open manhole that appeared suddenly out of the smoke, Maria slowed down and began feverishly rummaging in her pockets. She had suddenly realized that she had no mirror and no make-up with her. For a moment she was plunged into despair, and she even tried to recall whether she had passed a puddle in which she could view her own reflection. But then, when she remembered that she could appear to her beloved in whatever form she wished, Maria’s despair vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

She thought about this for a while. Let him see a very young girl, she decided, with two ginger plaits, a freckled face and… and… She needed some final touch, some naive and endearing detail -perhaps earrings? A baseball cap? Maria had almost no time left, and at the very final moment she adorned herself with padded pink earphones which looked like a continuation of the flame-bright flush of her cheeks. Then she raised her eyes and looked ahead.

In front of her, among the tattered wisps of smoke, something metallic gleamed for a moment and then immediately vanished. Then it appeared a little closer, only to be concealed again in the murk. A sudden gust of wind drove the smoke aside and Maria saw a tall glittering figure advancing slowly towards her. At the same moment she noticed, or so she thought, that with every step the figure took the ground shook. The metal man was much taller than her and his impassively handsome face expressed not the slightest trace of emotion. Maria was frightened and stumbled backwards - she remembered that somewhere behind her there was an open manhole, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the metal torso bearing down on her like the bow of some immense destroyer approaching an ice floe.

At the very moment when she was about to scream, the metal man underwent an astonishing transformation. First of all his gleaming thighs were suddenly clad in very domestic-looking striped underpants, then he acquired a white vest and his body took on the normal colour of tanned human skin and was promptly clad in canary-yellow trousers, a shirt and tie and a wonderful crimson sports jacket with gold buttons. That was enough to lay Maria’s fears to rest. But the delightful sight of the crimson jacket was soon concealed beneath a long grey raincoat. Black shoes appeared on the Visitor’s feet and sunglasses with glittering lenses on his face, his hair set itself into a gingerish crew cut and Maria’s heart skipped a beat for joy when she recognized that her bridegroom was Arnold Schwarzenegger - but then she realized it could never have been anyone else.

He stood there saying nothing and staring at her with those black rectangles of glass; the ghost of a smile played about his lips. Maria caught a glimpse of her reflection in his glasses and adjusted her earphones.

Ave Maria,’ said Schwarzenegger quietly.

He spoke without expression, in a voice that was hollow but pleasant.

‘No, my sweet,’ said Maria, smiling mysteriously and clasping her hands together over her breast, ‘just Maria.’

‘Just Maria,’ Schwarzenegger repeated.

‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘And you’re Arnold?’

‘Sure,’ said Schwarzenegger.

Maria opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly she realized she had absolutely nothing to say. Schwarzenegger carried on looking at her and smiling. Maria lowered her gaze and blushed, and then, with a gentle but irresistibly powerful movement, Schwarzenegger turned her round and led her away beside him. Maria looked up at him and smiled her famous stupid-mysterious smile. Schwarzenegger put his hand on her shoulder. Maria sank slightly under the weight, and suddenly her memory threw up something unexpected, a picture of Lenin carrying a beam at one of those communist working Saturdays. In the picture only the edge of the beam could be seen above Lenin’s shoulder and Maria thought that perhaps it wasn’t a beam after all, but the hand of some mighty creature at which Lenin could only glance up with a defenceless smile, as she was now glancing up at Schwarzenegger. But a moment later Maria realized that such thoughts were entirely out of place, and she promptly banished them from her mind.

Schwarzenegger turned his face towards her.

‘Your eyes,’ he intoned monotonously, ‘are like a landscape of the dreamy south.’

Maria trembled in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting words like these, and Schwarzenegger seemed to understand this immediately. Then something strange happened - or perhaps it didn’t really happen, and Maria simply imagined the faint red letters flickering across the inside surface of Schwarzenegger’s glasses, like running titles on a TV screen, and the soft whirring sound inside his head, as though a computer hard disk drive had been switched on. Maria started in fright, but then she remembered that Schwarzenegger, like herself, was a purely conventional being woven by the thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses which were thinking about him at that very second - and that different people could have very different thoughts about him.

Schwarzenegger raised his empty hand in front of him and flicked his fingers in the air as he looked for the right words.

‘No,’ he said at last, ‘your eyes aren’t eyes - they’re orbs!’

Maria clung tightly to him and looked up trustingly. Schwarzenegger tucked his chin into his neck, as though to prevent Maria from seeing under his glasses.

‘There’s a lot of smoke here,’ he said, ‘why are we walking along this embankment?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Maria.

Schwarzenegger turned round and led her away from the railings, straight into the smoke. After they’d gone a few steps Maria felt frightened: the smoke was so thick now that she couldn’t see anything, not even Schwarzenegger - all she could make out was his hand where it clutched her shoulder.

‘Where’s all this smoke from?’ asked Maria. ‘Nothing seems to be burning.’

‘C-N-N,’ Schwarzenegger replied.

‘You mean they’re burning something?’

‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘they’re shooting something.’

Aha, thought Maria, probably everybody who was thinking about her and Schwarzenegger was watching CNN, and CNN was showing some kind of smokescreen. But what a long time they were showing it for.

‘It’s okay,’ said the invisible Schwarzenegger, ‘it’ll soon be over.’

But there seemed to be no end to the smoke, and they were getting further and further away from the embankment. Maria suddenly had the terrible thought that for several minutes someone else could have been walking along beside her instead of Schwarzenegger, perhaps even the being that had put its arm round Lenin’s shoulder in that same picture, and this thought frightened her so badly that she automatically adjusted her earphones and switched on the music. The music was strcnge, chopped into small incoherent fragments. No sooner had the guitars and trumpets launched into a sweet song of love than they were swamped by a sudden electronic wailing, like the howling of wolves. But anything was better than listening to the sound of distant explosions from the area of the parliament building and the indistinct hubbub of human voices.

Suddenly a figure came hurtling straight at Maria out of the smoke so that she shrieked in fright. In front of her she saw a man in blotchy camouflage fatigues, carrying an automatic rifle. He looked up at Maria and opened his mouth to speak, but then Schwarzenegger took his hand from Maria’s shoulder, grabbed hold of the man’s head, twisted it gently to one side and tossed the limp body away beyond the bounds of their vision. His hand returned to Maria’s shoulder, and Maria pressed herself against his monumental torso.

‘Ah, men, men,’ she cooed softly.

Gradually the smoke began to disperse until once again Maria could see Schwarzenegger’s face, and then the entire massive body, concealed beneath the light grey shroud of the raincoat like a monument waiting to be unveiled. ‘Arnold,’ she asked, ‘where are we going?’

‘Don’t you know?’ said Schwarzenegger. Maria blushed and lowered her eyes.

What is an alchemical wedlock, though? she thought. And will it hurt me, I wonder? Afterwards, I mean? I’ve been hurt so many times before.

Looking up at him she saw the famous dimples in his cheeks -Schwarzenegger was smiling. Maria closed her eyes and walked on, hardly daring to believe in her own happiness, guided by the hand that lay on her shoulder.

When Schwarzenegger stopped, she opened her eyes and saw that the smoke had almost completely disappeared. They were standing on a street she didn’t recognize, between rows of old houses faced with granite. The street was deserted except for a few stooped figures with automatic rifles darting about aimlessly in the distance, nearer the embankment which was still hidden behind a pall of smoke. Schwarzenegger seemed to loiter in an odd, indecisive fashion, giving Maria the impression that he was tormented by some strange kind of doubt, and she was frightened at the thought that the doubt might concern her.

I have to say something romantic quickly, she thought. But what exactly? I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

‘You know, Arnold,’ she said, squeezing herself against his side, ‘I suddenly… I don’t know, perhaps you’ll think it’s silly… I can be honest with you, can’t I?’

‘Of course,’ said Schwarzenegger, turning his black lenses towards her.

‘When I’m with you, I want so much to soar up into the sky! I feel as though the sky is so very close!’

Schwarzenegger raised his head and looked upwards. There actually were glimpses of bright blue sky between the streams of smoke. It didn’t seem particularly close, but then neither was it that far away.

Ah, thought Maria, what nonsense I do talk.

But it was too late to stop now.

‘What about you, Arnold, wouldn’t you like to soar up into the sky?’

Schwarzenegger thought for a second.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And will you take me with you? You know, I… - Maria smiled shyly - ‘I’m so very earthbound.’

Schwarzenegger thought for another second.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up into the sky.’

He looked around, as though he were trying to locate landmarks that only he knew, and then he seemed to have found them, because he grabbed Maria decisively by the arm and dragged her onwards. Maria was startled by this sudden transition from poetic abstraction to concrete action, but then she realized that this was the way real men were supposed to behave.

Schwarzenegger dragged her along the facade of a long Stalin-era apartment block. After a few steps she managed to adjust to his rapid stride and began trotting along beside him, holding on to the sleeve of his raincoat. She sensed that if she slowed her pace at all, Schwarzenegger’s arm would change from a gallantly proffered fulcrum into a steel lever that would drag her implacably along the pavement, and for some reason the thought filled her with a feeling of boundless happiness that sprang from the very depths of her belly and spread in warm waves throughout her body.

On reaching the end of the building, Schwarzenegger turned through an arch. Once in the courtyard of the building, Maria felt as though they had been transported to a different city. Here the peace of the morning was still unbroken; there was no smoke to be seen, and it was hard to believe that somewhere close at hand there were crazy people dashing about shooting off their automatic rifles.

Schwarzenegger definitely knew where he was taking Maria. They made their way round a small children’s playground with swings and dived into a labyrinth of narrow alleys between rusting garages. Maria was thinking with sweet terror in her heart that somewhere here, quickly and rather awkwardly, their alchemical wedlock would probably be consummated, when suddenly the passageway led out into an empty space surrounded on all sides by sheet-iron walls of various colours and heights.

The space wasn’t entirely empty, though. Beneath their feet lay the usual collection of bottles, and there were a couple of old car tyres, a crumpled door from a Lada and other assorted quasi-mechanical garbage of the kind that always accumulates beside garages.

And, next to them, there was a jet fighter.

Although it took up almost all of the space, it was the very last thing that Maria noticed, probably because for several seconds her brain filtered out the signals it was receiving from her eyes as a hallucination. Maria felt afraid.

How could a plane get in here? she thought. On the other hand, how could Schwarzenegger have got here? But even so, this is really strange.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘A model A-4 «Harrier» jump-jet vertical take-off and landing pursuit craft,’ said Schwarzenegger.

Maria saw the famous dimples in his cheeks again -Schwarzenegger was smiling. She frowned slightly, drawing her frizzy eyebrows together, and the fear in her heart was replaced by a feeling of jealousy for this immense insect of glass and metal, which clearly occupied quite as important a place in Schwarzenegger’s heart as she did herself.

He approached the plane. Sunk in thought, Maria remained standing on the spot until she was jerked forward in turn - rather as if Schwarzenegger were a tractor and she were some piece of agricultural machinery casually hooked on to it.

‘But there’s only room for one,’ she said when she caught sight of the back of the seat through the glass canopy.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Schwarzenegger, and in a single light movement he lifted her up and sat her on the wing.

Maria drew in her legs and stood up on the angled aluminium surface. A gust of wind fluttered through her clothes, and she thought how well romantic roles had always suited her.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

But Schwarzenegger was already in the cockpit. He had clambered in with amazing speed and agility, and Maria realized it must have been a montage sequence or a piece of slick editing. He stuck his head out of the cabin and smiled, gesturing to her with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a ring; Maria decided she could think of it as her wedding ring.

‘Sit on the fuselage,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘at the base of the wings. Don’t be afraid. Imagine it’s a carousel. Imagine you’re sitting on one of the horses.’

‘You mean, you’re going to…’

Schwarzenegger nodded.

His dark glasses gazed straight into the depths of Maria’s soul and she realized her fate was being decided right here and now. She was being tested, there was no doubt about it: the woman worthy of standing beside Schwarzenegger could not be some feeble coward good for nothing more than multi-episode domestic and sexual intrigue. She had to be able to meet mortal danger face to face without betraying her feelings with anything more than a smile. Maria tried adjusting her expression accordingly, but felt that the smile turned out a little contrived.

‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘But won’t I get cold?’

‘It won’t take long,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Get up.’

Maria shrugged and took a cautious step towards the point where the fuselage protruded above the flat surface of the wings like the curved spine of a fish, and then sat down on it neatly.

‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘you can ride side-saddle when we go to my ranch in California. Right now you had better sit the ordinary way, or the wind’ll blow you off.’

Maria hesitated for a moment. ‘Look the other way,’ she said.

Schwarzenegger smiled with the left corner of his mouth and turned away. Maria threw her leg over the aluminium crest and straddled the fuselage. Underneath her the metal was cold and slightly damp with dew; she hoisted herself up slightly in order to tuck the hem of her jacket underneath her, and suddenly had the strange sensation that the very tenderest parts of her body had been flattened across the angular hips of a metal man lying on his back - some mutant cross between the iron Dzerzhinsky toppled by the wind of change and a robot from hell. She shuddered, but the brief hallucination disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by the feeling that she was sitting on a frying-pan which had just been taken out of the fridge. She was feeling worse and worse about what was happening.

‘Arnold,’ she called, ‘are you sure we ought to do this?’

She usually reserved these words for entirely different circumstances, but this time they just seemed to come out on their own.

‘It was you who wanted to soar up into the sky,’ he said, ‘but if you’re afraid…’

‘No,’ said Maria, pushing aside her fear, ‘I’m not afraid in the slightest. It’s just that I’m being such a bother to you.’

‘No bother,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘It’s going to be very noisy, better put your earphones on. What is it you’re listening to, anyway?’

‘Jihad Crimson,’ said Maria, settling the small pink pads on her ears.

Schwarzenegger’s face froze absolutely still. A strange flickering red light ran across the lenses of his dark glasses - Maria thought it must be the reflection of the leaves falling from the maple trees that stood just behind the garages.

‘Arnie,’ she called.

The corner of Schwarzenegger’s mouth twitched a few times, and then he seemed to recover the power of movement. He turned his head with difficulty, as though it were rotating on a bearing clogged with sand.

‘Crimson Jihad?’ he asked.

‘Jihad Crimson,’ answered Maria. ‘Nushrat Fatekh Ali Khan and Robert Fripp. Why?’

‘Nothing,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘it’s not important.’

His head disappeared into the cockpit. Underneath her, somewhere deep in the plane’s metal belly, she heard an electrical hum that expanded in the space of just a few seconds into a monstrous loud roaring until it seemed to Maria that she could feel the foam-plastic pads being forced into her ears. Then she was tilted smoothly over to one side and the garages drifted down and away behind her.

Swaying from side to side like a boat, the Harrier rose up vertically into the air - Maria had not even been aware that aeroplanes could fly like that. She thought that if she closed her eyes it might be less frightening, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear, and in less than a minute she had opened them again.

The first thing she saw was a window moving straight towards her. It was so close already that Maria had a perfectly clear view of a tank turning the muzzle of its gun in her direction from the screen of the television in the room. The tank on the screen fired, and at that precise moment the plane banked steeply and soared away from the wall. Maria almost slid across on to the wing, and she squealed in fear, but the plane soon righted itself.

‘Hold on to the antenna!’ shouted Schwarzenegger, poking his head out of the cabin and waving to her.

Maria looked down. Protruding out of the fuselage directly in front of her was a long metal form with a rounded, slightly swollen tip - it was strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like a narrow vertical wing, and it immediately roused immodest associations in Maria’s mind, although its dimensions were significantly larger than any encountered in real life. One glance at this powerful protuberance was enough to quell her fear and replace it with a joyful inspiration that had always been so lacking with all those languid Miguels and drunken Ivans from the television.

Everything was quite different this time. The rounded swelling -at the tip of the antenna was covered with small holes which reminded her slightly of a shower head and at the same time set her thinking of strange, non-terrestrial forms of life and love. Maria pointed to it and glanced inquiringly at Schwarzenegger. He nodded and gave a broad smile, and the sun glinted on his teeth.

Maria decided that what was happening to her now must be a childhood dream coming true. In some film or other she had spent a lot of time poring over fairy-tales in books, looking at the pictures and imagining herself flying through the sky on the back of a dragon or a huge bird, and now it was actually happening. Maybe not exactly the way she’d dreamed it, but then, she thought as she laid her palm on the steel projection of the antenna, dreams don’t always come true in the way we expect.

The plane banked slightly and Maria noticed it was obviously responding to her touching the antenna. More than that, the movement seemed to her to be incredibly animated, as though the plane were alive and the antenna were its most sensitive part. Maria ran her hand along the steel rod and squeezed its upper part tight in her fist. The Harrier twitched its wings nervously and rose a few yards higher. Maria thought to herself that the plane was behaving exactly like a man tied to a bed, unable to take her in his arms, incapable of anything but twitching and jerking his entire body. The similarity was enhanced by the fact that she was sitting just behind the wings, which looked like a pair of wide-spread legs, incredibly muscly, but quite incapable of movement.

This was certainly amusing, but it was all a bit too complicated. Instead of this huge steel bird, Maria would have preferred to have come across an ordinary camp-bed in the empty space between the garages. But then, she thought, with Schwarzenegger it couldn’t really have been any other way. She glanced at the cockpit. She couldn’t see much, because the sun was reflected in the glass, but he seemed to be sitting there, moving his head gently from side to side in time with the movement of her hand.

Meanwhile, the plane was rising higher and higher. The roofs of the houses were now far below them, and Maria had a magnificent panoramic view of the city of Moscow.

There were church domes gleaming on all sides, making the city look like an immense biker’s jacket embellished at random with a remarkable quantity of studs and rivets. There was far less smoke hanging over Moscow than Maria had imagined from down below on the embankment; though some was still visible here and there above the houses, it wasn’t always clear whether it was a fire, pollution from factory chimneys or simply low cloud.

Despite the revolting ugliness of each of its component parts, viewed as a whole the city looked extremely beautiful, but the source of this beauty was beyond all understanding. That’s always the way with Russia, thought Maria, as she ran her hands up and down the cold steel - when you see it from afar, it’s so beautiful it’s enough to make you cry, but when you take a closer look, you just want to puke.

The plane suddenly jerked beneath her, and she felt the upper part of the steel rod dangling loosely in her hand. She jerked her hand away, and immediately the metal knob with the small holes fell away from the antenna, struck the fuselage and flew off into space; the powerful protuberance was reduced to a short hollow tube with a screw thread around its top, with the torn blue and red strands of two wires twisted together protruding from its end.

Maria glanced in the direction of the cockpit. Through the glass she could make out the blond back of Schwarzenegger’s motionless head. At first she thought that he hadn’t noticed anything. Then she thought he must have fainted. She looked around in confusion, saw that the nose of the plane was wavering uncertainly, and immediately her suspicion hardened into certainty. Hardly even aware of what she was doing, she slumped down from the fuselage on to the small flat area between the wings (the stump of the antenna ripped her jacket as she fell) and crawled towards the cockpit.

The cockpit was open. Lying there on the wing, Maria propped herself up and shouted:

‘Arnie! Arnie!’

There was no answer. She fearfully manoeuvred herself on to all fours and saw the back of his head with a single lock of hair fluttering in the wind.

‘Arnie!’ she called again.

Schwarzenegger turned to face her.

‘Thank God!’ Maria exclaimed.

Schwarzenegger took off his glasses.

His left eye was half-closed in a way that expressed an absolutely clear and at the same time immeasurably complex range of feelings, including a strictly proportioned mixture of passion for life, strength, a healthy love for children, moral support for the American automobile industry in its difficult struggle with the Japanese, acknowledgement of the rights of sexual minorities, a slightly ironical attitude towards feminism and the calm assurance that democracy and judaeo-Christian values would eventually conquer all evil in this world.

But his right eye was quite different. It could hardly even be called an eye. A round glass lens looking like a huge wall-eye, set in a complicated metal holder connected to wires that ran out from under the skin, peered out at Maria from a tattered socket surrounded by streaks of dried blood. A beam of blinding red light shone directly out from the centre of the lens - Maria only noticed it when the beam shone into her own eyes.

Schwarzenegger smiled, and the left side of his face expressed exactly what the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to express when it smiles - an indefinable boyish quality between mischief and cunning, immediately making it clear that this is a man who will never do anything bad, and if he should happen to kill a few assholes now and then, it’s not until the camera has repeatedly revealed from several different angles what despicable trash they are. But the smile only affected the left side of his face, the right side remained absolutely unchanged - cold, focused and terrifying.

‘Arnold,’ Maria said in confusion, rising to her feet. ‘What are you doing that for? Stop it!’

But Schwarzenegger didn’t answer, and a moment later the plane banked steeply and Maria was sent tumbling along the wing. On the way she banged her face several times against various protruding objects, and then suddenly there was nothing holding her up any longer. She decided she must be falling and squeezed her eyes shut in order not to see the trees and roofs hurtling up towards her, but several seconds went by and nothing happened. Maria realized that the roaring of the engine was still as close to her as ever and she opened her eyes again.

She was hanging under the wing. The hood of her jacket had snagged on the empennage of some protrusion, which she recognized with some effort as a rocket. The sight of the rocket’s swollen head rather reminded her of the antenna she had been handling just a few minutes earlier, and she decided Schwarzenegger must be continuing with his loveplay. But this was too much - her face was probably covered in bruises, and she could taste the blood from a cut on her lip.

‘Arnold,’ she yelled, waving her arms furiously in an attempt to turn towards the cockpit, ‘stop it! I don’t want to do this! Do you hear me? I don’t want to!’

She finally managed to catch a glimpse of the cockpit and Schwarzenegger’s smiling face.

1 don’t want to do this, d’you hear me? It’s hurting me that way!’

‘You won’t?’ he asked.

‘No! No!’

‘Okay,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘You’re fired.’

A moment later his face zoomed back and away from Maria as she was thrust ahead of the plane by a force of unimaginable power; in just a few seconds the plane was transformed into a tiny silver bird which was connected to her only by a long streak of smoke. Maria turned her head to see where she was going and saw the spire of the Ostankino television tower veering towards her. The swollen lump at its centre grew rapidly as she watched and a split second before the impact came Maria had a clear view of some men in white shirts and ties sitting at a table and gazing at her in amazement through a thick pane of glass.

There was the ringing sound of a glass shattering and then something heavy fell to the floor. Someone started crying loudly.

‘Careful, careful.’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘There now, that’s better.’

Realizing that it was all over, I opened my eyes. By this time I could more or less see. Everything close to me was quite distinct, but objects further away shifted and blurred, and the overall perspective was as though I were sitting inside a large Christmas-tree decoration with the outside world daubed on its inner surface. Timur Timurovich and Colonel Smirnov towered up over me like twin cliffs.

‘Well,’ said someone in the corner. ‘So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Just Maria.’

‘I would like to point out,’ said Colonel Smirnov, clearing his throat and turning to Timur Timurovich, ‘the distinctly phallic relevance of the fact that the patient sees dicks everywhere. Did you notice that? The antenna, the rocket, the Ostankino tower?’

‘You military men always take things too literally.’ replied Timur Timurovich. ‘Not everything’s that simple. Russia cannot be grasped by logic, as the saying goes - but neither can it be entirely reduced to sexual neurosis. Let’s not be too hasty. What’s important here is that the cathartic effect is quite evident, even if it is attenuated.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the colonel, ‘the chair’s even broken.’

‘Precisely,’ agreed Timur Timurovich. ‘When blocked pathological material rises to the surface of consciousness it has to overcome powerful resistance, and so it often produces visions of catastrophes or conflicts of various kinds, as we’ve just seen. It’s the clearest possible sign that we’re working along the right lines.’

‘Maybe it’s just the shell-shock?’ said the colonel.

‘What shell-shock?’

‘What, didn’t I tell you about that? Well, when they were shelling the White House, a few of the shells went straight through, in the windows on one side and out of the windows on the other. And one of them landed in a flat just at the very moment when

The colonel leaned over to Timur Timurovich and whispered something in his ear. ‘Well, of course…’ - I could just make out odd words here and there - ‘… to smithereens… under security with the corpses at first, and then we saw something moving… Massive concussion, obviously.’

‘But why on earth have you kept this to yourself for so long, my good fellow? It changes the entire picture,’ said Timur Timurovich reproachfully. ‘I’ve been struggling so hard…’

He leaned down over me, parted one of my eyelids with two fat fingers and looked into my eye. ‘How about you?’

I’m not quite sure.’ I replied. ‘Of course, it was not the most interesting vision I have ever had, but 1… How can I put it? I found the dreamlike facility with which these delirious ravings acquired for several minutes the status of reality quite amusing.’

‘How do you like that?’ asked Timur Timurovich, turning to Colonel Smirnov.

The colonel nodded without speaking.

‘My dear fellow, I was not inquiring as to your opinion, but your condition.’ said Timur Timurovich.

‘I feel quite well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘But I am sleepy.’

This was no more than the simple truth.

‘Then sleep.’

He turned away from me.

‘Tomorrow morning.’ he said to an invisible nurse, ‘please give Pyotr four cc’s of taurepam immediately before the hydraulic procedures.’

‘Can we have the radio on?’ asked a quiet voice in the corner.

Timur Timurovich clicked a switch on the wall, took the colonel by the arm and led him in the direction of the door. I closed my eyes and realized that I did not have enough strength to open them again.

‘Sometimes I think that all our soldiers brave.’ a man began singing in a mournful voice, ‘Who fell on battle’s bloody hills and plains, Were never buried in their native graves, But turned into a soaring flight of cranes…’

At these final words turmoil broke out in the ward.

‘Keep tight hold of Serdyuk!’ yelled a voice right beside my ear. ‘Who put those blasted cranes on? Have you forgotten, or what?’

‘It was you asked for it to be turned on,’ answered another voice. ‘Let’s change channels.’

There was another click.

‘Is the time now past.’ an ingratiating voice asked from the ceiling, ‘when Russian pop music was synonymous with provincialism? Here’s the chance to judge for yourself. The «Inflamed Ovaries» are a rare kind of Russian pop group, consisting entirely of women whose stage gear weighs as much as a «T-90» tank. Despite such ultra-modern features, the «Inflamed Ovaries» play mostly classical music, but in their own interpretation. Listen to what the girls make of a simple fugue in F by the Austrian composer Mozart, who is well known to many of our listeners from the cream liqueur that bears the same name, which can be bought wholesale from our sponsor, the trading firm «Third Eye».’

I heard the beginning of wild music, like the wind howling in a prison chimney, but I was already, thank God, only half-conscious. At first I was overwhelmed by tormenting thoughts about what was happening, and then I had a brief nightmare about an American wearing dark glasses which seemed to continue the story told by the unfortunate Maria.

The American landed his plane in a yard, soaked it with kerosene and set fire to it. Into the flames he threw the crimson jacket, the dark glasses and the canary-yellow trousers, until he was left wearing nothing but the skimpy trunks. Rippling his magnificently developed muscles he searched for something in the bushes for a long time, but failed to find it. Then there was a gap in my dream, and the next time I saw him - horror of horrors! - he was pregnant: the encounter with Maria had obviously not been without its consequences. At that precise moment he was transformed into a terrifying metal figure with a sketchy mask in place of a face, and the sun glinted furiously on his swollen belly.