The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

1

Who is your hero, Dolores Haze,

Still one of those blue-caped starmen?

Humbert Humbert

The client I had been directed to by the barman Serge had been waiting in the Alexander Bar of the hotel National since seven-thirty in the evening. It was already seven-forty and the taxi was still crawling along, shifting from one traffic jam to another. I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.

‘I want to be forever young,’ Alphaville sang yet again on the radio.

I wish I had your problems, I thought. And immediately remembered my own.

I don’t really think about them that often. All I know is that they reside somewhere out there in the black void and I can come back to them again at any moment. Just to convince myself one more time that they have no solution. And thinking about that for a moment leads to interesting conclusions.

Let’s just suppose I solve them. What then? They’ll simply disappear - that is, they’ll drift away for ever into the same non-existence where they reside for most of the time anyway. And the only practical consequence will be that my mind will stop dragging them back out of that black void. Doesn’t that mean my insoluble problems only exist because I think about them, and I recreate them anew at the very moment when I remember them? The funniest of my problems is my name. It’s a problem I only have in Russia. But since I live here at the moment, I have to admit that it’s a very real problem.

My name is A Hu-Li. When this is spelt in Russian letters - ‘А Xули’ - it becomes a Russian obscenity.

In the old days, with the pre-Revolutionary Russian alphabet, I was able to avoid this, at least in the written form of my name, by writing it as ‘А Xyлі’. On a seal given to me in nineteen-thirteen by a certain wealthy patron of the arts from St. Petersburg who knew the secret, it is condensed into two symbols:

It’s an interesting story. The first seal that he ordered for me was carved on a ruby, and all five letters were incorporated into a single symbol.

He gave me that ruby when we were sailing on his yacht in the Gulf of Finland and I threw it straight into the water the moment I looked at it. He turned pale and asked me why I hated him. He didn’t, of course, really think that I hated him. But it was just a time when theatrical, soulful gestures were the fashion. Indeed, as it happens, they were responsible for the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

I explained that it was possible to lay all the letters on top of each other and fit them on a small gemstone, which wouldn’t be too expensive, but then you couldn’t tell which letter came first. A day later the second version was ready, carved on an oblong opal - ‘with a teasing mysterious “AH”’, as the patron noted elegantly in the poem appended to the gift.

That was the kind of people there used to be in Russia. Although, in fact, I suspect that he didn’t write the poem himself, but commissioned it from his friend - the gay poet Mikhail Kuzmin - since after the Revolution I was visited by a gang of cocaine-intoxicated queers from the Cheka, looking for some diamonds or other. Then they moved a load of plumbers and laundrywomen into my flat on Italianskaya Street and took away the final prop of my self-respect, the old Russian letter ‘i’ that rendered my name printable. So I never did like the communists from the very beginning, even at a time when many brilliant minds believed in them.

My name is actually very beautiful and has nothing to do with its apparent Russian meaning. In Chinese ‘A Hu-Li’ means ‘the fox named A’. By analogy with Russian names, you could say that ‘A’ is my first name and ‘Hu-Li’ is my surname. What can I say to justify it? I was given the name at a time when the obscene phrase didn’t exist in the Russian language, because the Russian language itself didn’t even exist yet.

Who could ever have imagined in those times that some day my noble surname would become an obscene word? Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that’s true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don’t change.

We foxes are fortunate creatures, because we have short memories. We only remember the last ten or twenty years clearly, and everything from before that slumbers in the dark void that I’ve already mentioned. But it doesn’t completely disappear. For us the past is like a dark room from which we can extract any memory we wish by making a special and rather painful effort of will. This makes us interesting to talk to. We have a lot to say about almost any subject; and apart from that, we know all the major languages of the world - we’ve had enough time to learn them. But we don’t go picking at the scab of memory without any need, and our everyday stream of thought is virtually the same as people have. The same applies to our operational personality, which renders a fox virtually indistinguishable from a tailless monkey (our ancient term for humans).

Many people cannot understand how this is possible. Let me try to explain. In every culture it is usual to link particular aspects of a person’s appearance with specific character traits. A beautiful princess is kind and compassionate; a wicked witch is ugly, and she has a huge wart on her nose. And there are more subtle connections that are not so easy to formulate - the art of portrait painting is constructed around them. These connections change over time, which is why the great beauties of one age are a puzzle for another. Anyway, to put it simply, a fox’s personality is the human type with which the present age associates her appearance.

Every fifty years or thereabouts, we select a new simulacrum of the soul to match our unchanging features, and that is what we present to people. Therefore, from the human point of view, at any given moment our inner reality corresponds completely to our external appearance. It’s a different question altogether that it’s not identical with the genuine reality, but who’s going to understand that? Most people don’t have any genuine reality at all, all they have are these external and internal realities, two sides of the same coin that the tailless monkey sincerely believes has actually been credited to his account.

I know it sounds strange, but that’s exactly how it is: in order to make ourselves acceptable to our contemporaries, we adopt a new personality to match our face, exactly like altering a dress to suit a different fashion. The previous personalities are consigned to the lumber room, and soon it becomes a strain for us to remember what we used to be like before. And our lives consist of jolly trivia, amusing fleeting moments. I think this is a kind of evolutionary mechanism designed to make mimicry and camouflage easier for us. After all, the best kind of mimicry is when not only your face becomes like others’ faces, but your stream of thought becomes like theirs too.

To look at I could be anything from fourteen to seventeen years old - closer to fourteen. My physical appearance arouses feelings in people, especially men, that are boring to describe, and there’s no need - nowadays everybody’s read Lolita, even the Lolitas. Those feelings are what provide my living. I suppose you could say I earn my living as a swindler: in actual fact I am anything but a juvenile. For the sake of convenience I define my age as two thousand years - the period that I can recall more or less coherently. This could possibly be regarded as coyness - I am actually significantly older than that. The origins of my life go very, very far back into the depths of time, and recalling them is as difficult as lighting up the night sky with a small torch. We foxes were not born in the same way as people. We are descended from a heavenly stone and are distantly related to the king of apes, Sun Wukong himself, the hero of Journey to the West (although I can’t really claim this is all actually true - I have no memories left of that legendary time). In those days we were different. I mean internally, not externally. We don’t change externally as we grow older - apart, that is, from the appearance of a new silver hair in our tails every 108 years.

I have not made such a significant mark in history as others of my kind. But even so, I am mentioned in one of the greatest works of world literature, and you can even read about me if you like. To do that, you have to go to the bookshop and buy the book Anecdotes of Spirits and Immortals, written by Gan Bao, and find the story of how the governor of Sih during the late Han period searched for the commander of his guards, who had fled. The governor was told that his officer had been led away by an evil spirit, and a detachment of soldiers was sent to look for him. To this day, reading what comes after that never fails to excite me (I carry the page with me as a talisman):

. . . the governor and several dozen soldiers on foot and on horse-back, having taken the hunting dogs with them, began prowling about outside the walls of the city, tracking down the fugitive. And indeed, Tsao was discovered in an empty burial crypt. But the were-creature had heard the voices of the people and dogs and hidden. The men sent by Sian brought Tsao back. In appearance he had become entirely like the foxes, almost nothing human remained in him. He could only mutter: ‘A-Tsy!’ (‘A-Tsy’ is a name for a fox.) About ten days later he gradually began to recover his reason and then he told his story:

‘When the fox came the first time, a woman who was most beautiful appeared in the far corner of the house, among the hen-roosts. Having named herself as A-Tsy, she began enticing me to herself. And so it happened several times, while I, without intending to, followed her summons. There and then she became my wife and that very evening we found ourselves in her home . . . I do not recall meeting the dogs, but I have never felt so glad.’

‘This is an evil spirit from the mountains,’ the Taoist soothsayer said.

‘In “Notes on the Glorious Mountains” it says: “In deep antiquity the fox was a dissolute woman and her name was A-TSY. Later she was transformed into a fox.”

‘This is why were-creatures of this kind most often give their name as A-Tsy.’

I remember that man. His head was like a yellow egg, and his eyes looked like two pieces of paper glued on to the egg. His version of the story of our affair is not entirely accurate, and the narrator is mistaken when he says I was called A-Tsy. The head of the guards called me by my first name, ‘A’, and ‘Tsy’ came from the sound that he began making involuntarily when his vital energy fell into decline: while we talked he sucked in air very noisily, as if he were trying to pull his dangling lower jaw back into place. And what’s more, it’s not true that I was once a dissolute woman and was then transformed into a fox - things like that simply don’t happen, as far as I’m aware. But even so, I get the same thrill from re-reading this passage of ancient Chinese prose as an old actress does from looking at the very earliest photograph that she has kept.

Why am I called ‘A’? A certain Confucian scribe with a predilection for boys, who knew what I was, but nonetheless had recourse to my services until the day he died, thought up an interesting explanation. He said it was the very shortest sound that a man could make when the muscles of his throat ceased to obey him. And it is true that some of the people over whom I cast my web of hallucination have just enough time to make a sound something like a muffled ‘A-a ...’ This Confucian scribe even wrote a special sheet of calligraphy as a gift for me - it began with the words ‘A Hu-Li, willow in the night above the river . . .’

It might seem that living in Russia with a name like mine is a rather sad fate. Something like living in America and being called Whatze Phuck. Yes, the name does lend my life a certain tone of gloom, and there is always a certain inner voice ready and willing to ask - ‘So what the fuck were you expecting from life anyway, A Hu-Li?’ But as I have already said, this is the very least of my concerns, not really even a concern, since I work under a pseudonym. It’s more like a humorous comment - although the humour, of course, is black.

Working as a prostitute doesn’t really bother me either. My shift partner at the Baltschug hotel, Dunya (she’s known as Adulteria in the hotel) once defined the difference between a prostitute and a respectable woman as follows: ‘A prostitute wants to get a hundred bucks out of a man for giving him a good time, but a respectable woman wants all his dough for sucking all the blood out of him.’ I don’t entirely agree with this radical opinion, but it does contain a certain grain of truth: morals in modern Moscow are such that the correct translation of the phrase ‘for love’ from the slick humour of the glamour magazines into legal terminology would be ‘for a hundred thousand dollars plus a pain in the arse’. Why bother paying any attention to the opinion of a society dominated by a morality like that?

I have more serious problems. Conscience, for instance. But I’ll think about that in some other traffic jam, we’re almost there now.

A top hat is a badge of caste indicating membership of the elite, no matter how we might feel about that. And when you are met at the entrance to a hotel by a man in a top hat who bows low and opens the door for you, you are elevated thereby to social heights that impose serious financial obligations towards those who have been less fortunate in life.

Which fact is immediately reflected in the menu. Taking a seat at a table by the bar, I immersed myself in the drinks list, trying to locate my niche among the forty-dollar whiskies and fifty-dollar cognacs (and that’s for just forty grams!). The names of the long drinks arranged themselves into the storyline of a high-tension thriller: Tequila Sunrise, Blue Lagoon, Sex on the Beach, Screwdriver, Bloody Mary, Malibu Sunset, Zombie. A ready-made proposal for a movie. So why am I not in the movie business?

I ordered the cocktail called Rusty Nail - not in honour of the impending meeting, as anybody of a psychoanalytical cast of mind might be inclined to think, but because in addition to scotch, its contents included the incomprehensible Drambuie. One should experience something new every day of one’s life.

There were two of my co-workers sitting in the bar - Karina, an ex-model, and the transsexual Nelly, who moved here from the hotel Moscow after it was closed. Nelly had just recently hit the big five-oh, but business was still going pretty well for her. Just then she was swarming all over some gallant Scandinavian type, while Karina was sitting on her own, finishing off a cigarette that wasn’t her first by a long way - that was obvious from the lipstick-smeared butts in the ashtray. I still haven’t finally figured out why that happens, but it kept happening all the time: Nelly, an ugly freak who spent her previous life in the Komsomol, earned more bucks than the young girls who looked like supermodels.

There could be various reasons for this:

1. Western man, who has imbibed the ideals of equal rights for women with his mother’s milk, is not capable of rejecting a woman because of her age or her external imperfections, since he sees her above all as a person.

2. For the thinking Western man, to satisfy his sexual needs with the help of a photographic model means to follow the dictates of the ideologues of consumerist society, and that is vulgar.

3. Western man regards social instinct as so far superior to biological instinct, even in such an intimate matter as sex, that his primary concern is for the individuals least capable of competing in the conditions of the market.

4. Western man assumes that an ugly freak will cost less, and after an hour of shame, he will have more money left for the payments on his ‘Jaguar’.

I did as the barman Serge said and didn’t even look in his direction. In the National everybody reports on everybody else, so you have to be careful. And anyway, right then I wasn’t much interested in Serge, I was more concerned about the client.

There were two possible candidates for the position in the bar; a Sikh wearing a dark-blue turban who looked like a chocolate Easter rabbit and a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit with glasses. They were both sitting alone - the man in glasses was drinking coffee and surveying the rectangular courtyard through its glass roof, and the Sikh was reading the Financial Times, swaying the toe of his lacquered shoe in time to the pianist, who was masterfully transforming the cultural legacy of the nineteenth century into acoustic wallpaper. The piece concerned was Chopin’s ‘Raindrops’, the same composition that the villain in the film Moonraker is playing when Bond appears. I used to adore that music. Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna, was right to entitle the rebuttal of her husband’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ that she worked on in her final years as ‘Chopin’s Preludes’ . . .

I’d prefer the one in glasses, I thought. He was obviously not saving up for a ‘Jaguar’, he already had one. For his kind the whole thrill is in spending money, they get more excited over that transaction than all the rest, which doesn’t even have to happen at all, provided you can get them drunk enough. But that Sikh would be really heavy work.

I smiled at the man in glasses and he smiled back. That’s great then, I thought, but just after that the Sikh folded his financial newspaper, got up and came to my table.

‘Lisa?’ he asked.

That was my pseudonym for the day.

‘That’s right,’ I said happily.

What else could I do?

He sat facing me and immediately started abusing the local cuisine. His English was good, not the kind people from India usually have - genuine Oxford pronunciation, with that dry tone to it reminiscent of a Russian accent. Instead of ‘fucking’ he said ‘freaking’, like a Boy Scout, and it sounded funny, because he stuck the word into every second sentence. Maybe swearing was against his religion, there was some little point like that in Sikhism, I thought. He turned out to be a professional portfolio investor, and I only just stopped myself from asking where his portfolio was. Portfolio investors don’t like jokes like that. I know that, because every third client of mine at the National is a portfolio investor. Not that there are all that many portfolio investors at the National, it’s just that I look very young, and every second portfolio investor is a paedophile. I don’t like them, to be quite honest. It’s strictly professional.

He began with extremely old-fashioned compliments, saying how he couldn’t believe his luck; I was like the girl from the romantic dreams of his childhood - that was what he said. And then more in the same vein. Then he wanted to see my passport, to make sure I wasn’t under age. I’m used to requests like that. I had a passport for foreign travel - false, naturally - in the name of ‘Alisa Li’ - it’s a common Korean surname and it suits my Asiatic face. The Sikh looked through it very carefully - he was obviously concerned about his good name. According to my passport I was nineteen.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked.

‘I’ve already ordered,’ I replied. ‘They’ll bring it in a moment. Tell me, do you say that to all the girls, about the romantic dream of your childhood?’

‘No, only to you. I’ve never said anything like that to any girl before.’

‘I see. Then I’ll say something to you that I’ve never said to any other man before. You look like Captain Nemo.’

‘From 20,000 Leagues under the Sea?’

Oho, I thought, what a well-read portfolio investor!

‘No, from the American film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. There was one extraordinary gentleman who looked just like you. An underwater karate specialist with a beard and a blue turban.’

‘Why, was the film based on Jules Verne?’

They brought my cocktail. It turned out to be small - only sixty grams.

‘No, they gathered together all the supermen of the nineteenth century - Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dorian Gray and so on.’

‘Really? That’s original.’

‘Nothing original about it. An economy based on brokerage gives rise to a culture that prefers to resell images and concepts created by others instead of creating new ones.’

That was a phrase I’d heard from a certain left-wing film critic who stung me for 350 euros. Not that I entirely agreed with it, it was just that every time I repeated those words in conversation with a client I felt the film critic was paying me back a few bucks. But it was too much for the Sikh.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked with a frown.

‘The point is, the Nemo character looked remarkably like you. A moustache and beard . . . he even prayed to the goddess Kali in his submarine.’

‘Then it’s not likely that we have much in common,’ he said with a smile. ‘I don’t worship the goddess Kali. I’m a Sikh.’

‘I have a lot of respect for Sikhism,’ I said. ‘I think it’s one of the most advanced religions in the world.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You’ve probably heard that Sikhs are men with beards who wear turbans?’ he laughed.

‘It’s not the external attributes of Sikhism that I find attractive. I really admire its spiritual side, especially the fearless transition from reliance on living teachers to reliance on a book.’

‘But that’s the case in many other religions,’ he said. ‘It’s just that instead of the Koran or the Bible, we have Guru Granth Sahib.’

‘But nowhere else do they address the book as their living mentor. And apart from that, nowhere else is there such a revolutionary concept of God. I’m impressed most of all by two features that distinguish Sikhism radically from all other religions. ’

‘Which ones?’

‘Firstly, the acceptance of the fact that God didn’t create this world for some exalted purpose, but exclusively for his own amusement. No one before the Sikhs ever dared go that far. And secondly, its God-finding. As distinct from other religions, in which there is only God-seeking.’

‘And what are God-finding and God-seeking?’

‘Do you remember the aporia with the execution on the square that is often referred to in the commentaries on the Sikh sacred texts? I think it goes back to Guru Nanak, but I’m not absolutely certain.’

The Sikh stared at me, opening his brown eyes wide, which instantly made him look like a crayfish.

‘Imagine a market square,’ I continued. ‘Standing at the centre of it is a scaffold surrounded by a crowd, and they’re beheading a prisoner on it. A fairly ordinary scene for medieval India. And for Russia too. Well then, God-seeking is when the best people are horrified by the sight of blood on the axe and start seeking for God and the result is that a hundred years and sixty million corpses later they get a slightly improved credit rating.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the Sikh. ‘That’s a tremendous achievement for your country. I mean the improved credit rating. So what’s God-finding then?’

‘That’s when they find God right there in the market square, as the teachers of the Sikhs did.’

‘And where is he?’

‘In this aporia God is both the executioner and his victim, but not only. He is the crowd round the scaffold, the scaffold itself, the axe, the drops of blood on the axe, the market square, the sky above the market square and the dust under people’s feet. And, of course, he is this aporia and - most importantly of all - the person who is listening to it . . .’

I’m not sure that this example can really be called an aporia, since it doesn’t contain an irresolvable contradiction - although that might be in the very fact that God is discovered in the midst of blood and horror. But the Sikh didn’t object to the term. He opened his eyes even wider, so that he looked even more like a crayfish, but a crayfish who has finally realized why he’s surrounded by all these immense beer mugs. While he pondered what I’d said, I calmly finished off my cocktail - I still hadn’t found out what Drambuie was. I must say the Sikh looked a real picture - he seemed to be teetering on the brink of enlightenment, as if a slight nudge would be enough for the unstable equilibrium of his mind to shift suddenly.

And that was what happened. The moment my glass touched the table, he recovered his wits. He took a Diners Club Platinum Card with a hologram of Che Guevara out of his wallet and tapped on the table with it to call the waiter, then he put his hand over mine and whispered:

‘Isn’t it time to go to the room?’

The name National suggests a hotel representative of national taste. In Russia this taste is eclectic, which is reflected in the decor: the carpet on the stairs is covered with classical fleurs-de-lys, the stained glass in the windows is art nouveau, and it is hard to discover any principle at all in the selection of paintings on the walls - churches, bouquets of flowers, forest thickets, old peasant women, views of Versailles, with Napoleon suddenly turning up in the middle of them all, looking like a blue parrot with a gold tail . . .

But actually it’s only at first glance that the pictures have nothing in common. In fact they all share the most important artistic attribute of all - they’re for sale. As soon as you remember that, the remarkable stylistic unity of the interior becomes clear. And in addition, you realize there is no such thing as abstract art at all, it’s all very concrete. A profound thought, I even wanted to make a note of it, but that would have been awkward with a client there.

We stopped at the glass door of room number 319 and the Sikh gave me a sultry smile as he slipped his key card into the lock. He had a VIP suite - they cost 600 dollars a day there. Behind the double door there was a small businessman’s sitting room: a striped sofa with a high back, two armchairs, a fax and a printer, a palm tree in a tub and a small cupboard with antique tableware. The window offered a panoramic view of a street from which the Kremlin could be seen. That’s category ‘B’. There’s a category ‘C’ there too - that’s when the window looks out on to a street from which you can see the other street, from which the Kremlin is visible.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I asked.

The Sikh began unfastening his tie.

‘Are we in a hurry?’ he asked playfully. ‘Over there.’

I opened the door he had indicated. Behind it was the bedroom. Almost the entire space was taken up by an immense double bed, and the small door into the bathroom was in the corner of the room: I didn’t even notice it at first. That was the way it should be, the dimensions of things proportionate to the place they occupy in life. The suite approached the ideal, since it was structured precisely like the VIP life. Work represented by the businessman’s sitting room - receive a fax, send a fax, sit on the stripy sofa for a while, look at the palm tree in the tub and when you get fed up with the palm tree, turn your head and look at the tableware in the cupboard; personal life represented by the bedroom with the bed stretching from wall to wall: take a sleeping pill and sleep. Or else what was happening now.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and started getting ready for work. It wasn’t difficult - I simply lowered my trousers a bit and freed my tail. I only turned on the water as camouflage.

I feel I have now reached the point where certain explanations are required, otherwise my narrative will seem rather outlandish. So let me pause for a while to say a few words about myself.

Foxes don’t have any sex in the strict sense of the word, and if we are referred to as ‘she’, it’s because of our external resemblance to women. In actual fact we’re like angels - that is, we don’t have any reproductive system. We don’t reproduce because we don’t grow old and we can carry on living until something kills us.

As for our appearance, we have slender, shapely bodies without a trace of fat and magnificently defined musculature - the kind that some teenagers who do sport have. We have fine, silky, gleaming hair that’s a bright fiery-red colour. We are tall, and in ancient times that often used to give us away, but nowadays people have become taller and so this feature doesn’t make us stand out at all.

Although we don’t have any sex in the sense of the ability to reproduce, all of its external signs are present - you could never take a fox for a man. Straight women usually take us for lesbians. Lesbians usually go nuts. And it’s not surprising. Beside us even the most beautiful women look crude and unfinished - like a carelessly dressed block of stone beside a completed sculpture.

Our breasts are small and perfectly formed, with small, dark-brown nipples. At the spot where women have their most important dream factory we have something similar in appearance - an imitative organ with a function I’ll tell you about later. It doesn’t serve for childbirth. And at the back we have a tail, a fluffy, flexible, fiery-red antenna. The tail can become larger or smaller: in the sleeping state it’s like a ponytail about ten or fifteen centimetres long, but in the working state it can reach almost a metre in length.

When a fox’s tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thicker and longer. It’s like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn’t draw any parallels with the male human erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn’t call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion.

How do we do that?

By using our tails. And there’s nothing more to be said about it. I have no wish to conceal the truth, but it really is difficult to add anything else. Can a person who isn’t a scientist explain how he sees? Or hears? Or thinks? He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears and thinks with his head, and that’s all. Likewise we create illusion with our tails. It feels just as simple and clear to us as the other examples. But I won’t attempt to explain the mechanics of what happens in scientific terms.

As for the illusions, they can be of various kinds. Everything here is determined by the personal qualities of the fox, her imagination, mental strength and other distinctive features. A great deal also depends on how many people have to see the illusion simultaneously.

There was a time when we could do a great deal. We could create illusions of magical islands and make crowds of thousands see dragons dancing in the sky. We could create the appearance of a huge army approaching the walls of a city and all the city dwellers would see this army in exactly the same way, right down to the details of its equipment and the hieroglyphs on its banners. But those were the great, incomparable foxes of antiquity, who paid for their wonderworking with their lives. In general, since those days, our kind has declined rather seriously - probably because we are always so close to people.

Of course, my powers are nothing like those of the great foxes. Put it this way - I can make one person see anything at all. Two? Almost always. Three? That depends on the circumstances. There aren’t any precise rules here, everything is decided by the feel of things: I sense what I am capable of more or less like a rock-climber standing in front of a crevice in the mountains. He knows where he can jump from one side to the other, and where he can’t. If you don’t make the jump, you fall off and tumble into the abyss - the analogy with our enchantment is very precise.

It’s best not to exceed your own limits, because a hallucination that is not strong enough to subdue another person’s mind gives the whole game away. The mechanism involved is complicated, but the external result is always the same - when a person suddenly escapes from hypnotic control (slips off the tail, as we say), he suffers a seizure, with unpredictable consequences. More often than not he tries to kill the fox, who is entirely defenceless just at that moment.

The point is that our sport involves a certain provocative detail. In the non-working state, our tails are really small, and so we hide them between our legs. For the antenna to work at full power, it has to be unfurled. To do this, you have to lower your trousers (or raise your skirt) and spread your tail into a fiery-red plume. This increases the power of suggestion by several orders of magnitude, and that’s the way all serious questions are decided.

The need to expose yourself could give rise to awkward and ambiguous situations, but - fortunately for foxes - there is one helpful feature to the process. If you can expose yourself quickly enough, the subject will forget everything that he has seen. There’s a kind of twilight zone, ten or twenty seconds that disappear from the memory, and we have to manage the manoeuvre within that time frame. They say the same thing happens when someone faints - when they come round, people don’t remember what happened immediately before their fainting fit.

And now for the final thing I ought to tell you. We eat ordinary food (fairly close to the Atkins Diet). But in addition to that, we are capable of directly assimilating the human sexual energy that is released during the act of love - whether real or imaginary. And while ordinary food simply maintains the chemical equilibrium of our bodies, sexual energy is like our most important vitamin, the one that makes us enchanting and eternally youthful. Is this vampirism? I’m not sure it is. We simply pick up what the irrational human being carelessly discards. And if he is so profligate that he actually kills himself, does that mean that we’re to blame?

In some books it says that foxes don’t wash - supposedly, that’s how they can be recognized. It’s not because we’re dirty creatures. It’s just that the excess sexual energy transfuses us with the immortal nature of the primordial Yang principle and our bodies clean themselves through the corresponding influx of Yin. The faint odour that our skin gives off is actually extremely pleasant and reminiscent of Essenza di Zegna eau de cologne, except that it is lighter and more lucid - without that hot, sensuous breath of the mistral in the distant background.

I hope that now the reasons for my actions will be clearer. And so, I turned on the water, so that my client would hear the noise, then unfastened my trousers and lowered them slightly to free my tail. And then, trying not to hurry, I counted to three hundred (a notional five minutes) and opened the door.

Popular expositions of the theory of relativity often ask the reader to compare the pictures that would be taken by two cameras - one in an independent system of coordinates and the other on the head of an astronaut. In our case it would be more correct to say ‘in the head’ rather than on it. What would the camera in the Sikh’s head have shown? The door of the bathroom opened and the girl of his romantic childhood dreams stepped into the room. With a blindingly white towel wrapped round her body.

After she came out of the bathroom, the girl went over to the bed, threw back the blanket and dived under it, blushing ever so slightly: everything pointed to the fact that she hadn’t been in the business long and still hadn’t acquired the professional shamelessness of the trade. That was what the Sikh saw.

I don’t know if the rooms in the National have cameras set in an independent system of coordinates. The staff there claim that they don’t. But if they did have, then they would have shown the following:

1. the girl wasn’t wearing any towel. She hadn’t even thought of getting undressed, but merely slightly lowered her trousers, releasing the red plume of her tail.

2. the girl didn’t walk into the room, she crawled into it on all fours and her tail swayed in the air before freezing above her back in a ginger question mark.

3. she looked less like a bride than a beast prepared to pounce - there was a fierce, intense look in her green eyes and there wasn’t even a trace of a smile on her face.

4. since in modern Russian the word ‘bride’ signifies something very close to ‘a beast prepared to pounce’, there is no contradiction here anyway.

The Sikh looked at me, raised his eyebrows and swayed on his feet. When a person is overwhelmed by the hypnotic shock, a shadow of something like faint revulsion passes across his face, like when a bullet just clips someone’s skull: if anyone has seen the documentary footage of Vietnamese executions, then he’ll know what I mean. Only after my bullet the client doesn’t fall down.

With a smile on his face, the Sikh staggered towards the empty bed, pulling off his jacket on the way. I waited until he had made himself comfortable in it, then sat on the chair beside it and opened my handbag.

I’m trying to improve myself morally, and so I avoid looking at the client once the paid time has begun. I feel ashamed even to describe what happens to a man during his encounter with a fox. Ashamed above all for the man, since he looks quite terrible. And a little awkward for myself too, since all this doesn’t just happen of its own accord.

I’m not writing for the yellow press, so I won’t go into the scabrous details, but simply say that a man’s behaviour is especially unattractive when he starts to realize his sexual fantasies. The fact that he is performing alone increases the obscenity of it to the second power. And if the man concerned is wearing a blue turban and is so hairy that his beard seems to cover his entire body, then it is quite fair to say it is raised to the third.

Maintaining an illusion is considerably easier than breaking into someone else’s mind in order to establish it. Everything is decided in the first moment, after that it’s all pretty routine. But even so, while the client is in the world of his illusions, it’s best not to go too far away from him, because you have to perform the functions of a nurse. As I’ve already explained, looking at the patient is rather unpleasant, so I usually take a book with me, and that was what I did this time. I settled down beside the bed and opened Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which includes a lot of interesting things about various systems of coordinates. I’ve already read the book from cover to cover several times, but I still haven’t got fed up with it, and every time I laugh as if I were reading it for the first time. I even have a suspicion that it’s a postmodern joke, a kind of scam. The very name Stephen Hawking is suspiciously reminiscent of another horror writer by the name of Stephen King. But the horrors here are of a different kind.

The Sikh turned out to be relatively quiet. He muttered something in his native language and squirmed about in the very centre of the bed. There was no need to be concerned that he might fall out on to the floor. But even so, like a good nurse, I glanced at the patient occasionally. When he got fed with embracing the upper half of an empty space, he started pressing himself against it from the side. Then he moved back to the top again.

It’s hard to get used to this sight. People have muscular spasms, and at such moments the client looks as if he really is lying on an invisible body. His entire weight is supported on his awkwardly twisted wrists, or sometimes on his fingers. Normally a man could never deliberately hold himself in that position for even a few seconds, but in a trance he can stay in it for hours. Similar phenomena are repeatedly described in the literature on hypnosis, so nobody will give me a Nobel Prize for the discovery. And I don’t need human fame anyway. I don’t need anything from human beings except love and money.

I have always felt that the means for maintaining eternal youth that has been laid open to me on the Great Way of Things is rather shameful, although I reject all accusations of vampirism. I take no satisfaction in stealing another being’s life force and I never have done. Moral satisfaction, I mean. There is no way to vanquish the physiological aspect, but that is not subject to moral judgement: even someone with immense compassion for animals can tuck into a bloody steak for dinner with his stomach gurgling, and there’s no contradiction involved. And apart from that, unlike people, who kill animals, I haven’t taken anybody’s life for centuries now, at least not deliberately. Accidents happen, but a night spent with me is less dangerous than a flight in a Russian helicopter in conditions of average visibility. People fly in helicopters in conditions of average visibility, don’t they? Of course they do. I’m the same kind of helicopter - only, as Bruce Springsteen put it, I can take you higher.

And apart from that, I don’t believe that it’s personal when I draw energy from someone. A man who eats an apple doesn’t enter into a personal relationship with the apple, he just follows the established order of things. I regard my role in the food chain in a similar fashion.

The energy that serves for the conception of life does not belong to people. Entering into the act of love, a human being becomes a channel for this energy and is transformed from a sealed vessel to a pipe that is connected for a few seconds to the bottomless source of the life force. I simply require access to that source, that’s all.

‘And now lie on your tummy, sweetheart,’ the Sikh said. ‘It’s time to try something a bit more serious.’

Anal sex is the favourite sport of portfolio investors. There’s a simple psychoanalytical explanation for this - just try comparing the prison slang term ‘shoving shit’ with the expression ‘investing money’ and everything should be clear enough. Personally, I’m all in favour of anal sex. It generates an especially large discharge of the life force from the male organism, and that’s the best time for gathering energy.

Setting aside my book, I closed my eyes and performed the usual visualization - the yin-yang symbol, surrounded by eight blazing trigrams. Then I pictured myself as the dark half of the symbol and the Sikh as the white half. A white dot began to glow in the centre of the dark half, and a similar black dot appeared in the centre of the white half.

The white began growing darker and black growing lighter, until they swapped places. Dilettantes believe that this is the most advantageous moment to disconnect, but I always work with the method known as ‘the bride returns the earring’ - the poetic name given to it in the Middle Kingdom six hundred years ago.

If you steal someone else’s life energy, it’s important not to provoke the wrath of heaven and the spirits with your greed. Therefore, I allowed the situation to proceed into the phase of reverse development. The flow of energy halted and then turned back on itself. My visualization began changing rapidly. A black dot appeared in the centre of the light half of the yin-yang symbol and a similar white dot appeared in the centre of the dark half. And it was only when the dots had become clearly visible that I broke the energy link and dissolved the visualization in the void.

After a big win in a casino, the right thing to do is not to leave - it’s better to lose a little, in order not to provoke resentment and anger. And it’s the same in our line of work. In ancient times many foxes were killed purely because of their greed. But then we realized we had to share! Heaven does not frown so darkly when we show compassion and return part of the life force. It might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference here is exactly the same as that between an armed robbery and a privatization auction. Formally speaking, in the latter case there is no crime for the spirits to punish. But there’s still no way you can trick your own conscience, so it’s best just to leave it out of things.

The Sikh got up off the bed and wandered into the bathroom. When he came back out, he lay down, lit up a cigarette and began speaking in a relaxed voice, telling the pillow beside him some story out of his life. After coitus, men become garrulous and benevolent for about half an hour, owing to the release of dopamine into the brain as a reward for fulfilling their duty. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. I wanted to finish reading about how a black hole behaves when gravitational collapse reduces its diameter to a distance shorter than the event horizon.

I thought I could detect an erotic subtext to these astrophysical models, and my conviction was growing that Stephen Hawking wasn’t writing about physics at all, but about sex - only not about squalid human intercourse, but the grandiose cosmic coitus that gave birth to matter. Surely it’s no accident that this great explosion is referred to as the ‘Big Bang’. All the most sacred mysteries of the universe are concealed in the darkness of black holes, but it’s impossible to look into a singularity because it doesn’t emit any light, like a bedroom when the lamp’s switched off . . . Basically, I thought, astrophysicists are nothing but voyeurs. Except that voyeurs sometimes manage to glimpse someone else’s act of love through the gap between the curtains, but physicists have been cheated by fate, and they have to imagine absolutely everything as they stare into ink-black darkness.

When he’d finished smoking and talking, the Sikh set to work again - he settled on his side and went at it for a long time. The regular creaking of springs was like a soothing lullaby. And I committed the most stupid blunder a fox can possibly commit during working hours. I fell asleep.

I actually only dozed off for a moment and then immediately woke up again. But that was enough. I sensed I’d lost contact with the Sikh and when I looked up, my eyes met his, staring wildly. He could see me just as I was, sitting on a chair with my trousers lowered and my tail sticking up behind my back. And that is a sight no one should ever see, apart from the mirror and the spirits.

The first thought I had was that I was facing a Taoist exorcist. This was a totally absurd idea because:

1. The last Taoist capable of hunting foxes lived in the eighteenth century.

2. Even if one of them had managed to hold out until modern times, he would hardly have been able to disguise himself as a bearded Sikh with an Oxford accent - that would have been ‘too freaking much’.

3. Since I work according to the method ‘the bride returns the earring’, Taoists have no formal right to come hunting me.

4. Taoists never come three times in a row.

But the powerful fear of exorcists of evil spirits is built into our genes, and in moments of danger we always think of them. Some time I must tell you a couple of stories about those guys, then you’ll understand the way I feel.

A moment later I realized this was no Taoist, but simply my client, who had slipped off the tail. It was an appalling sight. The Sikh was opening and closing his mouth like a fish just landed on a riverbank. Then, in an attempt to gain control of the body that wouldn’t obey him, he lifted his hands up in front of his face and began clenching and unclenching his fingers. Then he groaned hoarsely several times and suddenly bounded to his feet.

At this point I finally unfroze and made a dash for the bathroom. The Sikh came rushing after me, but I slammed the door in his face and locked it. In moments of danger my mind works quickly; I realized immediately what I had to do.

Every bathroom in the National has a red and white cord hanging out of a little hole in the wall. I don’t know what it’s connected to, but if you tug on it, ten seconds later the phone in the room will ring, and a minute after that someone will knock on the door. I pulled the cord and dashed back to the door of the bathroom.

The next few minutes were rather nerve-racking, while I waited for security to arrive, and shuddered at the furious blows on the door, counting to myself and trying not to hurry. The Sikh was pounding as hard as he could, but I managed to hold him back without too much trouble - he wasn’t a large man.

The phone rang after exactly twenty seconds. Naturally, the Sikh didn’t answer it. When the blows stopped after a minute or two, I knew there were other people in the room. They were just in time - the door was already coming off its hinges. I heard the sound of furniture being overturned, the tinkle of broken glass and a garbled shout that sounded liked ‘kali ma!’ It was the Sikh shouting. Then there was silence, broken only by the distant honking of car horns.

‘That’s fucked it,’ said a man’s voice. ‘He’s a goner.’

‘Lucky he didn’t take us with him,’ said another voice.

‘True enough,’ the first voice replied.

It was better to let them know I was there myself than wait for them to find me. I called out in a plaintive voice:

‘Help!’

The door opened.

There were two hulks standing in the doorway of the bathroom - dark glasses, suits, flesh-coloured wires dangling from their ears . . . A regular cult of Agent Smith, I thought. And, incidentally, that would make a great religion for security men - after all, the Roman legionaries worshipped Mithras, didn’t they?

One of the security men began muttering to himself - the only words I could make out were ‘three nineteen’ and ‘call’. He was-n’t talking to me.

As far as I’m aware, their microphones are hidden behind the lapels of their jackets, and that’s why it often seems like they’re talking to themselves. Sometimes it looks very funny. I once saw one of these goons searching a woman’s toilet - opening the doors of the cabins and chanting: ‘There’s no one here . . . There’s no one here at all . . . The window’s blocked off by a party wall . . .’ If I hadn’t known what he was doing, I might have thought he was pining over some failed lovers’ assignation and pouring out his grief in iambic pentameters.

‘Did you pull the cord?’ the second security man asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but where’s . . .’

The security man nodded towards an open window. The glass was broken.

‘Over there.’

‘You mean . . .’ I said, making big round eyes, ‘he’s . . .’

‘Yeah,’ said the guard. ‘Came at us like a lunatic the moment he saw us. Was he doing drugs?’

‘What drugs? I’ve been working here for a year now. Everybody knows me, I’ve never had any problems.’

‘Well, now you do. What did he want from you?’

‘I didn’t really understand,’ I said. ‘He wanted me to give him something called a fisting. I said I didn’t know how, and then he started . . . Well, anyway, I hid in the bathroom and pulled the alarm. And you saw everything else.’

‘We sure did. Got any ID on you?’

I shook my head. Give your passport to these guys and you’ll never see it again.

‘Maybe I could go? Before the fuzz gets here?’

‘What do you mean, go? Are you crazy? You’re the main witness, ’ the security man said. ‘You’ll have to testify about what you were doing here.’

That definitely wasn’t part of my plans. I evaluated the situation. While there were only two of them there, I still had a chance of avoiding any hassle. But it was getting slimmer every second - I knew the room would soon be packed with people.

‘Can I go to the toilet?’

The security man nodded, and I went back into the bathroom. I had to act quickly, so I didn’t hesitate for a second. I dropped my pants and freed my tail, bent over and opened the door. I did it very abruptly, and the guards immediately turned to look at me.

I believe a man reveals what he’s really like in that second when he’s already seen a fox’s tail but not yet fallen under its hypnotic influence. A client usually has enough time to express his response to what he’s seen. And that’s enough to tell you who you’re dealing with.

All the crude, narrow-minded losers screw their faces up into grimaces of sullen disbelief. But the faces of people who have the potential for inner growth express something like delighted surprise.

One of the security men wrinkled up his forehead and frowned. The other gaped in amazement (I could see his eyes even through his dark glasses) and opened his mouth like a little child who’s just seen the birdie the photographer promised him. It looked really sweet.

Of course, I couldn’t completely remove my imprint from their memories - to do that to someone, you have to shoot them in the head with a pistol. All I could do was change the context of the memory - I planted the suggestion in their minds that they’d met me in the corridor on their way to the suite. Then I made them go into the bathroom. As soon as the door closed behind them, I picked Stephen Hawking’s book up off the floor, dropped it in my handbag, pulled up my trousers and skipped out into the corridor.

There was another security man standing on the stairs. When he saw me, he gestured for me to go over to him, and when I reached him, he ran his hand over my buttocks, forcing me to squeeze my tail in between them as tightly as I could. In any other situation the least he would have got for that was a bruise pinch. But right then it still wasn’t clear how everything was going to work out, so I just slapped him on the hand. He wagged his finger at me, and then this gesture flowed smoothly into a different one, as his index finger and thumb connected and started rubbing against each other.

I understood. Girls like me usually hand over a hundred dollars on the way out, but under the present circumstances of force majeure, it was being suggested that payment should be made on the spot. I took a portrait of Benjamin Franklin out of my purse and the guard grabbed it with the same finger and thumb that had just been rubbing against each other. There was a certain kind of beauty in the economy of movement - from threat to reminder to acceptance. As the Japanese swordsman Minamoto Musashi said: ‘You can tell a master from his stance.’

I walked down the stairs decorated with fleurs-de-lys and made it out into the street without any further adventures. A crowd, including several militiamen, had already gathered to the left of the exit - that was clearly where the unfortunate Sikh was lying. I walked in the opposite direction and a few steps later I was already round the corner. Now all I had to do was stop a taxi. One pulled over almost immediately.

‘Bitsevsky Park,’ I said. ‘The equestrian complex.’

‘Three hundred and fifty,’ the driver answered.

Today was his lucky day. I jumped into the back, sat down and slammed the door, and the taxi carried me away from the disaster that had seemed inevitable only five minutes earlier.

I had nothing to reproach myself for, but my mood had been spoilt. Apart from the fact that an entirely innocent man had died, I’d lost my job at the National - it wouldn’t be wise to show my face in there for the foreseeable future. That meant I’d have to look for other ways to earn a living. And starting from the very next day - my funds were running low, and the hundred dollars I’d given the security guard had thrown my budget into deficit.

An acquaintance of mine used to say that the evil in our lives can only be overcome by money. It’s an interesting observation, although not entirely flawless from a metaphysical point of view: what we should really talk about is not victory over evil, but the opportunity to buy it off temporarily. But without money evil is triumphant in just a couple of days, that’s proven fact.

I could have got rich, if I earned my living dishonestly. But a virtuous fox must support herself only by prostitution and never, under any circumstances, exploit her hypnotic gift for other purposes - such is the law of heaven, which it is not permitted to transgress. Of course, sometimes you have to. I myself had only just fuddled the brains of two security guards. But you can only do that kind of thing when your life and freedom are in danger. A fox should not even think about gullible money couriers. And if the temptation becomes too great, you have to inspire yourself with examples from history. Jean-Jacques Rousseau could have been swimming in money, but how did he earn a living? By copying out music.

Getting a spot in another hotel wasn’t easy, and for the foreseeable future I could only see two alternatives: streetwalking and the Internet. The Internet seemed more attractive, after all, it was at the cutting edge of modern progress, and selling myself on its fibre-optic sidewalks would be stylishly futuristic. How interesting, I thought, everybody’s always going on about progress. And what does it all mean? Just that the oldest professions acquire an electronic interface, that’s all. Progress doesn’t alter the nature of the fundamental processes.

The driver spotted my gloomy mood.

‘What’s up,’ he asked, ‘someone upset you, love?’

‘Aha,’ I said.

He’d been the last person to upset me, when he named a price of three hundred and fifty roubles for the journey.

‘Don’t you pay ’em any heed,’ said the driver. ‘You know how many times a day people upset me? If I thought about it every time, my head would be like a great big balloon full of shit. Pay ’em no heed, I tell you. By tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about it. And life’s a long business, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But how do you do that - pay no heed?’

‘Just don’t, that’s all. Think about something you enjoy instead.’

‘And where do I get that from?’

The taxi-driver squinted at me in the mirror.

‘Isn’t there anything you enjoy in your life?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘All nothing but suffering, is it?’

‘Yes, and so’s yours.’

‘Well, now,’ the taxi-driver laughed, ‘you can’t know about that.’

‘Yes, I can,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise.’

‘Why?’

‘I could explain. Only I don’t know if you’d understand.’

‘Well, get you!’ the driver snorted. ‘Do you think I’m more stupid than you are? I reckon I ought to be able to understand, if you can.’

‘All right. Do you understand that suffering is the material out of which the world was created?’

‘Why?’

‘That can only be explained with an example.’

‘Well, give me an example then.’

‘Do you know the story of Baron Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of a bog by his own hair?’

‘I do,’ said the driver, ‘I’ve even seen the film.’

‘The foundations underlying the reality of this world are very similar. Only you have to imagine Münchhausen suspended in a total void, squeezing his own balls as hard as he can and screaming in unbearable pain. Look at it one way and you feel kind of sorry for him. But look at it a different way, and he only has to let go of his own balls and he’ll immediately disappear, because by his very nature he is simply a vessel of pain with a grey ponytail, and if the pain disappears, then he’ll disappear as well.’

‘Did you learn that at school?’ the driver asked. ‘Or at home?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘It was on the way home from school. It’s a long journey, I get to see and hear all sorts of things. Did you understand the example?’

‘Sure I did,’ he replied. ‘I’m not stupid. So why’s your Münchhausen afraid to let go of his balls?’

‘I told you, then he’ll disappear.’

‘Maybe it would be better if he did? Who the hell needs a life like that?’

‘A good point. And that’s precisely why the social contract exists.’

‘Social contract? What social contract?’

‘Every individual Münchhausen can decide to let go of his own balls, but . . .’

I remembered the Sikh’s crayfish eyes and stopped. One of my sisters used to say that when a client slips off the tail during an unsuccessful session, for a few seconds he sees the truth. And for a man this truth is so unbearable that the first thing he wants to do is kill the fox responsible for revealing it to him, and then he wants to kill himself . . . But other foxes say that in that brief second the man realizes that physical life is a stupid and shameful mistake. And the first thing he tries to do is to thank the fox who has opened his eyes. And after that he corrects the error of his own existence. It’s all nonsense, of course. But it’s clear enough how these rumours get started.

‘But what?’ the driver asked.

I remembered where I was.

‘But when there are six billion Münchhausens holding each others’ balls arm over arm, the world is in no danger.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s very simple. Münchhausen can let go of himself, as you so correctly observed. But the more someone else hurts him, the more he hurts the two that he’s holding on to. And so on for six billion times. Do you understand?’

‘Shee-it,’ he said and spat, ‘only a woman could come up something like that.’

‘I have to disagree with you again,’ I said. ‘It’s an extremely male picture of the universe. I’d even call it chauvinistic. There’s no place in it for a woman at all.’

‘Why?’

‘Because women don’t have any balls.’

We drove on in silence.

No point in denying it, sometimes it happens that you lay something heavy on someone, and your own heart feels lighter for it. Why is that? It’s a mystery. Never mind, let him think a bit, it’s never done anyone any harm.

The next morning the business with the Sikh was in the news. It wasn’t what I went onto the net for, but some lousy worm had set my home page to ‘rumours.ru’ and I’d never got around to changing it. I forced myself to read the article right through to the end:

BUSINESSMAN FROM INDIA KILLS HIMSELF IN FRONT OF SECURITY GUARDS

The public will soon start thinking of the National hotel as a high-risk zone. With the terrorist attack that took place right outside its door still fresh in the memories of Muscovites, another alarming incident has just taken place: yesterday a forty-year-old businessman from the Indian state of Punjab killed himself by jumping from a fifth floor window. At least that’s the story of the two security guards employed by the hotel who were with him at the time the tragedy occurred. They claim that the guest from India summoned them by pulling the special alarm cord, and then when they entered the room, for no apparent reason he took a run and jumped out of the window. He was killed instantly when he hit the surface of the road. It has been established that shortly before his death the businessman had received a visit from a female denizen of the demi-monde.

Why the fifth floor, I wondered, when his suite was number 319? Ah yes, they had that swanky European way of numbering the rooms - the first two floors didn’t count, so number three nineteen was on the fifth floor . . .

Then my thoughts moved on to that mysterious French word ‘demi-monde’ - the ‘half-world’. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it the quarter-world? If you followed that method of word formation, consistently you could define the precise depths to which a woman had fallen. After two thousand years my denominator would probably have been pretty impressive . . .

And then suddenly, at long last, I started to feel ashamed of my own insensitivity. A man with whom I had, in a certain sense, been intimate, had died, and here I was counting floors and doing fractions. The intimacy may have been arbitrary, hallucinatory and temporary, but it was still appropriate to feel some compassion, even if it was as insubstantial as our intimacy had been. Yet I didn’t feel any at all - my heart flatly refused to generate it. Instead I started thinking again about the reasons for the previous day’s outrageous events:

1. The reason could lie in the astral background of the hotel National, where the dancer Isadora Duncan and the KGB’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky hung side by side in the photo-gallery of ‘honoured guests’.

2. What had happened could have been a karmic echo of one of those bloody business rituals they’re so fond of in Asia.

3. It was an indirect consequence of India’s recoil from the teaching of the Buddha in the Middle Ages.

4. The Sikh had been a worshipper of the goddess Kali after all - why else would he have shouted ‘kali ma’ as he threw himself out of the window?

I have to explain that sometimes I have as many as five inner voices, with each of them conducting its own inner dialogue: and as well as that, they can start to argue with each other over anything at all. I don’t get involved in the argument, I just listen and wait for a hint at the right answer. These voices don’t have any names, though. In that sense I’m a simple soul - some foxes have as many as forty of these voices with very long and beautiful names.

The old foxes say these voices belong to the souls that we consumed during the primordial chaos: according to legend, these souls made their home in our inner space by entering into a kind of symbiosis with our own essential nature. But that’s probably all just fairy tales, because every one of the voices is mine, although they’re all different. And if you follow the old foxes’ logic, you could say I myself am a soul that someone else consumed some time in the depths of ancient antiquity. All this is no more than pointless juggling with the various summands, it makes no difference to the sum total that is A Hu-Li.

These voices mean that foxes don’t think in the same way as people: the difference is that several thought processes develop in our minds instead of just one. The mind follows several different paths at the same time, keeping an eye open to see which will lead to the light of truth first. In order to convey this peculiarity of my inner life, I designate the various levels of my inner dialogue as 1), 2), 3) and so on.

These thought processes don’t intersect with each other in any way - they’re absolutely autonomous - but my consciousness is involved in each one of them. Some circus performers juggle a large number of objects at the same time. What they do with their bodies, I do with my mind, that’s all. This peculiarity means I have a tendency to draw up lists and break everything down into points and sub-points, even when, from the human point of view, there’s no real need for it. Please accept my apologies if you come across such lists broken down into points in these pages - it’s exactly the way everything happens inside my head.

Picturing the dead Sikh to myself as accurately as I could, I recited the requiem mantra three times and went to reuters.com to find out what was going on in the world. Everything in the world was just the same as it had been for the last ten thousand years. I rejoiced briefly in the headline ‘America Ponders Mad Cow Strategy’ and then went to my mail server.

Together with an invitation to increase the length of my sexual organ and a zip file that I didn’t open, despite the alluring subject of the message (‘Britney Blowing a Horse’), there was a quite unexpected pleasant surprise waiting for me - a letter from my sister E Hu-Li, who I hadn’t heard from for ages.

I had known sister E since the times of the Warring Kingdoms. She was a terrible rogue. Many centuries ago she was famous throughout the whole of China as an imperial concubine by the name of Flying Swallow. As a result of watching her fly, the emperor lived for twenty years less than he could have done. After that E Hu-Li was punished by the guardian spirits, and she began keeping a low profile, specializing in rich aristocrats, whom she milked dry in the peace and quiet of their country estates, away from the eyes of the world. For the last few hundred years she’d been living in England.

It was a very short letter:

Hi there, Ginger,

How are you? I hope everything’s going well. Sorry to bother you for such a trivial reason, but I need to consult you urgently about something. According to my information, in Moscow there’s a Shrine of Christ the Saver that was first demolished completely, leaving not a single stone in place, and then restored to look just the way it used to be. Is this true? What do you know about it? Please answer quickly!

Heads and tails,

E.

Strange, I thought, what’s all this about? But she had asked me to reply urgently. I clicked on the ‘reply’ button.

Hello, Carrot-Top,

Up here in the north everything’s still the same as ever. I’ll write in more detail some time, but meanwhile here’s the answer to your question. Yes there is a Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (that’s the correct form) in Moscow. It was blown up after the revolution and restored at the end of the last century. There really wasn’t a single stone left standing - for a long time there used to be a swimming pool where it had been. But now the swimming pool has been filled in and the cathedral has been built again. The cultural significance of this event is highly ambiguous - at one of the demonstrations I saw the slogan: ‘We demand the restoration of the Moscow swimming pool, barbarously destroyed by the cleptocracy!’ Since I personally have never visited either the first or the second facility, I have no opinion of my own on this subject.

Heads and tails,

A.

I sent the letter and went to the site whores.ru.

It looked very picturesque - even most of the pop-up ads were subject-related:

SEE PARIS AND LIVE!

DUREX ANAL EXTRA STRONG.

SUVs had appeared even among the condoms. The market was seeking out new approaches and niches: I came across ‘Occam’s Razor’ condoms with a portrait of the medieval scholast and the slogan: ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’ - ‘One should not multiply entities without necessity’. I used to know William of Occam personally. I remember him chasing me round his house in Munich, and two centuries after that the Reformation began - for some reason the two entirely unrelated events have fused together in my memory. But I had no time now for reminiscences - I had to compose an ad for myself quickly, and to do it I had to familiarize myself with already existing examples.

Fortunately, there was a huge number of them. I found one feature of the genre rather amusing: many of the girls brightened up their notices with a few inserts in verse that had nothing to do with the list of services on offer - it was a kind of verbal piercing, and I decided to have a go at it as well.

An hour later my text was ready. A demanding critic might perhaps have described it as an eclectic compilation, but I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself in literary circles. My announcement began like this:

I’m a bright and nimble maid,

Mistress of the intimate trade!

Just the way you like it, a bright smile and slender waist,

Service classical and anal, passion geared to every taste.

The second couplet, separated from the first by an empty line, was not linked to it by rhyme or rhythm - they were like two different earrings in the lobe of one ear. It looked and sounded really authentic, just like what the other girls did. The lines of verse were set in bold script and the information followed:

A FAIRY-TALE CUM TRUE!

Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do gentleman. Classic sex, deep and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian Knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral and anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave Girl services. Face control. Visits by arrangement. Many things are possible. Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can . . .

A fine little kitten, I thought when I reread what I’d written. I must admit I didn’t really understand what the bandage was doing in there and why anyone would want a sakura branch up his ass. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what fisting was, either, but judging from what the other announcements said, it was either oral or vaginal, which made it the same kind of filth as all the rest. I supposed it must mean shoving in the fist? Did that mean it could be per oris too? In one of the announcements I even saw the following list: ‘fellatio, PR, cunnilingus’. What did that mean? Or ‘strap-on’? It sounded like something cosmic, from the romantic sixties of the last century. But, fortunately, I didn’t have to know what strap-on was - the only thing needed was to introduce myself to the client.

I don’t think anyone but a fox can understand how I could provide a ‘strap-on’ service without even knowing what it is. It’s not easy to explain that kind of thing, all you can do is offer analogies. I sense a client’s consciousness as a warm, spongy sphere, and in order to send the poor soul into the world of his dreams, first I have to make a little dent in the very hottest spot of that sphere with my tail, and then make the little dent smooth itself out and ripple across the surface of the sphere. That will just be a strap-on. But if I gently force the dent to fold back over on to itself so that it becomes a tender little nipple, that will be the kind of strap-on the client will remember and drool over until his mind finally drowns in the cold ocean of Alzheimer’s disease.

The same thing applies to fisting, light domination and all the rest. If, say, you want to take an elderly transvestite with higher musical education and a gold tooth in his mouth, and beat him to death with a baseball bat, even then I can assist you with your dubious project. But it’s better for me not to know everything that’s going on in someone else’s mind - it’s easier to keep my own soul pure that way.

That’s why I had no doubts about my ability to cope with the list of services advertised, no matter what they might be. But there was still something missing in the text. I thought for a moment and then, after ‘A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from well-to-do gentleman’ I wrote in:

Transsexual, versatile, penis 26x4. Always following the rules means denying yourself all the pleasures! We need to know how to commit the follies that our nature demands of us.

Ah, if only they knew what our true nature is, I sighed, and took out ‘Transsexual’. As the chef of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich used to say, before the revolution: ‘You can’t spoil gruel with butter, but you can spoil butter with gruel.’ Something else was required . . . After thinking about it for a while, I decided to replace ‘Mistress and Slave Girl services’ with ‘Mistress, Slave Girl and Ray of Light services’. That didn’t impose any additional physical exertions on me, not even imaginary ones, but it opened up wide scope for fantasy.

Fantasy . . . A courtesan I used to know in China during the Late Han period often used to say that a man’s weak spot is the fantasies that fill his mind. When she got old, she was given to a nomad leader as severance pay, and he boiled the poor woman in mare’s milk, hoping to bring back her youth. A weakness can sometimes become a terrible strength.

I could have gone on improving the text ad infinitum - everyone knows that for a real poet the process continues until the moment the publisher calls round to collect the manuscript. In this case I had to collect the manuscript from myself. And so I decided to put a full stop after the final touchingly artless couplet at the end:

Turbulent stream, pining without affection,

I promise you a passionate connection!

I’d never worked with the site whores.ru before. The procedure for posting information turned out to be the same as on other similar facilities, but there was one unpleasant difference. Posting plain text cost 150 dollars, photographs were twenty apiece. I had three of the WMZ cards that they accepted for payment on the site - a hundred, a fifty and a twenty. Obviously the whole thing was set up to suit these values. I could only post one photo - or else I would have to go to the nearest Metro station for a new supply of Internet money. I decided to make do with one picture, but to send it immediately, so that in the morning it would already be hanging out there on the wires. But I still didn’t manage to send the photograph off quickly - I spent almost an hour choosing it.

The choice proved difficult because every alternative tinted the services in my list in a different hue, illuminating the strap-on and the fisting with new nuances of meaning . . . Eventually I settled on an old black and white photograph - me in front of a set of bookshelves, with a volume of Alexander Blok in my hands. The book was The Snow Mask, and the photo itself, taken in the 1930s, had a magical, mysterious air to it, as if it had captured the final glimmering of the Silver Age of Russian literature - which was very appropriate for the final service offered in my list. It was a good thing I’d had my most precious negatives and daguerrotypes digitized.

All that left me to do was choose my artistic pseudonym. I found a suitable list through Google and chose a name from the very beginning - Adele, which reminded me of the Russian word for hell - ‘ad’.

It was a good quality photo and it took up half a megabyte. I clicked on the ‘send’ button. My little face obediently smiled, shot through the wires into the wall, was swept into the telephone cable and skipped along the electrical backbone of the street, to be intertwined with the other names and faces hurtling along from God knew where to God knew where else, as it dashed towards the distant network gateway.

The call in response to the announcement came the next morning, shortly after eleven. The client’s name was Pavel Ivanovich. His interest had been caught by the line about the Russian knout. It turned out that he had his own Russian knout, in fact not just one of them, but five - four on a special carved wooden stand and one in his tennis bag.

Let me say straight away that I would quite happily have thrown all mention of Pavel Ivanovich out of my memoirs, but without him the narrative would be incomplete. He played an important part in my life, in the same way as a filthy, slimy pedestrian underpass might if the heroine happens to walk through it on her way to the other bank of the river of fate. And so I shall have to tell you about him, and I beg your forgiveness in advance for the unappetizing details. Some computer games have a ‘Tx2’ button, and after you press it time moves twice as fast as before. So now I’ll press my little ‘Tx2’ button and try to boil him down into the least possible volume.

I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years!’

When I first read about this, I felt envious that I didn’t have any similar practice in my life. But after I met Pavel Ivanovich I realized that now I did.

Pavel Ivanovich was an elderly scholar of the humanities who looked like a melted-down, hairy pink candle. Formerly he had been a right-wing liberal (I didn’t understand what this outrageous word-combination meant), but following the common trend he had repented to such an extent that he had assumed personal responsibility for all the woes of the motherland. In order to soothe his soul, he had to take a flogging once or twice a week from Young Russia, which he had condemned to poverty by forcing it to earn a living by flogging old perverts instead of studying in university. And so he was caught in a closed circle, which I might possibly have pondered on more deeply, if only he hadn’t masturbated during the session. That destroyed all the mystery.

If he’d had a real sex worker from somewhere in Ukraine as his own Young Russia, she would never have agreed to be paid only 50 dollars for a one-hour session. Flogging someone is hard work, even when the procedure is merely a hypnotic suggestion. However, I began going to Pavel Ivanovich’s place not just for the sake of the money, but also because he irritated me quite incredibly, provoking uncontrollable spasms of wild fury in me. I had to summon up all my willpower to keep myself in hand. For sheer practical reasons I ought to have gone for richer sponsors, but character has to be trained during the difficult periods of life, when the meaning of doing it is not obvious. That’s when it does the most good.

So that I could understand my part in what was going on, Pavel Ivanovich gave me a detailed account of all the reasons for his repentance. I was going to take another 50 dollars an hour for this understanding, and I was just waiting for the moment to come when I could bring up the matter of the extra charge. But it never came - Pavel Ivanovich spoke at exceptional length:

‘Between 1940 and 1946, my dear, the volume of industrial output in Russia fell by twenty-five per cent. And that was with all the horrors of war. But between 1990 and 1999 it slumped by over half . . . worse than Genghis Khan and Hitler taken together. And that’s not just commie propaganda and lies. It’s what Joseph Stieglitz writes - the chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel Prize winner. Have you read Globalisation and its Discontents? What a terrifying book! And America doesn’t even need the atom bomb, because it has the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund . . .’

I actually began to forget what I was doing there in his apartment, and only the leather knout lying on the table between us reminded me of it. It soon emerged that Pavel Ivanovich’s repentance was total, embracing not only the economic aspect of the Russian reforms, but also the cultural history of the last few decades.

‘Did you know,’ he said, staring keenly into my eyes, ‘that the CIA actually financed the beatnik movement and the psychological revolution? The goal was to create an attractive image of the West for our youth. They wanted to pretend that America has fun. So they did - and for a while they even believed it themselves. But the funniest thing of all is that all these children of LSD generals who tried KGB and strove so hard to copy the beatniks really were doing just what the CIA wanted, that is, they were committing the very sin the Party accused them of! And they were the future intelligentsia, the nerve system of the nation . . .’

In speaking of the intelligentsia’s debt of guilt to the nation, he kept using two terms that I thought were synonyms - ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘intellectuals’. After a while I just had to ask:

‘But what difference is there between a member of the intelligentsia and an intellectual?’

‘There’s a very big difference,’ he replied. ‘I can only try to explain it allegorically. Do you understand what that means?’

I nodded.

‘When you were still very little, there were a hundred thousand people living in this city who were paid for kissing the ass of a loathsome red dragon - which you probably don’t even remember . . .’

I shook my head. Once in my young days I really had seen a red dragon, but I’d already forgotten what it looked like - the only thing I could remember was my own fear. It was unlikely that Pavel Ivanovich had that incident in mind.

‘Of course, those hundred thousand people hated the dragon, and they dreamed of being ruled by the green toad who fought against the dragon. So, anyway, they came to an arrangement with the toad, poisoned the dragon with lipstick that they got from the CIA and started living a new life.’

‘But what have the intell -’

‘Wait,’ he said, raising his hand. ‘At first they thought that under the toad they would be doing exactly the same as before, only they’d get ten times as much money for it. But it turned out that instead of a hundred thousand ass-kissers there was only a demand for three professionals working in three eight-hour shifts to give the toad a never-ending royal blowjob. And which of the hundred thousand those three would be, would be decided by an open competition, in which candidates would not only have to demonstrate their advanced professional skills, but also the ability to smile optimistically with the corners of their mouths while they were at work . . .’

‘I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread.’

‘Well, this is the thread. Those hundred thousand people were called the intelligentsia. And those three are called intellectuals.’

I have one quirk that is rather hard to explain. I can’t stand it when anyone uses the word blowjob in my presence - outside the context of work, at least. I don’t know why, but it just drives me wild. And in addition, Pavel Ivanovich’s explanation seemed like such a crude, boorish hint at my own profession that I even forgot about the additional fee I’d been planning to ask for.

‘Are you talking about a blowjob so that I can understand? On the basis of my experience of life?’

‘Of course not, my dear,’ he said patronizingly. ‘I explain things in those terms because then I start to understand the point myself. And the point here is not your experience of life, but mine . . .’

The next time he started reading a magazine during his flogging. That was insulting enough. But when he started prodding the article with his finger and muttering, ‘Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, you bastard,’ I began to get annoyed and interrupted the procedure, that is, I planted the suggestion of a pause in his mind.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked in surprise.

‘Tell me, are we doing a flagellation here, or is this a library day?’

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, ‘this interview’s outrageous. It’s absolutely incredible!’

He slapped his fingers down on the magazine.

‘I’ve got nothing against detective novels, but I can’t stand it when the people who write them start explaining how we ought to arrange things in Russia.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just like some underage prostitute who’s been given a lift by a long-distance truck driver so she can give him a blowjob suddenly stops work, looks up and starts giving him instructions about how to flush the carburettor in a frost.’

Pavel Ivanovich clearly didn’t understand just how insulting that sounds in a conversation with a sex worker. But I became aware of my upsurge of rage before it overwhelmed me, so that my soul was immediately flooded with a calm joy.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked in a perfectly natural voice. ‘Maybe she’s serviced so many truckers that she’s picked up all the subtle points and now she really can teach him how to flush his carburettor.’

‘Darling, I pity the kind of truck drivers who need to take advice from an underage blowjob provider. They won’t get very far.’

‘An underage blowjob provider’ - that was what he said. Why, what a . . . I caught another outburst of fury in the very instant it began, and stopped the anger before it could manifest itself.

This was great. It was like jumping on to a surfboard during a storm and coasting along over the waves of destructive emotions that can’t even touch you. If only it had always been like this, I thought, so many people would have lived longer lives . . . I did-n’t argue with Pavel Ivanovich about the substance of what he said. It’s best if we foxes who follow the Supreme Tao don’t have any opinions of our own on such matters. But one thing was clear: Pavel Ivanovich was an invaluable exercise machine for training the spirit.

Unfortunately, I realized too late that the load was too heavy for me. The first time I lost control it didn’t lead to any injuries. I was driven wild by a phrase about Nabokov (not to mention the fact that he had a photocopy of an article entitled ‘The appearance of the hairdresser to the waiters: the phenomenon of Nabokov in American culture’ lying on his desk).

I had loved Nabokov since the 1930s, ever since I used to get hold of his Paris texts from highly placed clients in the NKVD. What a breath of fresh air those typed pages were in Stalin’s gloomy capital! I remember I was particularly struck by one place in the ‘Paris Poem’, which I didn’t come across until after the war:

Life is irreversible -

It will be staged in a new theatre,

In a different way, with different actors.

But the ultimate happiness

Is to fold its magic carpet

And make the ornament of the present

Match the pattern of the past . . .

Vladimir Vladimirovich wrote that about us foxes. That’s exactly what we do, constantly folding the carpet. We watch the endless performance played out by bustling human actors who behave as if they were the first people ever to perform on the stage. They all die off with incredible speed, and their place is taken by the new intake, who begin playing out the same old parts with the same old pomposity.

Of course, the scenery keeps changing, sometimes far too much. But the play itself hasn’t changed for a long, long time. And since we can remember more exalted times, we are constantly tormented by a yearning for lost beauty and meaning, so those words touched many strings at once . . . And by the way, that carpet from ‘Paris Poem’ was later inherited by Humbert Humbert:

Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?

What make is the magic carpet?

I know what make it is. It was woven in Paris on a summer day sometime around 1938, under gigantic white clouds frozen in the azure heavens, and it travelled to America in a roll . . . It took all the abomination of the Second World War, all the monstrosity of the choices that it dictated, for that carpet to be hung up in Humbert’s reception room . . . and then this scholar of the humanities blurts out:

‘Happiness, my darling, is such a contradictory thing. Dostoevsky questioned whether it was permissible if it was paid for by a child’s tear. But Nabokov, on the other hand, doubted whether happiness could ever be possible without it.’

I couldn’t tolerate a vile insult like that to a dead writer and threw the whip down on the floor. I mean I didn’t just stop making Pavel Ivanovich think he was being flogged, I made him see the whip hit the floor so hard that it left a dent in the parquet. I had to scrape it out afterwards by hand, when he went to the shower. I always avoid arguing with people, but this time I just exploded and started talking seriously, as if I was with another fox:

‘I feel insulted when someone confuses Nabokov with his characters. Or calls him the godfather of American paedophilia. That’s such a profoundly mistaken view of the writer. Remember this - Nabokov isn’t speaking for himself when he describes the forbidden charms of a nymphet at such length. He speaks for himself when he describes in meagre terms, in the very merest hint, the impressive financial resources that allow Humbert to freewheel round America with Lolita. A writer’s true heart speaks out very furtively . . .’

I remembered where I was and stopped. I took Lolita’s story very personally and very seriously. For me Dolores Haze was a symbol of the soul, eternally young and pure, and Humbert Humbert was the metaphorical chairman of this world’s board of directors. Apart from that, in the line of verse describing Lolita’s age (‘Age: five thousand three hundred days’) it was enough to replace the word ‘days’ with ‘years’ and it would more or less fit me. Naturally, I didn’t share that observation with Pavel Ivanovich.

‘Go on, go on,’ he said in amazement.

‘Of course, what the writer was dreaming about wasn’t a green young schoolgirl, but the modest financial security that would allow him to catch butterflies in peace somewhere in Switzerland. I see nothing shameful in such a dream for a Russian nobleman who has realized the vanity of the heroic feat of a human life. And the choice of subject for the book intended to provide that security offers less insight into the secret aspirations of his heart than what he thought about his new fellow-countrymen and just how indifferent he was to what they thought about him. And the fact that the book turned out to be a masterpiece isn’t hard to explain either - talent is hard to conceal . . .’

As I concluded this tirade, in my own mind I cursed myself, and with good reason.

I’m a professional impersonator of an adolescent girl with big innocent eyes. Creatures like that don’t utter long sentences about the work of writers from the last century. They talk simply in monosyllables, mostly about material, visible things. And now . . .

‘Well, didn’t you get carried away,’ Pavel Ivanovich muttered in astonishment. ‘Eyes blazing, eh? Where did you pick up all that stuff?’

‘Here and there,’ I said in a morose voice.

I swore a solemn oath to myself never to get into an argument about culture with him again, but only to exploit him for his proper purpose, as a gymnastic apparatus for developing my spiritual strength. But it was too late.

In modern society it is fatal to give way to social instincts acquired in other times, and in a culture that was very dissimilar. They’re like gyroscopes trained on a planet which was blown to bits: it’s best not to think where the course they indicate might lead to.

The people who lived in ancient China were highly spiritual. If I’d demonstrated that kind of knowledge of the classical canon to any scholar then, he’d have gone into debt in order to reward me with double pay and he would have sent a letter in verse to my home, bound to a branch of plum blossom. Perhaps my old memories had led me to expect something similar when I started talking to Pavel Ivanovich about Nabokov. But the result was quite different.

The next time we met, Pavel Ivanovich asked me to conduct the session on credit because he’d just bought a refrigerator. He expressed this request in the spirit of a secret accomplice, an old comrade tried and tested in journeys to the heights of the spirit. A poet borrowing a bottle of ink from a colleague might have spoken like that. I couldn’t refuse.

The new refrigerator took up almost half his kitchen, it looked like the tip of an iceberg that had broken through the side of a ship and smashed into the hold. But nonetheless the captain of the ship was drunk and jolly. I’d noticed a long time before that nothing delights a member of the Russian intelligentsia (Pavel Ivanovich could hardly make the grade as an intellectual) as the purchase of a new electrical household appliance.

I don’t like drunks, so I was acting a bit sullen. No doubt he put that down to the fact that the session was being conducted on credit, and he wasn’t particularly demanding. We got down to work in silence, like a pair of Estonian yachtsmen who have sailed together for ages: he handed me the tattered knout that he kept in the tennis bag with Boris Becker’s signature on it, got undressed, lay down on the sofa and opened a fresh copy of Expert magazine.

I guessed that what was going on had nothing to do with his disdainful attitude to my art, or even his love for the printed word. Clearly his contrition before Young Russia coexisted in his heart with other vibes about which I knew nothing, and he hadn’t revealed all of his secrets to me. But I felt no urge to penetrate his inner world beyond the depth that had been paid for, and so I didn’t ask any questions. Everything was going as usual - I was lashing his backside with an imaginary knout, thinking my own thoughts, and he was muttering quietly. Sometimes he would start to groan, sometimes to laugh. It was boring, and I felt like some odalisque in an oriental harem, waving away the flies from her master’s fat carcass with regular sweeps of a fan. Then suddenly he said:

‘Would you believe it, what a name for a lawyer - Anton Drill. How did he manage to survive with that . . . I bet the kids gave him hell in school . . . People with names like that grow up psychological deviants, it’s a fact. They all need help from a psychotherapist. Any expert can tell you that.’

Of course, I shouldn’t have got involved in the conversation - there was absolutely no point in taking the situation beyond the limitations of our professional relationship. The reason I didn’t hold back is that names are a sore point with me.

‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what name anybody has. I have a girlfriend, for instance, and she has a name that sounds very, very crude. So crude you’d laugh out loud if I told you it. It’s almost a swearword, you could say, that kind of name. But she’s a beautiful girl, clever and kind. A name’s not a prison sentence.’

‘Perhaps, my dear, you don’t know your friend very well. If her name has an obscene meaning, then it will come out in her life. Just you wait, it will manifest itself yet. Everything depends on the name. There’s a scientific hypothesis that every person’s name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. Do you understand what a suggestive command is? Do you at least have some idea about hypnotic suggestion?’

‘In general terms,’ I replied, and mentally lashed him a bit harder.

‘Ooh . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody’s psyche is programmed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said irritably. ‘No two people in the world with identical names are the same.’

‘Just as no two ants are the same. But nonetheless ants are divided into functional classes . . . No, a name is a serious thing. Some names are like time bombs.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Here’s a real-life story for you. There was a Shakespeare scholar called Shitman who worked in the Institute of World Culture. He was getting along just fine, until one day he decided to learn English so that he could read his author and benefactor in the original . . . And he wanted to go to England - “to see London and die” as he put it. He started studying. And after a few lessons he learned what “shit” means in English. Can you imagine it? If he’d been a chemistry teacher, for instance, it wouldn’t have been so awful. But for specialists in the humanities words mean a lot, Derrida pointed that out. It’s hard to serve the cause of the beautiful wearing a decoration like that in your buttonhole. He began to feel as if the people in the British Council were giving him queer looks . . . In fact, just then the British Council couldn’t care less about the local Shakespeare specialists, because they were being screwed by the tax police, but Shitman decided it was their personal attitude to him. As you can understand, my dear, when someone looks for confirmation of his paranoid ideas, he always finds it. Anyway, omitting all the sad details, he went insane in a month.’

By this point I was positively seething with rage. I felt he was trying to insult me, although there were no rational grounds for such an assumption - he couldn’t possibly know my true name. But I remembered that the most important thing was to stay in control. Which I managed to do perfectly well.

‘Really?’ I asked politely.

‘Yes. In the madhouse he wouldn’t talk to anyone, just yelled so the entire hospital could hear him. Sometimes he yelled “same shit, different day”, sometimes “same shite, different night”. He obviously hadn’t wasted his time studying English. In the end they took Shitman away in a car with military number plates - the special services needed him, let’s put it that way. And nobody knows what’s become of him now, or if they do know, they’re not telling. So much for a midsummer night’s dream, my little darling. And they say nothing depends on a name. But it does, and how. If your friend has an obscenity in her name, sooner or later her path leads to only one place. It’s the madhouse for her. And by the way, Shitman was lucky, the special forces found a use for him. You must have heard about our madhouses. You can get a blowjob for a cigarette in there . . .’

Spiritual training using a human irritant is like a game of chance in which everything is staked on the kitty. The winnings are very big. But if you can’t take the heat and you lose control, you lose absolutely everything else too. I could have put up with doing the session on credit, even with his theory of obscene names, if only he hadn’t thrown in that blowjob for a cigarette. I wasn’t prepared for that.

‘Sweetheart!’ Pavel Ivanovich screamed. ‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong? What are you doing, you snake? Militia! Anybody! Help!’

When he started calling for the militia, I came to my senses. But it was too late - Pavel Ivanovich had received three lashes that even Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been ashamed of. And even though those three lashes were only hypnotic, the blood that had started running down his back was real. Of course, I regretted what I’d done, but that always happens a second later than it ought to. And anyway, in my heart I played another cunning trick - knowing I would be overwhelmed by repentance at any moment, and adopting the inner stance of a repentant sinner, I said in a final vengeful, voluptuous whisper:

‘That’s for you from Young Russia, you stupid old fart . . .’

As I review my life now, I find many dark spots in it. But the sense of shame I feel for this is exceptionally keen.

Many shrines in Asia surprise the traveller by the contrast between the bare poverty of their empty rooms and the multilevel splendour of their roofs - with their upturned corners, precious carved dragons and scarlet tiles. The symbolic meaning here is clear: treasure should not be stored up on earth, but in heaven. The walls symbolize this world, the roof symbolizes the next. Look at the building itself and it’s a hovel. But look at the roof and it’s a palace.

I found the contrast between Pavel Ivanovich and his ‘roof’ - the modern Russian term for protection - equally fascinating, even though there was absolutely no spiritual symbolism involved. Pavel Ivanovich was merely a petty philological demon. But the roof over his head . . . But then, all in good time.

The call came two days after the lashing, at eight-thirty in the morning, too early even for a client with special oddities. The number that lit up didn’t mean a thing to me. I’d been up since four o’clock and already managed to get a lot of things done, but just in case I drawled in a sleepy voice:

‘Hello-o. . .’

‘Adele?’ a cheerful voiced asked. ‘I’m ringing about your advert.’

I’d already taken the announcement off the site, but someone could easily have saved it for future reference, clients often do that.

‘Let a girl get some sleep, eh?’

‘Triple rates for short notice. If you’re there in an hour.’

When I heard the words ‘triple rates’, I stopped being difficult and wrote down the address. One of my Latin American sisters told me that the Panamanian general Noriega liked to drink whisky non-stop all night long, and early in the morning he would send for one of the six women who he always had around him to have sex - my sister knew this, because she was one of them. But that’s Panama - cocaine and hot blood. For our latitudes such early morning passion was a little bit strange. But I didn’t sense any danger.

For the sake of speed I took the Metro and in fifty minutes I was already there. The client lived in the quiet centre of town. When I walked into the courtyard of the building I wanted (a tall concrete candle with pretensions to architectural originality), I thought at first that I’d made a mistake and this was the back entrance to some bank.

There were two guards standing by the metal gates in the wall. They looked at me in glum incomprehension and I showed them the piece of paper with the address on it. Then one them of nodded towards an unobtrusive porch with an intercom on it. I walked up to the intercom.

‘Adele?’ the voice in the speaker asked.

‘In person.’

‘Come up to the first floor, the last door,’ said the intercom. ‘You’ll see when you get here.’

The door opened.

It didn’t look much like a block of flats. There wasn’t any lift, or any real stairway either. That is, there was one, but it ended on the first floor, running straight up to a black door with no spy-hole or bell, but with the tiny lens of a TV camera glinting in the wall beside it. As if someone had bought up all the flats from the first floor up and made a single entrance. But that’s a vulgar comparison, owing to the absence of any legitimate culture of large-scale property ownership in Russia. I didn’t have to ring - as soon as I reached the door, it opened.

Standing in the doorway was a solidly built man of about fifty, dressed like a bandit from the nineties. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit, trainers and gold - a bracelet and a chain.

‘Come in,’ he said, then turned round and walked back down the corridor.

It was a strange place that looked like some kind of business premises. One of the doors in the corridor was half open. Through the gap I could see a nickel-plated metal pole that disappeared down through a circular hole in the floor. But the client closed the door and I didn’t get a good look at anything.

‘Come on in,’ he said, letting me past him.

The bedroom at the end of the corridor looked perfectly civilized, only I didn’t like the smell - it smelled of dog, quite unmistakably, like in some dogs’ love hotel. As well as a bed, the room contained a low coffee table with a drawer and two armchairs. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, with two glasses, and standing beside them was a telephone with a large number of keys and a blue plastic document folder.