The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘And you believe it?’

‘What?’

‘That this fairy tale is not about how love conquers everything on earth, but how defecation realizes its power over incest?’

‘Defloration,’ I corrected him.

‘It doesn’t matter. Is that what you really think?’

I thought about it.

‘I . . . I don’t think anything. That’s simply the contemporary discourse of folktales.’

‘So you’re saying that because of this discourse, when someone gives you a scarlet flower you think it’s a symbol of defecation and incest?’

‘No, don’t be like that,’ I replied, a little embarrassed. ‘When someone gives me a scarlet flower I . . . I’m simply pleased.’

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘And as for contemporary discourse, it’s high time to take an aspen stake and stuff it back up the cocaine-and-amphetamine polluted backside that produced it.’

I hadn’t expected such a sweeping generalization.

‘Why?’

‘So it won’t defile our little scarlet flower.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I understand about the cocaine. You mean Dr Freud. He did have that little peccadillo. But what have amphetamines got to do with it?’

‘I can explain,’ he said, and tucked his legs up underneath himself in a parody of my pose.

‘Okay, explain.’

‘All those French parrots who invented discourse were high on amphetamines all the time. In the evening they take barbiturates to get to sleep, and they start off the morning with amphetamines so they can generate as much discourse as possible before they start taking barbiturates to get back to sleep again. That’s all there is to discourse. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Where did you get information like that?’

‘There was a course at the FSB Academy about modern psychedelic culture. Counter-brainwashing. Oh yes, I forgot to say - they’re all queers too. In case you were going to ask what the backside had to do with anything.’

The conversation was headed in the wrong direction, and it was time to change the subject. I prefer to do that abruptly.

‘Alexander,’ I said, ‘explain to me, so I can understand, just what I’m doing here. Do you want to screw me or re-educate me?’

He shuddered, as if I’d said something terrible, leapt up off the divan and began striding backwards and forwards past the window - or rather, not the window, but a rectangle in the wall that was still transparent.

‘Are you trying to shock me?’ he asked. ‘You’re wasting your time. I know there’s a pure, vulnerable soul hiding behind your affected cynicism.’

‘Affected cynicism? You mean me?’

‘Not even cynicism,’ he said, stopping. ‘Flippancy. A failure to understand the serious things you’re playing with, like a little child with a hand grenade. Let’s talk frankly, to the point.’

‘Okay, let’s.’

‘You say - the bestial essence of man, the horror of the first coitus . . . These are such terrible, dark things. If you want to know, even I am sometimes afraid to glance into those abysses . . .’

He really was funny after all - ‘even I’. He went on:

‘But you talk about it all like it was just peanuts. Don’t you have any fear of the beast in a man? Of the man in the beast?’

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Mikhalich told you who I am, didn’t he?’ He nodded.

‘Well, then. If I had problems like that I wouldn’t be able to do my job.’

‘You’re not afraid of the intimate contact with someone else’s body - immense and ugly, living according to its own laws?’

‘I simply adore it,’ I said and smiled.

He looked at me and shook his head dubiously.

‘I mean physical intimacy? In the very lowest sense?’

‘For spiritual intimacy I charge an extra hundred and fifty per cent. How long can you go on chewing over the same thing? Do you always yatter on like this before you have a screw?’

He frowned.

‘There’s no need to talk to me as if I were a bandit. That’s because of the FSB uniform, is it?’

‘Maybe. Try taking it off. Including the trousers.’

‘Why do you talk that way?’

‘Don’t you find me at all attractive?’

I lowered my head and gave him an offended look from under my eyebrows, screwing my eyes up slightly and pouting my lips. I worked on that look for over a thousand years, and there’s no point in trying to describe it. It’s my own patented brand of provocation - brazenness and innocence in the same armour-piercing package: it zaps straight through the client and then ricochets back to get him again. The only effective protection I know against that gaze is to look in the other direction. Alexander was looking at me.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said with a nervous twitch of his head. ‘And how!’

I realized the critical moment had arrived. When the client jerks his head like that, the control centres of his brain are failing, and he can throw himself at you at any moment.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said. ‘Where is your bathroom here?’

He pointed to a round wall of blue semi-transparent glass. There was no door - the way in was through a passage that curled like a snail’s shell.

‘I’ll just be a moment.’

Once I was inside I took a deep breath.

It was beautiful on the other side of the wall. The gold stars on a blue background and the bath lined with mother-of-pearl reminded me of the baths at Pompeii - perhaps the designer had deliberately evoked that image. But the owner was unlikely to know about that.

It’s risky to push a client up so far so fast, I thought, some day it will end badly. And maybe Alexander was injecting something, like Mikhalich? Or taking something by mouth? There must be some reason for the strange way he kept sniffing the air like that . . .

I took off my jeans and put them on the floor, then took a look at myself in the mirror. My pride and joy was like a Japanese fan painted to look like a red brush. It was beautiful. And against the starry blue background it looked simple fabulous. I was more sure of my powers than I had ever been - I was simply brimming over with energy, just a little bit more and the hairs of my tail would have started shooting out little balls of lightning. I remembered the funny Russian saying ‘to hold your tail like a pistol’, meaning to keep your spirits up. I don’t know where it came from, but a fox must have been involved one way or another. Well then, I thought, all guns blazing . . .

When I reached the way out, I prepared for take-off by taking a few deep breaths, seized that one and only right moment when every cell in your body says ‘Now!’ and hurtled out of the bathroom like a tornado.

After that there was no time to think. I braked, turned my backside to the target, thrust my hands and feet hard against the floor and curved my tail above my head. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the mirror surfaces - I looked like a menacing red scorpion prepared for battle . . . Alexander raised his eyes to look at me, but before he could even blink, my tail had delivered its precise, perfectly aligned, impeccably accurate blow to the very centre of his brain.

He put his hand over his eyes, as if to protect them against a blinding light. Then he lowered his hand and our eyes met. Something was happening that wasn’t right. My tail simply was-n’t able to sense him - and he was standing just a few steps away and looking at me as if he couldn’t believe that anything so beautiful could possibly exist in all the world.

‘Adele,’ he whispered, ‘my darling . . .’

And then the nightmare began.

He staggered, made a terrible howling sound and literally fell out of his own body - as if it were a bud that opened up into a sinister, shaggy flower in just a few seconds. It turned out that the man who was called Alexander was no more than a drawing on a door into the beyond. Now that door had opened, and the creature who had been watching me through the keyhole for a long time had come tumbling out.

Standing there in front of me was a monster, something halfway between a man and a wolf, with gaping jaws and piercing yellow eyes. At first I thought Alexander’s clothes had disappeared. Then I realized that his tunic and trousers had been transformed together with him: his torso was covered with ash-grey fur, but his hind legs were darker, and I could see the irregular traces of the stripes on them. There was an elongated mark on the beast’s chest, like the imprint of a tie that has slipped to one side. When my gaze moved lower I was horror-struck. I’d never seen how that place looked on a wolf that was aroused. And to my mind it looked more terrible than any gaping jaws.

At that point I realized I was still standing on all fours with my tail up in the air and my defenceless behind stuck out in his direction. Defenceless, because my antenna wasn’t working and I had nothing to stop him with. I could guess how my pose might be interpreted, but I was paralysed - instead of jumping back, I kept looking at him over my shoulder. That happens in some dreams - you need to run away fast, but instead you go on standing there and there’s just no way you can lift your leaden feet off the ground. I couldn’t even wipe the idiot grin off my face - like a burglar caught on the job.

‘’Grr-rra-rra,’ he said. ‘Gr-rrrrra...’

‘Hey, bro,’ I babbled, ‘wait. I’ll explain everything . . .’

He growled and took a step towards me.

‘Don’t you even think about it, all right? I’m serious, you big grey wolf, slow down . . .’

He fell gently on to his front paws or hands and took another step towards me. Entirely different words were required. But where could I find them?

‘Listen . . . Let’s discuss everything calmly, eh?’

He grinned, opening his jaws wide and raising his huge grey tail, almost copying my working pose.

‘Wait, grey beast,’ I whispered, ‘don’t . . .’

He jumped, and for a second I thought the world had been covered by a terrible, low storm cloud. The next moment the cloud collapsed on top of me.

Lying on the divan, covered with something like the skin of an albino mammoth, I sobbed into the pillow, unable to understand how there could have been so many tears inside me - the pillow was already soaked on both sides.

‘Ada,’ Alexander said and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘Go away, you monster,’ I sobbed and shook his hand off.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said timidly, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘I said go away, you dirty animal.’

I burst into floods of tears again. A minute or two later he tried to touch my shoulder again.

‘I asked you three times,’ he said.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘What do you mean? I told you. About the bestial body, about physical intimacy. Didn’t I?’

‘How was I supposed to guess?’

‘Well, for instance, from the smell.’

‘Foxes don’t have any sense of smell.’

‘I understood all about you straight away,’ he said, stroking my arm awkwardly. ‘In the first place, people don’t smell like that. And in the second place, Mikhalich has been dinning it into my ears. “Comrade lieutenant general, I’ve looked at the recording - you’ve got to sort this dame out properly. She stands on all fours, with her eyes blazing, I’ve never seen eyes so terrible, and on her back she has this huge red lens. And she uses that lens to burn right through our consultant’s brain! She turned the beam on him, and he was totally zonked . . .” At first I thought the ketamine had sent him totally insane. But then I watched the recording, and there it was . . . He took your tail for a lens.’

‘What recording’s that?’

‘Your client, the one you lashed until he bled, was shooting amateur porn. With a concealed camera.’

‘What? When I was working on credit?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, that’s your business. As soon as he came round he brought the tape to us.’

‘The fucking intelligentsia,’ I said, unable to restrain myself.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘not very nice. But that’s what people are like. You mean Mikhalich didn’t show you the photos? He had a whole file of them, specially printed for your conversation.’

‘He didn’t have time . . . You mean Mikhalich is going to watch all the vile things you just did with me?’

‘I don’t have a single camera here, relax, my darling.’

‘Don’t call me darling, you beast,’ I sobbed. ‘You filthy depraved male. Nobody’s done that to me in the last . . .’ - for some reason I suddenly decided not to mention any dates - ‘ever done that to me in my life. How vile!’

He pulled his head down into his shoulders, as if he’d been lashed with a wet rag. That was curious - although my tail apparently had no effect on him, it seemed that my words affected him quite powerfully. I decided to test this observation.

‘I’m so tender and delicate down there,’ I said in a pitiful voice. ‘And you’ve torn everything with your huge prick. I’ll probably die now . . .’

He turned pale, unbuttoned his tunic and took a huge nickel-plated pistol out of its holster. I was afraid he was going to shoot me, the way Robert De Niro shot that tedious woman he was talking to in Tarantino’s film, but fortunately I was wrong.

‘If anything happens to you,’ he said in a serious voice, ‘I’ll blow my brains out.’

‘Put it away,’ I said, ‘put it away . . . So what if you do blow your stupid brains out? What good will that do me? I told you, don’t!’

‘I thought,’ he said quietly, ‘that you were just being coy.’

‘Coy? Your dick is three times the size of that pistol, you wolf! I wasn’t being coy, I just wanted to stay alive! Nowadays they even teach children in school that if a girl says “No”, it means precisely “No”, and not “Yes” or “Oh, I don’t know”. All the rape cases in the West are centred round that. Didn’t they explain that in the FSB Academy?’

He shook his head dejectedly from side to side. It was a pitiful sight. I felt the time had come to stop, or I might overdo it. That recollection of Tarantino had been no accident.

‘Do you have some bandages and iodine?’ I asked in a weak voice.

‘I’ll send Mikhalich,’ he said, jumping to his feet.

‘I don’t want Mikhalich here! The last thing I need is Mikhalich giggling over me . . . Can’t you go to the chemist’s yourself?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘And don’t let that Mikhalich of yours come in here while you’re gone. I don’t want anyone to see me in this state.’

He was already at the lift.

‘I’ll be quick. Hold on.’

The door closed behind him and I breathed a sigh of relief.

As I’ve already said, foxes don’t have any sexual organs in the human sense. But we do have a rudimentary cavity under our tails, an elastic bag of skin that’s not connected with any other organs. It’s usually squeezed into a narrow slit, like the bladder of a deflated football, but when we experience fear it expands and becomes slightly moist. It plays the same role in our anatomy as a special hollow plastic cylinder does in the equipment of employees in a great ape reserve.

The great apes employ the same technologies of social control as are found in criminal and political circles: the males who are in charge ritually humiliate other apes who they think are aspiring to an unjustifiably high status. Sometimes outsiders like electricians and laboratory workers find themselves in this role (I mean in special reserves). In readiness for such a turn of events, they carry an empty plastic cylinder suspended on straps between their legs, and this cylinder is known by the glorious name of a ‘prick-catcher’. It is their guarantee of safety: if a large male obsessed by a sense of social justice jumps them, all they have to do is bend over and wait a few minutes - while the ape’s indignation is expended on the cylinder. Then they can continue on their way.

And now I could do the same - continue on my way.

It led me into the bathroom, where the first thing I did was to examine my body. Apart from the fact that the rudimentary cavity under my tail was chafed and reddened, there was no problem. True, my posterior section ached as if I’d been riding a crazed horse for at least an hour (which was a fairly accurate description of what had happened), but that couldn’t really be called an injury. Nature had definitely prepared foxes for encounters with werewolves.

I’d sensed earlier that I would have to wash myself in his mother-of-pearl bath - and my premonition had not deceived me. My entire tail, back, stomach and legs were covered in that wolf’s filthy muck, which I carefully washed off with shampoo. Then I quickly dried my tail with a hairdryer and got dressed. It suddenly occurred to me that it would be a good idea to search the premises.

There was practically nothing to search in that luxurious, empty barn of a place - no cupboards, no sideboards, no drawers that opened. The doors leading into the other rooms were locked. But even so, the results of the search were interesting.

Standing on the desk beside the elegant all-in-one computer was a massive silver object that I had taken at first glance for a figurine. On closer inspection the object turned out to be a cigar clipper. It was a figure of Monica Lewinsky lying on her side with one leg raised towards the ceiling to act as a lever, and when it was pressed (I couldn’t resist it) not only did the guillotine in the ring between her thighs snap into action, but a tongue of blue flame appeared out of her open mouth. It was a great little gadget, to my mind the only superfluous touch was the American flag that Monica was holding in her hand: sometimes just a tiny weight is enough to shift the balance and transform a piece of erotica into kitsch agitprop.

The silver Monica was holding down a big loose-leaf binder on the desk. Inside it there was a pile of very different-looking papers.

To judge from its high gloss, the paper lying on the very top was a page from some illustrated art book. Staring out at me from it was a huge, yellow-eyed wolf with a rune that looked like the letter ‘F’ on his chest - it was a photograph of a sculpture made of wood and amber (the eyes were the amber part). The caption said:

FENRIR: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin. Fenrir is bound until Ragnarek. At Ragnarek he will kill Odin and be killed by Widar.

It wasn’t clear from the caption just how Fenrir was going to catch the sun and devour it, if he was bound until Ragnarek, and Ragnarek would start when he caught the sun and devoured it. But then, it could well be that our world had only continued to exist so far thanks to inconsistencies of that kind: it was frightening to think just how many dying gods had cursed it.

I remembered who Fenrir was. He was the most fearsome brute in the Nordic bestiary, the central character of Icelandic eschatology: the wolf who would eat the gods when the northern project was shut down. I wanted to believe that Alexander did-n’t identify too closely with this creature, that the yellow-eyed monster was simply an unattainable aesthetic ideal, something like a photo of Schwarzenegger hanging on the wall in a novice bodybuilder’s room.

Further down the pile there was a page from a book with Borges’s miniature piece ‘Ragnarek’. I knew the story, which had astounded me with its somnambulistically precise depiction of something important and terrible. The hero and his friend witness a strange procession of gods returning from centuries of exile. A wave of human adoration carries them out on to a stage in a hall. They look strange:

One was holding a branch, something out of the uncomplicated flora of dreams; another flung a clawed hand forward in a sweeping gesture: Janus’s face glanced repeatedly at Tot’s crooked beak with a certain apprehension.

A dream echo of fascism. But then something very interesting happens:

Probably roused by the applause, one of them - I don’t remember now exactly who - suddenly broke into a triumphant screeching, unbearably harsh, as if he were either whistling or clearing his throat. From that moment everything changed.

From then on the text was covered with marks and notes. Words were underlined, framed with exclamation marks and even ringed - evidently to convey the relative intensity of emotion:

It began with the suspicion (evidently exaggerated), that the Gods could not talk. Centuries of wild and nomadic life had destroyed in them all that was human: the Islamic crescent moon and the Roman cross had shown no condescension to the exiled. The low sloping foreheads, yellow teeth and thin moustaches of mulattoes or Chinese and the out-turned lips of animals spoke of the decline of the Olympic breed. Their clothing was out of keeping with their modest and honest poverty and put me in mind of the dismal chic of the gambling houses and bordellos of Bakho. A carnation bled out of a buttonhole. The outline of a knife-handle was discernible beneath a close-fitting jacket. And then we realized that !they were playing their last card!, that they were !cunning, blind and as cruel as mature, powerful beasts when they are flushed out of the bushes!, and - !IF WE GAVE WAY TO FEAR OR COMPASSION - THEY WOULD ANNIHILATE US!

And then each of us took out a heavy revolver (the revolvers appeared from somewhere in the dream) AND WE SHOT THE GODS WITH DELIGHT.

After that there were two pages from the Elder Edda - apparently from a prophecy by Velva. They had been torn out of some gift edition: the text was printed in large red script on glazed paper in a very wasteful manner:

The wind raises

Waves to the sky,

Casts them on to the land,

The sky grows dark;

The blizzard hurtles along,

Swirling furiously:

These are the portents

Of the death of the gods.

‘The death of the gods’ in the last line had been underscored with a fingernail. The message of the text on the second page was equally morose:

But there is yet to come

The most powerful of all,

I dare not speak

His name;

Few are those who know

What will come to pass

Following the battle

Between Odin and the Wolf.

All the rest was in the same vein. In one way or another most of the papers in the file related to northern myth. The one I found most depressing was a photograph of the German submarine Nagelfahr - in Scandinavian mythology that was the name of the god Loki’s ship, which was made out of the nails of the dead. A highly appropriate name for a Second World War submarine. The unshaven crew members smiling from the bridge looked perfectly likeable - they reminded me of a detachment of modern ‘greens’.

As I got closer to the end of the file, there were fewer marks on the sheets of paper: as if the person who had been leafing through them and thinking about the collection of material had rapidly lost interest or, as Borges put it in a different story ‘a certain noble impatience’ had prevented him from leafing through all the way to the end. But the guy’s pretensions had been serious, especially by the standards of our mercenary times (‘the age of swords and pole axes’ as it was described in one of the extracts in the file, ‘the time of cursed wealth and great lechery’).

The last item in the file was a lined page torn out of a school exercise book. It had been inserted into a transparent plastic envelope to protect it. The handwritten text on the page was something like a gift dedication:

To Sashka, a memento.

Transform!

WOLF-FLOW!

Colonel Lebedenko

I closed the file and put it back under Monica, then continued with my search. I wasn’t surprised when I found several CDs beside the music centre, all with various performances of the same opera:

RICHARD WAGNER

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

Götterdämmerung.

The next curious item that caught my eye was a thick, grey notebook. It was lying on the floor between the wall and the divan - as if someone had been looking through it before going to bed, fallen asleep and dropped it. On its cover was written:

‘Shitman’ Project

Top secret.

Copy No. 9

not to be removed from the building

At that moment I didn’t make any connection between this strange title and the story about the Shakespeare specialist that Pavel Ivanovich had told me. My thoughts followed a different route - I decided it was yet another proof of the power of American cultural influence. Superman, Batman, another couple of similar films, and the mind begins to stereotype reality in their image and likeness. But then, I thought, what could Russia put up against this? The Shitov Project? Who would be willing to spend nights sweating over that for low pay? That Shitov in a poor suit had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire. The substance of life doesn’t change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper. Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality . That’s the reason for all the disasters . . .

I didn’t even bother to open the notebook. I’d had a horror of secret documents ever since Soviet times: they did you no good and they could snow you under with problems, even if you had FSB protection.

My eye was caught by several graphic works on paper that were hanging on the walls - runes that had been roughly drawn with either a broad brush or a paw. They reminded me a bit of Chinese calligraphy - the crudest and most expressive examples. Hanging between two of these runes there was a branch of mistletoe - I learned that from the caption on the wall: to look at, it was simply a dry, pointed stick.

The design on the carpet was curious, it showed a battle between lions and wolves - it looked like a copy of a Roman mosaic. The books on the only bookshelf were mostly massive illustrated editions (The Splendour of Rome, The New Revised History of the Russian Soul, The Origin of Species and Homosexuality and other, simpler titles about cars and guns). But then, I knew that the books on shelves like that had nothing to do with the taste of their owners, because they were chosen by the interior designers.

Having concluded my inspection, I went across to the glass door on to the roof. The view from there was beautiful. Down below were the dark pits of pre-Revolutionary courtyards improved by restoration work. Towering up above them were a few new buildings of the phallic architecture - an attempt had been made to insert them smoothly and gently into the historical landscape, and the result was that they looked as if they were smeared with some kind of personal lubricant. After them came the Kremlin, proudly thrusting up to the clouds its ancient dicks with the gold balls sewn into their tops.

This damned job, I thought, it’s terrible how badly it’s perverted my perception of the world. But then, has it really perverted it all that much? It’s all the same to us foxes - we pass through life and barely touch it, like a light shower of rain in Asia. But to be a human being here is hard. Take one step away from the secret national gestalt, and this country will screw you over. A theorem that has been proved by every life followed through to the end, no matter how many glamorous coverlets you spread over the daily festival of life. I should know, I’ve seen plenty of it. Why? I have my own suspicions, but I won’t go into the subject. People probably aren’t simply born here by chance, it’s no accident . . . And no one is able to help anyone else. Could that be the reason why Moscow sunsets always make me feel so sad?

‘A great view from up here, isn’t it?’

I swung round. He was standing by the door of the lift with a tightly packed plastic bag in his hand. The design on the bag was a green snake wound around a medical chalice.

‘There wasn’t any iodine,’ he said anxiously, ‘they gave me fuxidine. Said it was the same, only orange. I think that’s even better for us - it won’t stand out so much beside the tail . . .’

I felt like laughing and turned away towards the window. He walked across and stood beside me. We looked at the city for a while without speaking.

‘It’s beautiful here in summer,’ he said. ‘Put Zemfira on the player, watch and listen: ‘Goodbye, beloved city . . . I almost found a place among your annals . . . What do you think she meant - something like she’s been in deep shit for far too long?’

‘Don’t try to soft-soap me.’

‘You seem to be feeling better.’

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘But . . .’

He nodded towards the plastic bag.

‘No need, thanks. When they bring you in a wounded comrade, you’ll be able to treat him. I’m off.’

‘Mikhalich will drive you.’

‘I don’t want your Mikhalich, I’ll manage.’

I was already at the lift.

‘When can I see you?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t die, call in three days.’

After copulation, all animals are sad - so the ancient Romans used to say. Apart from foxes, I would have added. And apart from women. I knew that for certain now.

I don’t mean to say that women are animals. Quite the contrary - men are much closer to the animals in every respect: the smells they give off and the sounds they make, their type of physicality and the methods they use to fight for personal happiness (not to mention what they actually think of as happiness). But the ancient Roman who described his own mood after the act of love in metaphorical terms was evidently such an entirely organic sex-chauvinist that he simply failed to take woman into account, and that means I have to restore justice.

Generally speaking, there could be at least four explanations for this saying:

1. the Romans didn’t think woman was even an animal.

2. the Romans thought woman was an animal, but they copulated with her in a way that really did make her sad (for instance, Suetonius tells us that the law forbade the killing of virgins by strangulation, and the executioner used to ravish them before the execution - how could you help feeling sad?).

3. the Romans didn’t think woman was an animal, they assumed that only man was. For this noble view of things, the Romans could be forgiven a great deal - apart, of course, from those foul-ups of theirs with virgins and strangulation.

4. the Romans had no penchant for either woman or metaphor, but they did for livestock cattle and poultry, who did not reciprocate and were unable to conceal their feelings.

There could be an element of truth in each of these explanations - no doubt all sorts of things happened in the course of several centuries of empire. But I was a happy animal.

For the last fifteen hundred years I’d had an old maid complex - not, of course, in relation to human beings, to whose opinion I was profoundly indifferent, but within our small community of foxes. It had sometimes seemed to me that I was the butt of secret mockery. And there were good grounds for these thoughts of mine - all my sisters had lost their virginity in ancient times, in the most varied of circumstances. The most interesting story was what had happened to sister E - she had been set on a stake by a nomad leader, and she had honestly acted out her agony for three days. She had to wait until the nomads drank themselves into a stupor before making good her escape into the steppe. I suspected that this was the origin of the insatiable hatred for the aristocracy she had manifested for so many centuries in her most whimsical escapades . . .

But even so I was just a little bit sad. As the grammar-school girl Masha from Nikolaev, one of my colleagues on the game in the year 1919, said, there’s a good angel who abandons us when we lose our virginity. But the sadness I felt was radiant, and on the whole I was in an excellent mood.

There was one suspicion clouding it, though. I had the feeling that I’d been treated the same way I had been treating others all my life. Perhaps the whole thing was a suggestion that had been planted in my mind? It was pure paranoia - we foxes can’t be hypnotized. But there was a certain vague unease gnawing at my heart.

I couldn’t understand the transformation that Alexander had gone through. Foxes also undergo a supraphysical tranformation, which I will tell you about later. But it never goes so far - what Alexander had done was mind-blowing. There was an ancient mystery still alive in him, something that foxes had already forgotten, and I knew that I would keep coming back to it in my thoughts for a long time.

And I was also afraid that the loss of virginity might affect my ability to implant suggestions. I had no grounds for any such concerns, but irrational fear is always the hardest to shake off. I knew I wouldn’t calm down until I’d tested my powers. And so when the phone rang with an offer, I decided right away to go.

From his manner of speaking the client sounded to me like a bashful student from the provinces who had saved up enough money for a ritual of farewell with his childhood. But something in his voice made me check the number that lit up against the database I keep in my computer. It turned out to be the nearest militia station. Obviously the fuzz were calling me out for a subbotnik - a working Saturday in honour of the spring - the kind of event I simply couldn’t stand ever since Soviet times. But today I decided to enter the beast’s lair voluntarily.

There turned out to be three cops. There was no shower-room in the station, and I had to prepare myself for battle in a toilet with a cracked toilet-bowl that reminded me vividly of the Cheka’s place in Odessa during the revolutionary years (they used to hold people’s heads down over a toilet bowl like that when they executed them - to avoid getting blood on the floor). My fears, of course, proved entirely unfounded - all the militiamen sank into a trance just as soon as I raised my tail. I could have gone back to the equestrian complex, but an interesting idea occurred to me.

Early that morning I’d been thinking about Rome and remembering Suetonius, and clearly that was the reason for my sudden flash of ingenuity. I remembered a story about Tiberius’s orgies in Capri: it mentioned the so called ‘spintrii’, who inflamed the ageing emperor’s sensuality by conjoining themselves three at a time in front of him. This story fired my imagination - in my own mind I even translated ‘Splinter Cell’ (the title of an innocent computer game about Tom Clancy) as meaning ‘The Sect of the Splintrii’. Now that I found myself in the company of three moral outsiders, I couldn’t resist trying an experiment. And I managed it perfectly! Or rather, they did. Though I must say, I failed to understand what Tiberius found so arousing in this crude spectacle - to my mind it looked more like an illustration of the first noble truth of Buddhism: life is dukha - suffering and pain. But I already knew that, without a triad of copulating militiamen.

In the station I discovered four thousand dollars, which could-n’t have come at a better time. And as well as that, I came across a scholarly large-format volume on criminal tattoos, with photographs, which I enjoyed leafing through. The tendency that this genre had followed in its evolution matched the development of world culture perfectly: religious consciousness was reclaiming the positions it had lost in the twentieth century. Naturally, the manifestations of this consciousness were not always recognizable at first sight. For instance, I didn’t immediately realize that the words ‘SWAT SWAT SWAT’ tattooed under a blue cross that looked more like a German military award than a crucifixion were not meant to be the name of the Los Angeles Police Department’s special assault force, but the Russian phrase ‘Svyat, Svyat, Svyat’ (meaning ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’) written in Latin letters.

The photograph that made the biggest impression on me was a man’s back with a diptych depicting heaven and earth. Heaven was located between his shoulder-blades — the sun was shining and there were angels who looked like postal pigeons flying about. The earth level looked like the official crest of Moscow, with the dragon-killer mounted on his steed, except that instead of a lance, there was a bundle of different-coloured rays emerging from the horseman’s hand, and there were lots of little dragons - spiteful little ones, crooked squashed ones and some who looked quite nice, all crawling along an alleyway planted with trees. The whole scene was entitled ‘Saint George driving the lesbians off Tverskoi Boulevard’.

Flicking through several pages with the traditional Stalins, Hitlers, snakes, spiders and sharks (under one of them it said ‘deep is my motherland’, instead of ‘broad is my motherland’ as in the old patriotic song), I came across the religious theme again: someone’s back decorated with a panoramic view of hell with sinners in torment. I was especially impressed by Bill Gates being devoured by worms and Bin Laden blazing on a bonfire in a frivolous white T-shirt with the emblem:

The final page showed a pale, dystrophic shoulder with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, in which the cap of the mushroom had been replaced by the NIKE streak with the word NUKE in it - evidently a memory of the future.

With the groaning and panting of the spintrii in the background, all this seemed particularly dismal. Where was humanity going? Who was leading it? What was going to happen on earth in fifty years? A hundred years? My springtime mood was spoiled, despite the good haul I’d made. But at least my conscience was clear. I didn’t consider that I was stealing anything - I’d just taken payment for my services. The fuzz had got their sex, I’d got my money - and I’d never concealed the fact that my prices were high.

On the way home I thought about tattoos. I like them, but I almost never have any done. On foxes they don’t last more than twenty years. And apart from that, they often blur in the weirdest way. It’s something to do with the rather different nature of our physical being. In the whole of the last century, I only had one tattoo - two lines that the poet W. H. Auden burned into my heart for ever, and the one-eyed tattooist Slava Kosoi inscribed temporarily on my shoulder:

I am a sex machine.

And I’m super bad.

Below the words there was a large blue tear, which for some reason my clients used to take for either an onion or an enema syringe - as if the inhabitants of the shabby Soviet paradise really didn’t know what it was to be sad.

That tattoo caused me a whole heap of problems - during the struggle against the Soviet Teddy boys - the ‘stilyagi’ - I used to get stopped all the time by the fuzz and the public order squads, who wanted to know what that inscription was in the language of the supposed enemy. I had to work a few Saturday freebees a lot tougher than this one. In short, they put me right off the idea of wearing sleeveless dresses. I still avoid them, even today, although the tattoo faded away ages ago, and the supposed enemy crept up unnoticed and became a supposed ally just as soon as the dust had settled a bit.

When I got home I switched on the TV and tuned in to the BBC World Service. First I watched their review of the Internet, presented by a guy who looked like an immoral version of Bill Clinton, and then the news began. I could tell from the presenter’s dynamic expression that they had a good catch.

‘Today in London an attempt was made on the life of the Chechen essayist in exile, Aslan Udoev. A terrorist suicide bomber from a militant Shiite organization tried to blow him up. Aslan Udoev himself escaped with a minor concussion, but two of his bodyguards were killed at the scene.’

The camera showed the cramped office of a police official who carefully measured out his words into the black gun-barrel of a microphone:

‘We know that the assailant attempted to get close to Aslan Udoev when he was feeding the squirrels in St James’s Park. When Udoev’s guards spotted the terrorist, he detonated his bomb . . .’

A correspondent appeared on the screen - he was standing on a lawn, with the wind ruffling his yellow hair.

‘According to other sources, the device went off prematurely, before the suicide bomber had reached his target. The explosion took place at precisely twelve noon GMT. However, the police have so far declined to make any comment. Witnesses to the event said that before the explosion, instead of the usual “Allah u Akbar”, the suicide bomber shouted “Same Shiite, Different Fight!” But on this point the testimony of witnesses varies slightly, possibly because of the terrorist’s strong Arab accent. It was reported earlier that “Same Shiite, Different Fight” was the name of a Shiite terrorist organization which has stated that its goal is to open a second front of the jihad in Europe. In its ideology this group is close to the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Mokhtad Al-Sadr.’

The camera showed the police official squeezed into his narrow little space once again. The correspondent’s voice asked:

‘We know that the Chechens belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. And the attacker was a Shiite. In this connection, can we say, as many analysts are already doing in their commentaries, that clashes between Shiites and Sunnis are now taking place in London?’

‘We are avoiding any hasty conclusions concerning the motives for the crime and whoever is behind it,’ the police official replied. ‘The investigation has only just begun. And in addition, I should like to emphasize that at the present time we have no concrete information on the programme and goals of any terrorist group called “Same Shiite, Different Fight”, or about any militant Shiite groups in England.’

‘Is it true that the terrorist had wires embedded in his head?’

‘No comment.’

Aslan Udoev appeared on the screen. He was walking along a hospital corridor, squinting hostilely at the camera and holding his bandaged forehead in his hand.

After that they started talking about some footballer’s marriage.

I turned the television off and sat there in a state of prostration for a few minutes, trying to think. It was hard to think - I was in shock. I imagined the possible future: a special clinic, a zombification operation, a command cable installed in your head (I recalled the flesh-coloured wire in the ear of the security guard in the National hotel). And then - your mission. For instance, throw yourself under a tank with a mine on your back - like some heroic German shepherd during the Second World War . . . No, tanks were irrelevant now. Let’s say, under a yellow ‘Hummer’ on Fifth Avenue. That was a more picturesque option, but I didn’t like it much better. As they say, same shite, different Shakespeare specialist . . .

Go away? I could do that - I had a false passport for foreign travel. But where to? Thailand? London? Most likely London . . . I’d been meaning to write a letter to E Hu-Li for a long time, but never got round to it. Now I had a good reason. I sat down at the computer and focused my mind, recalling all the things I’d wanted to tell her just recently. Then I started typing:

Hello, Red,

How are you? Still the same old mischievous smile and those heaps of corpses behind your back? :))) Be careful. But then, you’re the most careful of all of us, so I have nothing to teach you there.

I recently got a letter from our sister U, whom you visited. How I envy her modest, but pure and happy life! She complains that the work makes her tired. It is probably a blissful kind of tiredness - like a peasant’s tiredness after a day’s work in the field. Tiredness like that heals spiritual wounds and helps you to forget your sorrows - it was what Leo Tolstoy was pursuing across the fields with his plough. In the city you get tired in a different way. You know, there are some horses who walk round and round a well, pumping water. If you think about it, you and I are the same kind of beast. The difference is that a well horse drives away the horseflies that feed on it with its tail, but you and I use our tails to lure the horseflies who feed us. And apart from that, the horse contributes to people’s well-being. As for us . . . Well, let’s say people contribute to ours. But I know you can’t stand moralizing.

U Hu-Li wrote that you have a new husband, a lord. Do you at least keep count of them? I’d love to get just a brief glimpse of him while there’s still something to see :)))) From what she said, just recently you’ve been taking a serious interest in the subject of the super-werewolf. And you obviously didn’t ask me about that demolished church out of idle curiosity.

It is true that the prophecy of the super-werewolf says he will appear in a city where a church or shrine will be restored after not a single stone of it was left standing. But the prophecy is about two thousand years old, and at that time similes and metaphors were the common manner, and everything that was important was always expressed allegorically. Prophecy was written in the language of ancient alchemy - ‘city’ means a soul and ‘a shrine that is destroyed and restored’ means a heart that has fallen under the power of evil and then returned to good. Please do not seek for any other meaning in these words.

I will risk making one suggestion - only, please, do not be offended. You have lived in the West for a long time, and the Christian mythologeme has imperceptibly taken root in your mind. Think about it: you are waiting for some super-werewolf to appear, atone for the sins of the foxes and make our souls pure, as they were at the very beginning of time. Listen. No messiah will ever come to us were-creatures. But each of us can change ourselves by exceeding our own limits. That is the meaning of the expression ‘super-werewolf’ — one who has passed beyond his own boundaries, exceeded himself. The super-werewolf does not come from the East or from the West, he appears from within. And that is the atonement. There is only one path that leads to him. Yes, those same old prescriptions that make you sick:

1. compassion;

2. causing no harm to the weak of this world, animals or people - at least not when it can be avoided;

3. most important of all - the striving to understand one’s own nature.

To put it very briefly, in the words of Nietzsche (adapted slightly to suit our case), the secret is simple - transcend the bestial! I have no doubt that you have already transcended the human :)))

Remember the lessons in meditation that we took with the teacher from the Yellow Mountain. Believe me, in the thousand years and more that have passed since then, they still haven’t invented anything better. The atom bomb, Gucci cologne, condoms with ribs and notches, CNN news, flights to Mars - this entire motley array of wonders has not had the slightest effect on the scales in which the essence of the world is weighed. And therefore, return to the practice, and in only a couple of hundred years you will have no need of any super-werewolf. If I have wearied you, forgive me - but I was sincerely thinking of your own good as I wrote these lines.

And now for the most important thing. In recent years things have not been going well for me. My basic earnings used to be provided by a paedophile financier who was certain he could be arrested for what he was doing. A school satchel, a report book with C grades - you understand. He was sentimental - while he was waiting for our meetings, he shuddered every time a siren sounded. Yes, he was repulsive. But I only used to go out to work once a month. And then he was paralysed and I had to look for different options. For more than a year my top spot was the hotel National. But I ran into serious problems there when a certain client slipped off the tail. And now I’m surrounded by problems on every side. I’m not sure that you can understand them. The specifically Russian flavour is too strong. But they are very, very serious.

I realize you have no time for other people’s troubles. But I’d still like to ask for your advice and, perhaps, assistance. Should I move to England? I’m sure I would get on with the English - I’ve seen quite a few of them in the National and they seem like a quite decent people to me. I’m often paid in pounds, so I wouldn’t suffer any culture shock. Write quickly and tell me if there is a quiet spot in London for A Hu-Li.

Heads and tails,

A.

As soon as I sent the letter, my mobile rang. There was no number displayed, and my heart skipped a beat, I guessed who it was before I heard the voice in the phone.

‘Hello,’ said Alexander, ‘you said three days, but that’s too long. Can I see you tomorrow? At least for five minutes?’

‘Yes,’ I said, before I’d even thought about it.

‘Then I’ll send Mikhalich. He’ll call you. I kiss you.’

The door of the lift opened, and Mikhalich and I entered the penthouse. Alexander was sitting in an armchair in his general’s uniform, watching television. He turned towards us, but it wasn’t me he spoke to.

‘Right, Mikhalich, I see your lot’s fucked it up again!’ he said cheerfully, with a nod at the long liquid-crystal panel that was showing two channels simultaneously - on one half of the screen there were red and white footballers running about, and on the other Aslan Udoev, who looked a bit like Bluebeard, with his dark purple beard and a sticking plaster on his forehead: he was muttering something into a microphone.

‘Yes sir, comrade lieutenant general,’ Mikhalich replied, embarrassed. ‘The entire crew’s made a real bollocks of it this time.’

‘Don’t swear in front of the girl.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But what the fuck went wrong?’

‘We can’t tell. Unforeseen interference. Apparently something distorted the precise time signal.’

‘Always the same story,’ said Alexander. ‘As soon as there’s a fuck-up, they blame it all on the technical department.’

‘Yes sir, comrade lieutenant general.’

‘Don’t you regret the waste of an operative?’

‘We’ve got any bloody amount of Shakespeare specialists like that, comrade lieutenant general. But somehow no Shakespeares.’

‘I told you quite clearly, Mikhalich, don’t swear here.’ Mikhalich squinted sideways at me.

‘Yes, sir. Shall I draw up a report?’

‘I don’t want a report. It’s none of my business, the ones who thought it up can take the consequences. I don’t like bits of paper. On paper everything always comes out right, but in life’ - Alexander nodded at the screen - ‘you can see for yourself.’

‘Yes, sir, comrade lieutenant general.’

‘You can go.’

Alexander waited until Mikhalich closed the door, then got up out of his chair and came over to me. I guessed he hadn’t wanted to show his feelings in front of a subordinate, but even so I pretended to be offended and when he put his hand on my shoulder I moved away.

‘You could have said hello to me first. And then you go and chat with that jerk about football. And in general, turn the television off!’

Udoev was no longer on the screen - he had been replaced by a smart young man with a motor-trike, who exclaimed boisterously:

‘Today we’re lighting it up with the Marlboro youth team!’

And then he disappeared in a pool of darkness.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alexander, tossing the remote control back on to the coffee table. ‘Hello.’

I smiled. We looked at each other in silence for a few seconds.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘Better now, thank you.’

‘And what’s that basket you’re holding?’

‘I brought that for you,’ I said shyly.

‘Right, let me have it . . .’

He took the basket out of my hands and tore open the packaging.

‘Pies?’ he asked, looking back up at me in bewilderment. ‘Why pies? What for?’

I looked away.

His face slowly lit up.

‘Wait . . . I was wondering why you were wearing that red hood. Ah-ha-ha-ha!’

He burst into peals of happy laughter, put his arms round me and sat me down beside him on the divan. He made the movement very naturally, too quickly for me push him away, although I’d been intending to play hard to get for a little longer. But then, I’m not sure that I really wanted to.

‘It’s like the joke,’ he said. ‘About Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Little Red Riding Hood says: “What big eyes you have, wolf!” And the wolf says: “All the better to see you with.” Little Red Riding Hood says: “What big ears you have, wolf!” “All the better to hear you with,” the wolf replies. And then Little Red Riding Hood says: “What a big tail you have!” “That’s not a tail,” says the wolf, and blushes . . .’

‘Phoo!’

‘Isn’t it funny?’

I shrugged.

‘It’s not realistic. For a wolf to blush. His entire face is covered with fur. Even if he does blush, how can you see it?’

Alexander thought about it.

‘I suppose that’s right,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s a joke.’

‘It’s a good thing you know who Little Red Riding Hood is, at least from jokes,’ I said. ‘I thought you might not get the hint. You don’t look like someone who reads too many books.’

He blushed, just like in his own joke.

‘That’s where you’re wrong. I read every day.’

He nodded towards the coffee table, which had a paperback detective novel lying on it. The title was Werewolves in Shoulder Straps.

‘Is it an interesting book?’ I asked.

‘Not really. Nothing special.’

‘Then why are you reading it?’

‘To understand why it’s called that. We check out every hostile comment.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘That’s not important,’ he said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with literature. ’

‘Detective novels don’t have anything to do with literature either,’ I said.

‘You don’t like them?’

I shook my head.

‘Why?’

‘They’re boring to read. You know from the first page who killed who and why.’

‘Yes? If I read you the first page of Werewolves, will you tell me who the killer is?’

‘I can tell you now. The author did it, for money.’

‘Hmmm . . . Well yes, I suppose. But then what is literature?’

‘Well, for instance, Marcel Proust. Or James Joyce.’

‘Joyce?’ he asked, moving closer. ‘The one who wrote Ulysses? I tried to read it. It’s boring. To be honest, I don’t know what books like that are any good for.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Nobody reads it, that Ulysses. Three people have read it, and then they live off it for the rest of their lives, writing articles and going to conferences. But no one else has ever got through it.’

‘Well now,’ I said, throwing Werewolves on to the floor. ‘Let me tell you that the value of a book doesn’t depend on how many people read it. The brilliance of the Mona Lisa doesn’t depend on how many people file past her every year. The greatest of books have few readers, because reading them requires an effort. But it’s precisely that effort that gives rise to the aesthetic effect. Literary junk-food will never give you anything of the kind.’

He put his arm round my shoulders.

‘I already asked you once, speak more simply.’

‘Speaking in very simple terms, I can say this. Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travellers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself. Wasting time on detective novels is . . . it’s like giving an illiterate prostitute a ride for the sake of a blowjob.’

‘And who should I give rides to?’ he asked, slipping his hand under my T-shirt.

‘You should read serious, profound books, without being afraid to spend time and effort on it.’

His open hand froze on my stomach.

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘So if I’m a long-distance truck driver I should take some bald-headed winner of the Schnobel Prize for literature into my cab, so that he can shaft me up the backside for two weeks while I dodge the oncoming traffic? Did I get it right?’

‘Well, you know, you can vulgarize anything like that,’ I said and stopped talking.

But would you believe it, I’d used the same example of a blowjob in a long-distance truck that had made me almost kill poor Pavel Ivanovich. And I couldn’t have come up with anything more stupid than my comment about prostitutes - after all, Alexander knew what I did for a living. I could only hope that it would pass for an expression of humility. Judging from his reply, it had.

We foxes have one serious shortcoming. If someone says something memorable to us, we almost always repeat it in conversation with other people, regardless of whether what was said was stupid or clever. Unfortunately, our mind is the same kind of simulator as the sack of skin under our tail that we use as a prick-catcher. It’s not a genuine ‘organ of thought’ - we have no need for that. Let human beings ‘think’ in the course of their heroic slalom from the vagina to the grave. A fox’s mind is simply a tennis racket you can use to keep bouncing the conversation from one subject to another for as long as you like. We give people back the ideas and opinions that we have borrowed from them - reflecting them from another angle, giving them a different spin, sending them into a vertical climb.

Let me remark modestly that my simulated thought almost always turns out better than the original. To continue the tennis analogy, my return improves on every hard shot. Of course, inside people’s heads every shot is a hard one. But what I can’t understand is - who serves all these shots? One of the people? Or should the server be sought in some completely different place, which isn’t even a place at all?

I’ll have to wait until I have a conversation on this subject with some intelligent person. Then we’ll see which way I drive the ball. That’s the way I’ve been discovering the truth for more than a thousand years now.

While I was finishing this thought, he had almost managed to remove my dress. I didn’t resist, I just raised the very ends of my eyebrows with a martyred air, like a little ballerina being raped yet again by a big red-necked SS man on her way to the philharmonia. What’s to be done, comrades - this is occupation . . .

Today, to be sure, the little ballerina had prepared for the encounter. I was wearing underwear - lacy white panties, in which I had cut a hole for my tail with scissors. And three identical lacy bras, size zero. The two lower ones had nothing to support, but they pressed into my body slightly and created a certain small content for themselves. Of course, I wasn’t actually trying to make any special concessions to lupine demands. It was an ironic postmodern comment on what was happening, a variation on the theme of the Beast that he had talked about so much during our last meeting.

I didn’t know if he would like my joke and I was a bit nervous. He liked it. In fact he liked it so much that he started to transform.

I wasn’t so scared this time and I studied the transformation more closely. First of all the grey, shaggy tail sprang out. It looked rather sexy - as if a spring that he couldn’t hold back inside his spine any more had suddenly straightened out. Then his body arched over and his tail and head jerked towards each other like the ends of a bow drawn together by an invisible string. And then he sprouted fur all over him.

The word ‘sprouted’ isn’t entirely appropriate here. It was more as if his tunic and trousers crumbled into fur - as if the shoulder straps and stripes were drawn in watercolour on a solid mass of wet hair that suddenly dried out and layered off into separate hairs.

At the same time, in some very natural manner, he inflated and grew. There are no wolves that large in nature, he looked more like a bear that has managed to slim a bit. But his body was real, physical and substantial - I felt its weight when he leaned his paw on my hand: it sank a long way into the divan.

‘You’ll crush me, you animal,’ I squealed, and he took his paw away.

He was obviously excited by the sensation of his own strength and my weakness. Leaning his huge, monstrous jaws down over me (his breath was hot, but fresh, like a baby’s), he bit through all three of my bras, pulling them off with his terrible hairy fingers.

My heart stopped every time his teeth clicked together so close to me. They were razor-sharp — I couldn’t think why he bothered to keep that Monica Lewinsky cigar-clipper on his desk. But then, I suppose he probably smoked cigars in his human form.

After doing the same thing with my panties, he pulled away from me and began growling, as if he was about to tear me to shreds. Then he went down on his knees in front of me and lowered his immense paws on to my fragile collarbones, like some infernal organist. This is the end, I thought.

But he avoided causing me pain. In fact, to my mind, he could have behaved a little more aggressively - I was prepared for it. But this wasn’t too bad either. I mean I’d geared myself up in advance for pain and suffering and was prepared to put up with more. However, the ordeal proved not to be as painful as I’d been expecting.

But I did things right anyway and groaned from time to time:

‘Oh, that hurts! Don’t pound so damn hard, you ugly monster. Gently, smoothly . . . That’s right.’

The letter from E Hu-Li was a long one.

Hello, Ginger,

So nice to see that you haven’t changed at all and are still trying to guide my lost soul out on to the true path.

You write that the clouds are gathering over your head. Are you serious about that? As far as I recall, the clouds have been gathering over your head for seven hundred years already; experience shows that in most cases you simply need to start thinking about something else. Maybe everything’s not so terrible this time either?

Do you seriously want to come to England? Do you think you’ll be better off here?

Understand this - the West is just one big shopping mall. From the outside it looks magical, fantastic. But you had to live in the Eastern Bloc to take its shop windows for the real thing. Perhaps that was the only meaning of your life - do you remember that Soviet song, ‘We were born to make the fairy tale reality’? That’s what you always did quite well - ‘in your head, in your head’, as the song goes. In actual fact, there are three roles you can play here - the buyer, the seller, or the product on the shelf. To be a seller is vulgar, to be a buyer is boring (and you still have to earn your living as a seller), and to be the product is repulsive. Any attempt to be anything else actually means ‘not to be’, as the market forces are quick to teach any and every Hamlet. All the rest is simply show.

Do you know what the secret horror of life here is? When you buy yourself a blouse or a car, or anything else, you have in your mind an image, implanted by advertising, of some wonderful place you will go wearing that blouse or driving that car. But there is no such wonderful place anywhere, apart from in the advertising clip, and this black hole in reality is lamented by every serious philosopher in the West. The joy of shopping cannot conceal the unbearable awareness that our entire world is one huge ski shop standing in the middle of the Sahara desert. You don’t just have to buy the skis, you have to buy the imitation snow as well. Do you understand the metaphor?

Apart from that, there is a specific difficulty for us foxes. With every year that passes it becomes harder and harder to maintain your identity and feel that you are a prostitute, so fast is everything else being prostituted all around you. If you hear an old friend’s voice speaking in confidential tones, you can be sure it is advising you to buy two bottles of anti-dandruff shampoo so that you can get the third one free. I remember a certain word that you always used to try to introduce into the conversation whether it was relevant or not - ‘uroborus’. I think it means a snake biting its own tail. When that snake’s head and tail only exist as special effects in an advertising clip, it’s no great comfort to know that the body is alive and fat. That is, maybe it is a comfort, but there’s no one to experience it.

Your world will soon be like ours (at least, for those who are kept on to service the extraction and export of oil), but as yet it still has twilight zones where a salutary ambivalence is the rule. And that is precisely where a soul like yours can be, if not happy, then at least in balance. If these zones of ambivalence are created for you by others, then enjoy them while they still exist. The world will not always be like that. This is me preaching to you in response to your lectures.

Now about English men. Don’t judge them from your brief encounters in the National. They’re quite different here. Do you remember the writer Yuan Mei, whom our sister U married in 1739? I don’t expect you’ve forgotten him - a scholar from the Hanlin Academy who studied the Manchurian language and collected stories about evil spirits . . . By the way, he knew who our sister really was. That was precisely why he married her.

His book (it was called What Confucius Did Not Speak Of) is half made up of stories, but it also contains some intriguing ethnographic sketches. In those times England was known as the ‘Land of the Redhairs’. This is what Yuan Mei wrote about the English - I cite the passage in full:

‘407. INHABITANTS OF THE LAND OF THE REDHAIRS SPIT AT YOUNG SINGERS

The inhabitants of the Land of Redhairs often engage in dissolute behaviour with young singers. When they arrange their carousals, they invite young singers, undress them then sit round them and spit at their secret place. They do not require any greater intimacy. When they have finished spitting, they let them go, with a generous reward. This is called “money from the common pot”.’

This story, which might appear to be historically inaccurate, in fact reflects very accurately how an English aristocrat deals with a woman’s soul when it opens itself to him (fortunately, the system of privileged education here transforms most of them into homosexuals). Before, when I observed the English, I used to wonder what was hidden beneath that impenetrable armour-plating of hypocrisy forged over the centuries. And then I realized - it was precisely that simple act. There is nothing else there, and that minimalism is what guarantees the stability of the order of things here.

Believe me, if you come to London, you will feel like a spittoon wandering alone among snipers who hawk and spit into your very soul, men for whom equality for women means only one thing - the chance to save a bit on ‘the money from the common pot’.

As for the super-werewolf... You know, it seems to me you have become too bogged down in introspection. Think - if everything that is most important were inside ourselves, then why would we need the external world? Or do you believe that it no longer holds any possible surprises for you and it is enough simply to sit by the wall on a dusty meditation rug, pushing away the thoughts that crowd round you, like a swimmer pushing away dead jellyfish? What if one of them turns out to be a golden fish that grants wishes? I think it is still too soon to give up on this world - by doing that you might find you have given up on yourself. You know what my hubby said to me yesterday? ‘The super-werewolf will come, and you will see him as clearly as you see me now.’ Even if in my heart of hearts I agreed with you, how would I dare to argue with the head of the house of Cricket? :-=))). But let us discuss this when we meet, my dear. In a week Brian and I shall be in Moscow - don’t turn your mobile off!

Heads and tails,

E

When I finished reading the letter, I shook my head. Someone was in for it soon. The doodle :-=))), which looked like the war criminal Hitler grinning, was an ominous sign that E Hu-Li used - it meant that she had bleak and cruel intentions in mind. But what else was to be expected from the most pitiless fox in our entire family? She’s the same in everything, I thought. Ask her for help, and she advises you to think about something else. The clouds, she says, are just an illusion . . .

Although, perhaps she’s right? After all, things aren’t nearly as bad as I thought only yesterday. I was bursting with the desire to tell someone about the affair I had been forced to start. But who? Of course, I could spill the whole thing out to a taxi driver, and then make him forget what he’d heard. Only it was dangerous to play pranks like that on the road. No, I have to wait for E Hu-Li, I thought. She’ll certainly be interested in listening to me. And apart from that, she had been making fun of my virginity for so many centuries that it would be a pleasure to throw the news in her face. For all her sophistication, she had never had any lovers like that, except perhaps for one yakshi-devil in the sixteenth century. But compared to Alexander, even he seemed pitiful . . .

At this point I came back to my senses - my sister’s letter had reminded me about the most important thing of all.

I had known for a long time that the moment when you are overflowing with the joys or sorrows of life is the best time to practise meditation. I turned off the computer and laid out a foam plastic rug on the floor. It’s absolutely fantastic, a real gift for a meditator, it’s a shame there weren’t any in ancient times. Then I put a cushion filled with buckwheat husks on it and sat on the cushion in the lotus position, with my tail lowered on to the floor.

The spiritual practice of foxes includes ‘contemplation of the mind’ and ‘contemplation of the heart’. Today I decided to begin my session with contemplation of the heart. The heart plays no part in this practice, apart from a metaphorical one. It’s an accident of translation: the Chinese hieroglyph ‘xin’, which stands for ‘heart’ here, has many different meanings and ‘contemplation of the innermost essence’ would probably have been a more accurate translation. And from a practical point of view, it would have been more correct to call the technique ‘tugging the tail’.

Every child knows that if you tug a dog or a cat by the tail, they feel pain. But if you pull a fox by the tail, then what happens is beyond the understanding of even the most intelligent tailless monkey. At that moment the fox feels the full weight of all her bad deeds. This is because she uses her tail to commit them. And since every fox, apart from the total failures, has a whole heap of bad deeds to her name, the result is an appalling attack of conscience, accompanied by terrifying visions and insights so overwhelming that the fox loses the very desire to carry on living. The rest of the time our conscience doesn’t bother us at all.

A lot here depends on the strength of the tug and how unexpected it is. For instance, when we happen to snag our tails on a bush during a chicken hunt (I’ll tell you about that later), we also experience light pangs of conscience. Only while we are running, the corresponding muscles are tensed, and so the effect is not so pronounced. But the essence of the practice of ‘tugging the tail’ lies in giving your own tail a powerful tug at a moment when the area of the tail muscles is as relaxed as possible.

Not everything here is as simple as it seems. In actual fact ‘contemplation of the heart’ cannot be separated from ‘contemplation of the mind’, because the correct performance of the techniques requires consciousness to be layered off into three independent streams:

1. the first stream of consciousness is the mind which remembers all its dark deeds from time immemorial.

2. the second stream of consciousness is the mind which spontaneously and unexpectedly makes the fox tug her own tail.

3. the third stream of consciousness is the mind as the abstract observer of the first two streams and itself.

Speaking very approximately, this third stream of consciousness is also the very essence of the technique ‘contemplating the mind’. All of these practices are preliminary - you have to perform them for a thousand years before moving on to the most important, which is called ‘tail of the void’ or ‘artlessness’. This is a secret practice that is not entirely clear even to foxes like me, who have completed the thousand-years preliminary cycle a long time ago.

And so, I sat in the lotus position, placing my left hand on my knee and my right hand on my tail. I concentrated and began remembering my past - the layers of it that are usually concealed from me by the stream of everyday thoughts. And suddenly, entirely out of the blue, my right hand jerked and tugged. I felt a pain in the base of my spine. But that pain was nothing compared with the stream of repentance, horror and shame for what I had done that flooded over me with such great power that tears sprang to my eyes.

The faces of those who had not survived their encounter with me floated past in front of my face, like yellow leaves drifting past a window in an autumn storm. They emerged from non-existence for only a second, but that second was long enough for each pair of eyes to sear me with a glance full of bewilderment and pain. I watched them, remembering the past, with the tears pouring down my cheeks in two great streams as repentance tore my heart apart.

At the same time I was serenely aware that what was taking place was simply the insubstantial play of reflections, the rippling of thoughts that is raised by the habitual draughts of the mind, and that when these ripples settled down, it would be clear that there were no draughts and no reflections, and no mind itself - nothing but that clear, eternal, all-penetrating gaze in the face of which nothing is real.

That is the way I have been practising for about twelve centuries.

From the very beginning Alexander and I had an unspoken agreement not to pester each other with questions. I wasn’t supposed to ask about things that he couldn’t talk about because of the non-disclosure agreements he’d signed and all the other FSB garbage. And he didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, because my answers might have placed him in an ambiguous position - for instance, what if I suddenly turned out to be a Chinese spy? Things could quite easily have been made to look that way, after all, I didn’t even have an internal passport, and only a fake one for foreign travel.

I wasn’t really happy with this situation: there were lots of things I wanted to find out about him. And I could see he was consumed by curiosity too. But we were getting to know each other gradually, groping our way along - the information was provided in homeopathic doses.

I liked to kiss him on the cheek before he transformed into a beast (I could never bring myself to kiss him on the lips, and that was strange, considering the extent of our intimacy). But then, the caresses didn’t last for long - a few touches were enough to trigger the transformation, and after that kissing became impossible.

For so many centuries a kiss had been simply one element of hypnotic suggestion to me, but now I myself was kissing, even if it was in a childish fashion . . . There was something dreamlike about that. His face was often hidden by a gauze mask, and I had to move it aside. One day I couldn’t stand it any more, I tugged on the lace of the mask that had slipped off his face and said:

‘Maybe you could not put it on when we’re together? Who do you think you are, Michael Jackson?’

‘It’s because of the smell,’ he said. ‘It has a special chemical that doesn’t let smells through.’

‘And what can you smell up here?’ I asked, surprised.

We were sitting by the door to the roof, which was open (he avoided going out of his mirror-walled birdhouse, because he was worried about snipers, or photographers, or avenging lightning from the heavens). Apart from a very faint whiff of exhaust fumes from the street, I couldn’t detect any smells at all.

‘I can smell everything in the world up here,’ he said with a frown.

‘Such as?’

He looked at my white blouse and drew in a deep breath through his nose.

‘That blouse of yours,’ he said. ‘Before you, it was worn by a middle-aged woman who used home-made eau-de-cologne made from Egyptian lotus extract . . .’

I sniffed my blouse. It didn’t smell of anything.

‘Seriously?’ I queried. ‘I bought it in a second-hand shop, I liked the embroidered pattern.’

He drew in another breath of air.

‘And what’s more, she diluted the extract with fake vodka. There’s a lot of fusel oil.’

‘What are you saying?’ I asked, nonplussed. ‘I feel like taking the blouse off and throwing it away . . . So what else can you smell?’

He turned towards the open door.

‘There’s a terrible smell of petrol. Bad enough to give you a splitting headache. And there’s a smell of asphalt, rubber, tobacco smoke . . . And of toilets, human sweat, beer, baking, coffee, popcorn, dust, paint, nail varnish, doughnuts, newsprint . . . I could go on and on with the list.’

‘But don’t these smells get mixed up together?’

He shook his head in reply.

‘It’s more as if they’re layered over each other and contained in each other, like a letter in an envelope that’s lying in the pocket of a coat that’s hanging in a wardrobe, and so on. The worst thing by far is that very often you find out lots of things you absolutely didn’t want to know. For instance, they give you a document to sign, and you can tell that yesterday there was a sandwich with stale salami lying on it. And that’s not all, the smell of the sweat from the hand that gave you the document makes it clear that what it says in the document isn’t true . . .

And so on.’

‘And why does this happen to you?’

‘It’s just the usual lupine sense of smell. It often stays with me even in the human phase. It’s tough. But I suppose it saves me from lots of bad habits.’

‘For instance?’

‘For instance, I can’t smoke hash. And definitely not snort cocaine.’

‘Why?’

‘Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on his way from Colombo to Minsk. And that’s nothing, I even know how many times that ass of his was . . .’

‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t go on. I’d already got the idea.’

‘And the worst thing is, I never know when it’s suddenly going to overwhelm me. It’s as unpredictable as a migraine.’

‘You poor thing,’ I sighed. ‘What a pain.’

‘Well, it’s not always a pain,’ he said. ‘There are some things about it I really enjoy. For instance, I like the way you smell.’

I was embarrassed. A fox’s body really does have a very faint aroma, but people usually take it for perfume.

‘And what do I smell of?’

‘I can’t really say . . . Mountains, moonlight. Spring. Flowers. Deception. But not a wily kind of deception, more as if you’re having a joke. I really love the way you smell. I think I could breathe that smell in all my life and still keep finding something new in it.’

‘Well that’s nice,’ I said. ‘I felt very awkward when you said that about my blouse. I’ll never buy anything in second-hand shops again.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But I would be grateful if you’d take it off.’

‘Is the smell that strong?’

‘No, it’s very weak. It’s just that I like you better without any blouse.’

I thought for a moment and then pulled the blouse off over my head.

‘You’re not wearing any bras today,’ he laughed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I read that when a girl goes to see her young man and something is supposed to happen . . . You know, if she is ready for something to happen . . . Then she doesn’t put one on. It’s a kind of etiquette.’

‘Where did you read that?’ he asked.

‘In Cosmopolitan. Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Do you mind that I have small breasts?’

‘No, I really like that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go on and on kissing them for ever.’

It seemed to me that he was talking with an effort, as if his jaws were being cramped by a yawn. That was what usually happened just before the transformation. Despite his reassuring declaration about ‘going on kissing them for ever’, we rarely got that far. But then, his hot wolf’s tongue . . . But I won’t transgress the bounds of propriety, the reader understands perfectly well without that.

He barely had time to take my knickers off before it all happened: sexual arousal triggered the mysterious mechanism of his metamorphosis. Less than a minute later, standing there in front of me was a sinister, handsome beast, whose most astounding asset was his instrument of love. Every time I found it impossible to believe that my simulacrum pouch was really capable of accommodating that hammer of the witches.

When he turned into a wolf, Alexander lost the ability to speak. But he could understand everything he heard - although, of course, I had no guarantee that his wolfish understanding was the same as his human one. His remaining communicative capabilities were inadequate for conveying the complex motions of the soul, but he could reply in the affirmative or the negative. ‘Yes’ was signified by a short, muffled roar:

‘Gr-r-r!’

And he expressed the meaning ‘no’ with a sound like something halfway between a howl and a yawn.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

I found this ‘whoo-oo-oo’ rather funny - it was more or less the way a dog whines in the heat when its masters have locked it out on the balcony. But I didn’t tell him about this observation of mine.

His hands didn’t turn into wolf’s paws, they were more like the fantastic extremities of some movie Martian. I found it impossible to believe those claws were capable of tender touching, even though I knew it from my own experience.

And so, when he set them on my bare stomach, as always, I felt a bit uneasy.

‘What do you want, beastling?’ I asked. ‘Shall I lie on my side?’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘On my tummy?’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Kneel down?’

‘Gr-r-r!’

‘All right, only be careful, okay?’

‘Gr-r-rrrrrr-r!’

I wasn’t entirely certain that last ‘grrrr’ meant ‘yes’, and not just ‘grrr’, but even so I did as he asked. And I was immediately sorry: he took hold of my tail with his paw.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘let go, you monster!’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Really, let go,’ I repeated plaintively.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

And then what I was most afraid of happened - he pulled my tail. Not very hard, but still hard enough for me suddenly to remember the Sikh from the National hotel. And when he jerked my tail a little more sharply, I felt so ashamed for the role I’d played in that man’s fate that I sobbed out loud.

Alexander hadn’t deliberately pulled my tail. He was just holding it, quite gently in fact. But the blows of his hips pushed my body forward, and the result was as if he was trying to rip my tail out of my body. I tensed all my muscles, but I just wasn’t strong enough. With every jerk my soul was inundated by waves of unbearable shame. But the most terrible thing was that the shame didn’t simply sear my heart, it also mingled into a single whole with the pleasure I was getting from what was going on.

It was something quite unimaginable - truly beyond good and evil. It was then that I finally understood the fatal abysses trodden by De Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who I had always thought absurdly pompous. No, they weren’t absurd at all - they simply hadn’t been able to find the right words to convey the true nature of their nightmares. And I knew why - there were no such words in any human language.

‘Stop,’ I whispered through my tears.

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

But in heart I didn’t know what I wanted - for him to stop or to carry on.

‘Stop,’ I repeated, gasping for breath, ‘please!’

‘Whoo-oo-oo!’

‘Do you want to kill me?’

‘Gr-r-r!’

I couldn’t hold back any longer and I started crying. But they were tears of pleasure, a monstrous, shameful pleasure that was too enthralling to be abandoned voluntarily. I soon lost any idea of what was happening - perhaps I even lost consciousness too. The next ting I remember is Alexander leaning down over me, already in his human form. He looked perplexed.

‘Did I hurt you?’

I nodded.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘Promise me one thing,’ I whispered. ‘Promise that you’ll never pull my tail again. Never, do you hear?’

‘My word as an officer,’ he said and set his hand on his medal ribbons. ‘Was it really bad?’

‘I felt ashamed,’ I whispered. ‘You know, I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I don’t want to remember. I’ve done a lot of harm to people . . .’

His face suddenly turned serious.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t. Not just now.’

We foxes are keen hunters of English aristocrats and chickens. We hunt English aristocrats because English aristocrats hunt us, and it’s a sort of point of honour. But we hunt chickens for our own enjoyment. Both types of hunting have their passionate supporters who will shout themselves hoarse defending their choice. The way I see things, hunting chickens has several serious advantages:

1. hunting English aristocrats is a source of bad karma, which is acquired by killing even the most useless of men. The karma from chickens is not all that serious.

2. to hunt aristocrats you have to travel to Europe (although some believe that the best place is a transatlantic cruise ship). You can hunt chickens anywhere you like.

3. while hunting English aristocrats, foxes don’t undergo any physical changes. But when we hunt chickens something happens that bears a distant similarity to a werewolf’s transformation - we come to resemble our wild relatives for a while.

I haven’t hunted English aristocrats for many decades, and I don’t regret it in the least. But to this day I’m still enthusiastic about chicken-hunting.

It’s hard to explain to an outsider what chicken-hunting really is. When you cast off your clothes and your shoes and pound furiously against the ground with three paws, clutching the chicken against your breast with the fourth, its little heart beats in unison with yours, and the speed-blurred course of your zigzag run flows freely through your empty mind. At that moment you see clearly that you, and the chicken, and even the pursuers clamouring behind you are really parts of a single incomprehensible whole that dons masks and plays hide-and-seek with itself . . . You want to believe that even the chicken realizes the same thing. And if it doesn’t, then in some life to come it very definitely will!

These are the basic principles of chicken-hunting:

1. you should approach the chicken coop in the guise of a extravagantly clad socialite - wearing an evening dress and high stiletto heels. Your clothes should restrict your movements as much as possible and provoke associations with glamorous fashion magazines.

2. you must attract the attention of the owners of the chicken coop - they have to see their elegant visitor steal a chicken.

3. you must not run away from your furious pursuers too fast, but not too slowly either - the most important aspect of the hunt is maintaining their confidence that they can overtake the thief.

4. when the pursuers have no strength left to continue the pursuit (and also in those cases when they suffer shock from seeing the transformation take place), you should erase their memory of what has happened with a special twitch of your tail and let the chicken go free.

I introduced the last addendum myself. Only don’t ask me what the chicken will do with this freedom. You can’t just wring its neck, can you? Of course, it sometimes happens that the chicken passes on during the chase. But would it be any better for its evolution to end this life in suburban soup?

Some of us extend the same logic to the English aristocrats, but I don’t agree with that - theoretically speaking, any English aristocrat could become a Buddha in this life, and you can’t deprive him of that chance just for the sake of idle amusement.

Ninety-nine per cent of aristocrat-hunting is a tedious social exercise that differs little from a formal tea party. But sometimes the most hard-bitten of my sisters, those with whom I want absolutely nothing to do, gather together in a pack and arrange battues, in the course of which many English aristocrats depart this life at once. In these cases events become quite picturesque, and the concomitant hallucination can be experienced by many thousands of people at the same time - you can get some idea of what I mean from the story of the so-called Battle of Waterloo. But the most shocking details remain hidden from the public.

I realize how hard it must be to believe in the possibility of such appalling mass deceptions, but the important point here is that when one and the same hallucination is induced simultaneously by several foxes, its power increases proportionately to their number cubed. That is, one and the same suggestion, implanted simultaneously by three foxes, will be almost thirty times as powerful as an illusion created by one of them on her own. This is achieved with the use of secret methods and practices - first the foxes study together how to visualize an object that they have just seen, then an object that they haven’t seen, and then they make others perceive objects that don’t exist, and so on. A complex technique, and the training for it lasts several centuries. But if ten or twelve foxes who have mastered it get together . . . Well, you can see what they’re capable of.

Some might ask why, in that case, the foxes are not yet the rulers of this world. There are two reasons:

1. foxes are not so stupid as to take on that heavy burden.

2. foxes are very egotistical and incapable of reaching long-term agreements with each other about anything, except for the collective hunting of English aristocrats.

These days people possess many new tracking and monitoring devices, and so foxes avoid interfering in human history and solve the problem in a simpler way. In the north of England there are several privately owned castles where aristocrats are bred from the finest stock and raised specially for hunting by foxes - the output isn’t all that large, but the quality is excellent. There are similar nurseries in Argentina and Paraguay, but the conditions there are appalling, and the English aristocrats, who are bred en masse using artificial insemination (so far attempts at cloning have been a failure) are only good for helicopter safaris: they talk like gauchos, drink tequila by the bucketful, require more than three attempts to draw their family tree, and as their last wish just before they die they ask to hear the song ‘Un Hombre’, dedicated to Che Guevara. Evidently, even in their final moments they are mimicking the portfolio investors whom they aspired to become.

There is another school of hunting, in which an English aristocrat is individually selected, and the fox herds him along his final road for several years - she becomes his mistress or wife and is there beside him right down to the moment of truth, which in this case is rather horrific. One day, during a thunder-storm or at some other dramatic moment, the fox reveals the whole truth to him and exposes her tail - not in order to implant a suggestion of one more dose of family happiness, but to strike him dead . . . This is the most complicated form of hunting, and it requires a virtuosic mastery of social manners, in which there is no one who can compare with my sister E Hu-Li, who has lived in England for many centuries and attained genuine perfection in this sport.

The greatest advantage of hunting chickens consists in the supraphysical transformation that we undergo. The chicken is required as a living catalyst who helps us to achieve it - in thousands of years of civilized life foxes have almost lost this ability and, like Dante, we require a guide to lead us into the lower worlds. The transformation does not always take place, and it doesn’t last long in any case, but the sensations it induces are so powerful that you are energized by the memories for many days afterwards.

Something similar happens to foxes when we are badly frightened, but that process is uncontrollable, whereas the art of chicken-hunting lies precisely in controlling our fear. You have to allow the pursuers to get close enough to trigger the mechanisms of internal alchemy which for a few seconds will turn you into a predatory beast, free from good and evil. Naturally, to avoid being freed from good and evil permanently, you have to maintain a safe distance. Basically, it’s pretty much like surfing, only the price paid for losing your balance is very much more serious. But the positive emotions are far stronger too - nothing is so refreshing for the soul as risk and pursuit.

It sometimes happens that dogs trail after me, but they immediately give up once they realize who I am. Dogs are just as easily to hypnotize as people. And in addition, they have a special system for spreading information, something like the Internet, only based on smells, so that news travels fast in their circles. After one courageous Rottweiler, who tried to play with me was raped by two Caucasian brothers (I mean sheepdogs), the dogs in the Bitsevsky forest began avoiding me. They’re intelligent beasts, capable of tracing the causal link between a certain Rottweiler growling as he attacks a beautiful red-haired sportswoman and all the male dogs, who are two heads taller than the said Rottweiler, suddenly taking him for a wide-eyed, lovesick bitch in full heat.

My decision to take Alexander hunting had nothing to do with any desire to boast. A fox’s transformation during a chicken hunt doesn’t go as far as what happens to a wolf, so there was nothing to boast about. But I thought that if I were to undergo the supraphysical shift while Alexander was watching, it would be the best way of saying to him, ‘you and I are of the same blood’. Perhaps it would extinguish the remnants of mistrust between us and bring us closer - that was what I was vaguely counting on.

I’d picked out the place for the hunt a lot earlier. One of the tracks that wound through the Bitsevsky forest emerged from the trees at a wooden house in which a forester lived (I’m not sure that’s the correct term, but the man’s job definitely had something to do with the park). Beside the house there was a chicken coop - a very rare thing in modern Moscow. I’d spotted it when I was riding my bike through the forest, and now I decided to make use of my discovery. But first I had to check everything one more time and determine my lines of retreat. Having devoted an entire day to reconnaissance on my bike, I established the following:

1. there were chickens in the chicken coop, and also people in the house; and so the two essential ingredients for the hunt were present.

2. I should bolt along the road that led into the forest.

3. I needed to escape from pursuit before the track emerged from the forest on the other side - there were always a lot of people strolling along the edge of the trees, mostly young mothers with prams.

In addition, I discovered how to drive a car almost right up to the chicken coop - although the forester’s house looked as if it was lost in the forest, the city began only three hundred metres away: the forest was cut short by a line of six-storey concrete buildings. I noted down the address of the block closest to the chicken coop. Now everything was ready for the hunt.

My bicycle reconnaissance trip also produced another result. On my way home I rode along a track I didn’t know and discovered a wonderful place where I’d never been before. It was a wide waste lot, actually more like a field, sloping down on one side to a small river and surrounded by the forest. The field was criss-crossed by narrow tracks, and on the slope leading down to the river there was a bike ramp for jumping - a steep embankment of earth worn smooth by numerous tyres. I didn’t dare jump, all I did was ride up it slowly, imagining how it would feel to pick up speed and go soaring into the air. But I wasn’t sure that I would be able to land.

Not far from the ramp I discovered a strange sculptural composition. A number of grey logs of various lengths had been set into the ground. Their tops had been chiselled into images of the faces of warriors. The warrior-logs stood tight against each other, and coarse, solid benches had been laid out around them. Standing at the outer perimeter, orientated towards the four points of the compass, were four simple gateways made of one log set across the tops of two others, as grey, monolithic and cracked as all the other elements. The whole thing was reminiscent of a wooden Stonehenge that had already suffered damage in its battle with eternity: the logs had been mutilated by camp-fires lit on them by the local kids. But despite the black scorch marks and a host of empty beer bottles, the site had beauty and even some vague kind of grandeur.

I sat down on one of the logs, fixed my gaze on the red disc of the sun (in Moscow you only get sunsets like that in May) and withdrew into thoughts of the past. I remembered a man I had met more than a thousand years earlier - he was called the Yellow Master, after the name of the Yellow Mountain on which his monastery stood. I only spent one night in conversation with him, but it was a conversation that I shall never forget - I only had to close my eyes and I could see the Yellow Master’s face as clearly as if he were there beside me. And yet I had encountered so many people from day to day over so many years - and they hadn’t left the slightest trace in my memory . . . My sister E knew the Yellow Master too, I thought. I wonder if she remembers him? I’ll have to ask her.

Just at that moment my mobile phone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello, Red.’

I couldn’t believe my ears.

‘Sister E? How wonderful! I was just thinking about you . . .’

‘So that’s why my tail’s itching,’ she laughed. ‘I’m already in Moscow.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In the National hotel. What are you doing tomorrow at one?’

I was afraid I’d have problems getting into the National, but none of the security men took any notice of me. Maybe that was because I was met by a young female administrator who looked like a Scharführer holding a board with the words ‘Valued guest of Lady Cricket-Taylor’. She showed me to one of the de luxe suites. All that was missing was a guard of honour with an orchestra.

E Hu-Li received me sitting on a stripy divan in the suite’s drawing room. I was bothered by the suspicion that I had once met a client in this apartment, either a businessman from South Korea or an Arab arms-dealer. But it might just have been that stripy divan, they have those in lots of the rooms there. When she saw me, my sister stood up to greet me and we embraced tenderly. A transparent plastic bag appeared in her hands.

‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘Not expensive, but elegant.’

The bag contained a T-shirt with one word on it in Russian and English:

‘They sell them in London,’ she said. ‘In all the different languages. But in Russian the effect is especially nice.’

And she laughed quietly. I couldn’t help myself and I laughed too - ‘cockney’ in Russian spells and sounds like ‘whack’ in the imperative mood; I never noticed that before.

E Hu-Li looked exactly the same as she had in 1929, when she came to Russia on business for the Comintern, which was fashionable at the time. Only now her hair seemed to be cut just a little shorter. As always, she was dressed absolutely impeccably.

E Hu-Li’s style hadn’t changed for the last thousand years - it was a kind of extreme radicalism, disguised as utilitarian minimalism. I envied her bold taste - she was always half a step ahead of the fashion. Fashion is cyclical, and over the long centuries my sister E had developed the knack of riding the crests of these cycles with all the skill of a professional surfer - in some miraculous way she was always at the precise point that all the fashion designers were desperately trying to identify.

And right now she was wearing a mind-blowing waistcoat that looked like a huge bandolier with lots of different-coloured appliqué pockets that were embroidered with tiny green Arabic script and the big words ‘Ka-Boom!’ in orange. It was a variation on the theme of the Muslim radical’s explosive belt - the way it would have been made for him by a libertine Japanese designer. At the same time it was a very convenient item - the owner of a waistcoat like that had absolutely no need for a handbag.

‘Isn’t that a little too bold for London?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t anyone wax indignant?’

‘Of course not! The English expend all their spiritual energy on hypocrisy. There’s none left over for intolerance.’

‘Is everything really as dismal as that?’

She waved her hand dismissively.

‘If I had my way, I’d introduce a new term to emphasize the scale of the problem: “Hippopocrisy”.’

I can’t stand it when someone speaks badly about entire nations. In my opinion, such a person is either a loser or has a guilty conscience. There was no way sister E was any kind of loser. But as for her conscience . . .

‘But why can’t you be the first to stop being hypocritical?’ I asked.

‘Then that would be cynicism. And who can say which is worst. All in all, the closet’s dark and damp.’

‘What closet?’

‘I mean the English soul, it reminds me of a closet. The best of the English spend all their lives trying to get out of it, but as a rule they only manage it at the moment of death.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you have to ask? I can see from the inside, I’m English myself. Well, of course, not entirely - about as much as you’re Russian. We could say that you’re Russian, couldn’t we?’

‘I suppose so,’ I agreed and sighed quietly.

‘And what is the Russian soul like?’

I thought about it.

‘Like the cab of a long-distance truck. The driver took you in so that you could give him a blowjob. And then he died, so you’re left in the cab on your own, surrounded by nothing but the boundless steppe, the sky and the road. And you have no idea how to drive.’

‘And is the driver still in the cab, or . . .?’

I shrugged.

‘That depends.’

‘Yes,’ said E Hu-Li. ‘So it’s the same thing, then.’

‘What’s the same thing?’ I asked.

‘We have a saying: “Everybody has his skeleton in the closet.” It was Lord Byron who said that. When he realized he had strangled the homosexual in himself.’

‘Poor fellow.’

‘Poor fellow?’ E Hu-Li echoed, raising her eyebrows. ‘You don’t understand anything. All his life he tormented and tortured that homosexual in himself, but he only finished him off just before he died, when he realized he was going to kick the bucket soon. But as it happens, all his verses and poems were really written by that homosexual. Two American scholars have proved that, I read it myself. That’s the kind of people there are in England! Better your dismal nightmare in the cab of a truck.’

‘Why call it a dismal nightmare? I think there’s a lot of beauty in it.’

‘In what? In the skeleton riding beside you?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘In the Russian soul. Just imagine, you have absolutely no idea how to drive, and you’re surrounded by the open steppe and the sky. I love Russia.’

‘And what exactly is it about her that you love?’

I pondered that question for a while. Then I replied rather uncertainly:

‘The Russian language.’

‘You do right to induce that feeling in yourself,’ said E Hu-Li. ‘Otherwise you would find it unbearable to live here. As I do in England.’

She stretched like a cat and looked into the distance, and for a brief moment there was a lazy, dreamy look in her eyes. I had a sudden vision of a predatory, sharp-toothed gaping maw superimposed on her face, the way it happens in the twenty-fifth shot on a film. I wanted to say something mildly sarcastic to her.

‘I think you induce in yourself the idea that you live among hypocrites and fiends.’

‘Me? Why would I do that?’ she asked.

‘They say no one can commit murder unless they ascribe some bad quality to their victim. Otherwise their conscience will torment them. But when there’s a whole series of murders, one after another, it’s convenient to extend those qualities to the entire target group. It makes the idea of retribution less frightening.’

A shadow ran across E Hu-Li’s face.

‘Is this a lecture on morality?’ she asked. ‘Even some human beings understand that in reality there is no good or evil. But you and I are foxes. After death there is no retribution for evil, and no reward for virtue, only the universal return to the Ultimate Supreme Limit. All the rest was invented to keep the people in submission and fear. What are you talking about?’

I realized how stupid I was being - angering a sister from whom I wanted to ask advice. Who was I to reproach her with anything? Was I even a single iota better? If I really did consider myself better, then I was even worse. I had to reduce the whole thing to a joke.

‘How serious we are,’ I said playfully. ‘That’s what we get for cohabiting with the tailless monkey for all these years. You’ve even started thinking like they do.’

E Hu-Li looked at me suspiciously for several seconds, kintting her downy eyebrows together. It suited her really well. Then she smiled.

‘So you decided to make fun of me? Well, make sure you don’t turn your backside towards me . . .’

As used by foxes, this phrase is based on different references than among humans, but the general meaning is pretty much the same. I had no intention of turning my backside towards her, especially since she was quite capable of tugging on my tail - it had happened once in the fifteenth century, and I still remembered it. But the phrase suddenly reminded me of my last meeting with Alexander, and I blushed. It didn’t escape my sister E’s keen eye.

‘Oho,’ she said, ‘you still blush the same way you did a thousand years ago. How I envy you. How do you manage it? I suppose for that you have to be a virgin?’

The really interesting thing is that I only blush in the company of other were-creatures. When I’m associating with people, it never happens. It’s a great pity - I could really hike up my rates.

‘But I’m not a virgin any more,’ I said, and blushed even more deeply.

‘Really?’ E Hu-Li was so astonished she slumped back against the divan. ‘Come on, tell me all about it!’

I’d been longing to share my story for ages, and I spent the next half-hour pouring out everything that my heart had been full of for so long.

While I was recounting the details of my giddy affair, E Hu-Li frowned, smiled, nodded and sometimes raised one finger, as if she were saying: ‘Aha! And how many times have I told you that!’

When I finished she said: ‘Well then. So it’s finally happened, even to you. A thousand years one way or the other - what’s the difference? Congratulations.’

I picked up a paper napkin off the table, crumpled it into ball and threw it at her. She dodged it nimbly.

‘Experience of life really is a great thing,’ she said. ‘Who could have even imagined anything of the sort in the days of our youth? You seduced him so professionally that it’s not even clear who raped who.’

‘What?’ My jaw dropped in amazement.

She chuckled.

‘At least among friends you could drop the mask of offended innocence. You provoked him.’

‘What do you mean? When did I provoke him?’

‘When you came leaping out of the bathroom naked and stood on all fours with your backside towards him.’

‘You think that’s provocation?’

‘Of course. The question is, why did you turn your backside towards him?’

I shrugged.

‘For greater accuracy.’

‘What makes that especially accurate?’

‘The tail’s closer to the target,’ I said, rather uncertainly.

‘Oh yes. But you have to look over your shoulder. Tell me honestly, have you ever done that before, for greater accuracy?’

‘No.’

‘So why did you suddenly decide to start?’

‘I . . . I just thought the occasion was very important. And I couldn’t afford to fall flat on my back. I mean, flat on my face.’

E Hu-Li burst out laughing.

‘I can’t believe this,’ she said, ‘did you really do the whole thing on autopilot?’

I definitely did not like the way the conversation was going.

‘I know you are prejudiced against it,’ she went on, ‘but if you have a talk with a good psychoanalyst, you’ll realize your true motives straight away. And by the way, you can talk to an analyst about anything you like without feeling embarrassed - that’s what he’s paid for. Of course, you don’t have to tell him about your tail. Although you could mention it, as if it were a fantasy. But then ignore everything he tells you about penis envy . . .’

To bare my soul to my friend and hear that. I was furious.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘doesn’t it seem to you that it’s high time to take an aspen stake and stuff all this psychoanalytical discourse up the cocaine-and-amphetamine sprinkled backside that produced it?’

She gaped at me in amazement.

‘Okay, I understand about the amphetamines. After all, I was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre for two years, in case you didn’t know. And I understand about the backside, for the same reason. But what has cocaine got to do with it?’

‘I can explain,’ I said, delighted that the conversation was moving away from a slippery subject.

‘So explain.’

‘Dr Freud was not only a cocaine freak himself, he prescribed it for his patients. And then he drew his conclusions. Cocaine is a powerful sexual stimulant. And so all that stuff Freud invented - all those oedipuses, sphinxes and sphincters - they all exist exclusively in the mental space of a patient whose brains have been scrambled by cocaine. In that state a man really does have only one problem - what to do first, screw his mummy or waste his daddy. Naturally, that’s only until the cocaine wears off. But in those days there was no supply problem.’

‘I’m not talking about . . .’

‘But as long as your daily dose is less than three grams,’ I continued, ‘you don’t have to worry about all that stuff he discovered. Basing the analysis of your own behaviour on Freud is about as helpful as relying on Carlos Castaneda’s peyote trips. As least Castaneda has heart, poetry. But all this Freud has is his pince-nez, two lines of coke on the sideboard and a quiver in his sphincter. The bourgeoisie love him because he is so loathsome. For his ability to reduce everything in the world to the asshole.’

‘But why should the bourgeoisie love him for that?’

‘Because portfolio investors need prophets who will explain the world in terms they can understand. And who will prove yet again that nothing threatens the objective reality in which they have invested so much money.’

E Hu-Li gave me a rather mocking look.

‘But what do you think?’ she asked. ‘Is the tendency to deny objective reality really based on sexual deprivation?’

‘Eh?’ I was flummoxed.

‘To put it more simply, do you agree that the world is regarded as an illusion by those who have problems with sex?’ she said, in the tone of a genial TV presenter.

This was a view of the world that I’d often come across in the National. Supposedly only sexually hung-up losers took refuge from the invigorating clamour of the market in mysticism and obscurantism. It was especially amusing to hear this from a client squirming all over the bed in splendid isolation: if you thought about it, it was the same thing that happened to the poor guy all the rest of the time, only instead of a fox’s tail it was the Financial Times that was bamboozling him, and his loneliness was not relative, as it was in my company, but absolute. But to hear such things from my own sister . . . That’s what the consumer society does to us.

‘It’s all the other way round,’ I said. ‘In actual fact the tendency to associate the spiritual search with sexual problems is based on the frustration of the anal vector of the libido.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked sister E, raising her eyebrows.

‘It’s obvious . . . Those who say that should do what they’ve always secretly wanted to do - screw themselves.’

‘What for?’

‘When they start doing something they understand, they’ll stop discussing things that they don’t understand. The way a pig’s neck is made means it can’t look at the sky. But it certainly doesn’t follow that the sky is a sexual neurosis.’

‘I get it . . . Did you pick all this stuff up from the wolf?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Well, well, well,’ said my sister E. ‘And can I get a look at him?’

‘Why the sudden interest?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘No need to be jealous,’ she laughed. ‘I’d just like to see who it is your heart took such a shine to. And apart from that, I’ve never seen any werewolves, I’ve only heard that they can be found somewhere in the north. By the way, the super-werewolf that you’re always lecturing me about is actually more likely to be a wolf than a fox. At least, that’s what my husband thinks. And so does his occult lodge the Pink Sunset.’

I sighed. It was simply incomprehensible to me how E Hu-Li, so astute in some matters, could be so absolutely ignorant in others. How many times did I have to explain the same thing to her? I decided not to get involved in an argument. Instead I asked:

‘Do you think the super-werewolf could turn out to be my Alexander?’

‘As far as I understand it, the super-werewolf is not simply a wolf. He’s something as far removed from a wolf as a wolf is from a fox. But a super-werewolf is not an intermediate stage between a fox and a wolf. He is far beyond a wolf.’

‘I don’t understand a thing,’ I said. ‘Where beyond a wolf?’

‘You know, I can’t really explain that coherently. Poor Brian has collected all the available material on the subject. Would you like him to give a brief lecture while he’s still alive to do it? We just happen to have some free time tomorrow afternoon. And you bring Alexander along - I think he’ll find it interesting too. And you can show him to me at the same time.’

‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘Only Alexander’s English isn’t so good.’

‘Never mind. Brian’s a polyglot and he speaks five languages fluently. Including Russian.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s give it a try.’

E Hu-Li raised her finger.

‘And your lieutenant general will do us one favour in return.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Brian and I have to get into the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour at night. And it has to be the night from Friday to Saturday, around the time of the full moon. Will he be able to arrange that?’

‘I think he will,’ I said. ‘He’s certain to have contacts in the Orthodox Patriarchate. I’ll try having a word with him.’

‘Then I’ll remind you,’ said E Hu-Li.

That’s always the way with her. She solves her problems at your expense and at the same time makes you feel that she’s done you a favour. Although on the other hand, I was terribly curious to get a look at Lord Cricket - the occultist, patron of the fine arts and lover of fox-hunting.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘does your husband have any idea? You know, about you?’

‘No. Are you crazy, or what? This is a hunt. The rules say he must only learn the whole truth at the very last moment.’

‘How do you manage to keep it all secret for so long?’

‘The formalities of English life are helpful. Separate bedrooms, the Victorian horror of nakedness, the demure ritual of preparing for bed. In aristocratic circles it’s easy - all you have to do is establish a definite routine, and then stick to it. The really difficult thing isn’t that, it’s constantly postponing the finale. That really does strain all your emotional faculties.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘your stamina is really amazing.’

‘Brian is my Moby Dick,’ E Hu-Li said and laughed. ‘Although the poor soul’s dick really isn’t all that moby . . .’

‘How long have you been herding him now? Five years? Or six?’

‘Six.’

‘And when are you planning?’

‘Some day soon,’ said E Hu-Li.

I shuddered in surprise. She put her arm round my shoulders and whispered.

‘That’s the reason we’re here.’

‘Why did you decide to do it all here?’

‘It’s less dangerous here. And then, it’s such an incredibly convenient situation. Brian doesn’t merely know the prophecy - according to which the super-werewolf is supposed to appear in this very city - he intends to become the super-werewolf himself. For some reason he’s certain that in order to do that, you have to hold something like a black mass in the church that was destroyed and restored, following the methodology of his idiotic sect. It all has to happen without any witnesses. I’ll be his only helper, since I’ve been initiated into the mystery.’

‘How?’

‘He initiated me.’

I was struck by a sudden conjecture.

‘Hang on now . . . Do you believe in the super-werewolf?’

‘In what sense?’

‘That he will come, and we shall see him clearly, and all the rest of it - you know, what you said in your e-mail?’

‘I didn’t say I believed it. I said that was what Brian said. I’m not interested in all that mysticism. The super-werewolf can come or not come, I couldn’t care less about him. But I could never find a better opportunity for . . .’ - she snapped her fingers to make sure I understood what she meant.

‘Why, you cunning beast!’

E Hu-Li smiled enchantingly.

It was only now that I understood her plan. A novice chess-player probably feels something of the kind when a brilliant strategy unfolds before his eyes. The denouement promised to be dazzlingly dramatic, just as the rules of the hunt required: it was hard to imagine a better setting for the final blow than a church at night. And apart from that, from the very beginning there had been a ready-made, bizarre but plausible cover-story to explain the event. In fact, it wasn’t really a cover-story, it was the absolute truth, which the star of the festivities himself believed - and so had I, only a minute ago. How could the investigating authorities suspect anything?

Elegant and natural, without even a hint of falsehood. A masterly plan. Of course, I didn’t approve of this sport, but I had to give my sister her due. E Hu-Li was undoubtedly the finest hunter in the world, the only sportsfox at such a high level. I cleared my throat respectfully.

‘And who’s your next in line? Or haven’t you decided yet?’

‘Oh, I’m really spoilt for choice. There are some extraordinary possibilities, quite unexpected.’

‘Such as?’

E Hu-Li half-closed her eyes and sang in a high, crystal-clear voice:

‘Don’t question why she needs to be so free . . .’

‘Mick Jagger?’ I gasped. ‘How dare you even think of it?’

‘Why not?’ E Hu-Li asked impassively. ‘He’s “Sir Mick” now, after all. A legitimate target. And then, surely you don’t still find those words touching? I think they started sounding like an advert for an aircraft-carrier ages ago.’

Lord Cricket was a man of indeterminate age. And sex, I feel like adding to make the description more precise. My sister E said that he came from a family with a military tradition, but his appearance gave no indication at all of that. My first look at him even put me in mind of that politically correct expression ‘war hero or shero’ - despite his shaved head and goatee beard. His facial expression was interesting - as if in his youth his soul had aspired towards freedom and light, but failed to break through his armour of self-control and duty and ended up frozen in an interrogatory bubble, puffing out his face into a grimace of disaffected surprise.

He was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt with a wide tie in an extremely delicate shade of green. There was a small enamel badge glinting on the lapel of his jacket. It looked like the enamel images of Mao Tse-tung that people used to wear in China, only it wasn’t Mao’s face smiling out of it, but Aleister Crowley’s (I wouldn’t really have recognized the British Satanist myself - E Hu-Li told me).

Alexander and Lord Cricket reacted to each other cautiously. When he saw the military uniform, Lord Cricket smiled. It was an amazing smile, with just the faintest hint of irony that, nevertheless, you couldn’t possibly fail to notice, no matter how hard you tried. How many centuries of effort must have gone into trimming that lawn! At the sight of Lord Cricket, Alexander nervously drew in the air through his nose and closed his eyes; his face darkened, as if he’d just remembered something upsetting.

I was frightened that they would argue. But they quickly got into small talk about the Middle East, Shiite terrorism and the oil business. I must have been looking dour, because Lord Cricket asked me the classic question:

‘Why do you Russians smile so little?’

‘We don’t need to be so competitive,’ I said morosely. ‘We’re a nation of losers in any case.’

Lord Cricket raised one eyebrow.

‘Come now, you exaggerate,’ he said.

But he seemed to be satisfied by my answer and he went back to his conversation with Alexander.

Having made sure they were talking about subjects that were safe, I started getting to grips with the video projector hired from a local business centre. Of course, there was something absurd about an occult Power Point presentation. But then, the whole field of human occultism was such a profanation that not even Microsoft could do anything to debase it.

While we were fiddling with the equipment, I succumbed yet again to the temptation to inoculate my sister E with the germs of moral principle.

‘You can’t possibly imagine,’ I said quickly in a low voice, trying to squeeze as much useful information as possible into the seconds allotted to me, ‘how liberating Kant’s categorical imperative is for the soul. I felt as if I’d grown wings when I realized - yes, yes, don’t laugh now - that for us foxes man can be not just a means to achieve the aim, but the aim itself!’

E Hu-Li frowned. And then she said:

‘You’re right. As soon as I’m done with Brian, I’ll fly to Argentina for a safari. I’ve wanted to go shooting from a helicopter for a long time.’

What on earth could I do with her?

We just couldn’t get the projector hooked up to the laptop. The Bluetooth refused to work, and I’d never had anything to do with it before. For a while I became completely absorbed in technical matters and stopped paying attention to what was happening in the room. And when I finally managed to solve the problem, Lord Cricket and Alexander were already going at it hammer and tongs - about values.

‘Do you seriously believe,’ Lord Cricket was asking, ‘that there is any better way of organizing society than liberal democracy? ’

‘We don’t want any of those liberals here, thank you very much! We’ve suffered enough in ten years. We’ve only just started to draw breath again.’

I realized it was time to interfere.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, showing my fist to Alexander where Lord Cricket couldn’t see it, ‘but I think you’re misunderstanding each other. It’s purely a matter of language.’

‘How’s that?’ Lord Cricket asked.

‘There are quite a number of sound combinations that mean completely different things in different languages. For instance, the Russian word “Bog”, meaning “God”, means a swamp, a “bog” in English. And the English word “God” means a calendar year in Russian. The sounds are the same, but the meaning is completely different. It happens with people’s names too, it can be very funny sometimes. And it’s exactly the same with the word “liberal”. It’s a classical inter-linguistic homonym. For instance, in America it means someone who is in favour of firearms control, single-sex marriage and abortion and feels more sympathy for the poor than the rich. But here in Russia . . .’

‘Here in Russia,’ Alexander interrupted, ‘it means an unscrupulous weasel who hopes someone will give him a little money if he makes big round eyes and keeps repeating that twenty greasy parasites should carry on squeezing Russia by the balls, simply because at the beginning of so-called privatization, they happened to be barbecuing grills with pissed Yeltsin’s daughter!’

‘Phoo, how crude,’ I said.

‘But it’s the truth. And the tragedy of Russian liberalism is that nobody’s ever going to give the weasel any money anyway.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because ten years ago those greasy parasites were choked with greed, now they are shitting their pants in fear, and in ten years they won’t have any money at all.’

It’s a rare thing, I thought, for all three tenses in Russian to be combined in a single sentiment as hopelessly gloomy as that.

‘Do you favour a review of the results of privatization?’ asked Lord Cricket, who was listening carefully.

‘And why not?’ put in E Hu-Li. ‘If you analyse it properly, the whole of human history for the last ten thousand years is nothing but a constant revision of the results of privatization. History is hardly likely to come to an end because a small number of people have stolen a large amount of money. Not even if the small number of people hire themselves three fukuyamas apiece!’

My sister E occasionally liked to express some radical, even seditious views - it suited her predatory beauty and instantly enchanted her future victim. And now I noticed how admiringly Alexander was gaping at her.

‘Precisely!’ he said. ‘I ought to write that down. A pity, I haven’t got a pen. But what’s a fukuyama? Some sort of geisha?’

‘Pretty much,’ said E Hu-Li and turned so that Alexander could see her profile. In profile she is absolutely irresistible.

Why you toad, I thought. After you promised . . . But even so I couldn’t help admiring her: my sister E understood nothing about Russian affairs, but she sensed instinctively what to say in order to slip the noose over a man’s head at the first attempt. Alexander was gazing at her with his mouth wide open and I realized I had to rescue him in a hurry. I had to say something even more radical.

‘And so all these arguments about liberalism,’ I said, as if I were closing the subject, ‘are simply a case of linguistic confusion. And although we greatly respect liberal democracy as a principle, in Russian the words will give off a bad stink for another hundred years or so!’

Alexander switched his adoring gaze from E Hu-Li to me. Then back to E Hu-Li. Then back to me again. The boy’s having a real feast today, I thought.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right about the words. It’s so easy to hide behind them. One of those offshore fat cats arrives in America, says he’s a liberal, and the oppressed blacks think he’s in favour of legalizing cannabis . . .’

‘Tell me, is your professional activity not hindered by such an emotional attitude to the subject?’ Lord Cricket asked.

Alexander didn’t appreciate the irony.

‘Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to say that democracy is bad. It’s good. What’s bad is when villains and swindlers try to exploit it. So democracy has to be helped to move in the right direction. That’s what we think.’

‘That’s no longer democracy,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘It’s in the essence of democracy that no one helps it, it helps itself.’

‘No one helps it? In translation that means we sit on our backsides and watch while we’re shafted in every orifice by various beneficiary owners with double chins and triple citizenships. We watched for twenty years. They’d already drawn up the plans to divide Russia into three parts and started to train the Russian-speaking staff, we know, we know . . . We’ve read the instructions. Do you think we started tightening the screws just for the love of it? If so, you’re mistaken. It’s just that if we had-n’t, we’d have been gobbled in three years.’

‘Who would have gobbled you up?’ Lord Cricket asked in surprise. ‘Democracy? Liberalism?’

‘Democracy, liberalism - those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it’s taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything’s fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it - the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society - why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhoea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on. And we were only given two choices - either to run out completely once and for all through some unidentified asshole, or take antibiotics for ages and ages, then slowly and carefully start all over again. But differently.’

‘Well, you’ve never had any shortage of antibiotics in your country,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘The question is - who’s going to prescribe them?’

‘People will be found,’ said Alexander. ‘And none of your World Bank or IMF, who first prescribe salmonella and then set the basin under your backside - we don’t need any consultants. We’ve been through that already. Soar boldly over the edge of the cliff, they say, come down smack on to the ground as hard as you can, and then you’ll hear the polite applause of the international community. Maybe we’d be better off without the applause or the cliff? After all, for a thousand years Russia decided for itself how to live, and it worked quite well, you only have to look at the map to see that. And now they say it’s time for us to go into the melting pot. We’ll see whose turn it is for the melting-pot. If someone wants to melt us down that badly, maybe we’ll be the ones to send him up in black smoke. We still have the means, and we will for a long time yet!’

Alexander smashed his fist down deafeningly on the desk, making the projector and the laptop bounce into the air. And then silence fell and I could hear a fly that had lost its way fluttering between the windowpane and the blind.

There were times when I myself couldn’t understand what roused the greatest turmoil in my heart - the monstrously huge instrument of love that I had to deal with when he changed into a wolf, or these wild, genuinely wolf-like views on life that he expressed when he was a man. Perhaps I found the latter just as fascinating as, as . . . I didn’t pursue my thought to the end - it was too frightening.

Especially since there was nothing to be fascinated by. For all his apparent radicalism, he only ever talked about the consequences and didn’t even mention the cause - the ‘upper rat’, engaged in slobbering self-satisfaction (that’s why I hate the word ‘blowjob’, I thought, there you have it - the psychopathology of everyday life). In fact, Alexander probably understood everything, but he was just being cunning, the way a werewolf is supposed to be: you can only live in Saudi Arabia and not notice the sand for big money, and he certainly had that. Or perhaps he wasn’t being cunning . . . After all, I’d only really understood everything about the ‘upper rat’ and the ‘oligarchy’ when I tried to explain it all in a letter to my sister U. And I still didn’t know how a wolf’s mind worked.

The first to recover his composure was Lord Cricket. His face assumed an expression of sincere sadness (of course, I didn’t actually think that it was sincere - it was simply that the British aristocrat’s mimetic skill required that precise word). He looked at his watch and said:

‘I can understand your feelings to some extent. But, to be honest, I find it boring to pursue the path along which your mind is moving. It’s such a barren desert! People spend their entire lives engaged in arguments like that. And then they simply die.’

‘So,’ said Alexander, ‘do you have other options to suggest?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘Take my word for it, I do. There are creatures living among us who are of a different nature. I understand that you take a keen interest in them.’

‘That’s right,’ said Alexander. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘First of all,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘I know that they are not occupied with the petty matters of which you speak with such fervour. They simply do not notice the mirages that make us turn crimson and hammer our fists on the table . . .’

Alexander lowered his head.

‘It is unlikely that you could even explain to them,’ Lord Cricket continued, ‘exactly what it is that makes you feel so bitter. As Thoreau put it, they march to the sound of a different drummer . . . Or perhaps it is better to say that they don’t march at all. They have no ideology, but that does not mean their lives are diminished. On the contrary. Their lives are far more real than those of human beings. For, after all, what you were just talking about is no more than a bad dream. Take a fifty-year-old newspaper and read it. The truncated, silly-looking letters, the paltry ambitions of dead men who don’t yet know that they are dead men . . . Everything that you are so concerned about now is in no way different from what set minds seething then - except, perhaps, that the order of the words in the headlines has changed. Wake up!’

Alexander’s head had sunk right down into his shoulders now - he was totally embarrassed. Lord Cricket apparently knew how to go for the jugular.

‘Surely you would like to find out who these beings of a different nature are? And understand how they differ from human beings?’

‘Yes, I would,’ Alexander muttered.

‘Then forget all this nonsense, and let’s get down to business. Today I’m going to tell you about what lies concealed behind the ability of certain people to transform themselves into animals - an ability that is real, not metaphorical. Anthy, is everything working? Then turn off the light, please . . .’

‘What you are about to hear,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘is normally regarded as esoteric knowledge. Therefore I ask you to keep what you hear secret. The information I intend to share with you originates from the Pink Sunset Lodge, or, more precisely, from Aleister Crowley, Aldous Huxley and their line of secret transmission. The condition of secrecy that I have mentioned is essential, not so much for the sake of the lodge, as for your own personal safety. Do you accept this condition?’

Alexander and I exchanged glances.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Alexander repeated, after a brief pause.

Lord Cricket touched one of the keys on his laptop. A diagram appeared on the wall - a man sitting in the lotus position, with a vertical line drawn along his spine. Set along this line were symbols marked with Sanskrit characters, looking like different-coloured cogwheels with various numbers of teeth.

‘No doubt you are aware that a human being is not merely a physical body with a nervous system, restricted to the perception of the physical world. On the subtle plane a human being is a psycho-energetic structure consisting of three channels of energy and seven psychic centres called chakras.’

Lord Cricket ran his finger down something rather like a bicycle chain connecting the cogwheels on the spine.

‘This subtle structure not only regulates a human being’s spiritual life. It is also responsible for the way in which he or she perceives the surrounding world. Each chakra is related to a specific set of psychic manifestations, which I won’t go into just now. What is important for us is that, according to the traditional occult view, spiritual progress consists in the ascent along the central energy channel of a force known as “kundalini”, or “snake energy”.’

A part of the previous diagram appeared on the screen, showing an inverted triangle at the very base of the spine.

‘In its coiled state, Kundalini slumbers in this triangular bone called the “sacrum”. The sacrum is located at the base of the spine - in fact, it is its first bone. Or its last, depending on your point of view. In traditional occultism it is believed that the gradual charging of the chakras with the kundalini force is the essential aspect of the journey from a philistine who is indifferent to spiritual matters, to a saint who has achieved unity with the godhead . . .’

Lord Cricket paused for effect.

‘In most occult schools it was usually assumed that kundalini can only rise upwards through the central channel. Nowhere in any openly available sources do we find any mention of the snake energy being able to move downwards. Nonetheless, it is possible for the energy to move in this manner.’

The following diagram was like the first, except that the vertical line continued below the seated man’s crossed legs and three new cogwheels, all black, had appeared on it. There were no Sanskrit characters beside them - only numerals. The one closest to the man’s body was marked ‘1’, the next was marked ‘2’, and the one furthest away was marked ‘3’.

‘I’m not going to talk about how the kundalini can be made to move downwards. That requires a degree of initiation that no one present here today possesses . . .’

‘Oh, Brian,’ E Hu-Li interrupted, ‘really, what are you saying. Tell them.’

‘Anthy,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘everything that can be said, will be said. And so, as a result of a certain procedure, the kundalini surges down along the shadow projection of the central channel. When this occurs, it can halt at three points, which are mirror reflections of the three lower chakras - muladhara, swadhishtana and manipura.’

He drew his finger down through the three black cogwheels. I noticed number one had four petals, which made it look like the blades in a kitchen mincer. Number two had six petals, and it looked like a martial arts weapon for throwing. And number three consisted of two stars, one superimposed on the other, each with five projections, folded over slightly - ten petals in all.

‘As I have already said, the movement of kundalini upwards along the central channel leads to unity with the godhead and likeness to god. It is logical to assume that the result of the snake force moving downwards must be the direct opposite. And at this point, I would like to draw your attention to a certain extremely interesting circumstance, of which I was reminded by our enchanting guest, when she spoke about the meaning of words in different languages . . .’

Lord Cricket bowed briefly in my direction and smiled. I smiled in reply and whispered to Alexander:

‘Learn some manners, you oaf.’

‘We heard about the Russian word “Bog” and its English equivalent “God”. If you read “God” backwards, you get “Dog”. You must understand that this coincidence is not simply an accident. It is possible to argue which came first - the language or the reality that it reflects. But that is merely the old chestnut about the chicken and the egg.’

The silhouettes of three animals appeared on the screen - a wolf, a dog and a fox.

‘The word “werewolf” means a human being who can assume the form of a wolf, or perhaps some other animal. In Chinese, however, the corresponding term is associated more closely with foxes. But there is no fundamental contradiction in this - the fox, like the wolf, is a member of the class of canines. They are still “God” spelt backwards, still the same highly charged black mass, the same downwards shift of kundalini.’

‘A highly charged black mass,’ E Hu-Li repeated in a low voice, giving her husband a respectful look.

‘The question that arises is how the kundalini travels once it leaves the body. After all, it can’t actually move through empty space. And here we reach the most interesting part. Again, it is possible to argue at length about what is the cause and what is the effect, but the emergence of kundalini from the body is accompanied by a physical mutation. Something quite incredible takes place. Do you remember those films about volcanic eruptions? Sometimes there are scenes in them where you can see lava flowing down a slope and burning out a channel that was-n’t there a moment earlier. The kundalini creates a physical channel for itself in exactly the same way. As soon as it moves below the muladhara - the lowest human chakra, located at the base of the spine - the were-creature starts to grow a tail!’

Two tails - a wolf’s and a fox’s - appeared on the screen. The fox’s tail was drawn with absurd mistakes. The next slide showed the man in the lotus position again, but now he had a shaggy tail, with three black cogwheels on it.

‘It is through the tail that the kundalini energy descends into the three lower infra-chakras. These centres do not have any Sanskrit names. They are conventionally referred to as “the position of the fox”, “the position of the wolf” and “the abyss”. The infra-chakra closest to the body is the position of the fox.’

He pointed to the black blades from the kitchen mincer, with the number ‘1’ beside them.

‘This is considered to be a point of stable equilibrium, where the energy can be located permanently, and so the were-creature can remain in the form of a fox for an unlimited period of time. However, you should not think that at this point transformation occurs into a fox that is the animal we know. The snake energy emerges only a short distance from the body, and therefore in physical terms the were-creature differs only in insignificant ways from a human being. It is simply a rather plain creature with a tail and a few changes in the shape of the ears . . .’

I almost snorted.

‘In addition to that, the shape of the pupils is transformed and the superciliary arches become slightly more pronounced, but you would probably not be surprised to meet one of these creatures on the street . . .’

‘Absolutely fantastic,’ said E Hu-Li.

Lord Cricket pointed to the cogwheel located in the centre of the tail.

‘The displacement of the kundalini to the second infra-chakra produces a far more spectacular effect. Here we are dealing with the absolutely classic case of a “werewolf”. The were-creature is not simply transformed into a wolf. He is, so to speak, a wolf writ large. He is taller than a man and incredibly strong, with huge jaws full of teeth, but he walks on his hind legs like a man - although if he wants, he can run on all four legs. The descriptions in folklore are fairly accurate, since this has always been the most widespread form of were-creature in Europe. I shall only remark upon one curious detail. It is widely believed that transformation into a werewolf is associated with a specific phase of the moon or the onset of twilight. And in the folk imagination, it comes to an end with the dawn, since evil spirits cannot bear the sunlight. In actual fact, darkness and light have nothing to do with the matter. But another, correct, observation has been made: the transformation into a werewolf is short-lived, since the infra-chakra number two is a point of unstable equilibrium, where the kundalini cannot be located for a long period of time . . .’

‘But what does that mean,’ asked E Hu-Li, ‘stable equilibrium, unstable equilibrium?’

Lord Cricket leaned down over his laptop.

‘Just a moment,’ he said, ‘I have a slide on that subject here somewhere . . .’

An image of Stonehenge appeared on the screen, followed by an advertisement in various shades of green for a trailer home with a vase of narcissi pasted lovingly, but not very professionally in its window, and finally a black sine curve.

‘There,’ said Lord Cricket, ‘please pardon the confusion.’

There was a blue ball lying in the hollow of the curve, and a red ball poised on its crest. The balls had little arrows of the same colours pointing away from them to indicate their direction of movement.

‘It’s very simple,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘Both balls are in a state of equilibrium, but if you move the blue ball, it will return to the point from which it started. That is stable equilibrium. However, if you move the red ball, it will not return to that point and will roll downwards. That is unstable equilibrium . . .’

‘I have a question,’ said Alexander. ‘May I?’

‘By all means.’

‘Why is the first ball blue, and the second one red?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And the arrows are the same colours. Why those two colours in particular?’

‘But what difference does it make?’

‘No difference at all,’ said Alexander. ‘I’m just curious. Perhaps you haven’t heard, but in Russian the word for blue - “goluboi” - means “homosexual”. I’ve been wondering for a long time about why the arrows on all the campaign maps are always blue and red. As if history consisted primarily of a struggle between the queers and the communists. I thought perhaps you might know?’

‘No,’ Lord Cricket replied politely, ‘I don’t know why precisely those two colours are used. May I continue?’

Alexander nodded. The tail with the black infra-chakras appeared on the screen again.

‘As I have already said, the second position, at which the transformation into a wolf takes place, is unstable. If we superimpose the curve on the drawing, you can see that the neighbouring positions - numbers one and three - must be stable. Number one is the position of the fox, which we have already discussed. You probably have a question about position number three?’

‘Yes,’ said E Hu-Li. ‘What is it, Brian?’

‘I have already mentioned that the three infra-chakras of a were-creature are located symmetrically to the lower three chakras of a human being. The final infra-chakra, located at the very tip of the tail, is a mirror reflection of the Manipura, located between the navel and the heart. At this point the central channel is interrupted. The kundalini cannot move on to the upper chakras unless the region around the Manipura, known as the “ocean of illusions” is charged with the energy of a genuine spiritual mentor. According to the principle of Hermes Trismegistus, the same applies to the were-creature’s infra-chakras. In order to move the kundalini to its lowest possible point, an involtation of darkness is required, the spiritual influence of a superior demonic entity that fills the so-called “desert of truth” - the rupture in the shadow central channel - with its vibrations . . .’

‘And what exactly is a superior demonic entity?’ I couldn’t help asking.

Lord Cricket smiled.

‘That depends on your personal contacts,’ he said. ‘The possibilities here are different for everyone . . . And so, we have come to the end of what I am permitted to tell you. I can only add one thing: position number three, the so-called abyss, is the point at which the transformation to the super-werewolf takes place.’

‘And has anyone ever succeeded in completing that manoeuvre? ’ I asked.

‘According to certain sources, in 1925 one of your compatriots, the anthroposophist Sharikov, succeeded. He was a disciple of Dr Steiner, and a friend of Maximilian Voloshin and Andrei Bely. As far as we know, Sharikov was taken into the Cheka, and the whole business was kept top secret. And the secrecy was taken very seriously: suffice it to say that the manuscript of A Dog’s Heart - a story by the well-known writer Bulgakov that was based on rumours about the event - was confiscated. After that no one ever saw Sharikov again.’

‘But what exactly is a super-werewolf? Alexander asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lord Cricket. ‘At least, I don’t know yet. But you have no idea how impatient I am to find out . . .’

‘What are you doing wearing an evening dress first thing in the morning?’ Alexander asked. ‘And high heels?’

‘Why, don’t they suit me?’

‘Black suits you very well,’ he said, and cautiously rubbed his cheek against mine. ‘But then, so does white.’

Instead of kissing we sometimes used to rub our cheeks together. I found this manner of his funny at first - there was something childish, puppyish about it. Then he confessed that he was sniffing my skin, which had an especially tender smell just behind my ear. After that, I used to experience a vague displeasure during this procedure - I had the feeling that I was being used.

‘Are we going to the theatre?’ he asked.

‘Something a bit more interesting than that. We’re going hunting. ’

‘Hunting. But who are we going to hunt?’

‘Chickens,’ I declared proudly.

‘Are you feeling hungry?’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘Then why do you want to go hunting chickens?’

‘It’s just that I want you to get to know me a little bit better. Get ready, we’re going out of town.’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘only first read this. Someone has a commercial proposition for you.’