The Sacred Book of the Werewolf [Victor Pelevin] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 5
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‘Isn’t it time to go to the room?’
The name National suggests a hotel representative of national taste. In Russia this taste is eclectic, which is reflected in the decor: the carpet on the stairs is covered with classical fleurs-de-lys, the stained glass in the windows is art nouveau, and it is hard to discover any principle at all in the selection of paintings on the walls - churches, bouquets of flowers, forest thickets, old peasant women, views of Versailles, with Napoleon suddenly turning up in the middle of them all, looking like a blue parrot with a gold tail . . .
But actually it’s only at first glance that the pictures have nothing in common. In fact they all share the most important artistic attribute of all - they’re for sale. As soon as you remember that, the remarkable stylistic unity of the interior becomes clear. And in addition, you realize there is no such thing as abstract art at all, it’s all very concrete. A profound thought, I even wanted to make a note of it, but that would have been awkward with a client there.
We stopped at the glass door of room number 319 and the Sikh gave me a sultry smile as he slipped his key card into the lock. He had a VIP suite - they cost 600 dollars a day there. Behind the double door there was a small businessman’s sitting room: a striped sofa with a high back, two armchairs, a fax and a printer, a palm tree in a tub and a small cupboard with antique tableware. The window offered a panoramic view of a street from which the Kremlin could be seen. That’s category ‘B’. There’s a category ‘C’ there too - that’s when the window looks out on to a street from which you can see the other street, from which the Kremlin is visible.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I asked.
The Sikh began unfastening his tie.
‘Are we in a hurry?’ he asked playfully. ‘Over there.’
I opened the door he had indicated. Behind it was the bedroom. Almost the entire space was taken up by an immense double bed, and the small door into the bathroom was in the corner of the room: I didn’t even notice it at first. That was the way it should be, the dimensions of things proportionate to the place they occupy in life. The suite approached the ideal, since it was structured precisely like the VIP life. Work represented by the businessman’s sitting room - receive a fax, send a fax, sit on the stripy sofa for a while, look at the palm tree in the tub and when you get fed up with the palm tree, turn your head and look at the tableware in the cupboard; personal life represented by the bedroom with the bed stretching from wall to wall: take a sleeping pill and sleep. Or else what was happening now.
I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and started getting ready for work. It wasn’t difficult - I simply lowered my trousers a bit and freed my tail. I only turned on the water as camouflage.
I feel I have now reached the point where certain explanations are required, otherwise my narrative will seem rather outlandish. So let me pause for a while to say a few words about myself.
Foxes don’t have any sex in the strict sense of the word, and if we are referred to as ‘she’, it’s because of our external resemblance to women. In actual fact we’re like angels - that is, we don’t have any reproductive system. We don’t reproduce because we don’t grow old and we can carry on living until something kills us.
As for our appearance, we have slender, shapely bodies without a trace of fat and magnificently defined musculature - the kind that some teenagers who do sport have. We have fine, silky, gleaming hair that’s a bright fiery-red colour. We are tall, and in ancient times that often used to give us away, but nowadays people have become taller and so this feature doesn’t make us stand out at all.
Although we don’t have any sex in the sense of the ability to reproduce, all of its external signs are present - you could never take a fox for a man. Straight women usually take us for lesbians. Lesbians usually go nuts. And it’s not surprising. Beside us even the most beautiful women look crude and unfinished - like a carelessly dressed block of stone beside a completed sculpture.
Our breasts are small and perfectly formed, with small, dark-brown nipples. At the spot where women have their most important dream factory we have something similar in appearance - an imitative organ with a function I’ll tell you about later. It doesn’t serve for childbirth. And at the back we have a tail, a fluffy, flexible, fiery-red antenna. The tail can become larger or smaller: in the sleeping state it’s like a ponytail about ten or fifteen centimetres long, but in the working state it can reach almost a metre in length.
When a fox’s tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thicker and longer. It’s like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn’t draw any parallels with the male human erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn’t call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion.
How do we do that?
By using our tails. And there’s nothing more to be said about it. I have no wish to conceal the truth, but it really is difficult to add anything else. Can a person who isn’t a scientist explain how he sees? Or hears? Or thinks? He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears and thinks with his head, and that’s all. Likewise we create illusion with our tails. It feels just as simple and clear to us as the other examples. But I won’t attempt to explain the mechanics of what happens in scientific terms.
As for the illusions, they can be of various kinds. Everything here is determined by the personal qualities of the fox, her imagination, mental strength and other distinctive features. A great deal also depends on how many people have to see the illusion simultaneously.
There was a time when we could do a great deal. We could create illusions of magical islands and make crowds of thousands see dragons dancing in the sky. We could create the appearance of a huge army approaching the walls of a city and all the city dwellers would see this army in exactly the same way, right down to the details of its equipment and the hieroglyphs on its banners. But those were the great, incomparable foxes of antiquity, who paid for their wonderworking with their lives. In general, since those days, our kind has declined rather seriously - probably because we are always so close to people.
Of course, my powers are nothing like those of the great foxes. Put it this way - I can make one person see anything at all. Two? Almost always. Three? That depends on the circumstances. There aren’t any precise rules here, everything is decided by the feel of things: I sense what I am capable of more or less like a rock-climber standing in front of a crevice in the mountains. He knows where he can jump from one side to the other, and where he can’t. If you don’t make the jump, you fall off and tumble into the abyss - the analogy with our enchantment is very precise.
It’s best not to exceed your own limits, because a hallucination that is not strong enough to subdue another person’s mind gives the whole game away. The mechanism involved is complicated, but the external result is always the same - when a person suddenly escapes from hypnotic control (slips off the tail, as we say), he suffers a seizure, with unpredictable consequences. More often than not he tries to kill the fox, who is entirely defenceless just at that moment.
The point is that our sport involves a certain provocative detail. In the non-working state, our tails are really small, and so we hide them between our legs. For the antenna to work at full power, it has to be unfurled. To do this, you have to lower your trousers (or raise your skirt) and spread your tail into a fiery-red plume. This increases the power of suggestion by several orders of magnitude, and that’s the way all serious questions are decided.
The need to expose yourself could give rise to awkward and ambiguous situations, but - fortunately for foxes - there is one helpful feature to the process. If you can expose yourself quickly enough, the subject will forget everything that he has seen. There’s a kind of twilight
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