Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  ‘Seems like you really don’t remember us.’ the bearded blond said after several seconds of silence. ‘Semyon Serdyuk.’

  ‘Pyotr.’ I replied.

  ‘Maria.’ said the young man in the far bath.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Maria, Maria.’ he repeated, obviously annoyed. ‘It’s a name. You know, there was a writer, Erich Maria Remarque? I was named after him.’

  ‘I have not come across him,’ I replied. ‘He must be one of the new wave.’

  ‘And then there was Rainer Maria Rilke. Haven’t you heard of him either?’

  ‘Why, certainly I have heard of him. We are even acquainted.’

  ‘Well then, he was Rainer Maria, and I’m just Maria.’

  ‘Pardon me.’ I said, ‘but I seem to recognize your voice. Was it not by any chance you who related that strange story with the aeroplane, about Russia’s alchemical wedlock with the West and so forth?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Maria, ‘but what do you find so strange about it?’

  ‘Nothing in general terms,’ I said, ‘but for some reason I had the impression that you were a woman.’

  ‘Well, in a certain sense, that’s right,’ replied Maria. ‘According to the boss here, my false personality is definitely that of a woman. You wouldn’t by any chance be a heterosexual chauvinist would you?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ I said, ‘I am simply surprised at how easily you accept that this personality is false. Do you really believe that?’

  ‘I don’t believe anything at all.’ said Maria. ‘My concussion’s to blame for everything. And they keep me here because the boss is writing his dissertation.’

  ‘But who is this boss?’ I asked in bewilderment, hearing the word a second time.

  ‘Timur Timurovich,’ Maria replied. ‘The head of the department. False personalities are his line.’

  ‘That’s not exactly right,’ Volodin countered. ‘The title of the dissertation he is working on is «The Split False Personality». Maria here is a fairly simple and uncomplicated case and you really have to strain the term a bit to talk about him having a split personality, but you, Pyotr, are a prize exhibit. Your false personality is developed in such fine detail that it outweighs the real one and almost entirely displaces it. And I he way it’s split is simply magnificent.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ objected Serdyuk, who had so far remained silent. ‘Pyotr’s case isn’t really very complicated. At a structural level it’s no different from Maria’s. Both of them have identified with names, only Maria’s identification is with the first name, and Pyotr’s is with the surname. But Pyotr’s displacement is stronger. He can’t even remember his surname. Sometimes he calls himself Fourply, sometimes something else.’

  ‘Then what is my surname?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Your surname is Voyd.’ Volodin replied, ‘and your madness is caused by your denying the existence of your own personality and replacing it with another, totally invented one.’

  ‘Although in structural terms, I repeat, it’s not a complicated case.’ added Serdyuk.

  I was annoyed - I found the idea of some strange psychic deviant telling me that my case was not complicated rather offensive.

  ‘Gentlemen, you are reasoning like doctors,’ I said. ‘Does that not seem to you to represent a certain incongruity?’

  ‘What kind of incongruity?’

  ‘Everything would be perfectly fine,’ I said, ‘if you were standing here in white coats. But why are you lying here yourselves, if you understand everything so very clearly?’

  Volodin looked at me for several seconds without speaking.

  ‘I am the victim of an unfortunate accident.’ he said.

  Serdyuk and Maria burst into loud laughter.

  ‘And as for me,’ said Serdyuk, ‘I haven’t even got any false personalities. Just an ordinary suicide attempt due to chronic alcoholism. They’re keeping me here because you can’t build a dissertation around just three cases. Just to round out the statistics.’

  ‘Never mind all that,’ said Maria. ‘You’re next in line for the garrotte. Then we’ll hear all about your alcoholic suicide.’

  By this time I felt thoroughly chilled; furthermore, I was unable to decide whether the explanation lay in the injection which, according to Volodin, ought to have made everything that was happening to me seem intolerable, or whether the water really was as cold as it seemed.

  Thankfully, however, the door opened at this point and two men in white coats entered the room. I remembered that one of them was called Zherbunov, the other Barbolin. Zherbunov held a large hourglass in his hand, while Barbolin was carrying an immense heap of linen.

  ‘Out we get.’ said Zherbunov merrily, waving the timer in front of him.

  They wiped down each of us in turn with huge fluffy sheets and helped us to put on identical pyjamas with horizontal stripes, which immediately lent events a certain naval flavour. Then they led us out through the door and down a long corridor, which also seemed somehow familiar - not the corridor itself, however, but the vaguely medical smell that hung in its air.

  ‘Tell me.’ I said quietly to Zherbunov, who was walking along just behind me, ‘why am I here?’

  He opened his eyes wide in surprise.

  ‘As if you didn’t know,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am prepared to admit that I am not well, but what was the cause? Have I been here for a long time? And what specific acts am I actually charged with?’

  ‘Ask Timur Timurovich all your questions,’ said Zherbunov. ‘We’ve no time for idle chatter.’

  I felt extremely depressed. We stopped at a white door bearing the number ‘7’. Barbolin opened it with a key and they allowed us through into a rather large room with four beds standing along the wall. The beds were made, there was a table by the barred window and standing by the wall was something that looked like a combination of a couch and a low armchair, with elastic loops for the sitter’s hands and feet. Despite these loops, there was nothing at all menacing about the contrivance. Its appearance was emphatically medical, and the absurd phrase ‘urological chair’ even came into my mind.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ I said, turning to Volodin, ‘but is this the garrotte of which you spoke?’

  Volodin gave me a brief glance and nodded towards the door. I turned to look. Timur Timurovich was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Garrotte?’ he asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘The garrotte, if I am not mistaken, is a chair on which people were executed by strangulation in medieval Spain, is that not so? What a dark and depressive perception of surrounding reality! Of course you, Pyotr, had your injection this morning, so it’s nothing to be surprised at. But you, Vladimir? I am astonished, astonished.’

  As he rattled off this speech, Timur Timurovich gestured for Zherbunov and Barbolin to leave and walked to the centre of the room.

  ‘It’s not a garrotte at all.’ he said. ‘It’s a perfectly ordinary couch for our group therapy sessions. You, Pyotr, have already attended one of these sessions, immediately after you returned to us from the isolation ward, but you were in rather poor condition, so it’s unlikely that you can remember anything.’

  ‘That is not the case,’ I said, ‘I do remember something.’

  ‘All the better. Then let me briefly remind you what takes place here. The method which I have developed and employ could be provisionally classified as turbo-Jungian. You are, of course, acquainted with the views of Jung…’

  ‘I beg your pardon, of whom?’

  ‘Karl Gustav Jung. Very well, I perceive that your mental activity is currently subject to powerful censorship from your false personality. And since your false personality is living in 1918 or 1919, we should hardly be surprised if you seem unable to remember who he is - or perhaps you really never have heard of Jung?’ I shrugged my shoulders in a dignified manner.

  ‘To put it simply, there was a psychologist by the name of Jung. His therapeutic methods were based
on a very simple principle. He attempted to draw to the surface of his patient’s consciousness the symbols which he could use to form a diagnosis. By means of deciphering them, that is.’ At this point Timur Timurovich gave a cunning little smile. ‘But my method is a little different,’ he said, ‘although the fundamentals are the same. With Jung’s method we would have to take you off somewhere to Switzerland, to some sanatorium up in the mountains, sit you down on a chaise-longue, enter into long-drawn-out conversations and wait for God knows how long before the symbols began to surface. We can’t do that sort of thing. Instead of the chaise-longue we sit you down over there.’ - Timur Timurovich pointed to the couch - ‘we give you a little injection, and then we observe the symbols that start floating to the surface in simply va-a-ast quantities. After that it’s up to us to decipher them and cure you. Is that clear?’

  ‘More or less.’ I said. ‘How do you go about deciphering them?’

  ‘You’ll see that, Pyotr, for yourself. Our sessions take place on Fridays, which means that in three… no, in four weeks it will be your turn. I must say, I am really looking forward to it, working with you is so very interesting. But then, of course, the same applies to all of you, my friends.’

  Timur Timurovich smiled, flooding the room with the warm radiance of his love, then he bowed and shook his own left hand with his right one.

  ‘And now it’s time for class to begin.’

  ‘What class?’ I asked.

  ‘Why,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘it’s already half past one. Practical aesthetics therapy.’

  With the possible exception of the psycho-hydraulic procedures which had roused me from sleep, I have never experienced anything quite so distressing as that session of practical aesthetics therapy - but then, perhaps the injection was really to blame. The exercises were held in a room adjacent to our ward; it was large and dimly lit, with a long table in its corner heaped with lumps of Plasticine of various colours, ugly misshapen toy horses of the kind moulded by artistically gifted children, paper models of ships, broken dolls and balls. At the centre of the table was a large plaster bust of Aristotle, and we sat opposite him, on four chairs covered with brown oilcloth, with drawing-boards on our knees. The aesthetics therapy consisted in our drawing the bust with pencils which were attached to the board and had also been covered in soft black rubber.

  Volodin and Serdyuk remained in their striped pyjamas, while Maria removed his jacket and put on instead an undershirt with a long slit reaching almost down to his navel. They all seemed quite accustomed to this procedure and sat there patiently pushing their pencils across the surface of the paper. Just to be on the safe side, I made a quick, rough sketch and then set the board aside and began inspecting my surroundings.

  The injection was certainly still working - I was still suffering from the same effect that I had felt in the bathroom and was incapable of perceiving external reality in its totality. Elements of the surrounding world appeared at the moment when my gaze fell on them, and I was developing a giddy feeling that my gaze was actually creating them.

  Suddenly I noticed that the walls of the room were hung with drawings on small sheets of paper, some of which appeared to be very curious indeed. Some of them obviously belonged to Maria. These were extremely clumsy, almost childish scribbles which all repeated in various forms the theme of an aeroplane adorned with a massive phallic projection. Sometimes the aeroplane was standing on its tail and the images acquired Christian overtones of a somewhat sacrilegious nature. In general though, Maria’s drawings were of no particular interest.

  However, another set appeared curious in the extreme, and not merely because the artist possessed indisputable talent. These were drawings united by a Japanese theme, represented in a strange, uneven fashion. Most of the drawings, seven or eight in number, attempted to reproduce an image seen somewhere previously: a samurai with two swords and the lower half of his body indecently exposed, standing on the edge of an abyss with a stone hung round his neck. Another two or three drawings depicted horsemen at rest against a background of distant mountains, which were drawn with astonishing skill in the traditional Japanese style. The horses in these images were tethered to trees and their dismounted riders, clad in loose, colourful garments, were sitting near by on the grass and drinking from shallow bowls. The drawing which made the strongest impression on me had an erotic theme; it showed an other-worldly man in a tiny blue cap astride a woman with broad Slavic cheekbones who was giving herself to him. There was something horrifying about her face.

  ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ I said, unable to restrain myself, ‘to whom do these drawings on Japanese themes belong?’

  ‘Semyon.’ said Volodin, ‘who do your drawings belong to? The hospital, I suppose?’

  ‘Are they yours, Mr Serdyuk?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Serdyuk, glancing sideways at me with his bright blue eyes.

  ‘Quite exquisite,’ I said. ‘Only, perhaps, rather sombre.’

  He gave no answer.

  The third series of drawings, which I guessed must be those of Volodin, was very abstract and impressionistic in manner. Here also there was a leitmotif - three dark blurred silhouettes around a burst of flame, with a broad beam of light falling on them from above. In compositional terms it was reminiscent of a well-known Russian painting of three hunters sitting round a camp-fire, except that in this work it was a high-explosive shell that had exploded in the flames just a moment before.

  I looked over at the other wall and started violently in surprise.

  It was probably the most acute attack of deja vu I have ever suffered in my life. From my very first glance at the six-foot-long sheet of cardboard, covered with its tiny figures in various colours, I sensed a profound connection with the strange object. I rose from my chair and went across to it.

  My gaze fell on the upper part of the sheet, which showed something like the plan of a battle, in the way they are usually drawn in history textbooks. At its centre was a solid blue oval, where the word ‘SCHIZOPHRENIA’ was written in large letters. Approaching it from above were three broad red arrows; one ran directly into the oval and the two others curved round to bite into its sides. Written on them were the words ‘insulin’, ‘aminazine’ and ‘sulphazine’, and running down from the oval in a broken line was a blue arrow, beneath which were the words ‘illness retreats’. I studied this plan and then turned my attention to the drawing below it.

  With its numerous characters, abundant detail and crowded composition it reminded me of an illustration to Tolstoy’s War and Peace - one including all of the novel’s characters and the entire scope of its action. At the same time the drawing was very childish in nature, because it broke all of the rules of perspective and common sense, exactly like a child’s drawing. The right-hand section of the drawing was occupied by a representation of a big city. When I spotted the bright yellow dome of St Isaac’s, I realized that it must be St Petersburg. Its streets, in some places drawn in detail and in others merely represented by simple lines, as though on a map, were filled with arrows and dotted lines which clearly represented the trajectory of someone’s life. From St Petersburg a dotted line led to a similar image of Moscow which was close beside it. In Moscow only two places were represented in real detail - Tverskoi Boulevard and the Yaroslavl Station. Leading away from the station was the fine double cobweb dine of a railway track, which widened as it approached the centre of the sheet and acquired a third dimension, turning into a drawing rendered more or less according to the laws of perspective. The track ran off to a horizon overgrown with bright yellow wheat, where a train stood on its rails, wreathed in clouds of smoke and steam.

  The train was drawn in detail. The locomotive had been badly damaged by several direct hits from shells; thick clouds of steam were pouring from the holes in the sides of the barrel-shaped boiler, and the driver’s dead body was hanging out of the cabin. Behind the locomotive there was an open goods truck with an armoured car standing on it - my heart
began to race at this - with its machine-gun turret turned towards the yellow waves of wheat. The trapdoor of the turret was open and I saw Anna’s close-cropped head protruding from it. The ribbed barrel of the machine-gun was spitting fire in the direction of the wheatfield; Chapaev, wearing a tall astrakhan hat and a shaggy black cloak buttoned from his neck to his feet, stood on the platform beside the armoured car and waved his raised sabre in the direction of its fire. His pose seemed a little too theatrical.

  The train in the picture had halted only a few yards short of a station, the greater part of which was invisible beyond the edge of the sheet of cardboard; all I could see was the platform barrier and a sign bearing the words ‘Lozovaya Junction’.

  I tried to spot the enemies at whom Anna was firing from her turret, but all I could discover in the drawing were numerous vaguely sketched silhouettes largely hidden by the wheat. I was left with the impression that the artist responsible for the work did not have a very clear idea of why and against whom the military action shown was being conducted. But I had little doubt as to the identity of the author.

  Written in large letters under the drawing were the words: ‘The Battle at Lozovaya Junction’. Close by, other words had been added in a different hand: ‘Chapaev’s waving, Petka’s raving’.

  I whirled round to face the others.

  ‘Come now, gentlemen, does it not seem to you that this rather exceeds the bounds of what is acceptable among decent people, eh? What if I should start acting in the same way, eh? Then what would happen?’

  Volodin and Serdyuk averted their gaze. Maria pretended that he had not heard. I carried on looking at them for some time, attempting to guess which of them was responsible for this vile act, but no one responded. Besides, I was not in all honesty particularly concerned and my annoyance was to a large extent feigned. I was far more interested in the drawing, which from my very first glance had given me the impression that it was somehow incomplete. Turning back to the cardboard, I struggled for some time to understand exactly what it was that was bothering me. It seemed to be the section between the plan of the battle and the train, where in principle the sky should have been - a large area of the cardboard was blank, which somehow produced the impression of a gaping void. I went over to the table and rummaged in its clutter until I found a stub of sanguine and an almost complete stick of charcoal.