Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘From that theatre of yours.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Just as I said. Three of them came from the Cheka, one introduced himself as some kind of literary functionary, and the others had no need to introduce themselves. They spoke with me for about forty minutes, mostly the literary one; then they said our conversation had been most interesting, but it would have to be continued in a different place. I did not want to go to that other place because, as you know, it’s not one from which one very often returns

  ‘But you did come back.’ Vorblei interrupted.

  ‘I did not come back,’ I said, ‘I never went there. I ran away from them, Grisha. You know, the way we used to run away from the doorman when we were children.’

  ‘But why did they come for you?’ asked Vorblei. ‘You’ve got absolutely nothing to do with politics. Was it something you did?’

  ‘I did absolutely nothing at all. It sounds stupid even to talk about it. I published a poem in a newspaper, but it was a newspaper which didn’t meet their approval. And there was one rhyme in it they did not like either: «Red» and «mad». Can you imagine that?’

  ‘And what was the poem about?’

  ‘Oh, it was completely abstract. It was about the stream of time washing away the wall of the present so that new patterns keep appearing on it, and we call some of them the past. Our memory tells us that yesterday really existed, but how can we be sure that all of these memories did not simply appear with the first light of dawn?’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Vorblei.

  ‘Neither do I.’ I said. ‘But that is not the point. The main thing I am trying to say is that there was no politics in it at all. At least, that was what I thought. But they thought differently, they explained that to me. The most frightening thing was that after the conversation with their consultant I actually understood his logic, I understood it so well that… It was so frightening that when they led me out on to the street, I ran away not so much from them as from this new understanding of mine…’

  Vorblei frowned.

  The entire story is a load of arrant nonsense.’ he said. They’re nothing but idiots. But you’re a fine fool yourself. Was that the reason you came to Moscow?’

  ‘Well, what could I do? As I was running away, I fired. You may understand that I was firing at a spectre created by my own fear, but that is hardly something I can explain to them at the Cheka.’

  Vorblei looked at me seemingly engrossed in his thoughts. I looked at his hands - he was running them across the tablecloth with a barely perceptible motion, as though he were wiping away sweat, and then suddenly he hid them under the table. There was an expression of despair on his face, and I sensed that our meeting and my account had placed him in an extremely awkward situation.

  ‘Of course, that makes it worse.’ he muttered. ‘But still, it’s a good thing you’ve confided in me. I think we’ll be able to sort it out… Yes, yes, I’m sure we can sort it out… I’ll give Gorky a call straight away… Put your hands on your head.’

  I did not take in the meaning of the final words until I saw the muzzle of the Mauser lying on the tablecloth. Incredibly enough, the very next thing that he did was to take a pince-nez out of his breast pocket and set it on his nose.

  ‘Put your hands on your head,’ he repeated.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, raising my hands. ‘Grisha?’

  ‘No.’ he said.

  ‘«No» what?’

  ‘Weapon and papers on the table, that’s what.’

  ‘How can I put them on the table.’ I said, ‘if my hands are on my head?’

  He cocked his pistol.

  ‘My God.’ he said, ‘if you only knew just how often I’ve heard that phrase.’

  ‘Well, then.’ I said, ‘the revolver is in my coat. What an incredible bastard you are. But then I’ve known that since we were children. What do you get out of all of this? Do you think they’ll give you a medal?’

  Vorblei smiled. ‘Into the corridor.’ he said.

  When we were in the corridor he kept the gun trained on me while he rummaged through the pockets of my coat, took out the revolver and put it in his pocket. There was a furtive haste about his movements, like a schoolboy on his first visit to a brothel, and the thought occurred to me that he had probably never had to commit an act of treachery in such an obvious and commonplace fashion before.

  ‘Unlock the door.’ he ordered, ‘and go out on to the landing.’

  ‘Let me put my coat on.’ I said, feverishly wondering whether there was anything I could say to this man, so excited by his own baseness, that might be capable of changing the unfolding course of events.

  ‘We’re not going far.’ said Vorblei, ‘just across the boulevard. But put it on anyway.’

  I took the coat down from the hanger with both hands, turned slightly to thrust my arm into one of the sleeves, and the next moment, to my own amazement, I had flung the coat over Vorblei - not simply tossed it in his direction, but actually thrown it right on top of him.

  To this day I do not understand how he failed to shoot me, but a fact is a fact. He pressed the trigger only as he was falling to the floor under the weight of my body and the bullet missed my side by a few inches and struck the door of the apartment. The coat covered Vorblei’s head where he had fallen and I grabbed hold of his throat through the thick fabric. I managed to pin the wrist of the hand clutching the pistol to the floor with my knee, though before his fingers opened he had fired several more bullets into the wall. I was almost deafened by the thunderous noise. I think that in the course of the struggle I must have butted his covered face; in any case, I can clearly recall the quiet crunching of his pince-nez in the interlude between two shots.

  Even after he had stopped moving, it was a long time before I could bring myself to release my grip on his throat. My hands scarcely obeyed me; in order to restore my breathing I performed an exercise, but it had a strange effect, inducing a mild fit of hysterics. I suddenly saw the scene from the perspective of an outside observer: a figure sitting on the corpse of a newly strangled friend and assiduously breathing according to Yogi Ramacharaki’s method as described in the journal Isida. As I stood up, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I had committed murder.

  Of course, like anyone else who did not entirely trust the authorities, I carried a revolver, and two days before I had had no qualms about using it. But this was something different, this was some dark scene out of Dostoevsky: an empty flat, a corpse covered with an English-style coat, and a door leading to a hostile world - a door perhaps already being approached by people attracted by idle curiosity. By an effort of will I banished these thoughts from my mind. The Dostoevskian atmosphere, of course, was not created by the corpse or the door with its bullet hole, but by myself, by my own consciousness, which had assimilated the forms of another’s repentance.

  Opening the door on to the stairs slightly, I listened for a few seconds. I could hear nothing, and I thought that perhaps the sound of a few pistol shots might not have attracted attention after all.

  My revolver was still in Vorblei’s trouser pocket, but I really did not feel inclined to retrieve it. I picked up his Mauser and looked it over. It had an excellent mechanism, and was quite new. I forced myself to search his jacket and discovered a packet of Tra’ papyrosas, a spare cartridge clip for the Mauser and a pass for a member of the Cheka in the name of Grigory Fourply. Yes, I thought to myself - that was a typical touch; but his true character had already been clear even when we were children.

  I squatted down on my haunches and opened the lock of his obstetrician’s bag. Inside there was an official looking file full of blank arrest warrants, another two cartridge clips, a tin box full of cocaine, some extremely unpleasant-looking medical. forceps (I immediately flung them into the corner) and a thick wad of money, with rainbow-coloured one-hundred-rouble Duma notes on one side and doll
ars on the other. It was all just what I needed. In order to restore myself a little after the shock I had suffered, I stuffed a generous amount of cocaine into my nostrils. It slashed across my brain like a razor and I instantly became calm. I did not like cocaine, it made me too sentimental, but just now I needed to recover control rapidly.

  Taking Vorblei under the arms, I dragged him along the corridor, kicked open the door into one of the rooms and was about to push him inside when I froze in the doorway. Despite the devastation and neglect, signs of the room’s former life were still visible, illuminated by a light still there from before the war; it had been the nursery, two small beds with light bamboo railings stood in one corner and on the wall there was a charcoal drawing of a horse and a face with a moustache. There was a red rubber ball lying on the floor. When I saw it, I immediately closed the door and dragged Vorblei further along the corridor. I was startled by the funereal simplicity of the next room: standing in the centre was a black grand piano with its lid open, and beside it a revolving stool. There was nothing else.

  At this moment a strange sensation came over me. Leaving Vorblei half-sitting in the corner (all the time I had been moving him I had been very careful to make sure that his face did not peep out from under the grey fabric of the coat), I sat down at the piano. How strange, I thought, comrade Fourply is here - and he is not here. Who knows what transformations his soul is now undergoing? I remembered a poem by him, published three years earlier in the New Satiricon - it took the form of a retelling of a newspaper article about the disbanding of some parliament or other and its acrostic read as ‘Mane Tekel Fares’, the words on King Belshazzar’s wall. He was alive; he thought; he pondered over things. How very strange.

  I turned towards the piano and began quietly playing a piece by Mozart, my favourite fugue in F, which always made me regret that I did not have the four hands the great musical madcap himself had dreamed of. The melody that engrossed me had nothing to do with the shocking incident with Vorblei: the image that appeared before my eyes was of the small bamboo beds in the next room, and for a second I imagined someone else’s childhood, someone else’s pure glance directed at the sunset, someone else’s world, deeply moving beyond all words, which had now been borne off into oblivion. I did not play for very long, though, the piano was out of tune, and I knew I should be leaving as quickly as possible. But where should I go?

  It was time to think about how I would spend the evening. I went back into the corridor and glanced doubtfully at Vorblei’s leather jacket, but there was nothing else. Despite the daring nature of several of my literary experiments, I was still not enough of a decadent to put on a coat which had now become a shroud and, moreover, had a bullet hole in its back. I took the jacket off the hook, picked up the obstetrician’s bag and went through into the room with the mirror.

  The leather jacket was just my size - the dead man and I were almost exactly the same height. When I tightened the belt with the holster dangling from it and looked at my reflection, what I saw was the very image of a Bolshevik. I expect that an inspection of the packages lying by the wall would have made me a rich man in the space of a few minutes, but my squeamishness won the upper hand. Painstakingly reloading the pistol, I checked that it sprang easily from its holster and was just about to leave the room when I heard voices in the corridor. I realized that all this time the front door of the apartment had been open.

  I dashed over to the balcony. It looked out on to Tverskoi Boulevard and the twenty or so yards of cold dark emptiness beneath it held nothing but swirling snowflakes. In the circle of light from a street lamp I could see Vorblei’s automobile, and a man wearing a Bolshevik helmet who had somehow appeared in the front seat. I decided that Vorblei must have summoned the Cheka when he was on the telephone. It was impossible to clamber down on to the balcony below, so I dashed back into the room. They were already pounding on the door. So be it, I thought, all of this had to come to an end sooner or later. I aimed the Mauser at the door and shouted: ‘Enter!’

  The door opened and two sailors in pea-jackets and rakishly flared trousers came tumbling into the room; they were hung all over with bottle-shaped hand grenades. One of them, with a moustache, was already elderly but the other was young, although his face was flaccid and anaemic. They paid not the slightest attention to the pistol in my hand.

  ‘Are you Fourply?’ asked the older one with the moustache.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Here,’ said the sailor, and he held out a piece of paper folded into two.

  I put the Mauser back in its holster and unfolded the paper.

  ‘Com. Fourply! Go immediately to the ‘Musical Snuffbox’ to propound our line. To assist you I am sending Zherbunov and Barbolin, experienced comrades. Babayasin’

  Below the text there was an illegible seal. While I was thinking what to say, they sat down at the table.

  ‘Is that driver downstairs yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ said the one with the moustache. ‘But we’ll take your car. What’s your name?’

  ‘Pyotr.’ I said, and then almost bit my tongue.

  ‘I’m Zherbunov.’ said the older one.

  ‘Barbolin.’ the younger one introduced himself. His voice was soft and almost womanish.

  I sat facing them at the table. Zherbunov poured out three glasses of vodka, pushed one across to me and raised his eyes to my face. I realized that he was waiting for something.

  ‘Well then.’ I said, taking a grip on my glass, ‘let us drink to the victory of world revolution!’

  My toast was not greeted with any great enthusiasm.

  ‘Of course, victory’s all very well.’ said Barbolin, ‘but what about the works?’

  ‘What works?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you try playing the fool with us.’ Zherbunov reproached me, ‘Babayasin told us you were issued a tin today.’

  ‘Ah, you’re talking about the cocaine.’ I said, reaching into the obstetrician’s bag. ‘Works is a word with many different meanings. Perhaps you’d like some ether, like William James?’

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Barbolin, grasping the tin in his coarse, broad palm.

  ‘An English comrade.’

  Zherbunov cleared his throat dubiously, but for a moment Barbolin’s face reflected one of those feelings that nineteenth-century Russian artists loved to depict when they were creating national types - the feeling that somewhere out there is a wide and wonderful world, filled with amazing and attractive things, and though you can never seriously hope to reach it yourself, you cannot help sometimes dreaming impossible dreams.

  The tension disappeared as though by magic. Zherbunov opened the tin, picked up a knife from the table, scooped up a monstrous amount of the white powder and rapidly stirred it into his vodka. Barbolin did the same, first with his own glass, and then with mine.

  ‘Now we can do the world revolution justice,’ he said.

  My face must have betrayed an element of doubt, because Zherbunov chuckled and said: ‘This goes right back to the Aurora, brother, back to the very beginning. It’s called «Baltic tea».’

  They raised their glasses and drained them at a gulp, and there was nothing left for me but to follow their example. Almost immediately my throat became numb. I lit a papyrosa and inhaled deeply, but I could not taste the smoke. We sat there without speaking for about a minute.

  ‘We should get going,’ Zherbunov said suddenly and rose from the table. ‘Ivan’ll freeze to death down there.’

  In a state of numb torpor, I put the tin back into the bag. I hung back in the corridor, trying to find my fur hat, then put on Vorblei’s peaked cap instead. We left the apartment and set off in silence down the dimly lit staircase.

  I was suddenly aware that my spirits were calm and easy, and the further I went, the calmer and easier they became. I was not thinking about the future, it was enough for me that I was not threatened by any immediate danger, and as we crossed the dark landings I gazed entranced at the incredibly
beautiful snowflakes swirling in the air outside the window-panes. It occurred to me that I myself was like one of those snowflakes, and the wind of fate was bearing me onwards in the wake of the two other snowflakes in black pea-jackets who were stomping down the stairs in front of me. However, despite the euphoria that had enveloped me, I remained capable of a sober assessment of reality and was able to make one interesting observation. While I was still in Petrograd I had been curious about how the sailors managed to keep up those heavy bullet harnesses they wore. On the third-floor landing, where a solitary electric bulb was shining, I spotted several hooks on Zherbunov’s back which held his machine-gun belts together, rather in the manner of a brassiere. I immediately had a vision of Zherbunov and Barbolin preparing themselves for their next killing and helping one another with this difficult element of their toilet like two girls in a bathing hut. It seemed to me yet another proof of the feminine nature of all revolutions. I suddenly understood several of Alexander Blok’s new moods; some involuntary exclamation must have escaped my throat, because Barbolin turned around.

  ‘And you didn’t want to try it, you nelly,’ he said, exposing a gleaming gold tooth.

  We went out into the street. Barbolin said something to the soldier sitting in the front seat of the car, opened the door and we climbed in. The car immediately moved off. Through the rounded windscreen of the passenger cabin I could see a snow-covered back and a sharp-pointed felt helmet. It was as though our carriage were being driven by one of Ibsen’s trolls. I thought that the construction of the automobile was most uncomfortable and, moreover, humiliating for the driver, who was always exposed to the elements - but perhaps this was a deliberate arrangement, so that the passengers could enjoy not only the view through the window, but also savour the inequality of the classes.

  I turned towards the side window. The street was empty and the snow falling on to the roadway was exceptionally beautiful. It was illuminated by widely spaced street lamps; by the light of one of them I caught a glimpse of a phrase of graffiti boldly daubed on the wall of a house: ‘lenine est MERDE’.