Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  When the automobile braked to a halt, I was already feeling a little more normal. We alighted on an unfamiliar street beside an entirely undistinguished-looking gateway in a wall, in front of which stood a couple of automobiles and several smart cabs. A little further off I noticed a frightening-looking armoured car with its machine-gun turret buried under a cap of snow, but I had no time for a closer look, for the sailors had already plunged into the gateway. We walked across an inexpressibly bleak courtyard and found ourselves facing a door surmounted by a protruding canopy with volutes and cherubs in the old merchant style. A small signboard had been hung on the canopy: ‘THE MUSICAL SNUFFBOX: LITERARY CABARET’.

  There was light showing through the pink curtains drawn tightly across several windows beside the door: from behind them I could hear the plaintively beautiful note of some obscure musical instrument.

  Zherbunov tugged the door open sharply, revealing behind it a short corridor hung with fur coats and greatcoats, which ended in a heavy velvet curtain. A man wearing a simple Russian shirt and looking like a convict rose from a stool to meet us.

  ‘Citizen sailors.’ he began, ‘we don’t…’

  With the agility of a circus acrobat Barbolin swung his rifle around his shoulder and struck him with the butt in the base of his belly; the attendant slid down the wall and on to the floor, his hostile face suddenly expressive of weariness and revulsion. Zherbunov pulled aside the curtain, and we entered a dimly lit hall.

  Feeling myself fired by an unusual burst of energy, I looked around. The place looked like an ordinary run-of-the-mill restaurant with some pretensions to chic, and the public seated among the dense clouds of smoke at small round tables was quite varied. There was a smell of opium. Nobody took any notice of us, and we sat at a small table not far from the entrance.

  The hall was bounded on one side by a brightly lit stage, on which a clean-shaven gentleman in evening dress, with one bare foot, was sitting on a black velvet stool. He was sliding the bow he held in his right hand across the smooth edge of a long saw, one handle of which was pressed against the floor by his foot while the other was gripped tightly in his left hand, so that the saw bent into a trembling curve. When he needed to dampen the vibration of the gleaming strip of metal, he would press his bare foot against it for a second. Beside him on the floor stood a patent-leather shoe with a blind-ingly white sock protruding from it. The sound which the gentleman extracted from his instrument was absolutely unearthly, at once doleful and enchanting. I think he was playing a simple melody, but that was not important; what mattered was the timbre, the modulations of a single note that faded away over an eternity and pierced straight to the very centre of my heart.

  The door-curtain at the entrance quivered and the man in the Russian shirt stuck his head and shoulders out from behind it. He clicked his fingers somewhere off into the darkness and nodded towards our table. Then he turned towards us, gave a short, formal bow and disappeared back behind the curtain. Immediately a waiter emerged out of somewhere with a tray in one hand and a copper teapot in the other (there were identical teapots standing on the other tables). The tray held a dish of small pies, three teacups and a tiny whistle. The waiter set the cups out in front of us, filled them from the teapot and then froze in motionless anticipation. I held out a bill drawn at random from my travelling bag - I think it was a ten-dollar note. I could not understand at first what the whistle was doing on the tray, but then I heard a melodic whistling from one of the neighbouring tables, and saw a waiter come dashing over at the sound.

  Zherbunov swallowed a mouthful of liquid from his cup and grimaced in distaste. Then I tried a sip from mine. It was khanja, a bad Chinese vodka made from kaoliang. I started chewing on a pie, but I could not taste it at all; the freezing effect on my throat of the cocaine had still not worn off.

  ‘What’s in the pies?’ Barbolin asked gingerly. ‘People keep disappearing these days, after all. I don’t feel like breaking my fast that way.’

  ‘I tried it once,’ Zherbunov said simply. ‘It’s like beef’.

  Unable to bear any more of this, I took out the tin box and Barbolin set about stirring the powder into our cups.

  Meanwhile the gentleman in evening dress finished playing, donned his sock and shoe with elegant rapidity, stood up, bowed, picked up the stool and quit the stage to the sound of scattered applause. A handsome-looking man with a small grey beard got up from a table beside the stage. His throat was wrapped in a grey scarf as though to conceal a love bite. I was astonished to recognize him as the poet Valery Briusov, now old and emaciated. He mounted the stage and turned to face the hall.

  ‘Comrades! Although we live in a visual age, in which lines of printed words are being supplanted by sequences of images or… hmm…,’ he declaimed, ‘still tradition does not abandon the struggle, but seeks to discover new forms. To this day the immortal Dostoevsky and his novel Crime and Punishment continue to inspire young seekers of truth, both with axes to grind and without. And so now a little tragedy -that is the precise definition of this play’s genre, according to the author himself, the chamber poet Ioann Pavlukhin, Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please for the little tragedy Raskolnikov and Marmeladov.’

  ‘Your attention please,’ echoed Zherbunov, and we drank.

  Briusov left the stage and returned to his table. Two men in military uniform carried a massive gilded lyre on a stand and a stool out on to the stage from the wings. Then they brought out a table, stood a pot-bellied liqueur bottle and two glasses on it, and pinned up two pieces of cardboard at either side of the stage, bearing the words ‘Raskolnikov’ and ‘Harmeladov’ (I immediately decided that the misspelling of the second name was not a mistake but a symbol of some kind), and finally they hung a board bearing the incomprehensible word ‘yhvy’ in the centre of the stage. Having duly situated all of these objects in their places, they disappeared. A woman in a long tunic emerged from the wings and began running leisurely fingers over the strings of the lyre. Several minutes passed in this fashion before a quartet of individuals in long black cloaks appeared on stage. Each of them went down on one knee and raised a black hem to conceal his face from the audience. Someone applauded. At the opposite end of the stage two figures appeared wearing tall buskins, long white robes and Creek masks. They began slowly moving towards each other, but stopped before they came close. One of them had an axe hanging under his arm in a noose entwined with roses - I realized that he was Raskolnikov. This, in fact, was obvious enough without the axe, because the board bearing his name was hanging by the wings on his side of the stage.

  The other figure halted, slowly raised his arm in the air and began intoning in ponderous hexameters. In almost exactly the same words as his drunken prototype in the novel, he confessed that he had nowhere left to turn, then declared that Raskolnikov’s blazing eyes betrayed a keen sensibility of the woes of the downtrodden and oppressed, and immediately suggested that they should drink to that (this was indeed a revolutionary innovation).

  The actor with the axe declined curtly. Marmeladov quickly drained his glass and continued his oration, paying Raskolnikov a long and confused compliment, in which I found several of the images quite effective - for instance that of the arrogant strength of emptiness blossoming behind the hero’s eyes and lending his face a semblance of the visage of God.

  On hearing the word ‘God’, Zherbunov nudged me with his elbow.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ he asked in a low voice.

  ‘It is still too soon,’ I whispered in reply, ‘Carry on watching.’

  Marmeladov’s meaning grew more and more ambiguous. Dark hints began to surface in the flow of his words: a comparison of the grey St Petersburg morning with a blow from an axe to the back of the head, of his own world-weary soul with a dark closet in which the bodies of dead women lay. At this, Raskolnikov began showing clear signs of nervousness, and he enquired what Marmeladov wanted of him. In some confusion, Marmeladov asked him to sell the axe.


  In the meantime I surveyed the hall. There were three or four people at each round table; the customers were a very mixed bunch, but as has always been the case throughout the history of humanity, it was pig-faced speculators and expensively dressed whores who predominated. Sitting at the same table as Briusov, and grown noticeably fatter since the last time I had seen him, was Alexei Tolstoy, wearing a big bow instead of a normal tie. The fat that had accumulated on him seemed to have been pumped from the skeletal frame of Briusov: together they looked quite horrific.

  Looking further, at one of the tables I noticed a strange man sporting a military blouse criss-crossed with belts and an upturned handlebar moustache. He was alone at his table, and instead of a teapot there was a bottle of champagne standing in front of him. I decided that he must be a big Bolshevik boss. I do not know what it was in his calm, powerful face that struck me as unusual, but for several seconds I was unable to take my gaze off him. His eyes met mine, but he immediately turned away to face the stage, where the meaningless dialogue was continuing.

  Raskolnikov attempted to discover for what purpose Marmeladov required the axe and received replies couched in vague, flowery phrases about youth, the Grail, eternity, power, hope and - for some strange reason - the phases of the moon. Eventually Raskolnikov capitulated and handed over the axe. He was counting the wad of bills that Marmeladov had given him in payment, when he suddenly swayed back and froze in astonishment. He had noticed that Marmeladov was standing there in front of him wearing a mask. Still speaking in the same laboured hexameters, he began asking Marmeladov to remove the mask. I was particularly struck by one image which he used, ‘Your eyes are like two yellow stars’ - Briusov broke into applause at the words, but overall it was far too long and drawn out. After Raskolnikov had repeated his request for the third time, Marmeladov paused in silence for a long, terrible moment before tearing the mask from his face. Simultaneously the tunic attached to the mask was torn from his body, revealing a woman dressed in lacy knickers and a brassiere, sporting a silvery wig with a rat’s-tail plait.

  ‘Oh God!… The old woman! And I am empty-handed… ‘Having pronounced these final words in an almost inaudible voice, Raskolnikov slumped to the floor from the full height of his buskins.

  What followed made me blench. Two violinists leapt out on to the stage and began frenziedly playing some gypsy melody, while the Marmeladov woman threw her tunic over

  Raskolnikov, leapt on to his chest and began strangling him, wiggling her lace clad bottom to and fro in excitement.

  For a moment I thought that what was happening was the result of some monstrous conspiracy, and that everybody was looking in my direction. I glanced around like a beast, my eyes once again met those of the man in the black military blouse, and I somehow suddenly realized that he new all about the death of Vorblei - that he knew, in fact, far more serious things about me than just that.

  At that moment I came close to leaping up from my chair fend taking to my heels, and it took a monstrous effort of will to remain sitting at the table. The audience was applauding idly; several of them were laughing and pointing at the stage, but most were absorbed in their own conversations and their vodka.

  Having strangled Raskolnikov, the woman in the wig bounded over to the front of the stage and began dancing wildly to the insane accompaniment of the two violins, kicking her naked legs up towards the ceiling and waving the axe. The four figures in black, who had remained motionless throughout the play, now took hold of Raskolnikov, still covered by the tunic, and carried him into the wings. I had a faint inkling that this was a reference to the very end of Hamlet, where there is a mention of four captains who are supposed to carry away the dead prince. Strangely enough, this thought brought me to my senses straight away. I realized that what was happening was not a conspiracy against me - nobody could possibly have arranged it all in the time which had passed - but a perfectly ordinary mystical challenge. Immediately deciding to accept it, I turned to the two sailors, who had by this time retreated into themselves.

  ‘Time to call a halt, lads. This is treason.’

  Barbolin looked up at me uncomprehendingly.

  ‘The agents of the Entente are at it again,’ I threw in at random.

  These words seemed to have some meaning for him, because he immediately tugged his rifle from his shoulder. I restrained him.

  ‘Not that way, comrade. Wait.’

  Meanwhile the gentleman with the saw had reappeared on the stage, seated himself on the stool and begun ceremoniously removing his shoe. Opening up my travelling bag, I took out a pencil and a blank Cheka arrest order; the plaintive sounds of the saw swept me upwards and onwards, and a suitable text was ready within a few minutes.

  ‘What’s that you’re writing?’ asked Zherbunov. ‘You want to arrest someone?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘if we take anyone here, we have to take them all. We will handle this a different way. Zherbunov, remember the orders? We’re not just supposed to suppress the enemy, we have to propound our line, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Zherbunov.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘you and Barbolin go backstage. I will propound our line from the stage. Once I have finished, I’ll give the signal, and you come out. Then we’ll play them the music of the revolution.’

  Zherbunov tapped a finger against his cup.

  ‘No, Zherbunov,’ I said sternly, ‘you won’t be fit for work.’

  An expression somewhat akin to hurt flitted across Zherbunov’s face.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t you trust me, then? Why I, I’d… I’d give my life for the revolution!’

  ‘I know that, comrade,’ I said, ‘ but cocaine comes later. Into action!’

  The sailors stood up and walked towards the stage with firm, lumbering strides, as if they were not crossing a parquet floor but the heaving deck of a battleship caught in a storm; at that moment I felt something almost like sympathy for them. They climbed up the side steps and disappeared into the wings. I tossed back the contents of my cup, rose and went over to the table where Tolstoy and Briusov were sitting. People were watching me. Gentlemen and comrades, I thought, as I strode slowly across the strangely expanded hall, today I too was granted the honour of stepping over my own old woman, but you will not choke me with her imaginary fingers. Oh, damnation take these eternal Dostoevskian obsessions that pursue us Russians! And damnation take us Russians who can see nothing else around us!

  ‘Good evening, Valery Yakovlevich. Relaxing?’

  Briusov started and looked at me for several seconds, obviously unable to place me. Then a doubtful smile appeared on his emaciated face.

  ‘Petya?’ he queried. ‘Is it you? I am truly glad to see you. Join us for a minute.’

  I sat at the table and greeted Tolstoy with reserve. We had met frequently enough at the Apollo editorial office, but hardlу knew one another at all. Tolstoy was extremely drunk.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Briusov. ‘Have you written anything lately?’

  ‘No time for that now, Valery Yakovlevich,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Briusov thoughtfully, his eyes skipping rapidly. over my leather jacket and Mauser, ‘that’s true. Very true. I’m the same… But I didn’t know you were one of us, Petya. I always thought highly of your verse, especially your first collection, The Poems of Captain Lebyadkin. And of course, Songs of The Kingdom of I. But I simply couldn’t have imagined… You.always had all those horses and emperors, and China… ‘

  Conspiracy, Valery Yakovlevich,’ I said, ‘conspiracy… ‘

  ‘I understand, ‘ said Briusov, ‘now I understand. But then, I assure you, I always did sense something of the sort. But you’ve changed, Petya. Become so dashing… your eyes are positively gleaming… By the way, have you found time to read Blok’s «Twelve»?’

  ‘I have seen it,’ I said.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I do not entirely understand the symbolism of the ending,’ I sai
d. ‘What is Christ doing walking in front of the patrol? Does Blok perhaps wish to crucify the revolution?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Briusov replied quickly, ‘Alyosha and I were just talking about that.’

  Hearing his name mentioned, Tolstoy opened his eyes and lifted his cup, but it was empty. He fumbled about on the table until he found the whistle and then raised it to his lips, but before he could blow it, his head slumped back on to his chest.

  ‘I have heard.’ I said, ‘that he has changed the ending, and now he has a revolutionary sailor walking ahead of the patrol.’

  Briusov pondered this for a moment, and then his eyes lit up.

  ‘Yes.’ he said, ‘that’s more correct. That’s more accurate. And Christ walks behind them! He is invisible and he walks behind them, dragging his crooked cross through the swirling blizzard!’

  ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘and in the opposite direction.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I am certain of it.’ I said, thinking that Zherbunov and Barbolin must have fallen asleep behind the curtain at this stage. ‘Valery Yakovlevich, I have something I would like to ask you. Would you announce that the poet Fourply will now present a reading of revolutionary verse?’

  ‘Fourply?’ Briusov asked.

  ‘My party pseudonym.’ I explained.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Briusov nodded, ‘and so very profound! I shall be delighted to listen to you myself

  ‘I would not advise that. You had better leave straight away. The shooting will start in a minute or two.’

  Briusov turned pale and nodded. Neither of us said another word; when the saw fell silent and the dandified musician had put his shoe back on, Briusov rose from the table and went up on the stage.

  ‘Today.’ he said, ‘we have already spoken of the very latest forms in art. This theme will now be continued by the poet Fourply.’ - he could not restrain himself, and he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, making it clear that he was about to indulge in his typically idiotic wordplay - ‘hmm… I have no wish to spoil the surprise, but let this poem serve as a kind of… hmm… foreplay. Your attention please for the poet Fourply, who will read his revolutionary verse!’