Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  He walked quickly back down into the hall, smiled guiltily at me, shrugged, grabbed the weakly protesting Tolstoy under the arm and dragged him towards the exit; at that moment he looked like a retired teacher tugging along a disobedient and stupid wolfhound on a leash.

  I went up on to the stage. The abandoned velvet stool stood conveniently ready at its edge. I set my boot on it and gazed out into the hall, which had fallen silent. All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility - beyond the slightest doubt, this was the face of the old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate, but still as alive as ever. Sitting dose to the stage was Ioann Pavlukhin, a long-haired freak with a monocle; beside him a fat, pimply woman with immense red bows in her mousy hair was chewing on a pie - I thought that she must be the Theatre Commissar Madam Malinovskaya. How I hated them all for that long second!

  I took the Mauser from its holster, raised it above my head, cleared my throat, and in my former manner, gazing straight ahead without expression and using no intonation whatsoever, but simply pausing briefly between quatrains, I read the poem that I had written on the Cheka arrest form:

  Comrades in the struggle! Our grief can know no bound.

  Comrade Fourply has been treacherously struck down.

  The Cheka reels now, pale and sick

  At the loss of a senior Bolshevik.

  it happened that on leaving a dangerous suspect

  He paused along the way to light a cigarette,

  When a counter-revolutionary White

  Caught him clearly in his pistol sight.

  Comrades! The muzzle thundered fierce and loud,

  The bullet smote brave comrade Fourply in the brow.

  He tried to reach a hand inside his jacket

  But his eyes closed and he fell down flat ker-smackit.

  Comrades in the struggle! Close ranks and sing in unison,

  And show the great White swine the terror of the revolution!

  With these words I fired at the chandelier, but missed; immediately there was another shot from my right, the chandelier shattered and I saw Zherbunov there at my side, resetting the breech on his gun. Going down on one knee, he fired a few more shots into the hall, where people were already screaming and falling to the floor or attempting to hide behind the columns, and then Barbolin emerged from the wings. Swaying as he walked, he went up to the edge of the stage, then screeched as he tossed a bomb into the hall. There was a searing flash of white fire and a terrible bang, a table was overturned, and in the silence that followed someone gasped in astonishment. There was an awkward pause; in an attempt to fill it at least partly, I fired several times more into the ceiling, and then I suddenly caught sight again of the strange man in the military tunic. He sat unperturbed at his table, sipping from his cup, and I think he was smiling. I suddenly felt stupid.

  Zherbunov fired off another shot into the hall,

  ‘Cease fire!’ I roared.

  Zherbunov muttered something that sounded like ‘too young to be giving me orders’, but he slung his rifle back be hind his shoulder.

  ‘Withdraw.’ I said, then turned and walked into the wings.

  At our appearance the people who had been hiding in the wings scattered in all directions. Zherbunov and I walked along a dark corridor, turning several corners before we reached the rear door and found ourselves in the street, where once again people fled from us. We walked over to the automobile. After the stuffy, smoke-polluted atmosphere of the hall, the clean frosty air affected me like ether fumes, my head began to spin and I felt a desperate need to sleep. The driver was still sitting there motionless on the open front seat, but now he was covered with a thick layer of snow. I opened the door of the cabin and turned round.

  ‘Where’s Barbolin?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll be along,’ chuckled Zherbunov, ‘just something he had to see to.’

  I climbed into the automobile, leaned back against the seat and instantly fell asleep.

  I was woken by the sound of a woman’s squeals, and I saw Barbolin emerging from a side street, carrying in his arms the girl in lace panties. She was offering token resistance and the wig with the plait had slipped to one side of her face.

  ‘Move over, comrade,’ Zherbunov said to me, clambering into the cabin. ‘Reinforcements.’

  I moved closer to the side wall. Zherbunov leaned towards me and spoke in an unexpectedly warm voice: ‘I didn’t really understand you at first, Petka. Didn’t see right into your heart. But you’re a good ‘un. That was a fine speech you gave.’

  I mumbled something and fell asleep again.

  Through my slumber I could hear a woman giggling and brakes squealing, Zherbunov’s voice swearing darkly and Barabolin hissing like a snake; they must have quarrelled over the unfortunate girl. Then the automobile stopped. Raising my head I saw the blurred and improbable-looking face of Zherbunov.

  ‘Sleep, Petka,’ the face rumbled, ‘we’ll get out here, there ire things still to be done. Ivan’ll get you home.’

  I glanced out of the window. We were on Tverskoi Boulevard, beside the city governor’s building. Snow was falling slowly in large flakes. Barbolin and the trembling semi-naked woman were already out on the street. Zherbunov shook my hand and got out. The car moved off.

  I was suddenly keenly aware of how alone and vulnerable i ns in this frozen world populated by people keen either to dispatch me to the Cheka or to perturb my inner soul with the dark sorcery of their obscure words. Tomorrow morning, I thought I will have to put a bullet through my brain. The last thing I saw before I finally collapsed into the dark pit of oblivion was the snow-covered railing along the street, which l яте up very close to the window as the automobile finally halted.

  2

  To be more precise, the railings were not simply close to the window, but were part of it; in fact, it appeared that they were bars across a small window through which a narrow beam of sunshine was falling directly on to my face. I tried to turn away from it, but that proved impossible. When I attempted to press one hand against the floor in order to turn from my stomach on to my back, I found that my hands had been secured behind me: I was dressed in a garment resembling a shroud, the long sleeves of which were tied behind my back.

  I felt no particular doubt as to what had happened to me. The sailors must have noticed something suspicious in my behaviour, and while I was asleep in the car they had taken me to the Cheka. By wriggling and squirming, I managed to get up on to my knees and then sit down by the wall. My cell had a rather strange appearance; up under the ceiling there was a small barred window - the point of entry for the ray of sunlight that had woken me - while the walls, the door, the floor and ceiling itself were all concealed beneath a thick layer of padding, which meant that romantic suicide in the spirit of Dumas (‘one more step, milord, and I dash my brains out against the wall’) was quite out of the question. The Chekists had obviously built cells like this for their specially honoured guests, and I must confess that for a second I was flattered at the thought.

  A few minutes went by as I gazed at the wall, recalling the frightening details of the previous day, and then the door swung open.

  Standing in the doorway were Zherbunov and Barbolin - but, my God, how changed they were! They were dressed in white doctors’ coats, and Barbolin had a genuine stethoscope protruding from his pocket. This was simply too much for me, and my chest heaved abruptly with nervous laughter that erupted from my cocaine-scorched throat in an explosion of hoarse coughing. Barbolin, who was standing in front, turned to Zherbunov and said something. I suddenly stopped laughing, struck by the thought that they were going to beat me.

  I should say that I was not in the least bit afraid of death. In my situation to die was every bit as natural and reasonable as to leave a theatre that has caught fire in the middle of a lacklustre performance. But I most definitely did not want my final departure to be accompanied by kicks and punches from people I h
ardly knew - in the depths of my soul I was clearly not sufficiently a Christian for that.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am sure you must understand that soon they will kill you too. Out of respect for death, therefore if not for mine, then at least for your own - I ask you to get it over with quickly, without any unnecessary humiliation. I shall not be able to tell you anything, in any case. I am no more than an ordinary private citizen and…’

  ‘That’s a bit feeble,’ Zherbunov interrupted me with a chuckle. ‘But that stuff you were giving us yesterday, that was something else. And that poetry you read! D’you remember any of that?’

  There was something strangely incongruous about the way he spoke, something rather odd, and I decided that he must have been tippling his Baltic tea already that morning.

  ‘My memory is excellent.’ I replied, looking him straight in the face.

  The emptiness in his eyes was impenetrable.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother talking to that asshole,’ Barbolin hissed in his thin voice. ‘Let Timurich handle it, that’s what he’s paid for.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Zherbunov, putting an end to the conversation. He came over to me and took hold of my arm.

  ‘Can you not at least untie my hands?’ I asked. ‘There are two of you, after all.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? And what if you try strangling one of us?’

  I cringed as though I had been struck. They knew everything. I had an almost physical sensation of the crushing weight of Zherbunov’s words tumbling down on top of me.

  Barbolin gripped me by my other arm. They easily stood me on my feet and dragged me out into the dimly lit, deserted corridor, which did actually have a vague hospital smell about it, not unlike the smell of blood. I made no attempt to resist, and a few minutes later they pushed me into a large room, sat me down on a stool at its centre and with drew.

  Directly in front of me stood a large desk piled high with bureaucratic-looking files. Sitting behind the desk was a gentleman of intellectual appearance wearing a white doctor’s coat just like those of Zherbunov and Barbolin. He was listening attentively to a black ebonite telephone receiver squeezed between his ear and his shoulder, while his hands mechanically sorted through some papers on the desk; from time to time he nodded, saying nothing, and he paid not the slightest attention to me. Another man wearing a white doctor’s coat and green trousers with red stripes down their sides was sitting by the wall, on a chair placed between two tall windows over which dusty blinds had been lowered.

  Something indefinite in the arrangement of the room reminded me of General HQ, which I had visited frequently in 1916, when I was trying my hopeful but inexperienced hand at patriotic journalism. But instead of a portrait of the Emperor (or at the very least of that infamous Karl who had left a trail of indelible marks across half the kingdoms of Europe), hanging on the wall above the head of the gentleman in the white coat was something so terrible that I bit my lip, drawing blood.

  It was a poster, printed in the colours of the Russian flag and mounted on a large piece of cardboard, depicting a blue man with a typically Russian face. His chest had been cleaved open and the top of his skull sawn off to expose his red brain. Despite the fact that his viscera had been extracted from his abdomen and labelled with Latin numerals, the expression in his eyes seemed one of indifference, and his face appeared frozen in a calm half-smile; on the other hand, perhaps that was simply the effect created by a wide gash in his cheek, through which I could see part of his jaw and teeth as flawless is in an advertisement for German tooth powder.

  ‘Get on with it, then.’ the man in the white coat barked, dropping I lie receiver back into its cradle.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’1 said, lowering my eyes to look at him.

  ‘Granted, granted.’ he said, ‘bearing in mind that I already have some experience in dealing with you. Allow me to remind you that my name is Timur Timurovich.’

  ‘Pyotr. For obvious reasons I am not able to shake your hand.’

  ‘No need for that. Well, well, Pyotr, my lad. How did you manage to get yourself into such a mess?’

  The eyes that watched me were friendly, even sympathetic, and the goatee beard made him look like an idealistic supporter of the liberal reform movement, but I knew a great deal about the Cheka’s cunning tricks, and my heart remained unstirred by even the slightest flickering of trust.

  ‘I do not believe that I have got myself into any particular mess.’ I said. ‘But if that is how you choose to put things, then I did not get into it on my own.’

  ‘Then with whom exactly?’

  This is it, I thought, it has begun.

  ‘If I understand you correctly, you expect me to provide you with details of addresses and hiding places, but I am afraid I shall be obliged to disappoint you. My entire life since childhood is the story of how I have shunned all company, and in such a context one can only speak of other people in terms of a general category, if you take my meaning?’

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, and wrote something down on a piece of paper. ‘No doubt about that. But there is a contradiction in what you say. First you tell me you didn’t get into your present condition on your own, and then you tell me you shun other people.’

  ‘Oh, come now.’ I replied, crossing my legs at some risk to my immediate equilibrium, ‘that is merely the appearance of a contradiction. The harder I try to avoid other people’s company, the less successful I am. Incidentally, it was only quite recently that I realized why this is the case. I was walking past St Isaac’s and I looked up at the dome - you know how it is, a frosty night, the stars shining… and I understood.’

  ‘And what is the reason?’

  ‘If one tries to run away from other people, one involuntarily ends up actually following in their path throughout the course of one’s life. Running away does not require knowing where one is running to, only what one is running from. Which means that one constantly has to carry before one’s eyes a vision of one’s own prison.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘Yes indeed, when I think of the trouble I’m going to have with you, it terrifies me.’

  I shrugged and raised my eyes to the poster above his head. Apparently it was not a brilliant metaphor after all, merely a medical teaching aid, perhaps something taken from an anatomical atlas.

  ‘You know,’ Timur Timurovich continued, ‘I have a lot of experience. Plenty of people pass through my hands here.’

  ‘Indeed, I do not doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘So let me tell you something. I’m less interested in the formal diagnosis than the internal event which has prised someone loose from his normal socio-psychological niche. And as far as I can see, yours is a very straightforward case. You simply will not accept the new. Can you remember how old you are?’

  ‘Of course. Twenty-six.’

  ‘There you are, you see. You belong to the very generation that was programmed for life in one socio-cultural paradigm, but has found itself living in a quite different one. Do you follow what I’m saying?’

  ‘Most definitely,’ I replied.

  ‘So what we have is a prima facie internal conflict. But let me reassure you straight away that you’re not the only one struggling with this difficulty. I have a similar problem myself.

  ‘Oh, really?’ I exclaimed in a rather mocking tone. ‘And just how do you deal with it?’

  ‘We can talk about me later,’ he said, ‘let’s try sorting you out first. As I’ve already said, nowadays almost everyone suffers from the same subconscious conflict. What I want you to do is to recognize its nature. You know, the world around us is reflected in our consciousness and then it becomes the object of our mental activity. When established connections in the real world collapse, the same thing happens in the human psyche. And this is accompanied by the release of a colossal amount of psychic energy within the enclosed space of your ego. It’s like a small atomic explosion. But what really matters is how the energy is channelled after the explosion.’
/>   The conversation was taking a curious turn.

  ‘And what channels, if I may ask, are available?’

  ‘If we keep it simple, there are two. Psychic energy can move outwards, so to speak, into the external world, striving towards objects like… well, shall we say, a leather jacket or a luxury automobile. Many of your contemporaries…’

  I remembered Vorblei and shuddered. ‘I understand. Please do not continue.’

  ‘Excellent. In the other case, for one reason or another, this energy remains within. This is the less favourable course of events. Imagine a bull locked inside a museum…’

  ‘An excellent image.’

  ‘Thank you. Well then, this museum, with its fragile and possibly beautiful exhibits, is your personality, your inner world. And the bull rushing about inside it is the release of psychic energy that you are unable to cope with. The reason why you are here.’

  Me really is very clever, I thought - but what an utter scoundrel!

  ‘I can tell you more,’ continued Timur Timurovich. ‘I’ve given a great deal of thought as to why some people have the strength to start a new life - for want of a better term, we can call them the «New Russians», although I detest that expression…’

  ‘Indeed, it is quite repulsive. And also inaccurate; if you are quoting the revolutionary democrats of the last century, then I believe that they called them the new people.’

  ‘Possibly. But the question remains the same: why do some people actively strive, as it were, towards the new, while others persist in their attempts to clarify their non-existent relations with the shadows of a vanished world?’

  ‘Now that really is magnificent. You’re a genuine poet.’

  ‘Thank you once again. The answer, in my view, is very simple - I’m afraid you might even find it rather primitive. Let me build up to it. The life of a man, a country, a culture and so on, is a series of constant metamorphoses. Sometimes they extend over a period of time and so are imperceptible, sometimes they assume acute forms, as in the present case. And it is precisely the attitude to these metamorphoses that determines the fundamental difference between cultures. For instance, China, the culture you are so crazy about…’