Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, feeling my tightly bound hands clench into fists behind my back.

  ‘Your case history,’ said Timur Timurovich, picking up the very fattest of the files on his desk. ‘I was just leafing through it.’

  He threw the file back down again. ‘Yes, China. As you may recall, their entire world view is constructed on the principle that the world is constantly degenerating as it moves from a golden age towards darkness and stagnation. For them, absolute standards have been left far behind in the past, and all that is new is evil insofar as it leads the world still further away from those standards.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘but this is a typical aspect of human culture in general. It is even present in language itself. In English, for instance, we are the descendants of the past. The word signifies movement downwards, not upwards. We are not ascendants.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Timur Timurovich answered. ‘I don’t know any foreign languages except Latin. But that’s not the point here. When this type of consciousness is embodied in an individual personality, then the person concerned begins to regard his childhood as a lost paradise. Take Nabokov. His endless musings on the early years of his life are a classic example of what I’m talking about. And the classic example of recovery, of the reorientation of consciousness to the real world is the contra-sublimation, as I would call it, that he achieved in such a masterly fashion by transforming his longing for an unattainable paradise which may never have existed at all into a simple, earthly and somewhat illegitimate passion for a little girl, a child. Although at first-’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted, ‘but which Nabokov are you talking about? The leader of the Constitutional Democrats?’

  Timur Timurovich smiled with emphatic politeness. ‘No,’ he said, ‘his son,’

  ‘Little Vovka from the Tenishevsky school? You mean you have picked him up as well? But he’s in the Crimea! And what kind of nonsense is all this about little girls?’

  ‘Very well, very well. He’s in the Crimea,’ Timur Timurovich replied briskly. ‘In the Crimea. But we were talking about China. And the fact that for the classic Chinese mentality, any advance is bound to mean degeneration. But there is another path, the one followed by Europe throughout its history, no matter what you might tell me about language. The path that Russia has been struggling to follow for so many years, as it enters again and again into its ill-fated alchemical wedlock with the West.’

  ‘Remarkable.’

  ‘Thank you. In this case the ideal is conceived not as something left behind in the past, but as something potentially existing in the future. Do you understand me? This is the idea of development, progress, movement from the less perfect to the more perfect. The same thing occurs at the level of the individual personality, even if individual progress takes such petty forms as redecorating an apartment or changing an old car for a new one. It makes it possible to carry on living - but you don’t want to pay for any of this. The metaphorical bull we were talking about rushes about in your soul, trampling everything in its path, precisely because you are not prepared to submit to reality. You don’t want to let the bull out. You despise the positions that the times require us to adopt. And precisely this is the cause of your tragedy.’

  ‘What you say is interesting, of course, but far too complicated.’ I said, casting a sideways glance at the man in military trousers over by the wall. ‘And now my hands have gone numb. As for progress, I can easily provide you with a brief explanation of what that is.’

  ‘Please do so.’

  ‘It is very simple. If we put everything that you were saying in a nutshell, then we are left with the simple fact that some people adapt themselves to change more quickly than others. But have you ever asked yourself why these changes take place at all?’

  Timur Timurovich shrugged.

  ‘Then let me tell you. You would not, I trust, deny that the more cunning and dishonourable a man is, the easier his life is?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘And his life is easier precisely because he adapts more rapidly to change?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Well then, there exists a level of dishonourable cunning, my dear sir, at which a man anticipates the outcome of change even before it is completed, and as a result he is able to adapt far more rapidly than everyone else. But far worse than that, the most sensitive of scoundrels actually adapt to change before it has even begun.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘In actual fact, all the changes that happen in the world only take place because of such highly sensitive scoundrels. Because, in reality, they do not anticipate the future at all, but shape it, by creeping across to occupy the quarter from which they think the wind will blow. Following which, the wind has no option but to blow from that very quarter.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It is obvious, surely. As I told you, I am speaking of the most villainous, sly and shameless of scoundrels. Surely you can believe them capable of persuading everyone else that the wind is blowing from the precise quarter in which they have established themselves? Especially since this wind we are talking about blows only within this idiom of ours… But now I am talking too much. In all honesty, I had intended to keep silent right up to the final shot.’

  The officer sitting by the wall grunted suddenly and gave Timur Timurovich a meaningful glance.

  ‘I haven’t introduced you,’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘This is Major Smirnov, a military psychiatrist. He is here for other reasons, but your case has attracted his interest.’

  ‘I am flattered, Major,’ I said, inclining my head in his direction.

  Timur Timurovich leaned over his telephone and pressed a button. ‘Sonya, four cc’s as usual, please,’ he spoke into the receiver. ‘Here in my office, while he’s in the jacket. Yes, and then straight into the ward.’

  Turning to me, Timur Timurovich sighed sadly and scratched his beard.

  ‘We’ll have to continue the course of medication for the time being.’ he said. ‘I tell you honestly, I regard it as a defeat. A small one, but nonetheless a defeat. I believe that a good psychiatrist should avoid using medication, it’s - how can I explain it to you? - it’s cosmetic. It doesn’t solve any of the problems, it merely conceals them from view. But in your case I can’t think of anything better. You’ll have to help me. If you want to save a drowning man, it’s not enough just to reach out to him, he has to offer his hand too.’

  The door opened behind me and I heard quiet footsteps, then gentle woman’s hands grasped me by the shoulder and I felt the small cold sting of a needle piercing my skin through the cloth of the strait-jacket.

  ‘By the way.’ said Timur Timurovich, rubbing his hands as though to warm them, ‘one small comment; in madhouse slang the term «final shot» isn’t used for what we’re injecting you with, that is, an ordinary mixture of aminazine and perevitine. It’s reserved for the so-called sulphazine cross, that is, four injections in… But then, I hope we’re never going to reach that stage.’

  I did not turn my head to look at the woman who had given me the injection. I looked at the dismembered red-white-and-blue man on the poster, and when he began looking back at me, smiling and winking, I heard Timur Timurovich’s voice coming from somewhere very far away:

  ‘Yes, straight to the ward. No, he won’t cause any problems. There may be at least some effect… He’ll be going through the same procedure himself soon enough.’

  Somebody’s hands (I think they belonged to Zherbunov and Barbolin again) pulled the shirt off my body, picked me up by the arms and dumped me like a sack of sand on to some kind of stretcher. Then the door-frame flashed past my eyes and we

  My unfeeling body floated past tall white doors with numbers on them, and behind me I could hear the distorted voices and laughter of the sailors in doctors’ coats, who appeared to be conducting a scurrilous conversation about women. Then I saw Timur Timurovich’s face peering down at me - apparently he had
been walking along beside me.

  ‘We’ve decided to put you back in the Third Section,’ he said. ‘At present there are four others in there, so you’ll make five. Do you know anything about Kanashnikov group therapy? My group therapy, that is?’

  ‘No,’ I mumbled with difficulty.

  The flickering of the doors as they passed me had become quite unbearable, and I closed my eyes.

  ‘To put it simply, it means patients pooling their efforts in the struggle for recovery. Imagine that for a time your problems become the collective problems, that for a certain time everyone taking part in a session shares your condition. They all identify with you, so to speak. What do you think the result of that would be?’ I did not answer.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ Timur Timurovich went on. ‘When the session comes to an end, a reaction sets in as the participants withdraw from the state that they have been experiencing as reality; you could call it exploiting man’s innate herd instinct in the service of medicine. Your ideas and your mood might infect the others taking part in the session for a certain time, but as soon as the session comes to an end, they return to their own manic obsessions, leaving you isolated. And at that moment - provided the pathological psychic material has been driven up to the surface by the process of catharsis - the patient can become aware of the arbitrary subjectivity of his own morbid notions and can cease to identify with them. And from that point recovery is only a short step away.’

  I did not follow the meaning of his words very clearly, assuming, that is, that there was any. But nonetheless, something stuck in my mind. The effect of the injection was growing stronger and stronger. I could no longer see anything around me, my body had become almost totally insensitive, and my spirit was immersed in a dull, heavy indifference. The most unpleasant thing about this mood was that it did not seem to have taken possession of me, but of some other person - the person into whom the injected substance had transformed me. I was horrified to sense that this other person actually could be cured.

  ‘Of course you can recover,’ Timur Timurovich confirmed. ‘And we will cure you, have no doubt about it. Just forget the very notion of a madhouse. Treat it all as an interesting adventure. Especially since you’re a literary man. I sometimes encounter things here that are just begging to be written down. What’s coming up now, for instance - we’re due for an absolutely fascinating event in your ward, a group session with Maria. You do remember who I’m talking about?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No, of course not, of course not. But it’s an extremely interesting case. I’d call it a psychodrama of genuinely Shakespearean proportions, the clash of such apparently diverse objects of consciousness as a Mexican soap opera, a Hollywood blockbuster and our own young, rootless Russian democracy. Do you know the Mexican television serial Just Maria? So you don’t remember that either. I see. Well, in a word, the patient has taken on the role of the heroine, Maria herself. It would be a quite banal case, if not for the subconscious identification with Russia, plus the Agamemnon complex with the anal dynamics. In short, it’s exactly my field, a split false identity.’

  Oh, God, I thought, how long the corridors here are.

  ‘Of course, you won’t be in any fit state to take a proper part in the proceedings,’ Timur Timurovich’s voice continued, ‘so you can sleep. But don’t forget that soon it will be your turn to tell your own story.’

  I think we must have entered a room - a door squeaked and I caught a fragment of interrupted conversation. Timur Timurovich spoke a word of greeting to the surrounding darkness and several voices answered him. Meanwhile I was transferred to an invisible bed, a pillow was tucked under my head and a blanket thrown over me. For a while I paid attention to the disembodied phrases that reached my ears -Timur Timurovich was explaining to somebody why I had been absent for so long; then I lost contact with what was happening, being visited instead by a quite momentous hallucination of an intimately personal character.

  1 do not know quite how long I spent alone with my conscience, but at some point my attention was caught again by the monotonous voice of Timur Timurovich.

  ‘Watch the ball closely, Maria. You are quite calm. If your mouth feels dry, it’s only because of the injection you were given - it will soon pass. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the reply, in what seemed to me more like a high male voice than a low female one.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Maria,’ answered the voice.

  ‘What’s your surname?’

  ‘Just Maria,’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘They say I look eighteen.’ replied the voice.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘Yes. In a hospital.’

  ‘And what brought you here?’

  ‘It was the crash, what else? I don’t understand how I survived at all. I couldn’t possibly have guessed he was that kind of man.’

  ‘What did you crash into?’

  ‘The Ostankino television tower.’

  ‘I see. And how did it happen?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Timur Timurovich said kindly, ‘we’re not in any hurry, we have time to listen. How did it all begin?’

  ‘It began when I went for a walk along the embankment.’

  ‘And where were you before that?’

  ‘I wasn’t anywhere before that.’

  ‘All right, carry on.’

  ‘Well then, I’m walking, you know, just walking along, and all around me there’s some kind of smoke. And the further I go, the more there is…’

  I suddenly realized that the longer I tried to listen to the words, the harder it was to make out their meaning. It felt as though the meaning were attached to them by pieces of string, which kept getting longer and longer. I found myself unable to keep up with the conversation, but that was not important, because at the same time I began to see the wavering outline of a picture - a river embankment enveloped in clouds of smoke and a woman with broad muscular shoulders walking along it, looking more like a man dressed in women’s clothes. I knew that she was called Maria and I could see her, and see the world through her eyes at the same time. A moment later I realized that in some way I was perceiving everything that she was thinking and feeling: she was thinking that however hard she tried, this walk was never going to lead to anything; the sunny morning at the beginning of which she had arrived in this world of suffering had given way to this unholy mess, and it had happened so smoothly that she had not even noticed.

  At first there was a smell of burning in the air, and Maria thought that someone somewhere must be burning fallen leaves. Then the first smell became mingled with that of scorched rubber, and soon she was swamped by a fog-like smoke that grew thicker and thicker until it hid everything from sight apart from the iron railings along the embankment and the few yards of space immediately around her.

  Soon Maria felt as though she were walking through a long hall in an art gallery: in their trite ordinariness the segments of the surrounding world which appeared from time to time out of the all-enveloping gloom looked very much like bizarrely fashioned works of modern art. Drifting out of the gloom towards her came signboards bearing the words ‘Bureau de Change’, benches scored all over by penknives and a vast quantity of empty cans, bearing witness to the fact that the generation next still chooses beer.

  Groups of agitated men carrying automatic rifles emerged from the mist and then disappeared back into it. They pretended not to notice Maria and she reacted in the same way. She already had more than enough people to remember her and think of her. How many was it - millions? Tens of millions? Maria didn’t know the exact number of them, but she was sure that if all the hearts in which fate had inscribed her name were to beat in unison, then their combined beating would be much louder than the deafening explosions she could hear from the other side of the river.

  Maria looked round and screwed up her radiant eyes as she tried to u
nderstand what was going on.

  Every now and then from somewhere close by - because of the smoke she couldn’t see exactly where - there was a thunderous crash; the booming sound was followed immediately by the barking of dogs and the roaring of a multitude of voices, like the noise from the crowd when a goal is scored at the stadium, Maria didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps they were shooting a film near the White House on the other bank of the river, or perhaps some new Russians were squabbling about which of them was the newest. I wish they’d get on with it and finish dividing everything up, she thought. How many more of our handsome young men must we see fall on the roadway and spill out their heart’s blood on the asphalt?

  Maria began thinking about how she could lighten the unbearable burden of this life for everyone who was writhing, God knows for what reason, in the grip of these black coils of smoke that obscured the sky and the sun. Her head was filled with clear, bright, uncomplicated images - there she was in a simple dress, entering a modest flat tidied specially for the occasion by its occupants. And there they were, sitting at the table with the samovar and gazing at her lovingly, and she knew that she didn’t have to say anything, all she had to do was sit opposite them and gaze tenderly back, paying as little attention as she could to the whirring of the camera. And there was a hospital ward full of people all bandaged up and lying on uncomfortable beds, and there was her image hanging on the wall in a place where everyone could see it. They gazed at her from their beds and for a while they forgot all about their woes, their aches and pains…

  This was all wonderful, but she vaguely realized that it was not enough. No, what the world needed was a strong hand, stern and unrelenting, capable of resisting evil whenever the need arose. But where was this strength to be found? And what would it look like? These were questions Maria couldn’t answer, but she sensed that they were the very reason why she was walking along this embankment in this city that was expiring in its suffering.