Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  For a second a puff of wind dispersed the smoke surrounding Maria and a ray of sunshine fell on her. Shielding her face with her hand, she suddenly understood where she should seek the answer. Of course, it lay in those innumerable hearts and minds that had summoned her and incarnated her here, on this smoky embankment. Through the millions of pairs of eyes staring at their television screens, they were fused into a single oceanic consciousness, and this entire ocean lay open to her gaze. She looked across it, at first seeing nothing that might help her. But no, of course there was an image of all-conquering power reflected in this consciousness, and in most cases its form was much the same: the figure of a young man with a small head and wide shoulders, wearing a double-breasted crimson sports jacket and standing beside a long, low-slung automobile with his feet planted wide apart. The image of the automobile was a little bit vague and somehow blurred, because all the people whose souls Maria could see imagined it in different ways. The young man’s face was much the same, it was a very generalized face, and only the hairstyle, a slightly curly chestnut-brown crew cut, was rather more clearly defined. The jacket, however, was drawn with quite remarkable precision, and with a little effort Maria could even have managed to read the words on its gold buttons. But she didn’t try. it didn’t matter what was written on the buttons, what mattered was how this all-conquering power could be united with her own meek and gentle love.

  Maria stopped and leaned on one of the low granite posts that punctuated the iron railings of the fence. Once again she had to seek an answer in the minds and hearts that had placed their trust in her, but this time - Maria was quite certain of this - the lowest common denominators of thought would not do. What was needed…

  There must be at least one intelligent woman out there, she thought.

  And the intelligent woman appeared almost immediately. Maria didn’t know who she was, or even what she looked like, she just caught a glimpse of tall bookshelves, a desk with heaps of papers and a typewriter, and a photograph hanging over the desk showing a man with an enormous curling moustache and intense, moody eyes. It was all in flickering, hazy black and white, as though Maria were viewing it from inside an ancient television with a screen the size of a cigarette packet that was standing somewhere off in the corner of the room. But the images disappeared too quickly for Maria to reflect on what she had seen, and then they were replaced by thoughts.

  Maria understood almost nothing at all in the swirling vortex of ideas that appeared before her; apart from anything else, it was somehow musty and oppressive, like the cloud that appears when you disturb the dust of a long-forgotten lumber room. Maria decided she must be dealing with a consciousness that was extremely cluttered and not entirely normal, and she felt very relieved when it was all over. The catch netted by the pink void of her soul consisted of words whose meanings were not entirely clear-there was a brief glimpse of the word ‘Bridegroom’ (for some reason, with a capital letter), and then the word ‘Visitor’ (another capital letter), followed by the incomprehensible words ‘Alchemical Wedlock’ and after that the totally obscure phrase, sounding like a snatch of Silver Age poetry: ‘all repose is vain, I knock at the gates’. With this the thoughts ended, and then there was another brief glimpse of the man with the ecstatic eyes and the long, droopy moustache which looked like a beard growing from right under his nose.

  She looked around her in bewilderment. Still more or less surrounded by smoke, she thought that perhaps somewhere close by there might be a gate she was supposed to knock at, and she took several timid steps through the murk. Immediately she was enveloped by total darkness on every side, and felt so afraid that she scurried back on to the embankment, where at least a little light remained.

  And if I do knock, she thought, will anybody actually open the gate? Hardly.

  Behind her Maria heard the quiet growling of a car engine. She pressed herself against the railings of the embankment and waited apprehensively to see what would emerge from the smoke. Several seconds went by, and then a long black automobile slowly swam past her, a ‘Chaika’ decorated with ribbons of various colours - she realized it was a wedding car. It was full of silent, serious-looking people; the barrels of several automatic rifles protruded from the windows and on the roof there were two gleaming yellow rings, one larger and one smaller.

  Maria watched the ‘Chaika’ as it drove away, then suddenly slapped herself on the forehead. But of course, now she understood. Yes - that was it. Two interlinked rings - Bridegroom, Visitor, Sponsor. She still couldn’t understand what alchemical wedlock was supposed to be, but if anything untoward happened, she had a good lawyer. Maria shook her head and smiled. It was so simple, how could she have failed to see the most important thing of all for so long? What could she have been thinking of?

  She looked around, orientating herself approximately by the sun, and held out her arms towards the West - somehow it seemed clear that the Bridegroom would appear from that direction.

  ‘Come!’ she prayed in a whisper, and immediately she could sense that a new presence had appeared in the world.

  Now all she had to do was wait for the meeting to take place. She ran on joyfully, sensing the distance between herself and the Bridegroom diminishing. Like her, he already knew, he was walking towards her along this very embankment - but unlike her he wasn’t hurrying, because it wasn’t in his nature to hurry.

  Miraculously managing to leap across an open manhole that appeared suddenly out of the smoke, Maria slowed down and began feverishly rummaging in her pockets. She had suddenly realized that she had no mirror and no make-up with her. For a moment she was plunged into despair, and she even tried to recall whether she had passed a puddle in which she could view her own reflection. But then, when she remembered that she could appear to her beloved in whatever form she wished, Maria’s despair vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  She thought about this for a while. Let him see a very young girl, she decided, with two ginger plaits, a freckled face and… and… She needed some final touch, some naive and endearing detail -perhaps earrings? A baseball cap? Maria had almost no time left, and at the very final moment she adorned herself with padded pink earphones which looked like a continuation of the flame-bright flush of her cheeks. Then she raised her eyes and looked ahead.

  In front of her, among the tattered wisps of smoke, something metallic gleamed for a moment and then immediately vanished. Then it appeared a little closer, only to be concealed again in the murk. A sudden gust of wind drove the smoke aside and Maria saw a tall glittering figure advancing slowly towards her. At the same moment she noticed, or so she thought, that with every step the figure took the ground shook. The metal man was much taller than her and his impassively handsome face expressed not the slightest trace of emotion. Maria was frightened and stumbled backwards - she remembered that somewhere behind her there was an open manhole, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the metal torso bearing down on her like the bow of some immense destroyer approaching an ice floe.

  At the very moment when she was about to scream, the metal man underwent an astonishing transformation. First of all his gleaming thighs were suddenly clad in very domestic-looking striped underpants, then he acquired a white vest and his body took on the normal colour of tanned human skin and was promptly clad in canary-yellow trousers, a shirt and tie and a wonderful crimson sports jacket with gold buttons. That was enough to lay Maria’s fears to rest. But the delightful sight of the crimson jacket was soon concealed beneath a long grey raincoat. Black shoes appeared on the Visitor’s feet and sunglasses with glittering lenses on his face, his hair set itself into a gingerish crew cut and Maria’s heart skipped a beat for joy when she recognized that her bridegroom was Arnold Schwarzenegger - but then she realized it could never have been anyone else.

  He stood there saying nothing and staring at her with those black rectangles of glass; the ghost of a smile played about his lips. Maria caught a glimpse of her reflection in his glasses and adjusted her
earphones.

  Ave Maria,’ said Schwarzenegger quietly.

  He spoke without expression, in a voice that was hollow but pleasant.

  ‘No, my sweet,’ said Maria, smiling mysteriously and clasping her hands together over her breast, ‘just Maria.’

  ‘Just Maria,’ Schwarzenegger repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘And you’re Arnold?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Schwarzenegger.

  Maria opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly she realized she had absolutely nothing to say. Schwarzenegger carried on looking at her and smiling. Maria lowered her gaze and blushed, and then, with a gentle but irresistibly powerful movement, Schwarzenegger turned her round and led her away beside him. Maria looked up at him and smiled her famous stupid-mysterious smile. Schwarzenegger put his hand on her shoulder. Maria sank slightly under the weight, and suddenly her memory threw up something unexpected, a picture of Lenin carrying a beam at one of those communist working Saturdays. In the picture only the edge of the beam could be seen above Lenin’s shoulder and Maria thought that perhaps it wasn’t a beam after all, but the hand of some mighty creature at which Lenin could only glance up with a defenceless smile, as she was now glancing up at Schwarzenegger. But a moment later Maria realized that such thoughts were entirely out of place, and she promptly banished them from her mind.

  Schwarzenegger turned his face towards her.

  ‘Your eyes,’ he intoned monotonously, ‘are like a landscape of the dreamy south.’

  Maria trembled in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting words like these, and Schwarzenegger seemed to understand this immediately. Then something strange happened - or perhaps it didn’t really happen, and Maria simply imagined the faint red letters flickering across the inside surface of Schwarzenegger’s glasses, like running titles on a TV screen, and the soft whirring sound inside his head, as though a computer hard disk drive had been switched on. Maria started in fright, but then she remembered that Schwarzenegger, like herself, was a purely conventional being woven by the thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses which were thinking about him at that very second - and that different people could have very different thoughts about him.

  Schwarzenegger raised his empty hand in front of him and flicked his fingers in the air as he looked for the right words.

  ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘your eyes aren’t eyes - they’re orbs!’

  Maria clung tightly to him and looked up trustingly. Schwarzenegger tucked his chin into his neck, as though to prevent Maria from seeing under his glasses.

  ‘There’s a lot of smoke here,’ he said, ‘why are we walking along this embankment?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Maria.

  Schwarzenegger turned round and led her away from the railings, straight into the smoke. After they’d gone a few steps Maria felt frightened: the smoke was so thick now that she couldn’t see anything, not even Schwarzenegger - all she could make out was his hand where it clutched her shoulder.

  ‘Where’s all this smoke from?’ asked Maria. ‘Nothing seems to be burning.’

  ‘C-N-N,’ Schwarzenegger replied.

  ‘You mean they’re burning something?’

  ‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘they’re shooting something.’

  Aha, thought Maria, probably everybody who was thinking about her and Schwarzenegger was watching CNN, and CNN was showing some kind of smokescreen. But what a long time they were showing it for.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said the invisible Schwarzenegger, ‘it’ll soon be over.’

  But there seemed to be no end to the smoke, and they were getting further and further away from the embankment. Maria suddenly had the terrible thought that for several minutes someone else could have been walking along beside her instead of Schwarzenegger, perhaps even the being that had put its arm round Lenin’s shoulder in that same picture, and this thought frightened her so badly that she automatically adjusted her earphones and switched on the music. The music was strcnge, chopped into small incoherent fragments. No sooner had the guitars and trumpets launched into a sweet song of love than they were swamped by a sudden electronic wailing, like the howling of wolves. But anything was better than listening to the sound of distant explosions from the area of the parliament building and the indistinct hubbub of human voices.

  Suddenly a figure came hurtling straight at Maria out of the smoke so that she shrieked in fright. In front of her she saw a man in blotchy camouflage fatigues, carrying an automatic rifle. He looked up at Maria and opened his mouth to speak, but then Schwarzenegger took his hand from Maria’s shoulder, grabbed hold of the man’s head, twisted it gently to one side and tossed the limp body away beyond the bounds of their vision. His hand returned to Maria’s shoulder, and Maria pressed herself against his monumental torso.

  ‘Ah, men, men,’ she cooed softly.

  Gradually the smoke began to disperse until once again Maria could see Schwarzenegger’s face, and then the entire massive body, concealed beneath the light grey shroud of the raincoat like a monument waiting to be unveiled. ‘Arnold,’ she asked, ‘where are we going?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said Schwarzenegger. Maria blushed and lowered her eyes.

  What is an alchemical wedlock, though? she thought. And will it hurt me, I wonder? Afterwards, I mean? I’ve been hurt so many times before.

  Looking up at him she saw the famous dimples in his cheeks -Schwarzenegger was smiling. Maria closed her eyes and walked on, hardly daring to believe in her own happiness, guided by the hand that lay on her shoulder.

  When Schwarzenegger stopped, she opened her eyes and saw that the smoke had almost completely disappeared. They were standing on a street she didn’t recognize, between rows of old houses faced with granite. The street was deserted except for a few stooped figures with automatic rifles darting about aimlessly in the distance, nearer the embankment which was still hidden behind a pall of smoke. Schwarzenegger seemed to loiter in an odd, indecisive fashion, giving Maria the impression that he was tormented by some strange kind of doubt, and she was frightened at the thought that the doubt might concern her.

  I have to say something romantic quickly, she thought. But what exactly? I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

  ‘You know, Arnold,’ she said, squeezing herself against his side, ‘I suddenly… I don’t know, perhaps you’ll think it’s silly… I can be honest with you, can’t I?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Schwarzenegger, turning his black lenses towards her.

  ‘When I’m with you, I want so much to soar up into the sky! I feel as though the sky is so very close!’

  Schwarzenegger raised his head and looked upwards. There actually were glimpses of bright blue sky between the streams of smoke. It didn’t seem particularly close, but then neither was it that far away.

  Ah, thought Maria, what nonsense I do talk.

  But it was too late to stop now.

  ‘What about you, Arnold, wouldn’t you like to soar up into the sky?’

  Schwarzenegger thought for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And will you take me with you? You know, I… - Maria smiled shyly - ‘I’m so very earthbound.’

  Schwarzenegger thought for another second.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up into the sky.’

  He looked around, as though he were trying to locate landmarks that only he knew, and then he seemed to have found them, because he grabbed Maria decisively by the arm and dragged her onwards. Maria was startled by this sudden transition from poetic abstraction to concrete action, but then she realized that this was the way real men were supposed to behave.

  Schwarzenegger dragged her along the facade of a long Stalin-era apartment block. After a few steps she managed to adjust to his rapid stride and began trotting along beside him, holding on to the sleeve of his raincoat. She sensed that if she slowed her pace at all, Schwarzenegger’s arm would change from a gallantly proffered fulcrum into a steel lever that wou
ld drag her implacably along the pavement, and for some reason the thought filled her with a feeling of boundless happiness that sprang from the very depths of her belly and spread in warm waves throughout her body.

  On reaching the end of the building, Schwarzenegger turned through an arch. Once in the courtyard of the building, Maria felt as though they had been transported to a different city. Here the peace of the morning was still unbroken; there was no smoke to be seen, and it was hard to believe that somewhere close at hand there were crazy people dashing about shooting off their automatic rifles.

  Schwarzenegger definitely knew where he was taking Maria. They made their way round a small children’s playground with swings and dived into a labyrinth of narrow alleys between rusting garages. Maria was thinking with sweet terror in her heart that somewhere here, quickly and rather awkwardly, their alchemical wedlock would probably be consummated, when suddenly the passageway led out into an empty space surrounded on all sides by sheet-iron walls of various colours and heights.

  The space wasn’t entirely empty, though. Beneath their feet lay the usual collection of bottles, and there were a couple of old car tyres, a crumpled door from a Lada and other assorted quasi-mechanical garbage of the kind that always accumulates beside garages.

  And, next to them, there was a jet fighter.

  Although it took up almost all of the space, it was the very last thing that Maria noticed, probably because for several seconds her brain filtered out the signals it was receiving from her eyes as a hallucination. Maria felt afraid.

  How could a plane get in here? she thought. On the other hand, how could Schwarzenegger have got here? But even so, this is really strange.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.