Buddha's Little Finger Read online

  ‘A model A-4 «Harrier» jump-jet vertical take-off and landing pursuit craft,’ said Schwarzenegger.

  Maria saw the famous dimples in his cheeks again -Schwarzenegger was smiling. She frowned slightly, drawing her frizzy eyebrows together, and the fear in her heart was replaced by a feeling of jealousy for this immense insect of glass and metal, which clearly occupied quite as important a place in Schwarzenegger’s heart as she did herself.

  He approached the plane. Sunk in thought, Maria remained standing on the spot until she was jerked forward in turn - rather as if Schwarzenegger were a tractor and she were some piece of agricultural machinery casually hooked on to it.

  ‘But there’s only room for one,’ she said when she caught sight of the back of the seat through the glass canopy.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Schwarzenegger, and in a single light movement he lifted her up and sat her on the wing.

  Maria drew in her legs and stood up on the angled aluminium surface. A gust of wind fluttered through her clothes, and she thought how well romantic roles had always suited her.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked.

  But Schwarzenegger was already in the cockpit. He had clambered in with amazing speed and agility, and Maria realized it must have been a montage sequence or a piece of slick editing. He stuck his head out of the cabin and smiled, gesturing to her with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a ring; Maria decided she could think of it as her wedding ring.

  ‘Sit on the fuselage,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘at the base of the wings. Don’t be afraid. Imagine it’s a carousel. Imagine you’re sitting on one of the horses.’

  ‘You mean, you’re going to…’

  Schwarzenegger nodded.

  His dark glasses gazed straight into the depths of Maria’s soul and she realized her fate was being decided right here and now. She was being tested, there was no doubt about it: the woman worthy of standing beside Schwarzenegger could not be some feeble coward good for nothing more than multi-episode domestic and sexual intrigue. She had to be able to meet mortal danger face to face without betraying her feelings with anything more than a smile. Maria tried adjusting her expression accordingly, but felt that the smile turned out a little contrived.

  ‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘But won’t I get cold?’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Get up.’

  Maria shrugged and took a cautious step towards the point where the fuselage protruded above the flat surface of the wings like the curved spine of a fish, and then sat down on it neatly.

  ‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘you can ride side-saddle when we go to my ranch in California. Right now you had better sit the ordinary way, or the wind’ll blow you off.’

  Maria hesitated for a moment. ‘Look the other way,’ she said.

  Schwarzenegger smiled with the left corner of his mouth and turned away. Maria threw her leg over the aluminium crest and straddled the fuselage. Underneath her the metal was cold and slightly damp with dew; she hoisted herself up slightly in order to tuck the hem of her jacket underneath her, and suddenly had the strange sensation that the very tenderest parts of her body had been flattened across the angular hips of a metal man lying on his back - some mutant cross between the iron Dzerzhinsky toppled by the wind of change and a robot from hell. She shuddered, but the brief hallucination disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by the feeling that she was sitting on a frying-pan which had just been taken out of the fridge. She was feeling worse and worse about what was happening.

  ‘Arnold,’ she called, ‘are you sure we ought to do this?’

  She usually reserved these words for entirely different circumstances, but this time they just seemed to come out on their own.

  ‘It was you who wanted to soar up into the sky,’ he said, ‘but if you’re afraid…’

  ‘No,’ said Maria, pushing aside her fear, ‘I’m not afraid in the slightest. It’s just that I’m being such a bother to you.’

  ‘No bother,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘It’s going to be very noisy, better put your earphones on. What is it you’re listening to, anyway?’

  ‘Jihad Crimson,’ said Maria, settling the small pink pads on her ears.

  Schwarzenegger’s face froze absolutely still. A strange flickering red light ran across the lenses of his dark glasses - Maria thought it must be the reflection of the leaves falling from the maple trees that stood just behind the garages.

  ‘Arnie,’ she called.

  The corner of Schwarzenegger’s mouth twitched a few times, and then he seemed to recover the power of movement. He turned his head with difficulty, as though it were rotating on a bearing clogged with sand.

  ‘Crimson Jihad?’ he asked.

  ‘Jihad Crimson,’ answered Maria. ‘Nushrat Fatekh Ali Khan and Robert Fripp. Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘it’s not important.’

  His head disappeared into the cockpit. Underneath her, somewhere deep in the plane’s metal belly, she heard an electrical hum that expanded in the space of just a few seconds into a monstrous loud roaring until it seemed to Maria that she could feel the foam-plastic pads being forced into her ears. Then she was tilted smoothly over to one side and the garages drifted down and away behind her.

  Swaying from side to side like a boat, the Harrier rose up vertically into the air - Maria had not even been aware that aeroplanes could fly like that. She thought that if she closed her eyes it might be less frightening, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear, and in less than a minute she had opened them again.

  The first thing she saw was a window moving straight towards her. It was so close already that Maria had a perfectly clear view of a tank turning the muzzle of its gun in her direction from the screen of the television in the room. The tank on the screen fired, and at that precise moment the plane banked steeply and soared away from the wall. Maria almost slid across on to the wing, and she squealed in fear, but the plane soon righted itself.

  ‘Hold on to the antenna!’ shouted Schwarzenegger, poking his head out of the cabin and waving to her.

  Maria looked down. Protruding out of the fuselage directly in front of her was a long metal form with a rounded, slightly swollen tip - it was strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like a narrow vertical wing, and it immediately roused immodest associations in Maria’s mind, although its dimensions were significantly larger than any encountered in real life. One glance at this powerful protuberance was enough to quell her fear and replace it with a joyful inspiration that had always been so lacking with all those languid Miguels and drunken Ivans from the television.

  Everything was quite different this time. The rounded swelling -at the tip of the antenna was covered with small holes which reminded her slightly of a shower head and at the same time set her thinking of strange, non-terrestrial forms of life and love. Maria pointed to it and glanced inquiringly at Schwarzenegger. He nodded and gave a broad smile, and the sun glinted on his teeth.

  Maria decided that what was happening to her now must be a childhood dream coming true. In some film or other she had spent a lot of time poring over fairy-tales in books, looking at the pictures and imagining herself flying through the sky on the back of a dragon or a huge bird, and now it was actually happening. Maybe not exactly the way she’d dreamed it, but then, she thought as she laid her palm on the steel projection of the antenna, dreams don’t always come true in the way we expect.

  The plane banked slightly and Maria noticed it was obviously responding to her touching the antenna. More than that, the movement seemed to her to be incredibly animated, as though the plane were alive and the antenna were its most sensitive part. Maria ran her hand along the steel rod and squeezed its upper part tight in her fist. The Harrier twitched its wings nervously and rose a few yards higher. Maria thought to herself that the plane was behaving exactly like a man tied to a bed, unable to take her in his arms, incapable of anything but twitching and jerking his entire body. The sim
ilarity was enhanced by the fact that she was sitting just behind the wings, which looked like a pair of wide-spread legs, incredibly muscly, but quite incapable of movement.

  This was certainly amusing, but it was all a bit too complicated. Instead of this huge steel bird, Maria would have preferred to have come across an ordinary camp-bed in the empty space between the garages. But then, she thought, with Schwarzenegger it couldn’t really have been any other way. She glanced at the cockpit. She couldn’t see much, because the sun was reflected in the glass, but he seemed to be sitting there, moving his head gently from side to side in time with the movement of her hand.

  Meanwhile, the plane was rising higher and higher. The roofs of the houses were now far below them, and Maria had a magnificent panoramic view of the city of Moscow.

  There were church domes gleaming on all sides, making the city look like an immense biker’s jacket embellished at random with a remarkable quantity of studs and rivets. There was far less smoke hanging over Moscow than Maria had imagined from down below on the embankment; though some was still visible here and there above the houses, it wasn’t always clear whether it was a fire, pollution from factory chimneys or simply low cloud.

  Despite the revolting ugliness of each of its component parts, viewed as a whole the city looked extremely beautiful, but the source of this beauty was beyond all understanding. That’s always the way with Russia, thought Maria, as she ran her hands up and down the cold steel - when you see it from afar, it’s so beautiful it’s enough to make you cry, but when you take a closer look, you just want to puke.

  The plane suddenly jerked beneath her, and she felt the upper part of the steel rod dangling loosely in her hand. She jerked her hand away, and immediately the metal knob with the small holes fell away from the antenna, struck the fuselage and flew off into space; the powerful protuberance was reduced to a short hollow tube with a screw thread around its top, with the torn blue and red strands of two wires twisted together protruding from its end.

  Maria glanced in the direction of the cockpit. Through the glass she could make out the blond back of Schwarzenegger’s motionless head. At first she thought that he hadn’t noticed anything. Then she thought he must have fainted. She looked around in confusion, saw that the nose of the plane was wavering uncertainly, and immediately her suspicion hardened into certainty. Hardly even aware of what she was doing, she slumped down from the fuselage on to the small flat area between the wings (the stump of the antenna ripped her jacket as she fell) and crawled towards the cockpit.

  The cockpit was open. Lying there on the wing, Maria propped herself up and shouted:

  ‘Arnie! Arnie!’

  There was no answer. She fearfully manoeuvred herself on to all fours and saw the back of his head with a single lock of hair fluttering in the wind.

  ‘Arnie!’ she called again.

  Schwarzenegger turned to face her.

  ‘Thank God!’ Maria exclaimed.

  Schwarzenegger took off his glasses.

  His left eye was half-closed in a way that expressed an absolutely clear and at the same time immeasurably complex range of feelings, including a strictly proportioned mixture of passion for life, strength, a healthy love for children, moral support for the American automobile industry in its difficult struggle with the Japanese, acknowledgement of the rights of sexual minorities, a slightly ironical attitude towards feminism and the calm assurance that democracy and judaeo-Christian values would eventually conquer all evil in this world.

  But his right eye was quite different. It could hardly even be called an eye. A round glass lens looking like a huge wall-eye, set in a complicated metal holder connected to wires that ran out from under the skin, peered out at Maria from a tattered socket surrounded by streaks of dried blood. A beam of blinding red light shone directly out from the centre of the lens - Maria only noticed it when the beam shone into her own eyes.

  Schwarzenegger smiled, and the left side of his face expressed exactly what the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to express when it smiles - an indefinable boyish quality between mischief and cunning, immediately making it clear that this is a man who will never do anything bad, and if he should happen to kill a few assholes now and then, it’s not until the camera has repeatedly revealed from several different angles what despicable trash they are. But the smile only affected the left side of his face, the right side remained absolutely unchanged - cold, focused and terrifying.

  ‘Arnold,’ Maria said in confusion, rising to her feet. ‘What are you doing that for? Stop it!’

  But Schwarzenegger didn’t answer, and a moment later the plane banked steeply and Maria was sent tumbling along the wing. On the way she banged her face several times against various protruding objects, and then suddenly there was nothing holding her up any longer. She decided she must be falling and squeezed her eyes shut in order not to see the trees and roofs hurtling up towards her, but several seconds went by and nothing happened. Maria realized that the roaring of the engine was still as close to her as ever and she opened her eyes again.

  She was hanging under the wing. The hood of her jacket had snagged on the empennage of some protrusion, which she recognized with some effort as a rocket. The sight of the rocket’s swollen head rather reminded her of the antenna she had been handling just a few minutes earlier, and she decided Schwarzenegger must be continuing with his loveplay. But this was too much - her face was probably covered in bruises, and she could taste the blood from a cut on her lip.

  ‘Arnold,’ she yelled, waving her arms furiously in an attempt to turn towards the cockpit, ‘stop it! I don’t want to do this! Do you hear me? I don’t want to!’

  She finally managed to catch a glimpse of the cockpit and Schwarzenegger’s smiling face.

  1 don’t want to do this, d’you hear me? It’s hurting me that way!’

  ‘You won’t?’ he asked.

  ‘No! No!’

  ‘Okay,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘You’re fired.’

  A moment later his face zoomed back and away from Maria as she was thrust ahead of the plane by a force of unimaginable power; in just a few seconds the plane was transformed into a tiny silver bird which was connected to her only by a long streak of smoke. Maria turned her head to see where she was going and saw the spire of the Ostankino television tower veering towards her. The swollen lump at its centre grew rapidly as she watched and a split second before the impact came Maria had a clear view of some men in white shirts and ties sitting at a table and gazing at her in amazement through a thick pane of glass.

  There was the ringing sound of a glass shattering and then something heavy fell to the floor. Someone started crying loudly.

  ‘Careful, careful.’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘There now, that’s better.’

  Realizing that it was all over, I opened my eyes. By this time I could more or less see. Everything close to me was quite distinct, but objects further away shifted and blurred, and the overall perspective was as though I were sitting inside a large Christmas-tree decoration with the outside world daubed on its inner surface. Timur Timurovich and Colonel Smirnov towered up over me like twin cliffs.

  ‘Well,’ said someone in the corner. ‘So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Just Maria.’

  ‘I would like to point out,’ said Colonel Smirnov, clearing his throat and turning to Timur Timurovich, ‘the distinctly phallic relevance of the fact that the patient sees dicks everywhere. Did you notice that? The antenna, the rocket, the Ostankino tower?’

  ‘You military men always take things too literally.’ replied Timur Timurovich. ‘Not everything’s that simple. Russia cannot be grasped by logic, as the saying goes - but neither can it be entirely reduced to sexual neurosis. Let’s not be too hasty. What’s important here is that the cathartic effect is quite evident, even if it is attenuated.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the colonel, ‘the chair’s even broken.’

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed Timur Timurovich. ‘When blocked pathological
material rises to the surface of consciousness it has to overcome powerful resistance, and so it often produces visions of catastrophes or conflicts of various kinds, as we’ve just seen. It’s the clearest possible sign that we’re working along the right lines.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the shell-shock?’ said the colonel.

  ‘What shell-shock?’

  ‘What, didn’t I tell you about that? Well, when they were shelling the White House, a few of the shells went straight through, in the windows on one side and out of the windows on the other. And one of them landed in a flat just at the very moment when

  The colonel leaned over to Timur Timurovich and whispered something in his ear. ‘Well, of course…’ - I could just make out odd words here and there - ‘… to smithereens… under security with the corpses at first, and then we saw something moving… Massive concussion, obviously.’

  ‘But why on earth have you kept this to yourself for so long, my good fellow? It changes the entire picture,’ said Timur Timurovich reproachfully. ‘I’ve been struggling so hard…’

  He leaned down over me, parted one of my eyelids with two fat fingers and looked into my eye. ‘How about you?’

  I’m not quite sure.’ I replied. ‘Of course, it was not the most interesting vision I have ever had, but 1… How can I put it? I found the dreamlike facility with which these delirious ravings acquired for several minutes the status of reality quite amusing.’

  ‘How do you like that?’ asked Timur Timurovich, turning to Colonel Smirnov.

  The colonel nodded without speaking.

  ‘My dear fellow, I was not inquiring as to your opinion, but your condition.’ said Timur Timurovich.

  ‘I feel quite well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘But I am sleepy.’

  This was no more than the simple truth.

  ‘Then sleep.’

  He turned away from me.

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’ he said to an invisible nurse, ‘please give Pyotr four cc’s of taurepam immediately before the hydraulic procedures.’

  ‘Can we have the radio on?’ asked a quiet voice in the corner.