The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin Page A

you’re interested.’

    ‘I am.’

    And I really was interested.

    ‘Do you know that game on PlayStation - Final Fantasy 8?’

    I shook my head.

    ‘I got almost all the way through it once - and that takes a long time. And then just before the end the enchantress Adele appeared. Very beautiful, a lot taller than a man. The animation’s spectacular - she wakes up and opens her eyes, and she’s covered in these rays of light, radiating out, a lot like the logo for Universal Studios, and she flies to Earth in her sarcophagus.’

    ‘Where does she fly from?’

    ‘The Moon.’

    ‘Aha. And how does it all end?’

    ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘That’s the point. I couldn’t defeat her. I did for all the rest, but not her, no way. So the game ended there . . .’

    ‘Why is this memory so important to you?’ I asked. ‘There are plenty of games.’

    ‘Before that I’d always succeeded at everything,’ he said.

    ‘Absolutely everything?’

    He nodded.

    ‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

    ‘You don’t believe me?’

    ‘Why not? I believe you. I can tell from the car.’

    A few seconds passed in silence. I glanced out of the window. We were approaching the beginning of Tverskoi Boulevard.

    ‘A new restaurant,’ I said. ‘The Palazzo Ducale. Have you been there?’

    He nodded.

    ‘And what are the customers like?’

    ‘Oh, the usual.’

    ‘So what do people talk about there?’

    He thought for a second. Then he answered in a ludicrous woman’s voice:

    ‘What do you think, is Zhechkov frightened to live in the dacha where Stalin’s butcher Yezhov lived?’

    Then he answered himself in an equally ludicrous bass:

    ‘What do you mean? It’s Stalin’s butcher Yezhov who’ll be shitting himself in his grave because Zhechkov’s living in his dacha . . .’

    ‘And who is this Zhechkov?’ I asked.

    He glanced at me suspiciously. Apparently Zhechkov was someone I ought to know. I’m losing the context, I thought, it happens every twenty years or so.

    ‘I was just giving an example,’ he said. ‘The kind of thing they talk about there.’

    I remembered Yezhov’s dacha as it was in the 1930s. I used to like the plaster lions with balls under their paws who guarded the entrance - their faces had a slightly guilty expression, as if they could sense they wouldn’t be able to protect their master. A thousand years earlier a lion looking almost exactly the same used to stand in front of the shrine of the Huáyán sect - only he was made of gold and on his side he had an inscription that I still remember by heart:

    The cause of error by living beings is that they believe it is possible to cast aside the false and attain unto the truth. But when you attain unto yourself, the false becomes true, and there is no other truth to which one need attain after that.

     

    What people there used to be around in those times! But nowadays is there anyone who can even understand the meaning of those words? All of them, every last one, have departed to the higher worlds. No one wishes to be born in this hellish labyrinth any more, not even out of compassion, and I’m wandering here on my own in the dark . . .

    We stopped at a crossroads.

    ‘Tell me, Alexander, where are we going?’ I asked.

    ‘Do you know a good jeweller’s anywhere round here? I mean really good?’

     
     

    Every time I see a girl in a boutique with an admirer buying her a brooch that costs as much as a small aeroplane, I’m convinced that human females are every bit as good at creating mirages as we are. Perhaps even better. It’s some going to pass off a reproductive mechanism as a delightful spring flower worthy of a precious setting - and to maintain that illusion, not just for minutes, as we do, but for years and decades, and all without the use of a tail. That takes real skill. Evidently women, like mobile phones, have some kind of inbuilt antenna.

    This is what my internal voices say about