Free The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin

to myself never to get into an argument about culture with him again, but only to exploit him for his proper purpose, as a gymnastic apparatus for developing my spiritual strength. But it was too late.

     
     

    In modern society it is fatal to give way to social instincts acquired in other times, and in a culture that was very dissimilar. They’re like gyroscopes trained on a planet which was blown to bits: it’s best not to think where the course they indicate might lead to.

    The people who lived in ancient China were highly spiritual. If I’d demonstrated that kind of knowledge of the classical canon to any scholar then, he’d have gone into debt in order to reward me with double pay and he would have sent a letter in verse to my home, bound to a branch of plum blossom. Perhaps my old memories had led me to expect something similar when I started talking to Pavel Ivanovich about Nabokov. But the result was quite different.

    The next time we met, Pavel Ivanovich asked me to conduct the session on credit because he’d just bought a refrigerator. He expressed this request in the spirit of a secret accomplice, an old comrade tried and tested in journeys to the heights of the spirit. A poet borrowing a bottle of ink from a colleague might have spoken like that. I couldn’t refuse.

    The new refrigerator took up almost half his kitchen, it looked like the tip of an iceberg that had broken through the side of a ship and smashed into the hold. But nonetheless the captain of the ship was drunk and jolly. I’d noticed a long time before that nothing delights a member of the Russian intelligentsia (Pavel Ivanovich could hardly make the grade as an intellectual) as the purchase of a new electrical household appliance.

    I don’t like drunks, so I was acting a bit sullen. No doubt he put that down to the fact that the session was being conducted on credit, and he wasn’t particularly demanding. We got down to work in silence, like a pair of Estonian yachtsmen who have sailed together for ages: he handed me the tattered knout that he kept in the tennis bag with Boris Becker’s signature on it, got undressed, lay down on the sofa and opened a fresh copy of Expert magazine.

    I guessed that what was going on had nothing to do with his disdainful attitude to my art, or even his love for the printed word. Clearly his contrition before Young Russia coexisted in his heart with other vibes about which I knew nothing, and he hadn’t revealed all of his secrets to me. But I felt no urge to penetrate his inner world beyond the depth that had been paid for, and so I didn’t ask any questions. Everything was going as usual - I was lashing his backside with an imaginary knout, thinking my own thoughts, and he was muttering quietly. Sometimes he would start to groan, sometimes to laugh. It was boring, and I felt like some odalisque in an oriental harem, waving away the flies from her master’s fat carcass with regular sweeps of a fan. Then suddenly he said:

    ‘Would you believe it, what a name for a lawyer - Anton Drill. How did he manage to survive with that . . . I bet the kids gave him hell in school . . . People with names like that grow up psychological deviants, it’s a fact. They all need help from a psychotherapist. Any expert can tell you that.’

    Of course, I shouldn’t have got involved in the conversation - there was absolutely no point in taking the situation beyond the limitations of our professional relationship. The reason I didn’t hold back is that names are a sore point with me.

    ‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what name anybody has. I have a girlfriend, for instance, and she has a name that sounds very, very crude. So crude you’d laugh out loud if I told you it. It’s almost a swearword, you could say, that kind of name. But she’s a beautiful girl, clever and kind. A name’s not a prison sentence.’

    ‘Perhaps, my dear, you don’t know your friend very well. If her