The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin Page A

to fisting, light domination and all the rest. If, say, you want to take an elderly transvestite with higher musical education and a gold tooth in his mouth, and beat him to death with a baseball bat, even then I can assist you with your dubious project. But it’s better for me not to know everything that’s going on in someone else’s mind - it’s easier to keep my own soul pure that way.

    That’s why I had no doubts about my ability to cope with the list of services advertised, no matter what they might be. But there was still something missing in the text. I thought for a moment and then, after ‘A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from well-to-do gentleman’ I wrote in:

    Transsexual, versatile, penis 26x4. Always following the rules means denying yourself all the pleasures! We need to know how to commit the follies that our nature demands of us.

    Ah, if only they knew what our true nature is, I sighed, and took out ‘Transsexual’. As the chef of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich used to say, before the revolution: ‘You can’t spoil gruel with butter, but you can spoil butter with gruel.’ Something else was required . . . After thinking about it for a while, I decided to replace ‘Mistress and Slave Girl services’ with ‘Mistress, Slave Girl and Ray of Light services’. That didn’t impose any additional physical exertions on me, not even imaginary ones, but it opened up wide scope for fantasy.

    Fantasy . . . A courtesan I used to know in China during the Late Han period often used to say that a man’s weak spot is the fantasies that fill his mind. When she got old, she was given to a nomad leader as severance pay, and he boiled the poor woman in mare’s milk, hoping to bring back her youth. A weakness can sometimes become a terrible strength.

    I could have gone on improving the text ad infinitum - everyone knows that for a real poet the process continues until the moment the publisher calls round to collect the manuscript. In this case I had to collect the manuscript from myself. And so I decided to put a full stop after the final touchingly artless couplet at the end:

    Turbulent stream, pining without affection,
I promise you a passionate connection!

    I’d never worked with the site whores.ru before. The procedure for posting information turned out to be the same as on other similar facilities, but there was one unpleasant difference. Posting plain text cost 150 dollars, photographs were twenty apiece. I had three of the WMZ cards that they accepted for payment on the site - a hundred, a fifty and a twenty. Obviously the whole thing was set up to suit these values. I could only post one photo - or else I would have to go to the nearest Metro station for a new supply of Internet money. I decided to make do with one picture, but to send it immediately, so that in the morning it would already be hanging out there on the wires. But I still didn’t manage to send the photograph off quickly - I spent almost an hour choosing it.

    The choice proved difficult because every alternative tinted the services in my list in a different hue, illuminating the strap-on and the fisting with new nuances of meaning . . . Eventually I settled on an old black and white photograph - me in front of a set of bookshelves, with a volume of Alexander Blok in my hands. The book was The Snow Mask , and the photo itself, taken in the 1930s, had a magical, mysterious air to it, as if it had captured the final glimmering of the Silver Age of Russian literature - which was very appropriate for the final service offered in my list. It was a good thing I’d had my most precious negatives and daguerrotypes digitized.

    All that left me to do was choose my artistic pseudonym. I found a suitable list through Google and chose a name from the very beginning - Adele, which reminded me of the Russian word for hell - ‘ad’.

    It was a good quality photo and it took up half a megabyte. I clicked on the ‘send’