The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin Page B

button. My little face obediently smiled, shot through the wires into the wall, was swept into the telephone cable and skipped along the electrical backbone of the street, to be intertwined with the other names and faces hurtling along from God knew where to God knew where else, as it dashed towards the distant network gateway.

     
     

    The call in response to the announcement came the next morning, shortly after eleven. The client’s name was Pavel Ivanovich. His interest had been caught by the line about the Russian knout. It turned out that he had his own Russian knout, in fact not just one of them, but five - four on a special carved wooden stand and one in his tennis bag.

    Let me say straight away that I would quite happily have thrown all mention of Pavel Ivanovich out of my memoirs, but without him the narrative would be incomplete. He played an important part in my life, in the same way as a filthy, slimy pedestrian underpass might if the heroine happens to walk through it on her way to the other bank of the river of fate. And so I shall have to tell you about him, and I beg your forgiveness in advance for the unappetizing details. Some computer games have a ‘Tx2’ button, and after you press it time moves twice as fast as before. So now I’ll press my little ‘Tx2’ button and try to boil him down into the least possible volume.

    I think it was Diogenes Laertius who told the story about a philosopher who studied for three years to rid himself of all passion, paying money to every man who insulted him. When his period of study was completed, he stopped giving out money, but the habitual skills remained with him: one day he was insulted by some ignoramus, and instead of setting about him with his fists, he began to laugh. ‘Well, did you ever,’ he said, ‘today I received for nothing what I’d been paying for three whole years!’

    When I first read about this, I felt envious that I didn’t have any similar practice in my life. But after I met Pavel Ivanovich I realized that now I did.

    Pavel Ivanovich was an elderly scholar of the humanities who looked like a melted-down, hairy pink candle. Formerly he had been a right-wing liberal (I didn’t understand what this outrageous word-combination meant), but following the common trend he had repented to such an extent that he had assumed personal responsibility for all the woes of the motherland. In order to soothe his soul, he had to take a flogging once or twice a week from Young Russia , which he had condemned to poverty by forcing it to earn a living by flogging old perverts instead of studying in university. And so he was caught in a closed circle, which I might possibly have pondered on more deeply, if only he hadn’t masturbated during the session. That destroyed all the mystery.

    If he’d had a real sex worker from somewhere in Ukraine as his own Young Russia , she would never have agreed to be paid only 50 dollars for a one-hour session. Flogging someone is hard work, even when the procedure is merely a hypnotic suggestion. However, I began going to Pavel Ivanovich’s place not just for the sake of the money, but also because he irritated me quite incredibly, provoking uncontrollable spasms of wild fury in me. I had to summon up all my willpower to keep myself in hand. For sheer practical reasons I ought to have gone for richer sponsors, but character has to be trained during the difficult periods of life, when the meaning of doing it is not obvious. That’s when it does the most good.

    So that I could understand my part in what was going on, Pavel Ivanovich gave me a detailed account of all the reasons for his repentance. I was going to take another 50 dollars an hour for this understanding, and I was just waiting for the moment to come when I could bring up the matter of the extra charge. But it never came - Pavel Ivanovich spoke at exceptional length:

    ‘Between 1940 and 1946, my dear, the volume of industrial output in Russia fell by