I did as the barman Serge said and didn’t even look in his direction. In the National everybody reports on everybody else, so you have to be careful. And anyway, right then I wasn’t much interested in Serge, I was more concerned about the client.
There were two possible candidates for the position in the bar; a Sikh wearing a dark-blue turban who looked like a chocolate Easter rabbit and a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit with glasses. They were both sitting alone - the man in glasses was drinking coffee and surveying the rectangular courtyard through its glass roof, and the Sikh was reading the
Financial Times
, swaying the toe of his lacquered shoe in time to the pianist, who was masterfully transforming the cultural legacy of the nineteenth century into acoustic wallpaper. The piece concerned was Chopin’s ‘Raindrops’, the same composition that the villain in the film
Moonraker
is playing when Bond appears. I used to adore that music. Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna, was right to entitle the rebuttal of her husband’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ that she worked on in her final years as ‘Chopin’s Preludes’ . . .
I’d prefer the one in glasses, I thought. He was obviously not saving up for a ‘Jaguar’, he already had one. For his kind the whole thrill is in spending money, they get more excited over that transaction than all the rest, which doesn’t even have to happen at all, provided you can get them drunk enough. But that Sikh would be really heavy work.
I smiled at the man in glasses and he smiled back. That’s great then, I thought, but just after that the Sikh folded his financial newspaper, got up and came to my table.
‘Lisa?’ he asked.
That was my pseudonym for the day.
‘That’s right,’ I said happily.
What else could I do?
He sat facing me and immediately started abusing the local cuisine. His English was good, not the kind people from India usually have - genuine Oxford pronunciation, with that dry tone to it reminiscent of a Russian accent. Instead of ‘fucking’ he said ‘freaking’, like a Boy Scout, and it sounded funny, because he stuck the word into every second sentence. Maybe swearing was against his religion, there was some little point like that in Sikhism, I thought. He turned out to be a professional portfolio investor, and I only just stopped myself from asking where his portfolio was. Portfolio investors don’t like jokes like that. I know that, because every third client of mine at the National is a portfolio investor. Not that there are all that many portfolio investors at the National, it’s just that I look very young, and every second portfolio investor is a paedophile. I don’t like them, to be quite honest. It’s strictly professional.
He began with extremely old-fashioned compliments, saying how he couldn’t believe his luck; I was like the girl from the romantic dreams of his childhood - that was what he said. And then more in the same vein. Then he wanted to see my passport, to make sure I wasn’t under age. I’m used to requests like that. I had a passport for foreign travel - false, naturally - in the name of ‘Alisa Li’ - it’s a common Korean surname and it suits my Asiatic face. The Sikh looked through it very carefully - he was obviously concerned about his good name. According to my passport I was nineteen.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked.
‘I’ve already ordered,’ I replied. ‘They’ll bring it in a moment. Tell me, do you say that to all the girls, about the romantic dream of your childhood?’
‘No, only to you. I’ve never said anything like that to any girl before.’
‘I see. Then I’ll say something to you that I’ve never said to any other man before. You look like Captain Nemo.’
‘From
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
?’
Oho, I thought, what a well-read portfolio investor!
‘No, from the American film
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
. There was one extraordinary gentleman who looked just like you. An underwater karate specialist with a beard and a blue turban.’
‘Why, was the film based on Jules Verne?’
They brought my cocktail. It turned out to be small - only sixty grams.
‘No, they gathered together all the supermen of the nineteenth century - Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dorian Gray and so on.’
‘Really? That’s original.’
‘Nothing original about it. An economy based on brokerage gives rise to a culture that prefers to resell images and concepts created by others instead of creating new ones.’
That was a phrase I’d heard from a certain left-wing film critic who stung me for 350 euros. Not that I entirely agreed with it, it was just that every time I repeated those words in conversation with a client I felt the film critic was paying me back a few bucks. But it was too much for the Sikh.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked with a frown.
‘The point is, the Nemo character looked remarkably like you. A moustache and beard . . . he even prayed to the goddess Kali in his submarine.’
‘Then it’s not likely that we have much in common,’ he said with a smile. ‘I don’t worship the goddess Kali. I’m a Sikh.’
‘I have a lot of respect for Sikhism,’ I said. ‘I think it’s one of the most advanced religions in the world.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You’ve probably heard that Sikhs are men with beards who wear turbans?’ he laughed.
‘It’s not the external attributes of Sikhism that I find attractive. I really admire its spiritual side, especially the fearless transition from reliance on living teachers to reliance on a book.’
‘But that’s the case in many other religions,’ he said. ‘It’s just that instead of the Koran or the Bible, we have Guru Granth Sahib.’
‘But nowhere else do they address the book as their living mentor. And apart from that, nowhere else is there such a revolutionary concept of God. I’m impressed most of all by two features that distinguish Sikhism radically from all other religions. ’
‘Which ones?’
‘Firstly, the acceptance of the fact that God didn’t create this world for some exalted purpose, but exclusively for his own amusement. No one before the Sikhs ever dared go that far. And secondly, its God-finding. As distinct from other religions, in which there is only God-seeking.’
‘And what are God-finding and God-seeking?’
‘Do you remember the aporia with the execution on the square that is often referred to in the commentaries on the Sikh sacred texts? I think it goes back to Guru Nanak, but I’m not absolutely certain.’
The Sikh stared at me, opening his brown eyes wide, which instantly made him look like a crayfish.
‘Imagine a market square,’ I continued. ‘Standing at the centre of it is a scaffold surrounded by a crowd, and they’re beheading a prisoner on it. A fairly ordinary scene for medieval India. And for Russia too. Well then, God-seeking is when the best people are horrified by the sight of blood on the axe and start seeking for God and the result is that a hundred years and sixty million corpses later they get a slightly improved credit rating.’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Sikh. ‘That’s a tremendous achievement for your country. I mean the improved credit rating. So what’s God-finding then?’
‘That’s when they find God right there in the market square, as the teachers of the Sikhs did.’
‘And where is he?’
‘In this aporia God is both the executioner and his victim, but not only. He is the crowd round the scaffold, the scaffold itself, the axe, the drops of blood on the axe, the market square, the sky above the market square and the dust under people’s feet. And, of course, he is this aporia and - most importantly of all - the person who is listening to it . . .’
I’m not sure that this example can really be called an aporia, since it doesn’t contain an irresolvable contradiction - although that might be in the very fact that God is discovered in the midst of blood and horror. But the Sikh didn’t object to the term. He opened his eyes even wider, so that he looked even more like a crayfish, but a crayfish who has finally realized why he’s surrounded by all these immense beer mugs. While he pondered what I’d said, I calmly finished off my cocktail - I still hadn’t found out what Drambuie was. I must say the Sikh looked a real picture - he seemed to be teetering on the brink of enlightenment, as if a slight nudge would be enough for the unstable equilibrium of his mind to shift suddenly.
And that was what happened. The moment my glass touched the table, he recovered his wits. He took a Diners Club Platinum Card with a hologram of Che Guevara out of his wallet and tapped on the table with it to call the waiter, then he put his hand over mine and whispered:
‘Isn’t it time to go to the room?’
The name National suggests a hotel representative of national taste. In Russia this taste is eclectic, which is reflected in the decor: the carpet on the stairs is covered with classical fleurs-de-lys, the stained glass in the windows is art nouveau, and it is hard to discover any principle at all in the selection of paintings on the walls - churches, bouquets of flowers, forest thickets, old peasant women, views of Versailles, with Napoleon suddenly turning up in the middle of them all, looking like a blue parrot with a gold tail . . .
But actually it’s only at first glance that the pictures have nothing in common. In fact they all share the most important artistic attribute of all - they’re for sale. As soon as you remember that, the remarkable stylistic unity of the interior becomes clear. And in addition, you realize there is no such thing as abstract art at all, it’s all very concrete. A profound thought, I even wanted to make a note of it, but that would have been awkward with a client there.
We stopped at the glass door of room number 319 and the Sikh gave me a sultry smile as he slipped his key card into the lock. He had a VIP suite - they cost 600 dollars a day there. Behind the double door there was a small businessman’s sitting room: a striped sofa with a high back, two armchairs, a fax and a printer, a palm tree in a tub and a small cupboard with antique tableware. The window offered a panoramic view of a street from which the Kremlin could be seen. That’s category ‘B’. There’s a category ‘C’ there too - that’s when the window looks out on to a street from which you can see the other street, from which the Kremlin is visible.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I asked.
The Sikh began unfastening his tie.
‘Are we in a hurry?’ he asked playfully. ‘Over there.’
I opened the door he had indicated. Behind it was the bedroom. Almost the entire space was taken up by an immense double bed, and the small door into the bathroom was in the corner of the room: I didn’t even notice it at first. That was the way it should be, the dimensions of things proportionate to the place they occupy in life. The suite approached the ideal, since it was structured precisely like the VIP life. Work represented by the businessman’s sitting room - receive a fax, send a fax, sit on the stripy sofa for a while, look at the palm tree in the tub and when you get fed up with the palm tree, turn your head and look at the tableware in the cupboard; personal life represented by the bedroom with the bed stretching from wall to wall: take a sleeping pill and sleep. Or else what was happening now.
I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and started getting ready for work. It wasn’t difficult - I simply lowered my trousers a bit and freed my tail. I only turned on the water as camouflage.
I feel I have now reached the point where certain explanations are required, otherwise my narrative will seem rather outlandish. So let me pause for a while to say a few words about myself.
Foxes don’t have any sex in the strict sense of the word, and if we are referred to as ‘she’, it’s because of our external resemblance to women. In actual fact we’re like angels - that is, we don’t have any reproductive system. We don’t reproduce because we don’t grow old and we can carry on living until something kills us.
As for our appearance, we have slender, shapely bodies without a trace of fat and magnificently defined musculature - the kind that some teenagers who do sport have. We have fine, silky, gleaming hair that’s a bright fiery-red colour. We are tall, and in ancient times that often used to give us away, but nowadays people have become taller and so this feature doesn’t make us stand out at all.
Although we don’t have any sex in the sense of the ability to reproduce, all of its external signs are present - you could never take a fox for a man. Straight women usually take us for lesbians. Lesbians usually go nuts. And it’s not surprising. Beside us even the most beautiful women look crude and unfinished - like a carelessly dressed block of stone beside a completed sculpture.
Our breasts are small and perfectly formed, with small, dark-brown nipples. At the spot where women have their most important dream factory we have something similar in appearance - an imitative organ with a function I’ll tell you about later. It doesn’t serve for childbirth. And at the back we have a tail, a fluffy, flexible, fiery-red antenna. The tail can become larger or smaller: in the sleeping state it’s like a ponytail about ten or fifteen centimetres long, but in the working state it can reach almost a metre in length.
When a fox’s tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thicker and longer. It’s like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn’t draw any parallels with the male human erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn’t call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion.