‘There, you see,’ said Gireiev, ‘what did I tell you?’
He stood up, left the room and came back with an open newspaper scattered with dry pieces of sliced fly-agaric mushrooms. Some of them still had scraps of red skin with little white blots, while others had shreds of newspaper with the mirror-images of letters clinging to them.
Tatarsky tossed a few pieces into his mouth, chewed them and swallowed. The taste of the dried fly-agarics reminded him a little of potato flakes, except that it was nicer - it occurred to him that they could be sold in packets like potato chips, and this must be one of the secret routes to a bank loan, Grand Cherokee jeep, advertisement clip and violent death. He started pondering what the clip might be like, tossed another portion into his mouth and looked around him. It was only at this stage that he actually noticed several of the objects decorating the room. For instance, that sheet of paper hanging in the obvious place on the wall - there was a letter written on it, maybe Sanskrit, maybe Tibetan, resembling a dragon with a curved tail.
‘What’s that?’ he asked Gireiev.
Gireiev glanced up at the wall. ‘Hum.’ he said.
‘What d’you need it for?’
‘That’s how I travel.’
‘Where to?’ asked Tatarsky.
Gireiev shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ he said. ‘Hum. When you don’t think, lots of things become clear.’
But Tatarsky had already forgotten his own question. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude to Gireiev for inviting him here. ‘You know.’ he said.’ I’m going through a difficult period right now. Most of the time I associate with bankers and other scum who want advertising. The stress is just incredible. But out here with you… I feel just as though I’ve come back home.’
Gireiev seemed to understand what he was feeling. ‘It’s nothing.’ he said, ‘Don’t even think about it. A couple of those bankers came to see me last winter. Wanted to expand their consciousness. Afterwards they ran off barefoot across the snow. Why don’t we go for a walk?’
Tatarsky was happy to agree. Once outside the garden gate, they set off across a field criss-crossed by freshly dug ditches. The path led them to a forest and began winding between the trees. The itching and trembling in Tatarsky’s hands was getting stronger, but it still wasn’t reaching his fingers. Noticing there were lots of fly-agarics growing on the ground among the trees, he dropped behind Gireiev and picked several of them. They weren’t red, but dark brown and very beautiful. He ate them quickly and then caught up with Gireiev, who hadn’t noticed anything.
Soon the forest came to an end and they came out into a large open space, a collective farm field bounded on its far side by the river. Tatarsky looked upwards to where motionless clouds towered up into the sky above the field in the last orange rays of one of those inexpressibly sad sunsets that autumn sometimes produces outside Moscow. They walked on for a while down the track along the edge of the field and sat down on a fallen tree.
Tatarsky suddenly thought of a potential advertising concept for fly-agarics. It was based on the startling realisation that the supreme form of self-realisation for fly-agarics is an atomic explosion - something like the glowing non-material body that certain advanced mystics acquire. Human beings were simply a subsidiary form of life that the fly-agarics exploited in order to achieve their supreme goal, in the same way as human beings exploited mould for making cheese. Tatarsky raised his eyes towards the orange rays of the sunset and the flow of his thoughts was abruptly broken off.
‘Listen,’ Gireiev said after a few more minutes’ silence, ‘I just thought about Lyosha Chikunov again. Sad about him, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Tatarsky replied.
‘Weird, that - he’s dead, and we’re alive… Only I suspect that every time we lie down and sleep, we die just the same way. And the sun disappears for ever, and all history comes to an end. And then non-existence just gets sick of itself and we wake up. And the world comes into existence all over again.’
‘How can non-existence get sick of itself?’
‘Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don’t even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and our world are the same thing.’
Tatarsky tried to understand what this meant. He noticed that thinking had became difficult and even dangerous, because his thoughts had acquired such freedom and power that he could no longer control them. The answer appeared to him immediately in the form of a three-dimensional geometrical figure. Tatarsky saw his own mind: it was a white sphere, like a sun but absolutely calm and motionless. Dark, twisted fibrous threads extended from the centre of the sphere to its periphery. Tatarsky realised that they were his five senses. The fibres that were a little thicker were sight, the ones a bit thinner than those were hearing, and the others were almost invisible. Dancing and meandering around these motionless fibres was a winding spiral, like the filament of an electric-light bulb. Sometimes it would align itself for a moment with one of them; sometimes it would curl up around itself to form a glowing circle of light like the one left by the lighted tip of a cigarette swirled rapidly in the dark. This was the thought with which his mind was occupied.
‘That means there is no death.’ Tatarsky thought happily. ‘Why? Because the threads disappear, but the sphere remains!’
He was filled with happiness at having managed to formulate the answer to a question that had tormented humanity for the last several thousand years in terms so simple anyone could understand them. He wanted to share his discovery with Gireiev, and taking him by the shoulder he tried to pronounce this final phrase out loud. But his mouth spoke something else, something meaningless - all the syllables that made up the words were still there, but they were jumbled up chaotically. Tatarsky thought he needed a drink of water, and so he said to Gireiev, who was staring at him in fright:
‘Li’d winker drike I watof!’
Gireiev obviously didn’t understand what was going on; but it was clear that whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
‘Li’d dratinker wike of wit!’ Tatarsky repeated meekly and tried to smile.
He really wanted Gireiev to smile back at him; but Gireiev did something strange - he got to his feet and backed away from Tatarsky, who understood for the first time what was meant by the phrase ‘a mask of horror’. His friend’s face was distorted into the most distinct possible mask of precisely that kind. Gireiev took several faltering steps backwards, then turned and ran. Tatarsky was offended to the depths of his soul.
Meanwhile the evening twilight had begun to thicken. As it flitted through the blue haze between the trees, Gireiev’s Nepalese waistcoat looked like a large butterfly. Tatarsky found the idea of pursuit exciting. He launched himself after Gireiev, bounding high in the air in order not to stumble over some root or hummock. It was soon clear that he was running a lot faster that Gireiev, quite incomparably faster, in fact. He overtook him and turned back several times before he realised that he wasn’t running around Gireiev, but around the remnant of a dry tree-trunk the same height as a man. That sobered him up a little, and he set off down the path in what he thought was the direction of the railway station.
Along the way he ate several more fly-agarics that attracted his attention among the trees, and soon he found himself on a wide dirt road with a fence of barbed wire running along one edge of it.
Someone appeared ahead of him, walking along. Tatarsky went up to him and asked politely: ‘Stan gou thecation totet yell he mow? There trun rewains?’
Glancing sharply at Tatarsky, the stranger took a quick step backwards, then took to his heels. Everybody seemed to be reacting to him in the same way today. Tatarsky remembered his Chechen employer and thought cheerfully to himself:
‘What if I met Hussein now, I wonder if he’d be scared?’