“I wondered,” I say, sipping more vodka.
“That and the fact that he’s even more of a head case than me. You should have heard our last conversation. It was like Hindu science fiction. I guess he didn’t enjoy it as much as I did, though, because he stayed away three years.”
“You passed out after insulting the Buddha.”
“I did? Why didn’t you shoot me?”
“I didn’t think you were alive.”
“Anyway, what did I say?”
“You said that Gautama Buddha was the greatest salesman in history.”
To Jones: “I was right. He was selling nothing. That’s what ‘nirvana’ means: nothing. As a cure for the great cosmic disaster most of us call life, he prescribed a rigorous course of meditation and perfect living over any number of lifetimes, with nothing as its final reward. D’you think anyone on Madison Avenue could sell that? But the whole of the Indian subcontinent bought it at the time. Today there are more than three hundred million Buddhists in the world and growing.”
“You also said he was right. I can’t remember the argument.”
“Correct. Black holes in space, which can fairly be described as pockets of nonexistence since no light or time survives there, have been seen to emit subatomic particles and reabsorb them. Life comes from nothing and returns there after all. Smoke and mirrors, just like the man said two thousand five hundred years ago. Magic. Which may yet make logic the biggest superstition since the virgin birth.”
“Well, there you are,” Jones says. “It only goes to show. But there’s a play on words here, isn’t there? He was only selling nothing if you understand nothing in a certain sense. Nothing to a Buddhist is also everything, since only nothing has any reality.” A little self-consciously, she takes another glug of vodka. Iamskoy and I are both grinning at her. Iamskoy suddenly claps a few times and I feel obliged to join him. Jones blushes but I’ve never seen her so happy.
“You’ve been schooling her?” Iamskoy asks me.
“Not at all. I didn’t think she was interested in Buddhism.”
“Are you?” Iamskoy asks.
“I’m interested in this jerk.” She points at me and takes another deep swallow of vodka. “And Buddhism is the only sure way to turn him on. At least with Buddhism you can get some conversation out of him.”
“I found that too,” Iamskoy says. “He has this Thai way of falling asleep at the drop of a hat, but mention rebirth or nirvana or relative truth, and he perks up. That’s what I love about this country. Everyone has a spiritual dimension, even cops. Even crooks. Some of the biggest gangsters make merit by giving huge sums to the monasteries and donating to the poor. Makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“About what the past five hundred years of Western civilization have been about. If we’d remained medieval we might have been smiling as much as the Thais.”
“Gimme some more vodka, will you?” Jones says to me. “I’ve been waiting for a conversation like this, seems like forever. It’s better than school.”
There are footsteps in the hall and the woman in the nightgown appears. After Iamskoy’s comment I check her figure, as far as I can. She is slim and pale with hair which is almost black and very large green eyes. I could find her exotic. Jones gives her a big warm smile, woman to woman, and she smiles back.
“This is Valerya,” Iamskoy says. “She’s the Ph.D. You see, she heard the conversation and was irresistibly drawn to join us. That is one of our million faults, Russians are perpetual undergraduates. We still talk about life in a way the West grew out of fifty years ago.”
“It’s better than sucking cocks,” Valerya says, walking to the coffee table and taking one of the bottles and swigging it. “But I’m not yet a Ph.D. I’m funding my thesis.” Her English is less accented than Iamskoy’s, with a British tone. Now that she has spoken I can see her hardness, though, the hardness of a beautiful woman who doesn’t need to care. I no longer find her exotic.
“Were you funding your thesis at the casino last night?”
A shrug followed by a second swig. “You’re right about Russians. We love to blow everything on a bad bet. I can’t believe it. All that sex, for nothing. If I could delete the gambling I could delete the selling of my body, they cancel each other out, but I’d still need to fund my Ph.D.”
“What is your subject?” Jones wants to know.
“Child psychology.”
Iamskoy and I both see the look of horror cross Jones’ face, but Valerya doesn’t seem to as she engages Jones’ eyes and speaks earnestly about how a Russian degree isn’t worth a dime even in Russia, but with a Ph.D. she could probably get a teaching job in one of the American universities, using her research project into criminalized street kids, of which there is an abundance in Vladivostok, just like in New York or Los Angeles. She really wants to get to the States.
As Iamskoy predicted, the babble of semi-intelligent conversation is too tempting for the three other women, who now appear one by one, with two vodka bottles cloudy with condensation. More plastic cups appear and all of a sudden we have a party. Despite her passing disgust that a hardened prostitute should also be a child psychologist, Jones is taken with Valerya, who seems to offer intelligent female companionship, maybe something to develop while she’s here, maybe she’ll help Valerya get to the States and they’ll be bosom buddies. They yammer away twenty to the dozen about a dazzling array of subjects while Iamskoy develops his theory about materialism being the superstition of the twentieth century, a dark age which will be replaced by an enlightenment of magic. He believes I will be seduced by this, which only goes to show he doesn’t understand Buddhism, which despises magic, but I don’t want to annoy him quite yet. The three other women are babbling in Russian interspersed with English and seem to be talking about a winning strategy at blackjack. The vodka swills and the noise level rises and I fall into silence. This is a Caucasian party. What I see is the great juggernaut of Western culture with its insane need to fill space, all of it, until there is no space or silence left. After a while I say: “Andreev, did any of your workers ever get flayed alive?”
A thundering silence. Jones is deeply embarrassed and red in the face. Valerya has stopped in mid-sentence and is boring into me with those green eyes which don’t seem so beautiful anymore. Iamskoy has snapped his head away toward a wall and the three others who I didn’t think spoke much English are looking down at the carpet. When Iamskoy brings his head round again to face me his mouth is crooked. “Is that what you came to ask me?”
“Yes.”
“Get out!”
“Andy!” Valerya says.
“Get the fuck out of my flat!”
“Andy, you can’t talk like that to a Thai cop. You’re a Russian pimp in a foreign land. Stop it.”
For a moment I think he is going to stand up to hit me, and he does begin to rise, but he is too drunk to make it all the way up from the floor and falls back in despair with his head resting on the seat of the sofa as if he has lost the use of his limbs. “Why?” His eyes plead with me. “Why bring that up? Didn’t your people do enough? Haven’t I spent enough of my life in that purgatory? Was it my fault?”
I turn to Valerya, whose cynicism might be exactly what I need, in the face of all this indecipherable Russian emotion. “You know what I’m talking about?”
“You’re talking about Sonya Lyudin.”
“Shut up,” Iamskoy tells her.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Andreev, the whole of Vladivostok still talks about it. Why shouldn’t we tell him?”
“He knows already. He’s just being a sly Thai.”
“I don’t,” I say. “I don’t know already. Already what?”
“If you don’t know already, what are you up to? This is very hush-hush over here, you know. Very hush-hush. Oh yes.” Upset, Iamskoy has lost his urbanity and control over his tongue. “You’re not shupposed to talk about it, even if it’s shtill the big story in Vladivostok. At leasht in the grimy circles in which I am now forced to mix.” Picking up the vodka bottle and looking at it. “Grimy circles. I who once shat at the feet of the great Sakharov.” He bursts into cackles. “That’s good. Shat at the feet…”