‘I have to disagree with you again,’ I said. ‘It’s an extremely male picture of the universe. I’d even call it chauvinistic. There’s no place in it for a woman at all.’
‘Why?’
‘Because women don’t have any balls.’
We drove on in silence.
No point in denying it, sometimes it happens that you lay something heavy on someone, and your own heart feels lighter for it. Why is that? It’s a mystery. Never mind, let him think a bit, it’s never done anyone any harm.
The next morning the business with the Sikh was in the news. It wasn’t what I went onto the net for, but some lousy worm had set my home page to ‘rumours.ru’ and I’d never got around to changing it. I forced myself to read the article right through to the end:
BUSINESSMAN FROM INDIA KILLS HIMSELF IN FRONT OF SECURITY GUARDS
The public will soon start thinking of the National hotel as a high-risk zone. With the terrorist attack that took place right outside its door still fresh in the memories of Muscovites, another alarming incident has just taken place: yesterday a forty-year-old businessman from the Indian state of Punjab killed himself by jumping from a fifth floor window. At least that’s the story of the two security guards employed by the hotel who were with him at the time the tragedy occurred. They claim that the guest from India summoned them by pulling the special alarm cord, and then when they entered the room, for no apparent reason he took a run and jumped out of the window. He was killed instantly when he hit the surface of the road. It has been established that shortly before his death the businessman had received a visit from a female denizen of the demi-monde.
Why the fifth floor, I wondered, when his suite was number 319? Ah yes, they had that swanky European way of numbering the rooms - the first two floors didn’t count, so number three nineteen was on the fifth floor . . .
Then my thoughts moved on to that mysterious French word ‘demi-monde’ - the ‘half-world’. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it the quarter-world? If you followed that method of word formation, consistently you could define the precise depths to which a woman had fallen. After two thousand years my denominator would probably have been pretty impressive . . .
And then suddenly, at long last, I started to feel ashamed of my own insensitivity. A man with whom I had, in a certain sense, been intimate, had died, and here I was counting floors and doing fractions. The intimacy may have been arbitrary, hallucinatory and temporary, but it was still appropriate to feel some compassion, even if it was as insubstantial as our intimacy had been. Yet I didn’t feel any at all - my heart flatly refused to generate it. Instead I started thinking again about the reasons for the previous day’s outrageous events:
1. The reason could lie in the astral background of the hotel National, where the dancer Isadora Duncan and the KGB’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky hung side by side in the photo-gallery of ‘honoured guests’.
2. What had happened could have been a karmic echo of one of those bloody business rituals they’re so fond of in Asia.
3. It was an indirect consequence of India’s recoil from the teaching of the Buddha in the Middle Ages.
4. The Sikh had been a worshipper of the goddess Kali after all - why else would he have shouted ‘kali ma’ as he threw himself out of the window?
I have to explain that sometimes I have as many as five inner voices, with each of them conducting its own inner dialogue: and as well as that, they can start to argue with each other over anything at all. I don’t get involved in the argument, I just listen and wait for a hint at the right answer. These voices don’t have any names, though. In that sense I’m a simple soul - some foxes have as many as forty of these voices with very long and beautiful names.
The old foxes say these voices belong to the souls that we consumed during the primordial chaos: according to legend, these souls made their home in our inner space by entering into a kind of symbiosis with our own essential nature. But that’s probably all just fairy tales, because every one of the voices is mine, although they’re all different. And if you follow the old foxes’ logic, you could say I myself am a soul that someone else consumed some time in the depths of ancient antiquity. All this is no more than pointless juggling with the various summands, it makes no difference to the sum total that is A Hu-Li.
These voices mean that foxes don’t think in the same way as people: the difference is that several thought processes develop in our minds instead of just one. The mind follows several different paths at the same time, keeping an eye open to see which will lead to the light of truth first. In order to convey this peculiarity of my inner life, I designate the various levels of my inner dialogue as 1), 2), 3) and so on.
These thought processes don’t intersect with each other in any way - they’re absolutely autonomous - but my consciousness is involved in each one of them. Some circus performers juggle a large number of objects at the same time. What they do with their bodies, I do with my mind, that’s all. This peculiarity means I have a tendency to draw up lists and break everything down into points and sub-points, even when, from the human point of view, there’s no real need for it. Please accept my apologies if you come across such lists broken down into points in these pages - it’s exactly the way everything happens inside my head.
Picturing the dead Sikh to myself as accurately as I could, I recited the requiem mantra three times and went to reuters.com to find out what was going on in the world. Everything in the world was just the same as it had been for the last ten thousand years. I rejoiced briefly in the headline ‘America Ponders Mad Cow Strategy’ and then went to my mail server.
Together with an invitation to increase the length of my sexual organ and a zip file that I didn’t open, despite the alluring subject of the message (‘Britney Blowing a Horse’), there was a quite unexpected pleasant surprise waiting for me - a letter from my sister E Hu-Li, who I hadn’t heard from for ages.
I had known sister E since the times of the Warring Kingdoms. She was a terrible rogue. Many centuries ago she was famous throughout the whole of China as an imperial concubine by the name of Flying Swallow. As a result of watching her fly, the emperor lived for twenty years less than he could have done. After that E Hu-Li was punished by the guardian spirits, and she began keeping a low profile, specializing in rich aristocrats, whom she milked dry in the peace and quiet of their country estates, away from the eyes of the world. For the last few hundred years she’d been living in England.
It was a very short letter:
Hi there, Ginger,
How are you? I hope everything’s going well. Sorry to bother you for such a trivial reason, but I need to consult you urgently about something. According to my information, in Moscow there’s a Shrine of Christ the Saver that was first demolished completely, leaving not a single stone in place, and then restored to look just the way it used to be. Is this true? What do you know about it? Please answer quickly!
Heads and tails,
E.
Strange, I thought, what’s all this about? But she had asked me to reply urgently. I clicked on the ‘reply’ button.