Tengiz Kokoev,
Major, head of the ‘Bitsa Centre’ Department of the FSB
Maya Marmeladoff, Igor Shitman,
PhD in philological science
Peldis Sharm,
Presenter of the TV programme ‘Karaoke Homeland’
1
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze,
Still one of those blue-caped starmen?
Humbert Humbert
The client I had been directed to by the barman Serge had been waiting in the Alexander Bar of the hotel National since seven-thirty in the evening. It was already seven-forty and the taxi was still crawling along, shifting from one traffic jam to another. I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.
‘I want to be forever young,’ Alphaville sang yet again on the radio.
I wish I had your problems, I thought. And immediately remembered my own.
I don’t really think about them that often. All I know is that they reside somewhere out there in the black void and I can come back to them again at any moment. Just to convince myself one more time that they have no solution. And thinking about that for a moment leads to interesting conclusions.
Let’s just suppose I solve them. What then? They’ll simply disappear - that is, they’ll drift away for ever into the same non-existence where they reside for most of the time anyway. And the only practical consequence will be that my mind will stop dragging them back out of that black void. Doesn’t that mean my insoluble problems only exist because I think about them, and I recreate them anew at the very moment when I remember them? The funniest of my problems is my name. It’s a problem I only have in Russia. But since I live here at the moment, I have to admit that it’s a very real problem.
My name is A Hu-Li. When this is spelt in Russian letters - ‘А Xули’ - it becomes a Russian obscenity.
In the old days, with the pre-Revolutionary Russian alphabet, I was able to avoid this, at least in the written form of my name, by writing it as ‘А Xyлі’. On a seal given to me in nineteen-thirteen by a certain wealthy patron of the arts from St. Petersburg who knew the secret, it is condensed into two symbols:
It’s an interesting story. The first seal that he ordered for me was carved on a ruby, and all five letters were incorporated into a single symbol.
He gave me that ruby when we were sailing on his yacht in the Gulf of Finland and I threw it straight into the water the moment I looked at it. He turned pale and asked me why I hated him. He didn’t, of course, really think that I hated him. But it was just a time when theatrical, soulful gestures were the fashion. Indeed, as it happens, they were responsible for the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
I explained that it was possible to lay all the letters on top of each other and fit them on a small gemstone, which wouldn’t be too expensive, but then you couldn’t tell which letter came first. A day later the second version was ready, carved on an oblong opal - ‘with a teasing mysterious “AH”’, as the patron noted elegantly in the poem appended to the gift.
That was the kind of people there used to be in Russia. Although, in fact, I suspect that he didn’t write the poem himself, but commissioned it from his friend - the gay poet Mikhail Kuzmin - since after the Revolution I was visited by a gang of cocaine-intoxicated queers from the Cheka, looking for some diamonds or other. Then they moved a load of plumbers and laundrywomen into my flat on Italianskaya Street and took away the final prop of my self-respect, the old Russian letter ‘i’ that rendered my name printable. So I never did like the communists from the very beginning, even at a time when many brilliant minds believed in them.
My name is actually very beautiful and has nothing to do with its apparent Russian meaning. In Chinese ‘A Hu-Li’ means ‘the fox named A’. By analogy with Russian names, you could say that ‘A’ is my first name and ‘Hu-Li’ is my surname. What can I say to justify it? I was given the name at a time when the obscene phrase didn’t exist in the Russian language, because the Russian language itself didn’t even exist yet.
Who could ever have imagined in those times that some day my noble surname would become an obscene word? Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that’s true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don’t change.
We foxes are fortunate creatures, because we have short memories. We only remember the last ten or twenty years clearly, and everything from before that slumbers in the dark void that I’ve already mentioned. But it doesn’t completely disappear. For us the past is like a dark room from which we can extract any memory we wish by making a special and rather painful effort of will. This makes us interesting to talk to. We have a lot to say about almost any subject; and apart from that, we know all the major languages of the world - we’ve had enough time to learn them. But we don’t go picking at the scab of memory without any need, and our everyday stream of thought is virtually the same as people have. The same applies to our operational personality, which renders a fox virtually indistinguishable from a tailless monkey (our ancient term for humans).
Many people cannot understand how this is possible. Let me try to explain. In every culture it is usual to link particular aspects of a person’s appearance with specific character traits. A beautiful princess is kind and compassionate; a wicked witch is ugly, and she has a huge wart on her nose. And there are more subtle connections that are not so easy to formulate - the art of portrait painting is constructed around them. These connections change over time, which is why the great beauties of one age are a puzzle for another. Anyway, to put it simply, a fox’s personality is the human type with which the present age associates her appearance.
Every fifty years or thereabouts, we select a new simulacrum of the soul to match our unchanging features, and that is what we present to people. Therefore, from the human point of view, at any given moment our inner reality corresponds completely to our external appearance. It’s a different question altogether that it’s not identical with the genuine reality, but who’s going to understand that? Most people don’t have any genuine reality at all, all they have are these external and internal realities, two sides of the same coin that the tailless monkey sincerely believes has actually been credited to his account.
I know it sounds strange, but that’s exactly how it is: in order to make ourselves acceptable to our contemporaries, we adopt a new personality to match our face, exactly like altering a dress to suit a different fashion. The previous personalities are consigned to the lumber room, and soon it becomes a strain for us to remember what we used to be like before. And our lives consist of jolly trivia, amusing fleeting moments. I think this is a kind of evolutionary mechanism designed to make mimicry and camouflage easier for us. After all, the best kind of mimicry is when not only your face becomes like others’ faces, but your stream of thought becomes like theirs too.
To look at I could be anything from fourteen to seventeen years old - closer to fourteen. My physical appearance arouses feelings in people, especially men, that are boring to describe, and there’s no need - nowadays everybody’s read Lolita, even the Lolitas. Those feelings are what provide my living. I suppose you could say I earn my living as a swindler: in actual fact I am anything but a juvenile. For the sake of convenience I define my age as two thousand years - the period that I can recall more or less coherently. This could possibly be regarded as coyness - I am actually significantly older than that. The origins of my life go very, very far back into the depths of time, and recalling them is as difficult as lighting up the night sky with a small torch. We foxes were not born in the same way as people. We are descended from a heavenly stone and are distantly related to the king of apes, Sun Wukong himself, the hero of Journey to the West (although I can’t really claim this is all actually true - I have no memories left of that legendary time). In those days we were different. I mean internally, not externally. We don’t change externally as we grow older - apart, that is, from the appearance of a new silver hair in our tails every 108 years.