I have not made such a significant mark in history as others of my kind. But even so, I am mentioned in one of the greatest works of world literature, and you can even read about me if you like. To do that, you have to go to the bookshop and buy the book Anecdotes of Spirits and Immortals, written by Gan Bao, and find the story of how the governor of Sih during the late Han period searched for the commander of his guards, who had fled. The governor was told that his officer had been led away by an evil spirit, and a detachment of soldiers was sent to look for him. To this day, reading what comes after that never fails to excite me (I carry the page with me as a talisman):
. . . the governor and several dozen soldiers on foot and on horse-back, having taken the hunting dogs with them, began prowling about outside the walls of the city, tracking down the fugitive. And indeed, Tsao was discovered in an empty burial crypt. But the were-creature had heard the voices of the people and dogs and hidden. The men sent by Sian brought Tsao back. In appearance he had become entirely like the foxes, almost nothing human remained in him. He could only mutter: ‘A-Tsy!’ (‘A-Tsy’ is a name for a fox.) About ten days later he gradually began to recover his reason and then he told his story:
‘When the fox came the first time, a woman who was most beautiful appeared in the far corner of the house, among the hen-roosts. Having named herself as A-Tsy, she began enticing me to herself. And so it happened several times, while I, without intending to, followed her summons. There and then she became my wife and that very evening we found ourselves in her home . . . I do not recall meeting the dogs, but I have never felt so glad.’
‘This is an evil spirit from the mountains,’ the Taoist soothsayer said.
‘In “Notes on the Glorious Mountains” it says: “In deep antiquity the fox was a dissolute woman and her name was A-TSY. Later she was transformed into a fox.”
‘This is why were-creatures of this kind most often give their name as A-Tsy.’
I remember that man. His head was like a yellow egg, and his eyes looked like two pieces of paper glued on to the egg. His version of the story of our affair is not entirely accurate, and the narrator is mistaken when he says I was called A-Tsy. The head of the guards called me by my first name, ‘A’, and ‘Tsy’ came from the sound that he began making involuntarily when his vital energy fell into decline: while we talked he sucked in air very noisily, as if he were trying to pull his dangling lower jaw back into place. And what’s more, it’s not true that I was once a dissolute woman and was then transformed into a fox - things like that simply don’t happen, as far as I’m aware. But even so, I get the same thrill from re-reading this passage of ancient Chinese prose as an old actress does from looking at the very earliest photograph that she has kept.
Why am I called ‘A’? A certain Confucian scribe with a predilection for boys, who knew what I was, but nonetheless had recourse to my services until the day he died, thought up an interesting explanation. He said it was the very shortest sound that a man could make when the muscles of his throat ceased to obey him. And it is true that some of the people over whom I cast my web of hallucination have just enough time to make a sound something like a muffled ‘A-a ...’ This Confucian scribe even wrote a special sheet of calligraphy as a gift for me - it began with the words ‘A Hu-Li, willow in the night above the river . . .’
It might seem that living in Russia with a name like mine is a rather sad fate. Something like living in America and being called Whatze Phuck. Yes, the name does lend my life a certain tone of gloom, and there is always a certain inner voice ready and willing to ask - ‘So what the fuck were you expecting from life anyway, A Hu-Li?’ But as I have already said, this is the very least of my concerns, not really even a concern, since I work under a pseudonym. It’s more like a humorous comment - although the humour, of course, is black.
Working as a prostitute doesn’t really bother me either. My shift partner at the Baltschug hotel, Dunya (she’s known as Adulteria in the hotel) once defined the difference between a prostitute and a respectable woman as follows: ‘A prostitute wants to get a hundred bucks out of a man for giving him a good time, but a respectable woman wants all his dough for sucking all the blood out of him.’ I don’t entirely agree with this radical opinion, but it does contain a certain grain of truth: morals in modern Moscow are such that the correct translation of the phrase ‘for love’ from the slick humour of the glamour magazines into legal terminology would be ‘for a hundred thousand dollars plus a pain in the arse’. Why bother paying any attention to the opinion of a society dominated by a morality like that?
I have more serious problems. Conscience, for instance. But I’ll think about that in some other traffic jam, we’re almost there now.
A top hat is a badge of caste indicating membership of the elite, no matter how we might feel about that. And when you are met at the entrance to a hotel by a man in a top hat who bows low and opens the door for you, you are elevated thereby to social heights that impose serious financial obligations towards those who have been less fortunate in life.
Which fact is immediately reflected in the menu. Taking a seat at a table by the bar, I immersed myself in the drinks list, trying to locate my niche among the forty-dollar whiskies and fifty-dollar cognacs (and that’s for just forty grams!). The names of the long drinks arranged themselves into the storyline of a high-tension thriller: Tequila Sunrise, Blue Lagoon, Sex on the Beach, Screwdriver, Bloody Mary, Malibu Sunset, Zombie. A ready-made proposal for a movie. So why am I not in the movie business?
I ordered the cocktail called Rusty Nail - not in honour of the impending meeting, as anybody of a psychoanalytical cast of mind might be inclined to think, but because in addition to scotch, its contents included the incomprehensible Drambuie. One should experience something new every day of one’s life.
There were two of my co-workers sitting in the bar - Karina, an ex-model, and the transsexual Nelly, who moved here from the hotel Moscow after it was closed. Nelly had just recently hit the big five-oh, but business was still going pretty well for her. Just then she was swarming all over some gallant Scandinavian type, while Karina was sitting on her own, finishing off a cigarette that wasn’t her first by a long way - that was obvious from the lipstick-smeared butts in the ashtray. I still haven’t finally figured out why that happens, but it kept happening all the time: Nelly, an ugly freak who spent her previous life in the Komsomol, earned more bucks than the young girls who looked like supermodels.