Victor Pelevin - A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

Just for a moment Sasha thought that the battered Zil would stop for him: it was so old and rattled so loudly, and was so obviously ready for the scrap heap, that it should have stoppedif only the law by which old people who have been rude and inconsiderate all their lives suddenly become helpful and obliging shortly before they die had applied to the world of automobilesbut it didnt. With a bucket clanking beside its gas tank with a drunken, senile insolence, the Zil rattled past him, struggled up a small hill, giving vent to a whoop of indecent triumph and a jet of gray smoke at the summit, and disappeared silently behind the asphalt rise. Sasha stepped off the road, dropped his small backpack on to the grass and sat down on it. Something in it bent and cracked and Sasha felt the spiteful satisfaction of a person in trouble who learns that someone or something else is also having a hard time. He was just beginning to realize how serious his own situation was.

There were only two courses of action open to him: either he could go on waiting for a lift or head back to the villagea three mile walk. As far as the lift was concerned, the question seemed as good as settled already. There were obviously certain regions in the country, or a least certain roads, where all the drivers belonged to some secret brotherhood of black-hearted villains. Hitchhiking became impossible, and you had to take great care the passing cars didnt splash you with mud from the puddles as you walked along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo to the nearest oasis on the railway linea straight stretch of 15 mileswas one such enchanted highway. Not one of the five cars that had passed him had stopped, and if not for one aging lady wearing purple lipstick and an I still love you hairstyle who stuck her long arm out of the window of a red Niva to give him the finger, Sasha could have believed hed become invisible. Hed still been hoping for that mythical driver, the kind you encounter in newspaper stories and films, who would stare silently through the dusty windscreen of his truck at the road ahead for the entire journey and then refuse any payment with a curt shake of his head (at this point you suddenly notice the photograph hanging above the steering wheel, showing a group of young men in paratrooper uniforms against a backdrop of distant mountains)but when the Zil rattled past, even this hope had died.

Sasha glanced at his watchit was twenty minutes past nine. It would get dark soon. He looked around. Beyond a hundred yards or so of broken ground (tiny hillocks, scattered bushes, and grass that was too high and luscious for his liking, because it suggested it was growing on a bog) there was the edge of a forest, thin and unhealthy looking, like the sickly offspring of an alcoholic. All the vegetation in the neighborhood looked strange, as though anything bigger than flowers and grass had to strain and struggle to grow, and even when it eventually reached normal size, it still gave the impression of only having grown under the threat of violenceotherwise it would have flattened itself against the ground like lichen. It was an unpleasant sort of place, oppressive and deserted, as though it was ready for removal from the face of the earthbut then, Sasha thought, if the earth does have a face, it must be somewhere else, not here.

Of the three villages he had seen that day only one had appeared more or less convincingthe last one, Konkovo; the others had been deserted, with just a few little houses inhabited by people waiting to die. The abandoned huts had reminded him more of an ethnographic exhibition than human dwellings. Even Konkovo, distinguished by a plaster sentry standing beside the road and a sign which read Michurin Collective Farm, only seemed like a human settlement in comparison with the desolation of the other nameless villages nearby. Konkovo had a shop, and there was a poster for the village club, with the title of an avant-garde French film traced in green watercolor, flapping in the wind, while a tractor whined somewhere behind the housesbut even there he hadnt felt comfortable. There was no one on the streetsonly one woman dressed in black had passed him, crossing herself hurriedly at the sight of Sashas Hawaiian shirt with its design of multicolored magical symbols, and a man in spectacles had ridden by on a bicycle with a string shopping bag dangling from the handlebars. The bicycle was too big for him, so he couldnt sit in the saddle and stood instead on the pedals, looking as though he was running in the air above the heavy rusty frame. All the other villagers, if there were any, must have been staying indoors.

He had imagined his trip would be quite different. He would get off the small flat-bottomed riverboat, walk to the village, and there on the zavalinkasSasha had no idea what a zavalinka was, but he imagined it as a comfortable wooden bench set along the log wall of a peasant hutthere would be half-crazy old women sitting peacefully among the sunflowers, and clean-shaven old men playing chess quietly beneath the broad yellow discs of the blossoms. In other words, Sasha had imagined Tverskoi Boulevard in Moscow overgrown with sunflowerswith a cow occasionally lowing in the distance. After that he would make his way to the edge of the village to find a forest basking in the sun, a river with a boat drifting by on it or some country road cutting through an open field, and whichever way he walked, everything would be simply wonderful: he could light a fire, he could remember his childhood and climb treesif, that is, his memories told him that was what he used to do. In the evening he would hitch a lift to the train.

What had actually happened was very different. It had been a colored photograph in a thick, tattered book that was to blame for everything, an illustration with the title The ancient Russian village of Konkovo, now the main center of a millionaire collective farm. Sasha had found the spot from which the photograph that caught his eye had been taken, roundly cursed the American word millionaire and marveled at how different the same view can appear in a photograph and in real life.

Having promised himself never again to set out on a senseless journey purely on impulse, Sasha decided that at least he would watch the film in the village club. After buying a ticket from an invisible womanhe had to conduct his conversation with the plump freckled hand in the window, which tore off the blue scrap of paper and counted out his changehe made his way into the half-empty hall, spent one and a half bored hours there, occasionally turning to look at an old man who sat in his chair straight as a ramrod and whistled at certain points in the actionhis criteria for whistling were quite incomprehensible, but his whistle had a wild bandit ring to it, a lingering note from Russias receding past.