Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin

Author:Victor Pelevin [Pelevin, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781101655849
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2001-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

‘Dinama! Dinama! Where the fuck you goin’?’

I leapt up from my bed. A man was chasing a horse around the yard and yelling: ‘Dinama! Where d’ya think you’re off to? Come ‘ere, yer bugger!’

There were horses snorting and whinnying under my window; looking out, I saw a huge jostling crowd of Red Army men who had not been there the day before. I could only actually tell that they were Red Army men from their ragamuffin appearance: they were clearly dressed in the first garments that had come to hand, for the most part in civilian garb, and it seemed that their preferred method for equipping themselves must have been pillage. Standing in the centre of the crowd was a man wearing a pointed Red Army helmet with a crookedly tacked-on red star, waving his arms about and issuing some kind of instruction. He bore a striking resemblance to the weavers’ commissar, Furmanov, whom I had seen at the meeting in front of the Yaroslavl Station in Moscow, except that now he had a crimson scar from a sabre cut across his cheek.

I did not, however, waste long contemplating this motley crew, for my attention was drawn to the carriage standing in the very centre of the yard. Four black horses had been harnessed to a long open landau with pneumatic tyres, soft leather seats and a frame made of expensive timber which still bore lingering traces of gilt. There was something quite unbearably nostalgic in this object of luxury, this fragment of a world which had disappeared for ever into oblivion; its inhabitants had naively supposed that they would be riding into the future in vehicles just like this one. In the event, it was only the vehicles which had survived their jaunt into the future, and only then at the cost of transformation into parodies of Hunnish war chariots – such were the associations triggered by the sight of the three Lewis machine-guns tied together by a metal beam which had been installed in the rear section of the landau.

As I moved back from the window I suddenly remembered that in Russian the soldiers called this kind of chariot a tachanka. The origins of this word were mysterious and obscure, and although I mentally reviewed all of the possible etymologies as I pulled on my boots, I could not find one that really suited the case. I did, however, come up with a humorous play on words in English: tachanka – ‘touch Anka’. But since the memory of my declaration of feelings the previous day to the lady in question was enough to bring a sullen flush to my cheeks, I felt unable to share my joke with anyone.

These, more or less, were the thoughts that filled my head as I went down the stairs and out into the yard. Someone said that Kotovsky had asked me to come into the staff barn, and I set off in that direction immediately. Two soldiers in black uniforms were standing on guard at the entrance.

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