A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Read online

  “Hey!” said a quiet voice behind him. Sasha turned cold. Slowly turning around he saw a girl in a tracksuit with an Adidas lily on her breast. “What are you doing here?” she asked in the same low voice. He forced his mouth open to answer:

  “I... just happened along.”

  “How did you happen along?”

  “I was just walking along the road and I ended up here.”

  “Just ended up here?” said the girl in astonishment. “You mean you didn’t come with us?”

  “No.”

  She made a movement as though she was about to spring away from him, but stayed where she was.

  “You mean you came on your own? You just walked here?”

  “What’s so strange about that?” Sasha asked.

  He thought for a moment that she was teasing him, but the girl shook her head in such sincere astonishment that he abandoned the idea and began to feel that he really must have made an outlandish gaffe. She thought for a minute without saying anything, then asked:

  “So now what are you going to do?”

  Sasha decided she must be talking about his status as a solitary pedestrian stranded in the night, and he said:

  “What am I going to do? Ask someone to drive me to some station or other. When are you going back?”

  She didn’t answer. He repeated his question and she twirled her hand in an indefinite gesture.

  “Or I’ll keep on walking,” Sasha blurted out.

  The girl looked at him pityingly.

  “Listen to me: don’t even try to run. I mean it. You’d better wait about five minutes and then walk over to the fire as if you belong here. And make wild eyes. They’ll ask you who you are and what you’re doing here. You tell them that you heard the call. And sound as though you mean it. All right?”

  “What call?”

  “Just the call. I’m the one giving the advice here.”

  The girl looked Sasha up and down one more time, walked around him and went towards the clearing. When she got close to the fire a man wearing running shoes patted her on the head and gave her a sandwich.

  “She’s making fun of me,” Sasha thought. But then he looked closely at the man with the leather band on his forehead who was still standing at the edge of the clearing, and decided that the girl must be serious: there was something very strange in the way the man was peering into the night. And in the center of the clearing he suddenly noticed a skull on a wooden stake thrust into the earth—the skull was long and narrow, with powerful jaws. A dog maybe? No, more like a wolf.

  He gathered himself together, stepped out from behind the tree, and walked towards the orange-red blur of the campfire. He swayed as he walked, without understanding why, and his eyes were glued to the flames. The voices in the clearing instantly fell silent.

  “Stop,” said a hoarse voice by the stake with the skull.

  He didn’t stop—they came running over to him and he was seized by large male hands.

  “What are you doing here?” asked the voice that had ordered him to stop.

  “I heard the call,” Sasha replied in a dull, expressionless voice, staring down at the ground.

  “Aha, the call...” several voices repeated. They released him, the others suddenly laughed and someone said. “A new boy.”

  They gave Sasha a sandwich and a glass of water, and he was immediately forgotten. He remembered the backpack he had left behind the tree. “Just too bad,” he thought, and started eating the sandwich. The girl in the tracksuit walked past him.

  “Hey!” he said, “what’s going on here? A picnic?”

  “Wait a while and you’ll find out.”

  She crooked her little finger at him in a gesture that looked cryptically Chinese, and went back to the group standing by the stake. Someone tugged at Sasha’s sleeve. He turned around and shuddered: it was the army officer.

  “There you go, new boy,” he said, “fill that in.”

  A sheet of paper with lines of print and a pen appeared in Sasha’s hands. The fire lit up the officer’s high cheekbones and the writing on the sheet of paper: it was a standard form. Sasha squatted down on his haunches and writing awkwardly on his knee, began filling in the answers—where he was born, when, why, and so on. It certainly felt strange to be filling in a form in the forest in the middle of the night, but the presence of a man in uniform towering over him somehow balanced things out. The officer waited, occasionally sniffing at the air and glancing over Sasha’s shoulder. When the last line had been filled in, he grabbed the pen and the form, bared his teeth in a smile and set off towards the car with a strange springy run.

  While Sasha was filling in the form there had been obvious changes over by the fire. The people were still talking, but now their voices seemed to bark, and their movements and gestures had become smooth and dexterous. A man in an evening suit was squirming agilely in the grass, moving his head in an attempt to free it from his dangling tie. Another had frozen motionless on one leg like a stork and was gazing prayerfully at the moon, and through the tongues of flame Sasha could see someone else standing on all fours. Sasha himself could hear a ringing in his ears and his throat was dry. It was all definitely caused in some strange way by the music: it was faster now, and the hoarse notes of the horns were more and more strident, increasingly resembling a car alarm. The horns suddenly broke off on a sharp note that was followed by the howling of a gong.

  “The elixir!” the Colonel ordered.

  Sasha saw a skinny old woman wearing a long jacket and red beads. She was carrying a jar covered with paper—the kind they sell mayonnaise in. Suddenly there was a slight commotion by the stake with the skull.

  “Well, look at that!” someone said in admiration, “without any elixir...”

  Sasha glanced in that direction and saw the girl in the tracksuit kneeling on the ground. She looked very odd—her legs seemed to have grown shorter, while her face had stretched out into an incredible, fearsome muzzle almost like a wolf’s.

  “Magnificent,” said the Colonel, looking around and inviting everyone to admire the event. “No other word for it! Quite magnificent! And they say young people today are good for nothing!” A tremor ran through the body of the terrifying creature, followed by another and another, until it was shuddering violently. After a minute a young female wolf was standing among the people in the clearing.

  “That’s Lena from Tambov,” someone said in Sasha’s ear, “she’s really talented.”

  The conversation died away, and everyone lined up in a rough row. The woman and the Colonel walked along it, giving everyone in turn a sip from the jar. Sasha, totally stupefied by what he’d just seen, found himself in the middle of the line. For a few minutes he couldn’t take anything in, and then he saw the woman with the beads standing in front of him and holding out the jar. Sasha smelled something familiar—like the way leaves smell if you rub them against your palm. He started back, but the woman’s hand reached further and thrust the rim of the jar up to his lips. Sasha took a little sip, at the same moment feeling that he was being held from behind. The woman walked on. He opened his eyes. As long as he held the liquid in his mouth, the taste actually seemed quite pleasant, but when he swallowed it, it almost made him sick.

  A pungent smell of vegetation welled up and filled Sasha’s empty head as though someone had suddenly pumped a jet of gas into a balloon. The balloon grew and stretched, straining upwards with ever greater force until suddenly it broke the slim thread binding it to the earth and soared upwards—leaving the forest and the clearing with the fire and the people far below, and the scattered clouds came rushing towards him, followed by the stars. Soon he couldn’t see anything below him. He began looking upwards and saw he was getting close to the sky, which turned out to be a sphere of stone with shiny metal spikes protruding from its inner surface. From down below the spikes looked like stars, and one of the gleaming points was hurtling directly towards Sasha, and there was nothing he could do to prevent the collision—he was so
aring up faster and faster. Finally he hit the spike and burst with a loud bang. All that was left of him was the stretched skin, swaying in the air, which began slowly sinking back down to earth. He fell for a long, long time, for a thousand years, until he finally felt solid ground under his feet. It felt so good that Sasha wagged his tail vigorously in pleasure and gratitude, got up from his belly on to his four paws and howled gently.

  There were several wolves standing beside him. He immediately recognized Lena among them, although he couldn’t understand exactly how. The human features which had struck him earlier had disappeared, of course, and now she had those of a wolf. He would never have imagined that the expression of a wolf’s muzzle could be simultaneously so mocking and dreamy if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Lena noticed his gaze.

  “Like what you see?” she asked.

  She didn’t speak in words. She whined gently, whimpering—it was nothing like human speech, but Sasha not only understood her question, he even caught the familiar tone she imparted to her howling. He wanted to answer “Great!” What came out was a brief barking sound, but it expressed exactly what he wanted to say. Lena lay down in the grass and lowered her muzzle between her paws.

  “Rest,” she whined, “we’ll be running for a long time.”

  Sasha looked around. By the stake the Colonel was rolling about on the ground, with fur growing right over his greatcoat: a thick bushy tail was appearing out of his trousers as fast as a blade of grass in a school biology film.

  The clearing was now full with the wolf pack, and only the woman with the beads who had handed out the elixir was still in human form. She walked rather apprehensively around two large male wolves and climbed into a car. Sasha turned to Lena and whined:

  “Isn’t she one of us?”

  “She just helps us. She turns into a cobra.”

  “Is she going to do that now?”

  “It’s too cold for her now. She goes to Central Asia.”

  The wolves were prowling around the clearing, going up to each other and barking quietly. Sasha sat on his haunches and tried to appreciate every aspect of his new condition.

  He could sense numerous smells impregnating the air, in a way which felt like a second gift of sight—for instance, he could immediately smell his own backpack behind a tree that was quite a long way off, as well as the woman sitting in the car, the scent of a ground squirrel that had recently run along the edge of the clearing, the reliable, brave smell of the older wolves and the gentle aura of Lena’s smell—perhaps the freshest and purest note in the entire unimaginably wide gamut of scents.

  He felt a similar change in his perception of sounds: they had become far more meaningful, and their variety had increased significantly. He could distinguish the creaking of a branch in the wind a hundred yards from the clearing and the chirping of a cricket coming from precisely the opposite direction. He could follow the fluctuations in both sounds simultaneously, without dividing his attention.

  But the greatest transformation that Sasha sensed was in his own awareness of himself. This was something very difficult to express in human language, and he began barking, whining and howling to himself in the same way that he used to think in words. The change in his self-awareness had affected the meaning of life, and he realized that people could talk about it, but they couldn’t feel the meaning of life in the same way as they felt the wind or the cold. But now Sasha was able to feel it, he felt the meaning of life continuously and clearly as an eternal quality of the world itself, and that was the greatest charm of his present condition. No sooner did he realize this than he also realized that he was not likely ever to return to his former existence of his own free will—life without this feeling seemed like a long, tormenting dream, dim and incomprehensible.

  “Ready?” the Colonel barked from the direction of the stake.

  “Ready!” a dozen throats howled in response.

  “Hang on...” someone wheezed behind him. “I can’t finish changing...”

  Sasha tried to look around, but he couldn’t manage it. It turned out that his neck didn’t bend very well, and he had to turn his entire body. Lena came over, stuck her cold nose in his side and whined softly:

  “Stop trying to turn around, just move your eyes. Like this.” When she swiveled her eye it flashed red. Sasha tried doing the same, and he found that by turning his eyes he could see his back, his tail and the dying camp fire.

  “Where are we going to run to?” he asked.

  “To Konkovo,” Lena replied, “there are two cows in a field there.”

  “But aren’t they locked away now?”

  “It’s all been arranged. Ivan Sergeievich arranged a call from the top”—Lena jerked her muzzle upwards—“to say they were studying the effect of night grazing on milk yields, or something like that.”

  “You mean we have people up there”—Sasha repeated her gesture—“as well?”

  “What do you think?”

  Ivan Sergeievich, who before had been the man in the black jacket with the leather band on his forehead—it had turned into a strip of dark fur—nodded his muzzle significantly. Sasha squinted around at Lena. Suddenly she seemed incredibly beautiful—her smooth, shiny fur, the delicate curve of her spine, her slim, powerful hind legs, fluffy young tail and shoulder blades moving so touchingly beneath her skin—in her he sensed at one and the same time strength, a slightly reticent thirst for blood, and that special charm peculiar to young she-wolves that is quite impossible to express in wolf howls.

  Noticing his glance, Lena felt embarrassed and moved off to the side, lowering her tail so that it lay on the grass. Sasha also felt embarrassed and he pretended to be biting burrs out of the fur on his paw.

  “One more time, is everybody ready?” barked the leader in a low voice that filled the entire clearing.

  “Ready!” they all howled together.

  “Then, forward!”

  The leader trotted to the edge of the forest—he seemed deliberately to be moving slowly and loosely, like a sprinter warming up before settling on the starting blocks in order to emphasize even more the speed and concentration he would demonstrate after the starting shot. At the edge of the clearing the leader bent his muzzle down to the ground, sniffed, howled, and suddenly leapt forward into the darkness. The others hurtled after him, barking and whining. For the first few seconds of this wild pursuit through a night studded with sharp branches and thorns, Sasha felt as if he’d dived into water without knowing how deep it was—he was afraid of splitting his head open. But it turned out that he could sense approaching obstacles and avoid them quite easily. Having realized that, he relaxed, and running became easy and enjoyable—his body seemed to be hurtling along by itself, simply releasing the power concealed within it.

  The pack stretched out and formed itself into a diamond shape. The powerful, full-grown wolves raced along at its edges, while the she-wolves and cubs stayed in the center. The cubs somehow managed to play as they ran along, grabbing each other by the tail and making all sorts of unimaginable leaps and bounds. Sasha’s place was at the leading corner of the diamond, just behind the leader, somehow he knew this was a place of honor which he had been granted today as a newcomer. The forest came to an end and they moved on through a large deserted field and on to a road—the pack raced along the asphalt, picking up speed and stretching out into a ribbon of gray along the edge of the highway. Sasha recognized the road. On his way to the clearing it had seemed dark and empty, but now he could see life everywhere: field mice darted across the road and disappeared down their burrows as soon as the wolves appeared; on the shoulder a hedgehog curled up into a ball of prickles and bounced off into the grass when it was struck lightly by a wolf’s paw, two hares swept by like a jet plane, leaving a thick trail of scent which made it clear that they were frightened to death and that one of them was also a total idiot. Lena was running alongside Sasha.

  “Be careful,” she howled, pointing upwards with her muzzle.

&
nbsp; He looked up, allowing his body to find its own way along. There were several owls flying along above the road at exactly the same speed as the wolves. The owls hooted threateningly, and the wolves growled in reply. Sasha felt a strange connection between the owls and the pack. They were hostile to each other, but somehow alike.

  “Who are they?” he asked Lena.

  “Were-owls. They’re tough customers—if they catch you alone.”

  Lena growled something else and looked up with hate in her eyes. The owls began moving away from the road and climbing higher—they flew without flapping their wings, simply stretching them out in the air. Circling once, they turned towards the rising moon.

  “They’re heading for the poultry farm,” Lena growled, “during the day they’re the sponsors there.”

  They had reached the fork in the road. There ahead was the familiar telephone pole and the tall tree. Sasha sensed the scent trail he had left when he was still human, and even an echo of the thoughts that had come into his head on the road several hours ago—the echo lingered in the smell. The pack flowed smoothly around the bend and raced on towards Konkovo. Lena had fallen back a little, and now the Colonel was running along beside Sasha—he was a large reddish wolf with a muzzle that looked as though it had been singed. There was something strange about the way he moved—when Sasha looked more closely he noticed that the Colonel sometimes fell into a canter.

  “Comrade Colonel!” he howled. The actual sound was something like “Rrrr-uuu-vviii,” but the Colonel understood perfectly and looked around in a friendly fashion.