<html><head><title>Viktor Pelevin. Code of the World</title>
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<ul><a name=0></a><h2>Viktor Pelevin. Code of the World</h2></ul>
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Published: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.02.2001.
Translated by Kirill Zikanov
<a href=http://pelevin.nov.ru>Origin: http://pelevin.nov.ru</a>
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A man is half of what he is, and half of he wants to be, said Oscar
Wilde. If that is the case, then the Soviet children of the sixties and
seventies were all half-cosmonauts. I know this for sure, since myself, at
the age of seven-eight years I was such a half-cosmonaut. It is strange, but
already then I surmised, that this is all a child's delirium that will pass
with the years. At the same time, I told myself: "I know, everyone wants to
be a cosmonaut. But this is completely different for me! I actually want to
become one, for real! And if this passes for others, please! Not for me!?
I think that many of my peers, dreaming of flying into space,
penetrated the same depths of self-reflection. A few even held the oath - a
few cosmonauts, after all, actually existed. However that may be: at that
time, we all, from young to old, lived with one foot in the cosmos. The
cosmos was everywhere. In school books, on the walls of houses and on the
mosaics in the Moscow metro: a snub-nosed cosmonaut, behind the glass of his
helmet- aquarium, was doing some symbolic work - planting a small green
sprout into a dimple on Mars, or reaching a satellite to the stars. In the
fumes of the cities he was always and everywhere, so he became to some
degree a constant witness of all that was happening, a constant "third", the
same kind of hypostasis, as that Lenin, who is dragging that log during a
subbotnik. In this case the adults assumed him, in all likelihood, for the
inevitable boon companion, who although made no contribution to the purchase
of the bottle, also did not drink much. It could be that the couple of
drops, that the alcoholics ritually sprinkle on the earth before the bottle
makes its first round, are dedicated to him.
Under the windows of the five-storied khrushchevoks stood models of
satellites. In the tear-off calendars, one spaceship was followed by
another. The flow of space allusions opened, so to speak, the road to the
future during the Soviet working days, and did not let the stink of life
strike the nose. The world around seemed to be a tent camp, in which the
people lived only temporarily, until the sun city is built. And the fact
that this camp existed almost eternally, we did not remember, in the
apotheosic moments of our space illusions: on television they were showing
the launches from Baikonur. These were the moments, when the cosmonauts from
the friezes on the houses came alive. In their suits and hoods, with
microphones by their lips, they waved with their hand to the viewers for a
last time, before turning and walking to the white phallus that stood ready,
aiming into the dark-blue Kazakhstan sky.
One accessory from the cosmonaut equipment seemed especially mysterious
to me. They carried with them small, pot-bellied suitcases that shone steel
and titanium in the sun. I was greatly occupied by the question what could
be inside. Maybe, star charts? Code tables? Secret weapons? Emergency
rations for extreme situations? I wouldn't dare to ask adults about this for
a long time - out of experience knowing, that after their explanations the
world rarely became more interesting. When I could not hold the question
back anymore, the answer was stunning. "Suitcase?" - asked one of the people
sitting in front of the television again. "They're for shit. See, there is a
hose connecting it to the suit. Cosmonauts are people too, you know."
That such a system of waste disposal was important could not be denied.
However a cosmonaut with a suitcase of shit in his hands seemed so
unthinkable to me, that my clean star world obtained an explicit crack at
that moment. Since then, whenever a new cosmonaut walked to his new rocket,
my eyes, without blinking, looked only at that suitcase. This was probably
because I grew up and noticed, that not only the cosmonauts carried with
them this suitcase; all the Soviet people were doing it. (In
pre-revolutionary Russia it was said that everyone has to carry their cross
- possibly, this suitcase was an atheistic stump of that metaphor.)
Moreover, all the Soviet cosmonautics ended up rooted deep in the stink
of the GULAG, where the main constructor Korolev was, his suitcase always
with him. The symbols that the Soviet rockets carried into the cosmos
(emblems with bundles of wheat, streamers with stars, and so on) were fake,
while this was the very precise symbol, unveiling all the horror: the Soviet
man, who built the first space ships and flew in them to the stars, towards
inhabitants of other words, could not offer them anything besides a suitcase
full of stored shit, tyranny and dark misery. The more I found out about the
world, the bigger became the suitcase, and the harder it was for the
cosmonaut to drag it to the rocket.
This is why it did not surprise me that during the launch of the Soviet
shuttle "Buran" there was not one cosmonaut on board. The invisible suitcase
was at that time so heavy, that there was no space for humans anymore. Later
on, during the time of Elzin, it turned out that this universal symbol also
exists in another one, deeply Freudian incarnation: as a suitcase in a bank
safe. In order for some Russians to keep their incarnation in a Swiss bank,
other Russians have to exists, that drag a different incarnation up the icy
stairs in their houses somewhere in the cold Vladivostok - all this is, so
to say, the law of conservation of energy. The fatter one suitcase, the more
goes into the other one.
Finally, I understood that in Russia there are no communists, no
democrats, nationalists and liberals, and rights and lefts, no matter how
hard the television tries to convince us. There is only this suitcase - the
invisible main property of all the dramas occurring in Russia. It is that
mysterious object that the "Kursk" collided with before its death. At this
moment, it is throwing the station "Mir" down from its orbit. And - who
knows - maybe, it is that case, that one president inherits from another,
and the generals do not cease to assure us in the fact that it is a nuclear
one.
Once, the suitcase and I were still small, I discovered a mysterious
picture in a Soviet children's encyclopedia: white lines zigzag on a black
background. According to the signature under the picture, the picture was
the oscillographically coded words "USSR", "Lenin" and "Peace", which were
sent as high-frequency radio signals into space. Us, the future cosmonauts
of that time, have long grown up. The USSR doesn't exist for a few years
already. Monuments of Lenin were removed from the pedestals and melted down.
Now the "Mir" is falling - and with it the world, in which we were born. And
only those three word-signals fly into the Universe as rays of a long dead
star, which, not existing anymore, still can be seen in the sky, and behind
this visibility there is nothing, besides emptiness and lucky circumstances.
Published: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.02.2001.
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