clean themselves through the corresponding influx of Yin. The faint odour that our skin gives off is actually extremely pleasant and reminiscent of Essenza di Zegna eau de cologne, except that it is lighter and more lucid - without that hot, sensuous breath of the mistral in the distant background.
I hope that now the reasons for my actions will be clearer. And so, I turned on the water, so that my client would hear the noise, then unfastened my trousers and lowered them slightly to free my tail. And then, trying not to hurry, I counted to three hundred (a notional five minutes) and opened the door.
Popular expositions of the theory of relativity often ask the reader to compare the pictures that would be taken by two cameras - one in an independent system of coordinates and the other on the head of an astronaut. In our case it would be more correct to say ‘in the head’ rather than on it. What would the camera in the Sikh’s head have shown? The door of the bathroom opened and the girl of his romantic childhood dreams stepped into the room. With a blindingly white towel wrapped round her body.
After she came out of the bathroom, the girl went over to the bed, threw back the blanket and dived under it, blushing ever so slightly: everything pointed to the fact that she hadn’t been in the business long and still hadn’t acquired the professional shamelessness of the trade. That was what the Sikh saw.
I don’t know if the rooms in the National have cameras set in an independent system of coordinates. The staff there claim that they don’t. But if they did have, then they would have shown the following:
1. the girl wasn’t wearing any towel. She hadn’t even thought of getting undressed, but merely slightly lowered her trousers, releasing the red plume of her tail.
2. the girl didn’t walk into the room, she crawled into it on all fours and her tail swayed in the air before freezing above her back in a ginger question mark.
3. she looked less like a bride than a beast prepared to pounce - there was a fierce, intense look in her green eyes and there wasn’t even a trace of a smile on her face.
4. since in modern Russian the word ‘bride’ signifies something very close to ‘a beast prepared to pounce’, there is no contradiction here anyway.
The Sikh looked at me, raised his eyebrows and swayed on his feet. When a person is overwhelmed by the hypnotic shock, a shadow of something like faint revulsion passes across his face, like when a bullet just clips someone’s skull: if anyone has seen the documentary footage of Vietnamese executions, then he’ll know what I mean. Only after my bullet the client doesn’t fall down.
With a smile on his face, the Sikh staggered towards the empty bed, pulling off his jacket on the way. I waited until he had made himself comfortable in it, then sat on the chair beside it and opened my handbag.
I’m trying to improve myself morally, and so I avoid looking at the client once the paid time has begun. I feel ashamed even to describe what happens to a man during his encounter with a fox. Ashamed above all for the man, since he looks quite terrible. And a little awkward for myself too, since all this doesn’t just happen of its own accord.
I’m not writing for the yellow press, so I won’t go into the scabrous details, but simply say that a man’s behaviour is especially unattractive when he starts to realize his sexual fantasies. The fact that he is performing alone increases the obscenity of it to the second power. And if the man concerned is wearing a blue turban and is so hairy that his beard seems to cover his entire body, then it is quite fair to say it is raised to the third.
Maintaining an illusion is considerably easier than breaking into someone else’s mind in order to establish it. Everything is decided in the first moment, after that it’s all pretty routine. But even so, while the client is in the world of his illusions, it’s best not