lity of the Russian consumer. The work was
'freelance' - Tatarsky used the term as though it still had its original
sense, having in mind first of all the level of his pay.
Pugin, a man with a black moustache and gleaming black eyes very like a
pair of buttons, had turned up by chance among the guests at a mutual
acquaintance's house. Hearing that Tatarsky was in advertising, he'd shown a
moderate interest. Tatarsky, on the other hand, had immediately been fired
with an irrational respect for Pugin - he was simply amazed to see him
sitting there drinking tea still in his long black coat.
That was when the conversation had turned to the Soviet mentality.
Pugin confessed that in the old days he had possessed it himself, but he'd
lost it completely while working for a few years as a taxi-driver in New
York. The salty winds of Brighton Beach had blown all those ramshackle
Soviet constructs right out of his head and infected him with a compulsive
yearning for success.
'In New York you realise especially clearly/ Pugin said over a glass of
the vodka they moved on to after the tea, 'that you can spend your entire
life in some foul-smelling little kitchen, staring out into some shit-dirty
little yard and chewing on a lousy burger. You'll just stand there by the
window, staring at all that shit, and life will pass you by.'
'That's interesting,' Tatarsky responded thoughtfully, 'but why go to
New York for that? Surely-'
'Because in New York you understand it, and in Moscow you don't,' Pugin
interrupted. 'You're right, there are far more of those stinking kitchens
and shitty little yards over here. Only here there's no way you're going to
understand that's where you're going to spend the rest of your life until
it's already over. And that, by the way, is one of the main features of the
Soviet mentality.'
Pugin's opinions were disputable in certain respects, but what he
actually had to offer was simple, clear and logical. As far as Tatarsky was
able to judge from the murky depths of his own Soviet mentality, the project
was an absolutely textbook example of the American entrepreneurial approach.
'Look,' said Pugin, squinting intensely into the space above Tatarsky's
head, 'the country hardly produces anything at all;
but people have to have something to eat and wear, right? That means
soon goods will start pouring in here from the West, and massive amounts of
advertising will come flooding in with them. But it won't be possible simply
to translate this advertising from English into Russian, because the . . .
what d'you call them .. . the cultural references here are different... That
means, the advertising will have to be adapted in short order for the
Russian consumer. So now what do you and I do? You and I get straight on the
job well in advance - get my point? Now, before it all starts, we prepare
outline concepts for all the serious brand-names. Then, just as soon as the
right moment comes, we turn up at their offices with a folder under our arms
and do business. The most important thing is to get a few good brains
together in good time!'
Pugin slapped his palm down hard on the table - he obviously thought
he'd got a few together already - but Tatarsky suddenly had the vague
feeling he was being taken for a ride again. The terms of employment on
offer from Pugin were extremely vague - although the work itself was quite
concrete, the prospects of being paid remained abstract.
For a test-piece Pugin set him the development of an outline concept
for Sprite - at first he was going to give him Marl-boro as well, but he
suddenly changed his mind, saying it was too soon for Tatarsky to try that.
This was the point - as Tatarsky realised later - at which the Soviet
mentality for which he had been selected raised its head. All his scepticism
about Pugin instantly dissolved in a feeling of resentment that Pugin
wouldn't trust him with Marlboro, but this resentment was mingled with a
feeling of delight at the fact that he still had Sprite. Swept away by the
maelstrom created by these conflicting feelings, he never even paused to
think why some taxi-driver from Brighton Beach, who still hadn't given him
so much as a kopeck, was already deciding whether he was capable of applying
his mind to a concept for Marlboro.
Tatarsky poured into his conception for Sprite every last drop of his
insight into his homeland's bruised and battered history. Before sitting
down to work, he re-read several selected chapters from the book
Positioning: A Battle for your Mind, and a whole heap of newspapers of
various tendencies. He hadn't read any newspapers for ages and what he read
plunged him into a state of confusion; and that, naturally, had its effect
on the fruit of his labours.
'The first point that must be taken into consideration,' he wrote in
his concept, is that the situation that exists at the present moment in
Russia cannot continue for very long. In the very near future we must expect
most of the essential branches of industry to come to a total standstill,
the collapse of the financial system and serious social upheavals, which
will all inevitably end in the establishment of a military dictatorship.
Regardless of its political and economic programme, the future dictatorship
will attempt to exploit nationalistic slogans: the dominant state aesthetic
vsill be the pseudo-Slavonic style. (This term is not used here in any
negative judgemental sense: as distinct from the Slavonic style, •which does
not exist anywhere in the real world, the pseudo-Slavonic style represents a
carefully structured paradigm.) Within the space structured by the symbolic
signifiers of this style, traditional Western advertising is inconceivable.
Therefore it will either be banned completely or subjected to rigorous
censorship. This all has to be taken into consideration in determining any
kind of long-term strategy.
Let us take a classic positioning slogan: 'Sprite - the Uncola'. Its
use in Russia would seem to us to be most appropriate, but for somewhat
different reasons than in America. The term 'Uncola' (i.e. Non-Cola)
positions Sprite very successfully against Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola,
creating a special niche for this product in the consciousness of the
Western consumer. But it is a well-known fact that in the countries of
Eastern Europe Coca-Cola is more of an ideological fetish than a refreshing
soft drink. If, for instance, Hershi drinks are positioned as possessing the
'taste of victory', then Coca-Cola possesses the 'taste of freedom', as
declared in the seventies and eighties by a vast number of Eastern European
defectors. For the Russian consumer, therefore, the term 'Uncola' has
extensive anti-democratic and anti-liberal connotations, which makes it
highly attractive and promising in conditions of military dictatorship.
Translated into Russian 'Uncola'would become 'Nye-Cola'. The sound of
the word (similar to the old Russian name 'Nikola') and the associations
aroused by it offer a perfect fit with the aesthetic required by the likely
future scenario. A possible version of the slogan:
SPRITE. THE NYE-COLA FOR NIKOLA
(It might make sense to consider infiltrating into the consciousness of
the consumer the character 'Nikola Spritov', an individual of the same type
as RonaldMcDonald, but profoundly national in spirit.)
In addition, some thought has to be given to changing the packaging
format of the product as sold on the Russian market. Elements of the
pseudo-Slavonic style need to be introduced here as well. The ideal symbol
would seem to be the birch tree. It would be appropriate to change the
colour of the can from green to white with black stripes like the trunk of a
birch. A possible text for an advertising clip:
Deep in the spring-time forest I drank my birch-bright Sprite.
After reading the print-out Tatarsky brought him, Pugin said: '"The
Uncola" is Seven-Up's slogan, not Sprite's.'
After that he said nothing for a while, simply gazing at Tatarsky with
his black-button eyes. Tatarsky didn't speak either.
'But that's OK,' Pugin said, eventually softening. 'We can use it. If
not for Sprite, then for Seven-Up. So you can consider you've passed the
test. Now try some other brand.'
'Which one?' Tatarsky asked in relief.
Pugin thought for a moment, then rummaged in his pockets and held out
an opened pack of Parliament cigarettes. 'And think up a poster for them as
well,' he said.
Dealing with Parliament turned out to be more complicated. For a start
Tatarsky wrote the usual intro: 'It is quite clear that the first thing that
has to be taken into consideration in the development of any half-serious
advertising concept is . . .' But after that he just sat there for a long
time without moving.
Exactly what was the first thing that had to be taken into
consideration was entirely unclear. The only association the word
'Parliament' was able, with a struggle, to extract from his brain, was
Cromwell's wars in England. The same thing would obviously apply to the
average Russian consumer who had read Dumas as a child. After half an hour
of the most intensive intellectual exertion had led to nothing, Tatarsky
suddenly fancied a smoke. He searched the entire flat looking for something
smokeable and eventually found an old pack of Soviet-time Yava. After just
two drags he chucked the cigarette down the toilet and dashed over to the
table. He'd come up with a text that at first glance looked to him as if it
was the answer:
PARLIAMENT- THE NYE-YAVA
When he realised this was only a poor low-grade caique on the word
'uncola', he very nearly gave up. Then he had a sudden inspiration. The
history dissertation he'd written in the Literary Institute was called: 'A
brief outline of parliamentar-ianism in Russia'. He couldn't remember a
thing about it any more, but he was absolutely certain it would contain
enough material for three concepts, let alone one. Skipping up and down in
his excitement, he set off along the corridor towards the built-in closet
where he kept his old papers.
After searching for half an hour he realised he wasn't going to find
the dissertation, but somehow that didn't worry him any more. While sorting
through the accumulated strata deposited in the closet, up on the attic
shelf he'd come across several objects that had been there since his
schooldays: a bust of Lenin mutilated with a small camping axe (Tatarsky
recalled how, in his fear of retribution following the execution, he'd
hidden the bust in a place that was hard to reach), a notebook on social
studies, filled with drawings of tanks and nuclear explosions, and several
old books.
This all filled him with such aching nostalgia that his employer Pugin
suddenly seemed repulsive and hateful, and was banished from consciousness,
together with his Parliament.
Tatarsky remembered with a tender warmth how the books he had
discovered had been selected from amongst the waste paper they used to be
sent to collect after class. They included a volume of a left-wing French
existentialist published in the sixties, a finely bound collection of
articles on theoretical physics. Infinity and the Universe, and a loose-leaf
binder with the word Tikhamat' written in large letters on the spine.
Tatarsky remembered the book Infinity and the Universe, but not the
binder. He opened it and read the first page:
TIKHAMAT-2 The Earthly Sea Chronological Tables and Notes
The papers bound into the folder obviously dated from a pre-computer
age. Tatarsky could recall heaps of samizdat books that had circulated in
this format - two typed pages reduced to half-size and copied on a single
sheet of paper. What he was holding in his hands seemed to be an appendix to
a dissertation on the history of the ancient world. Tatarsky began
rememberin: in his childhood, he thought, he hadn't even opened the file,
taking the word 'Tikhamat' to mean something like a mixture of diamat
(dialectical materialism) with histmat (historical materialism). He'd only
taken the work at all because of the beautiful folder, and then he'd
forgotten all about it.
As it turned out, however, Tikhamat was the name either of an ancient
deity or of an ocean, or perhaps both at the same time. Tatarsky learned
from a footnote that the word could be translated approximately as 'Chaos'.
A lot of the space in the folder was taken up by tables of kings. They
were pretty monotonous, with their listings of unpronounceable names and
Roman numerals, and information about when they'd launched their campaigns
or laid the foundations of a wall or taken some city, and so forth. In
several places different sources were compared, and the conclusion drawn
from the comparison was that several events that had been recorded in
history as following each other were in fact one and the same event, which
had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that its echo had
been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of its own.
It was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by the author
that his discovery appeared to him to be quite revolutionary and even
iconoclastic, which set Tatarsky pondering yet again on the vanity of all
human endeavour. He didn't experience even the slightest sense of shock at
the fact that Ashuretilshamersituballistu II had turned out actually to be
Nebuchadnezzar III, and the nameless historian's depth of feeling really
seemed rather laughable. The kings seemed rather laughable too: it wasn't
even known for certain whether they were people or simply slips made by a
scribe on his clay tablets, and the only traces remaining of them were on
those same clay tablets.
The chronological tables were followed by extensive notes on some
unknown text, and there were a lot of photographs of various antiquities
pasted into the folder. The second or third article that Tatarsky came
across was entitled: 'Babylon: The Three Chaldean Riddles'. Beneath the
letter '0' in the word 'Babylon' he could make out a letter 'E' that had
been whited out and corrected - it was nothing more than a typing error, but
the sight of it threw Tatarsky into a state of agitation. The name he'd been
given at birth and had rejected on reaching the age of maturity had returned
to haunt him just at the moment when he'd completely forgotten the story
he'd told his childhood friends about the part the secret lore of Babylon
was to play in his life.
Below the heading there was a photograph of the impression of a seal -
a gate of iron bars on the top of either a mountain or a stepped pyramid,
and standing beside it a man with a beard dressed in a skirt, with something
that looked like a shawl thown over his shoulders. It seemed to Tatarsky
that the man was holding two severed heads by their thin plaits of hair; but
one of the heads had no facial features, while the second was smiling
happily. Tatarsky read the inscription under the drawing: 'A Chaldean with a
mask and a mirror on a zig-gurat'. He squatted on a pile of books removed
from the closet and began reading the text beneath the photograph.
P. 123. The mirror and the mask are the ritual requisites oflshtar. The
canonical representation, which expresses the sacramental symbolism of her
cult more fully, is oflshtar in a gold mask, gazing into a mirror. Gold is
the body of the goddess and its negative projection is the light of the
stars. This has led several researchers to assume that the third ritual
requisite of the goddess is the fly-agaric mushroom, the cap of which is a
natural map of the starry sky. If this is so, then we must regard the
fly-agaric as the 'heavenly mushroom' referred to in various texts. This
assumption is indirectly confirmed by the details of the myth of the three
great ages, the ages of the red, blue and yellow skies. The red fly-agaric
connects the Chaldean with the past; it provides access to the wisdom and
strength of the age of the red sky. The brown fly-agaric ('brown' and
'yellow' were designated by the same word in Accadian), on the other hand,
provides a link with the future and a means of taking possession all of its
inexhaustible energy.
Turning over a few pages at random, Tatarsky came across the word
'fly-agaric' again.
P. 145. The three Chaldean riddles (the Three Riddles oflshtar).
According to the tradition of the Chaldean riddles, any inhabitant of
Babylon could become the goddess's husband. In order to do this he had to
drink a special beverage and ascend her ziggurat. It is not clear whether by
this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in Babylon or a
hallucinatory experience. The second assumption is supported by the fact
that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it
included 'the urine of a red ass' (possibly the cinnabar traditional in
ancient alchemy) and 'heavenly mushrooms' (evidently fly-agaric, cf. 'The
Mirror and the Mask').
According to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom
(the Babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen
as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of
the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess,
which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. It was believed that
at certain times the spirit of Ishtar descended into this idol.
In order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the
Three Riddles oflshtar. These riddles have not come down to us. Let us note
the controversial opinion of Claude Greco (see 11,12), who assumes that what
is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient Accadian discovered
during the excavation of Nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by
means of their homo-nymic structure.
A far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several
sources taken together: the Three Riddles of Ishtar were three symbolic
objects that were handed to a Babylonian who wished to become a Chaldean. He
had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic
message). On the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways,
where the future Chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. Anybody
who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the
ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (There is some
reason to derive the later cult ofKybela, based on ritual self-castration,
from the cult of Ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was
evidently as a substitute sacrifice.)
Even so, there were a great many candidates, since the answers that
would open the path to the summit of the ziggurat and union with the goddess
actually did exist. Once in every few decades someone was successful. The
man who answered all three riddles correctly would ascend to the summit and
meet the goddess, following which he became a consecrated Chaldean and her
ritual earthly husband (possibly there were several such simultaneously).
According to one interpretation, the answers to the Three Riddies
oflshtar also existed in written form. In certain special places in Babylon
tablets were sold imprinted with the answers to the goddess's questions
(another interpretation holds that what was meant was a magical seal on
which the answers were carved). Producing these tablets and trading in them
was the business of the priests of the central temple ofEnkidu, the patron
deity of the Lottery. It was believed that the goddess selected her next
husband through the agency of Enkidu. This provides a resolution to the
conflict, well known to the ancient Babylonians, between divine
predetermina-tion and free will. Therefore most of those who decided to
ascend the ziggurat bought clay tablets bearing answers; it was believed the
tablets could not be unsealed until after the ascent had begun.
This practice was known as the Great Lottery (the accepted term, for
which we are indebted to numerous men of letters inspired by this legend,
but a more precise rendering would be 'The Game without a Name'). Its only
possible outcomes were success and death. Certain bold spirits actually
decided to ascend the ziggurat without any tablet to prompt them.
Yet another interpretation has it that the three questions oflshtar
were not riddles, but rather symbolic reference points indicative of
specific life-situations. The Babylonian had to pass through them and
present proofs of his wisdom to the guard on the ziggurat in order to make
it possible for him to meet the goddess. (In this case the ascent of the
ziggurat described above is regarded rather as a metaphor.) There was a
belief that the answers to the three questions oflshtar were concealed in
the words of the market songs that were sung every day in the bazaar at
Babylon, but no information about these songs or this custom has survived.
Tatarsky wiped the dust off the folder and hid it away again in the
closet, thinking that some time he would definitely read it all the way
through.
He never did find his diploma dissertation on the history of Russian
parliamentarianism in the closet; but by the time his search was over
Tatarsky had realised quite clearly that the entire history of
parliamentarianism in Russia amounted to one simple fact - the only thing
the word was good for was advertising Parliament cigarettes, and even there
you actually could get by quite well without any parliamentarianism at all.
CHAPTER 4. The Three Riddles of Ishtar
The following day Tatarsky, still absorbed in his thoughts about the
cigarette concept, ran into his old classmate Andrei Gireiev at the
beginning of Tverskaya Street. Tatarsky hadn't had any news of him for
several years, and he was astounded at the style of the clothes he was
wearing - a light-blue cassock with a Nepalese waistcoat covered in
embroidery worn over the top of it. In his hands he had something that
looked like a large coffee-mill, covered all over with Tibetan symbols and
decorated with coloured ribbons. He was turning its handle. Despite the
extreme exoticism of every element of his get-up, in combination they
appeared so natural that they somehow neutralised each other. None of the
passers-by paid any attention to Gireiev. Just like a fire hydrant or an
advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, he failed to register in their field of
perception because he conveyed absolutely no new visual information.
Tatarsky first recognised Gireiev's face and only afterwards began to
pay attention to the rich details of his appearance. Looking attentively
into Gireiev's eyes, he realised he was not quite himself, although he
didn't seem to be drunk. In fact he was calm and in control, and he inspired
confidence.
He said he was living just outside Moscow in the village of Rastorguevo
and invited Tatarsky to visit him. Tatarsky agreed, and they went down into
the metro, then changed to the suburban train. They travelled in silence;
Tatarsky occasionally turned away from the view through the window to look
at Gireiev. In his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost
universe - not the Soviet universe, because that didn't contain any
wandering Tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in
parallel with the Soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished
together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal
of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe,
which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had
been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity, and just as
imperceptibly. Gireiev lived in a crooked black house with the garden in
front of it run wild, all overgrown with umbrellas of giant dill half as
tall again as a man. In terms of amenities his house was somewhere between
village and town: looking down through the hole in the hut of the outside
lavatory he could see wet and slimy sewage pipes that ran across the top of
the cesspit, but where they ran from or to wasn't clear. On the other hand,
the house had a gas cooker and a telephone.
Gireiev seated Tatarsky at the table on the verandah and tipped a
coarsely ground powder into the teapot from a red tin box with something
Estonian written on it in white letters.
'What's that?' Tatarsky asked.
'Fly-agarics,' answered Gireiev, and began pouring boiling water into
the teapot. The smell of mushroom soup wafted round the room.
'What, are you going to drink that?'
'Don't worry,' said Gireiev, 'there aren't any brown ones.'
He said it as though it was the answer to every conceivable objection,
and Tatarsky couldn't think of anything to say in reply. He hesitated for a
moment, until he recalled that only yesterday he'd been reading about
fly-agarics, and he overcame his misgivings. The mushroom tea actually
tasted quite pleasant.
'And what will it do for me?'
'You'll see soon enough,' replied Gireiev. 'You'll be drying them for
winter yourself.'
'Then what do I do now?'
'Whatever you like.'
'Is it OK to talk?'
'Try it.'
Half an hour passed in rather inconsequential conversation about people
they both knew. As was only to be expected, nothing very interesting had
happened to any of them in the meantime. Only one of them, Lyosha Chikunov,
had distinguished himself - by drinking several bottles of Finlandia vodka
and then freezing to death one starry January night in the toy house on a
children's playground.
'Gone to Valhalla,' was Gireiev's terse comment.
'Why are you so sure?' Tatarsky asked; then he suddenly remembered the
running deer and the crimson sun on the vodka label and assented internally.
He reached for his notebook and wrote: 'An ad for Finlandia. Based on their
slogan:
"In my previous life I was clear, crystal spring water".
Variant/complement: a snowdrift with a frozen puddle of puke on top. Text:
"In my previous life I was Finlandia vodka".'
Meanwhile a scarcely perceptible sensation of happy relaxation had
developed in his body. A pleasant quivering rose in his chest, ran in waves
through his trunk and his arms and faded away without quite reaching his
fingers. And for some reason Tatarsky very much wanted the quivering to
reach his fingers. He realised he hadn't drunk enough; but the teapot was
already empty.
'Is there any more?' he asked.
'There, you see,' said Gireiev, 'what did I tell you?'
He stood up, left the room and came back with an open newspaper
scattered with dry pieces of sliced fly-agaric mushrooms. Some of them still
had scraps of red skin with little white blots, while others had shreds of
newspaper with the mirror-images of letters clinging to them.
Tatarsky tossed a few pieces into his mouth, chewed them and swallowed.
The taste of the dried fly-agarics reminded him a little of potato flakes,
except that it was nicer - it occurred to him that they could be sold in
packets like potato chips, and this must be one of the secret routes to a
bank loan, Grand Cherokee jeep, advertisement clip and violent death. He
started pondering what the clip might be like, tossed another portion into
his mouth and looked around him. It was only at this stage that he actually
noticed several of the objects decorating the room. For instance, that sheet
of paper hanging in the obvious place on the wall - there was a letter
written on it, maybe Sanskrit, maybe Tibetan, resembling a dragon with a
curved tail.
'What's that?' he asked Gireiev.
Gireiev glanced up at the wall. 'Hum/ he said.
'What d'you need it for?'
'That's how I travel.'
'Where to?' asked Tatarsky.
Gireiev shrugged. 'It's hard to explain/ he said. 'Hum. When you don't
think, lots of things become clear.'
But Tatarsky had already forgotten his own question. He was overwhelmed
by a feeling of gratitude to Gireiev for inviting him here. 'You know/ he
said/ I'm going through a difficult period right now. Most of the time I
associate with bankers and other scum who want advertising. The stress is
just incredible. But out here with you ... I feel just as though I've come
back home.'
Gireiev seemed to understand what he was feeling. 'It's nothing/ he
said, 'Don't even think about it. A couple of those bankers came to see me
last winter. Wanted to expand their consciousness. Afterwards they ran off
barefoot across the snow. Why don't we go for a walk?'
Tatarsky was happy to agree. Once outside the garden gate, they set off
across a field criss-crossed by freshly dug ditches. The path led them to a
forest and began winding between the trees. The itching and trembling in
Tatarsky's hands was getting stronger, but it still wasn't reaching his
fingers. Noticing there were lots of fly-agarics growing on the ground among
the trees, he dropped behind Gireiev and picked several of them. They
weren't red, but dark brown and very beautiful. He ate them quickly and then
caught up with Gireiev, who hadn't noticed anything.
Soon the forest came to an end and they came out into a large open
space, a collective farm field bounded on its far side by the river.
Tatarsky looked upwards to where motionless clouds towered up into the sky
above the field in the last orange rays of one of those inexpressibly sad
sunsets that autumn sometimes produces outside Moscow. They walked on for a
while down the track along the edge of the field and sat down on a fallen
tree.
Tatarsky suddenly thought of a potential advertising concept for
fly-agarics. It was based on the startling realisation that the supreme form
of self-realisation for fly-agarics is an atomic explosion - something like
the glowing non-material body that certain advanced mystics acquire. Human
beings were simply a subsidiary form of life that the fly-agarics exploited
in order to achieve their supreme goal, in the same way as human beings
exploited mould for making cheese. Tatarsky raised his eyes towards the
orange rays of the sunset and the flow of his thoughts was abruptly broken
off.
'Listen,' Gireiev said after a few more minutes' silence, 'I just
thought about Lyosha Chikunov again. Sad about him, isn't it?'
'Yeah, it is,' Tatarsky replied.
'Weird, that - he's dead, and we're alive ... Only I suspect that every
time we lie down and sleep, we die just the same way. And the sun disappears
for ever, and all history comes to an end. And then non-existence just gets
sick of itself and we wake up. And the world comes into existence all over
again.'
'How can non-existence get sick of itself?'
'Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does
everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning
wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think
about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and our
world are the same thing.'
Tatarsky tried to understand what this meant. He noticed that thinking
had became difficult and even dangerous, because his thoughts had acquired
such freedom and power that he could no longer control them. The answer
appeared to him immediately in the form of a three-dimensional geometrical
figure. Tatarsky saw his own mind: it was a white sphere, like a sun but
absolutely calm and motionless. Dark, twisted fibrous threads extended from
the centre of the sphere to its periphery. Tatarsky realised that they were
his five senses. The fibres that were a little thicker were sight, the ones
a bit thinner than those were hearing, and the others were almost invisible.
Dancing and meandering around these motionless fibres was a winding spiral,
like the filament of an electric-light bulb. Sometimes it would align itself
for a moment with one of them; sometimes it would curl up around itself to
form a glowing circle of light like the one left by the lighted tip of a
cigarette swirled rapidly in the dark. This was the thought with which his
mind was occupied.
'That means there is no death/ Tatarsky thought happily. 'Why? Because
the threads disappear, but the sphere remains!'
He was filled with happiness at having managed to formulate the answer
to a question that had tormented humanity for the last several thousand
years in terms so simple anyone could understand them. He wanted to share
his discovery with Gireiev, and taking him by the shoulder he tried to
pronounce this final phrase out loud. But his mouth spoke something else,
something meaningless - all the syllables that made up the words were still
there, but they were jumbled up chaotically. Tatarsky thought he needed a
drink of water, and so he said to Gireiev, who was staring at him in fright:
'Li'd winker drike I watof!'
Gireiev obviously didn't understand what was going on; but it was clear
that whatever it was, he didn't like it.
'Li'd dratinker wike of wit!' Tatarsky repeated meekly and tried to
smile.
He really wanted Gireiev to smile back at him; but Gireiev did
something strange - he got to his feet and backed away from Tatarsky, who
understood for the first time what was meant by the phrase 'a mask of
horror'. His friend's face was distorted into the most distinct possible
mask of precisely that kind. Gireiev took several faltering steps backwards,
then turned and ran. Tatarsky was offended to the depths of his soul.
Meanwhile the evening twilight had begun to thicken. As it flitted
through the blue haze between the trees, Gireiev's Nepalese waistcoat looked
like a large butterfly. Tatarsky found the idea of pursuit exciting. He
launched himself after Gireiev, bounding high in the air in order not to
stumble over some root or hummock. It was soon clear that he was running a
lot faster that Gireiev, quite incomparably faster, in fact. He overtook him
and turned back several times before he realised that he wasn't running
around Gireiev, but around the remnant of a dry tree-trunk the same height
as a man. That sobered him up a little, and he set off down the path in what
he thought was the direction of the railway station.
Along the way he ate several more fly-agarics that attracted his
attention among the trees, and soon he found himself on a wide dirt road
with a fence of barbed wire running along one edge of it.
Someone appeared ahead of him, walking along. Tatarsky went up to him
and asked politely: 'Stan gou thecation totet yell he mow? There trun
rewains?'
Glancing sharply at Tatarsky, the stranger took a quick step backwards,
then took to his heels. Everybody seemed to be reacting to him in the same
way today. Tatarsky remembered his Chechen employer and thought cheerfully
to himself:
'What if I met Hussein now, I wonder if he'd be scared?'
When Hussein promptly appeared at the edge of the road, it was Tatarsky
who was scared. Hussein was standing there silently in the grass and not
reacting in any way to Tatarsky's approach. But Tatarsky slowed his pace,
walked across to Hussein with meek, childish steps and stood there paralysed
with guilt.
'What did you want?' Hussein asked.
Tatarsky said something extremely inappropriate: 'I just need a second.
I wanted to ask you, as a representative of the target group: what
associations does the word "parliament" have for you?' In his fright he
didn't even notice whether he was speaking normally or not.
Hussein wasn't surprised at all. He thought for a moment and answered:
'Al-Ghazavi had this poem called "The Parliament of Birds". It's about how
thirty birds flew off in search of the bird that is called Semurg - the king
of all birds and a great master.'
'But why did they fly off in search of a king, if they had a
parliament?'
'You ask them that. And then, Semurg was not just a king, he was a
fount of great knowledge. That's more than you can say for a parliament.'
'How did it all end?' asked Tatarsky.
'When they had endureded thirty trials, they learned that the word
"Semurg" means "thirty birds".'
'Who from?'
'The voice of God told them.'
Tatarsky sneezed. Hussein immediately fell silent and turned away his
glowering face. Tatarsky waited for a continuation for quite a long time
before he realised that Hussein was actually a post with a sign nailed to it
saying: 'Campfires forbidden!' that he could scarcely make out in the
semi-darkness. That upset him - so Gireiev and Hussein were in league now!
He'd liked Hussein's story, but now it was clear that he'd never leam all
the details, and in the form he'd heard it, it wasn't even fit for a
cigarette concept. Tatarsky walked on, wondering what it was that had made
him stop in such a cowardly fashion by a Hussein-post that hadn't even asked
him to.
The explanation was not a very pleasant one: it was a relict of the
Soviet era, the slave mentality he still hadn't completely squeezed out of
himself. Tatarsky thought for a while and came to the conclusion that the
slave in the soul of Soviet man was not concentrated in any particular
sector, but rather tinged everything that happened in its twilit expanses in
a shade of chronic psychological peritonitis, which meant there was no way
to squeeze this slave out drop by drop without damaging precious spiritual
qualities. This thought seemed important to Tatarsky in the light of his
forthcoming collaboration with Pugin, and he rummaged in his pockets for a
long time to find a pen to note it down, but couldn't find one.
Another passer-by appeared, coming towards him; this time it was
definitely no hallucination. That much became clear after Tatarsky's attempt
to borrow a pen - the passer-by took to his heels, running with genuine
speed and not looking back.
Tatarsky simply couldn't figure out what it was in his behaviour that
had such a terrifying effect on the people he met. Perhaps they were
frightened by the strange disorder of his speech, the way the words he tried
to pronounce fell apart into syllables that then re-attached themselves to
each other in a random order. Even so, there was something rather flattering
in such an extreme reaction.
Tatarsky was suddenly struck so forcibly by a certain thought that he
stopped dead and slapped his palm against his forehead. 'Why, of course,
it's the Tower of Babel!' he thought. 'They probably drank that mushroom tea
and the words began to break apart in their mouths, just like mine.
Later they began to call it a confusion of tongues. It would be better
to call it a confusion of language ...'
Tatarsky could sense that his thoughts were filled with such power that
each one was a stratum of reality, just as important in every respect as the
forest he was walking through this evening. The difference was that the
forest was a thought he couldn't stop thinking, no matter how much he wanted
to. On the other hand, there was almost no will whatsoever involved in what
was going on in his mind. As soon as he had the thought about the confusion
of tongues, it became clear to him that the memory of Babylon was the only
possible Babylon: by thinking about it, he had summoned it to life