ediacracy, since it is a regime under which the object of
choices (and also the subject, as vse have demonstrated above) is a
television programme. It should be remembered that the word 'democracy',
which is used so frequently in the modem mass media, is by no means the same
word 'democracy ' as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word 'democracy' was
derived from the Greek 'demos', while the new word is derived from the
expression 'demo-version'.
Ana so, let us sum up.
Identialism is dualism at that stage of development when the major
corporations are finalising the division of human consciousness which, being
under the constant influence of oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses,
begins independently to generate the three corresponding wow-factors. This
results in the stable and permanent displacement of the personality and the
appearance in its place of the so-called 'identity '. Identialism is dualism
that possesses a triple distinction. It is dualism that is: a) dead; b)
putrid; c) digitised.
Numerous different definitions of identity could be provided, but this
would be a senseless exercise, because in any case it does not exist in
reality. At the stage ofidentialism, the individual for whose freedom it was
once possible to fight disappears completely from the field of view.
It follows, therefore, that the end of the world, which is the
inevitable outcome of the wowerisation of consciousness, will present
absolutely no danger of any kind -for the very subject of danger is
disappearing. The end of the world will simply be a television programme.
And this, comrades in the struggle, fills us all with inexpressible bliss.
Che Guevara
Mt Shumeru, eternity, summer.
'Sumer again. We're all Sumerians, then/ Tatarsky whispered quietly and
looked up. The grey light of a new day was trembling beyond the blind at the
window. To the left of the ouija board lay a heap of paper covered in
writing, and the weary muscles of his forearms ached. The only thing he
could remember from all that writing was the expression 'bourgeois thought'.
Getting up from the table, he went across to the bed and threw himself on to
it without getting undressed.
'Just what is bourgeois thought?' he wondered. 'God only knows. About
money, I suppose. What else?'
CHAPTER 8. Safe Haven
The lift that was elevating Tatarsky towards his new job contained only
a single solitary graffito, but even that was enough to make it clear at a
glance that the heart of the advertising business beat somewhere close at
hand. The graffito was a variation on a classic theme, the advertisement for
Jim Beam whisky in which a simple basic hamburger evolved into a complex,
multi-tiered sandwich, then the sandwich became an even more intricate
baguette, and finally the baguette turned back into the basic hamburger,
which all went to show that everything returns to its origins. Traced out on
the wall in gigantic three-dimensional letters casting a long drawn shadow
were the words: FUCK YOU.
Written below it in small letters was the original Jim Beam slogan:
'You always get back to the basics.'
Tatarsky was simply delighted at the way the entire evolutionary
sequence implied in the inscriptions had simply been omitted - he could
sense the laconic hand of a master at work. What was more, despite the
risque nature of the subject, there wasn't even the slightest trace of
Freudianism in the text.
It was quite possible that the unknown master was one of his two
colleagues who also worked for Khanin. They were called Seryozha and
Malyuta, and they were almost complete opposites. Seryozha, a short man with
light hair, wore gold-rimmed spectacles and strove with all his might to
resemble a Western copywriter, but since he didn't know what a Western
copywriter actually looked like and relied on nothing but his own strange
ideas about the matter, the impression he actually produced was of something
touchingly Russian and very nearly extinct.
Malyuta, a robust slob in a dirty denim suit, was Tatarsky's comrade in
misfortune - he had also suffered from his romantically-minded parents' love
for exotic names -- in this case the name borne by Ivan the Terrible's most
infamous lieutenant - but that didn't make them close. When he began talking
to Tatarsky about his favourite theme, geopolitics, Tatarsky said that in
his opinion it consisted mostly of an irresolvable conflict between the
right hemisphere and the left that certain people suffer with from birth.
After that Malyuta began behaving towards him in an unfriendly fashion.
Malyuta was a frightening individual in general. He was a rabid
anti-Semite, not because he had any reason to dislike Jews, but because he
tried as hard as he could to maintain the image of a patriot, logically
assuming there was nothing else a man called Malyuta could do with his life.
All the descriptions of the world Malyuta encountered in the analytical
tabloids were in agreement that anti-Semitism was an indispensable element
of the patriotic image. The result was that, following long efforts to mould
his own image, Malyuta had come to resemble most of all a villain from Bin
Laden's gang in a stupid low-budget action movie, which started Tatarsky
wondering whether these low-budget action movies were quite so stupid after
all, if they were capable of transforming reality after their own image.
When they were introduced, Tatarsky and Khanin's other two employees
exchanged folders of their work; it was a bit like the mutual positioning of
dogs sniffing each other's ass the first time they meet. Leafing through the
works in Ma-lyuta's folder, Tatarsky several times found himself shuddering
in horror. The very same future he had playfully described in his concept
for Sprite (the folk-costume image of the pseudo-Slavonic aesthetic, visible
ever more clearly through the dark, swirling smoke of a military coup) was
present in full-blown form in these sheets typed with carbon paper. Tatarsky
was particularly badly shaken by the scenario for a Harley-Davidson clip:
A street in a small Russian town. In the foreground a rather blurred,
out-of-focus motorcycle, looming over the viewer. In the distance is a
church; the bell is ringing. The service has only just finished and people
are walking down along the street. Among the passers-by are two young men
wearing red Russian shirts outside their trousers - they could be cadets
from military college on holiday. Close-up: each of them is carrying a
sunflower in his hands. Close-up: a mouth spitting out a husk. Close-up:
foreground - the handlebars and petrol tank of the motorcycle, behind it -
our heroes, gazing obsessively at the motorcycle. Close-up: fingers breaking
seeds out of a sunflower. Close-up: the two heroes exchange glances, one
says to the other:
'Sergeant in our platoon was called Harley. A real bull of a man. But
he took to the drink.'
'Why'd he do that?'
'You know. No one gives a Russian a chance these days.'
Next frame - a HassidicJew of massive proportions comes out of the door
of a house wearing a black leather jacket and a black wide-brimmed hat.
Beside him our two heroes appear skinny and puny -- they involuntarily take
a step backwards. The Jew gets on to the motorcycle, starts it up with a
roar, and a few seconds later has disappeared from view - all that's left is
a blue haze of petrol smoke. Our two heroes exchange glances again. The one
who recalled the sergeant spits out a husk and says with a sigh:
'Just how long can the Davidsons keep riding the Harley s? Russia,
awake!'
(Or: 'World history. Harley-Davidson'. A possible softer version of the
slogan: 'The Harley motorcycle. Not to say Davidson's.')
At first Tatarsky decided it must be a parody, and only after reading
Malyuta's other texts did he realise that for Ma-lyuta sunflowers and
sunflower-seed husks were positive aesthetic characteristics. Having been
convinced by the analytical tabloids that sunflower seeds were inseparably
fused with the image of a patriot, Malyuta had cultivated his love of them
as dedicatedly and resolutely as he cultivated his anti-Semitism.
The second copywriter, Seryozha, would leaf for hours at a time through
Western magazines, translating advertising slogans with a dictionary, on the
assumption that what worked for a vacuum cleaner in one hemisphere might
well do the job for a wall-clock ticking away in the other. In his good
English he would spend hours interrogating his cocaine dealer, a Pakistani
by the name of Ali, about the cultural codes and passwords to which Western
advertising made reference. Ali had lived for a long time in Los Angeles and
even if he couldn't provide explanations for the most obscure elements of
obscurity, he could at least lie convincingly about what he didn't
understand. Perhaps it was Seryozha's intimate familiarity with advertising
theory and Western culture in general that made him think so highly of the
first job Tatarsky based on the secret wow-technology imparted by
commendante Che during the seance. It was an advert for a tourist firm
organising tours to Acapulco. The slogan was:
WOW! ACAPULYPSE NOW!
'Right on!' Seryozha said curtly, and shook Tatarsky by the hand.
Tatarsky in turn was quite genuinely delighted by one of Seryozha's
early works, which the author himself regarded as a failure:
No, you're not a sailor any more... Your friends will reproach you for
your indifference. But you will only smile in reply - you never really were
a sailor anyway. All your life you've simply been heading for this safe
haven.
SAFE HAVEN. THE PENSION FUND
Malyuta never touched Western magazines - he only ever read the
tabloids, or The Twilight of the Gods, always with a bookmark in one and the
same place. But soon Tatarsky was astonished to notice that for all their
serious differences in intellectual orientation and personal qualities,
Seryozha and Malyuta were both sunk equally deeply in the bottomless pit of
moutharsing. It was evident in numerous details and traits of behaviour. For
instance, when they spoke to Tatarsky about a certain common acquaintance of
theirs, both of them in turn described him as follows:
'You know,' said Seryozha, 'in psychological terms he's something like
a novice broker who earns six hundred dollars a month, but is counting on
reaching fifteen hundred by the end of the year ...'
'And then,' added Malyuta, raising a finger, 'when he takes his dame
out to Pizza Hut and spends forty dollars on the two of them he thinks it's
a big deal.'
Immediately following this phrase Malyuta was overwhelmed by the
influence of the anal wow-factor: he took out his expensive mobile phone,
twirled it between his fingers and made an entirely unnecessary call.
Apart from all that, Seryozha and Malyuta actually turned out a
remarkably similar product - Tatarsky realised this when he discovered two
works devoted to the same item in their folders.
Two or three weeks before Tatarsky joined the staff, Khanin's office
had submitted a big order to a client. Some shady customers, who urgently
needed to sell a large lot of fake runners, had ordered an advert from
Khanin for Nike -that was the brand their canvas slippers were disguised to
look like. The intention was to off-load the goods at the markets around
Moscow, but the lot was so large that the shady characters, having mumbled a
few incantations over their calculators, had decided to shell out for a
television advert in order to accelerate their turnover. And the kind of ad
they wanted had to be heavy stuff - 'the kind,' as one of them said,
'that'll do their heads in straight off. Khanin submitted two versions,
Seryozha's and Malyuta's. Seryozha, who read at least ten textbooks on
advertising written in English while he was working on the job, produced the
following text:
The project employs an American cultural reference familiar to the
Russian consumer from the mass media - that is, the mass suicide of members
of the occult group Heaven's Gate from San Diego, which vsas intended to
allow them to make the transition to their subtle bodies so that they could
travel to a comet. All those who killed themselves were lying on simple
two-level bunk-beds; the video sequence was shot strictly in black and
white. The faces of the deceased were covered with simple black cloth, and
on their feet they were wearing black Nike runners with a white symbol, the
so-called 'swoosh'. In aesthetic terms the proposed video is based on an
Internet clip devoted to the event - the picture on the television screen
duplicates the screen of a computer monitor, in the centre of which
well-known frames from a CNN report are repeated in sequence. At the end,
when the motionless soles of the runners with the inscription 'Nike' have
been displayed for long enough, the shot shifts to the end-board of a bed
with a sheet of Whatman paper glued to it, on which a 'swoosh' looking like
a comet has been drawn with a black felt-tip pen:
The camera moves lower, and vse see the slogan, written in the same
felt-tip pen:
JUST DO IT.
While Malyuta was working on his scenario he didn't read anything at
all except the gutter tabloids and so-called patriotic newspapers with their
scatologically eschatalogical positioning of events; but he obviously must
have watched a lot of films. His version went like this:
A street in a small Vietnamese village lost deep in the jungle. In the
foreground a typical third-world country Nike workshop - we recognise it
from the sign: NIKE sweatshop No. 1567903. All around there are tall
tropical trees, a section of railway line suspended on the village fence
rings like a bell. Standing in the doorway of the workshop is a Vietnamese
with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, wearing khaki trousers and a black
shirt, which automatically bring to mind the film The Deer Hunter. Close-up:
hands on an automatic rifle. The camera enters the door and we see two rows
of work-tables with workers who are chained in place sitting at them. The
scene brings to mind the galley scene from the film Ben Hur. A// of the
workers are wearing incredibly old, torn and tattered American military
uniforms. They are the last American prisoners of war. On the table in front
of them there are Nike runners in various stages of completion. All of the
prisoners of war have curly black beards and hooked noses. (This last phrase
was written in between the lines in pencil - evidently the inspiration had
struck Malyuta after the text had been printed.) The prisoners of war are
dissatisfied with something - at first they murmur quietly, then they start
banging on the tables with the half-glued runners. There are shouts of:
'We demand a meeting with the American consul!' and, 'We demand a visit
from a UN commissioner!' Suddenly a burst of automatic rounds is fired into
the ceiling, and the noise instantly ceases. The Vietnamese in the black
shirt is standing in the doorway, with a smoking automatic in his hands. The
eyes of everyone in the room are fixed on him. The Vietnamese strokes his
automatic rifle, then jabs his finger in the direc-
/ion of the nearest table with half-finished runners and says in broken
English: 'Just do it!'
Voice-over: 'Nike. Good2, Evi/o.'
Once when he caught Khanin alone in his office, Tatarsky asked: 'Tell
me, this work Malyuta produces - does it ever get
accepted?'
'It does/ said Khanin, putting aside the book he was reading. 'Of
course it does. The runners may be American, but they have to be sold to the
Russian mentality. So it all suits very well. We edit it a bit, of course,
so as not to fall foul of the law.'
'And you say the advertisers like it?'
'The advertisers we have here have to have it explained to them what
they like and what they don't. And anyway, why does any advertiser give us
an ad?'
Tatarsky shrugged.
'No, go on, tell me.'
'To sell product.'
"That's in America - to sell product/
"Then so he can feel like a big-shot.'
"That was three years ago,' Khanin said in a didactic tone. 'Things are
different now. Nowadays the client wants to show the big guys who keep a
careful eye on what's happening on screen and in real life that he can
simply flush a million dollars down the tubes; and for that, the worse his
advert is, the better. The viewer is left with the feeling that the client
and the producers are absolute idiots, but then' - Khanin raised one finger
and his eyes twinkled wisely - 'the signal indicating how much money it
costs reaches the viewer's brain. The final conclusion about the client is
as follows - he may be a total cretin, but his business is doing so well he
can afford to put out any old crap over and over again. And that's the best
kind of advertising there can possibly be. A man like that will get credit
anywhere, no sweat.'
'Complicated,' said Tatarsky.
'Sure it is. There's more to it than reading your Al Rice.'
'And where can you gather such profound insight into life?' asked
Tatarsky.
'From life itself,' Khanin said with feeling.
Tatarsky looked at the book lying on the desk in front of him. It
looked exactly like a Soviet-era secret edition of Dale Carnegie for Central
Committee members - there was a three-digit copy number on the cover and
below that a typed title:
Virtual Business and Communications. There were several bookmarks set
in the book: on one of them Tatarsky read the words: 'Suggest,
schizo-blocks'.
'Is that something to do with computers?' he asked.
Khanin picked up the book and hid it away in the drawer of his desk.
'No,' he replied unwillingly. 'It actually is about virtual business.'
'And what's that?'
'To cut it short,' said Khanin, 'it's business in which the basic goods
traded are space and time.'
'How's that?'
'It's just like things are here in Russia. Look around: the country
hasn't produced anything for ages. Have you done a single advertising
project for a product produced here?'
'I can't recall one,' Tatarsky replied. 'Hang on, though, there was one
- for Kalashnikov. But you could call that an image ad.'
'There, you see,' said Khanin. 'What's the most important feature of
the Russian economic miracle? Its most important feature is that the economy
just keeps on sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, while business keeps
on growing stronger and expanding into the international arena. Now try
this: what do the people you see all around you trade in?'
'What?'
"Things that are absolutely non-material. Air time and advertising
space - in the newspapers or out on the street. But time in itself can't be
air time, just as space in itself can't be advertising space. The first
person who managed to unite time and space via the fourth dimension was the
physicist Einstein. He had this theory of relativity - maybe you've heard of
it. Soviet power did it as well, only via a paradox - you know that. They
lined up the guys in the camps, gave them shovels and told them to dig a
trench from the fence as far as lunchtime. But
now it's very easily done - one minute of prime air time costs the same
as a two-column colour ad in a major magazine.' 'Then that means the fourth
dimension is money?' asked Tatarsky.
Khanin nodded.
'Not only that/ he said, 'from the point of view of monetarist
phenomenology, it is the substance from which the world is constructed.
There was an American philosopher called Robert Pirsig who believed that the
world consists of moral values; but that was just the way things could seem
in the sixties - you know, the Beatles, LSD, all that stuff. A lot more has
become clear since then. Have you heard about the cosmonauts' strike?'
'I think I heard something,' Tatarsky answered, vaguely recalling some
newspaper article.
'Our cosmonauts get twenty to thirty thousand dollars a flight. The
Americans get two hundred or three hundred thousand. So our guys said:
"We're not going to fly at thirty grand; we want to fly at three hundred
grand too." What does that mean? It means they're not really flying towards
the twinkling points of light of those unknown stars, but towards absolutely
specific sums of hard currency. Such is the nature of the cosmos. And the
non-linear nature of time and space is expressed in the fact that we and the
Americans bum equal amounts of fuel and fly equal numbers of kilometres in
order to arrive at absolutely different amounts of money. That is one of the
fundamental secrets of the Universe ...'
Khanin suddenly broke off and began to light a cigarette, clearly
winding up the conversation. 'Now go and get some work done,' he said.
'Can I read the book some time?' Tatarsky asked, nodding towards the
desk where Khanin had hidden his secret text. 'For my general development?'
'All in good time,' said Khanin, giving him a sweet smile.
Even without any secret handbooks Tatarsky was already beginning to
find his bearings in the commercial relations of the age of virtual
business. As he was quick to realise from observing the behaviour of his
colleagues at work, the basis of these relations was so-called 'black PR',
or as Khanin pronounced it in full: 'black public relations'. The first time
Tatarsky heard the words the bard of the Literary Institute was resurrected
briefly in his soul, intoning in sombre tones:
'Black public relations, uniting all nations . . .' But there wasn't
actually any real romantic feeling behind this abbreviation, and it was
entirely devoid of the baggage of negative connotations ascribed to it by
those who use the phrase 'black PR' to mean an attack mounted via the mass
media.
It was actually quite the opposite - advertising, like other forms of
human activity in the vast, cold expanses of Russia, was inextricably
intertwined with the 'black cash flow', which in practical terms meant two
things. Firstly, journalists were quite willing to deceive their newspapers
and magazines by extracting black cash from anyone who more or less
naturally fell within their field of attention - and it wasn't just
restaurant-owners who wanted to be compared with Maxim's who had to pay, but
writers who wanted to be compared with Marquez, which meant that the
boundary between literary and restaurant criticism grew ever finer and more
arbitrary. Secondly, copywriters took pleasure in deceiving their agencies
by finding a client through them and then concluding an unwritten deal with
him behind their bosses' backs. After he'd taken a good look around,
Tatarsky took a cautious first step on to this fruitful ground, where he met
with immediate success: he managed to sell his slightly modified project for
Finlandia vodka (the new slogan was: 'Reincarnation Now!').
Usually he dealt with lowly cogs in the PR machinery, but this time he
was summoned to the owner of the firm that intended to take on the
dealership for Finlandia, who was a dour and serious-minded youth. Having
read several times through the two pages Tatarsky had brought, he chuckled,
thought for a moment, rang his secretary and asked her to prepare the
paperwork. Half an hour later a stunned Tatarsky emerged on to the street,
carrying in his inside pocket an envelope containing two and a half thousand
dollars and a contract for the full and unconditional transfer of all rights
to the young man's company.
For those changed times this was an absolutely fantastic haul.
But a couple of months later Tatarsky accidentally discovered an
incredibly insulting little detail: it turned out Finlan-dia's future
distributor hadn't paid up because he'd decided to use his text in his
advertising, but because he was afraid Tatarsky might sell it to Absolut or
Smimoff dealers. Tatarsky even started to write a sonnet dedicated to this
event, but after a couple of minutes discarded it as non-functional. In
general, it was hard to believe that not so very long ago he had been wont
to spend so much time searching for meaningless rhymes that had long since
been abandoned by the poetry of the market democracies. It seemed simply
inconceivable that only a few short years ago life had been so gentle and
undemanding that he could waste entire kilowatts of mental energy in
dead-end circuits of his brain that never paid back the investment.
Tatarsky suspected that black PR was a more widespread and significant
phenomenon than just a means of survival for certain protein-based
life-forms in the era of the mass media; but he couldn't connect up his
heterogeneous suspicions concerning the true nature of the phenomenon to
form a clear and unified understanding. There was something missing.
'Public relations are people's relations with each other,' he jotted
down in confused fashion in his notebook.
People want to earn money in order to gain freedom, or at least a
breathing space from their interminable suffering. And we copywriters
manipulate reality in front of people's eyes so that freedom comes to be
symbolised by an iron, or a sanitary towel with wings, or lemonade. That's
what they pay us for. We pawn this stuff of f on them from the screen, and
then they pawn it off on each other, and on us who write the stuff, and it's
like radioactive contamination, when it makes no difference any longer who
exploded the bomb. Everyone tries to show everyone else that they've already
achieved freedom, and as a result, while we pretend to socialise and be
friendly, all we really do is keep pawning each other off with all sorts of
jackets, mobile phones and cars. It's a closed circle. And this closed
circle is called black PR.
Tatarsky became so absorbed in his thoughts on the nature of this
phenomenon that he wasn't in the least surprised when one day Khanin stopped
him in the corridor, grabbed hold of one of his buttons and said: 'I see you
know all there is to know about black PR.'
'Almost,' Tatarsky answered automatically, because he'd just been
thinking about the topic. "There's just some central element that's still
missing.'
'I'll tell you what it is. What's missing is the understanding that
black public relations only exist in theory. What happens in real life is
grey PR.'
'That's interesting,' said Tatarsky enthusiastically, 'very
interesting! Quite astounding! But what does it mean in practical terms?'
'In practical terms it means you have to shell out.'
Tatarsky started. The fog of thoughts clouding his mind was dispersed
in an instant to be replaced by a terrifying clarity.
'How d'you mean?' he asked feebly.
Khanin took him by the arm and led him along the corridor.
'Did you take delivery of two grand from Finlandia?' he asked.
'Yes,' Tatarsky replied uncertainly.
Khanin bent the middle and fourth fingers of his hand over slightly -
far enough to suggest that he was about to shift to the hand-gestures
characteristic of New Russian thugs, but not too far, so the situation still
seemed to be peaceful.
'Now remember this,' he said quietly. 'As long as you work here, you
work to me. There's no other way to figure it and make sense. So the figures
say one grand of greenbacks is mine. Or were you thinking of setting up on
your own?'
'!,!... I'd be delighted . ..' Tatarsky stammered in a state of shock.
'That is, of course I don't want to... That is, I do. I wanted to split it;
I just didn't know how to bring up the subject.'
'No need to be shy about it. Someone might get the wrong idea. You know
what? Why don't you come round to my place this evening. We can have a drink
and a talk. And you can drop in the mazuma while you're at it.'
Khanin lived in a large, newly refurbished flat, in which Tatarsky was
astonished by the patterned oak doors with gold locks - what astonished him
about them was the fact that the wood had already cracked and the gaps in
the panels had been filled in a slapdash fashion with mastic. Khanin was
already drunk when he greeted his guest. He was in an excellent mood - when
Tatarsky held out the envelope to him from the doorway, Khanin knitted his
brows and waved it aside, as though offended at such a brusque businesslike
entrance, but at the extreme extent of the gesture he lifted the envelope
out of Tatarsky's fingers and immediately tucked it away somewhere.
'Let's go,' he said, 'Liza's cooked something.'
Liza proved to be a tall woman with a face red from some kind of
cosmetic scrubbing. She fed Tatarsky stuffed cabbage leaves, which he had
hated ever since he was a small child. In order to overcome his revulsion he
drank a lot of vodka, and by the time the dessert arrived he had almost
reached Khanin's state of intoxication, which meant socialising went a lot
smoother.
'What's that you have up there?' Tatarsky asked, nodding in the
direction of the wall.
There was a reproduction of a Stalinist poster hanging at the spot he
indicated: ponderous red banners with yellow tassels and the blue-looking
Moscow university building visible in the gaps between them. The poster was
obviously twenty years or thereabouts older than Tatarsky, but the print was
absolutely fresh.
'That? A young guy who used to work for us before you did that on the
computer,' answered Khanin. 'You see, there used to be a hammer and sickle
there, and a star, but he took them out and put in Coca-Cola and Coke
instead.'
'Yes, I see,' Tatarsky said, amazed. 'But you can't see it at first -
they're exactly the same yellow colour.'
'If you look closely you'll see it. I used to have the poster over my
desk, but the other guys started getting awkward about it. Malyuta took
offence for the flag and Seryozha took offence for Coca-Cola. In the end I
had to bring it home.'
'Malyuta took offence?' Tatarsky asked in surprise 'Have you seen what
he put up over his own desk yesterday?'
'Not yet.'
'"Every pogrom has its programme, every brand has its bend".'
'So what?'
Tatarsky suddenly realised that Khanin really didn't see anything
strange in such sentiments. And what was more, he suddenly stopped seeing
anything strange in them himself.
'I didn't understand what it meant: "Every brand has its bend".'
'Bend. That's the way we translate the expression "brand essence".
That's to say, the concentrated expression of a comprehensive image policy.
For instance, the Marlboro bend or essence is a country of real men. The
Parliament essence is jazz, and so on. You mean you didn't know that?'
'No, of course I knew that. What d'you take me for? It's just a very
odd kind of translation.'
'What's to be done about it?' said Khanin. "This is Asia.'
Tatarsky got up from the table. 'Where's your toilet,' he asked.
'First door after the kitchen.'
When he stepped into the toilet, Tatarsky's gaze was confronted by a
photograph of a diamond necklace with the text:
'De Beers. Diamonds are for ever', hanging on the wall facing the door.
This rather threw him off balance and for several seconds he couldn't recall
why he was there. When he remembered, he tore off a sheet of toilet paper
and wrote on it:
i) Brand essence (bend). Include in all concepts in place of
'psychological crystallisation'.
•2.) Parliament with tanks on the bridge. Instead of 'the smoke of the
Motherland'' - 'All that jazz'.
Tucking the piece of paper into his breast pocket and flushing the
toilet conspiratorially, he went back to the kitchen and walked right up to
the Coca-Cola red banners.
'It's quite incredible,' he said. 'Looks like it said "Coke" on this
flag from the very beginning.'
'So what did you expect? What's so surprising about that? D'you know
what the Spanish for "advertising" is?' Khanin hiccupped: '"Propaganda." So
you and me are ideological workers, if you hadn't realised it yet.
Propagandists and agitators. I used to work in ideology, as it happens. At
Komsomol Central Committee level. All my friends are bankers now; I'm the
only one ... I tell you, I didn't have to reconstruct myself at all. It used
to be: "The individual is nothing, the collective is everything/' and now
it's: "Image is nothing, thirst is everything." Agitprop's immortal. It's
only the words that change.'
Tatarsky felt an uneasy presentiment.
'Listen/ he said, 'you didn't happen to speak at party personnel
meetings outside Moscow, did you?'
'Yes, I did,' said Khanin. 'Why?'
'In Firsanovka?'
'Yes, in Firsanovka.'
'So that's it,' said Tatarsky, gulping down his vodka. 'All the time I
had this feeling your face was familiar, but I couldn't remember where I'd
seen it. Only you didn't have a beard then.'
'You mean you used to go to Firsanovka too?' Khanin asked in delighted
surprise.
'Only once,' Tatarsky answered. 'You came out on the platform with such
a hangover I thought you were going to puke the moment you opened your mouth
...'
'Hey, take it easy in front of the wife . . . Although you're right:
the main reason we went out there was to drink. Golden days!'
'And so what happened? You came out with this great speech,' Tatarsky
continued. 'I was studying at the Literary Institute at the time, and it
really upset me. I felt jealous, because I realised I would never learn to
manipulate words like that. No sense to it whatsoever, it just blew me away;
all at once everything was absolutely clear. That's to say, what the speaker
- you - was trying to say wasn't clear, because he didn't really want to say
anything, but everything in life was clear. I suppose that's what those
party personnel meetings were held for. I sat down to write a sonnet that
evening, but I just got drunk instead.'
'What was I speaking about, d'you remember?' Khanin asked. He obviously
found reminiscing pleasant.
'Something or other to do with the twenty-seventh Party congress and
its significance.'
Khanin cleared his throat: 'I think there is no need to explain to you
Komsomol activists,' he said in a loud, well-trained voice, 'why the
decision of our Party's twenty-seventh congress are regarded as not merely
significant, but epoch-making. Nonetheless, the methodological distinction
between these two concepts occasions misunderstanding even among
propagandists and agitators. After all, the propagandists and agitators are
the builders of our tomorrow, and they should not be unclear in any way
about the plan for the future that they have to build ...'
He hiccupped loudly and lost the thread of his speech.
'That's it, that's it,' said Tatarsky. 'I recognise you now all right.
The most amazing thing is that you actually did spend an entire hour
explaining the methodological difference between "significant" and
"epoch-making", and I understood every single sentence perfectly. But if I
tried to understand any two sentences together, it was like running my head
against a brick wall... There was just no way. And there was no way I could
repeat it in my own words. But then, on the other hand . . . What's "Just do
it" supposed to mean? And what's the methodological difference between "Just
do it" and "Just be"?'
'Exactly what I'm getting at,' said Khanin, pouring the vodka. "S
exactly the same.'
'What are you men doing drinking away like that?' put in Liza, speaking
for the first time. 'You might at least propose a toast.'
'OK, let's have a toast,' said Khanin, and he hiccupped again. 'Only,
you know, one that's not only significant, but epoch-making as well.
Komsomol member to party member, you follow?'
Tatarsky held on to the table as he rose to his feet. He looked at the
poster and thought for a second before raising his glass and speaking:
'Comrades! Let us drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a flood of images!'
CHAPTER 9. The Babylonian Stamp
On arriving home, Tatarsky felt the kind of energy rush he hadn't
experienced in ages. Khanin's metamorphosis had positioned the entire recent
past in such a strange perspective it simply had to be followed by something
miraculous. Pondering on what he might amuse himself with, Tatarsky strode
restively around the flat several times until he remembered the acid tab he
had bought in the Poor Folk bar. It was still lying in the drawer of the
desk - in all that time he'd not had any reason to swallow it, and anyway
he'd been afraid.
He went over to the desk, took the lilac-coloured stamp out of the
drawer and looked at it carefully. The face with the pointed beard smirked
up at him; the stranger was wearing an odd kind of hat, something between a
helmet and a dunce's cap with a very narrow brim. 'Wears a pointed cap,'
thought Tatarsky; 'probably a jester, then. That means it'll be fun.'
Without giving it any more thought, he tossed the tab into his mouth, ground
it up between his teeth and swallowed down the small ball of soft fibres.
Then he lay down on the divan and waited.
He was soon bored just lying there. He got up, lit a cigarette and
walked around the flat again. Reaching the closet, he remembered that since
his adventure in the forest outside Moscow he hadn't taken another look into
the 'Tikhamat-2' folder. It was a classic case of displacement: not once had
he recalled that he wanted to finish reading the materials in the file,
although, on the other hand, he didn't really seem to have forgotten it
either. It had been exactly the same story with the acid tab, as though both
of these items had been reserved for that special occasion which, in the
course of normal life, never arrives. Tatarsky took down the folder from the
top shelf and went back into the room. There were a lot of photographs
inside, glued to the pages. One of them fell out as soon as he opened the
folder, and he picked it up from the floor.
The photo showed a fragment of a bas-relief - a section of sky with
large stars carved into it. In the lower part of the photograph there were
two upraised arms, cut off by the edge of the shot. These were genuine stars
of heaven - ancient, immense and alive. Stars like that had long ago ceased
to shine for the living and continued to exist only for stone heroes in
antediluvian sculptures. But then, thought Tatarsky, the stars themselves
can hardly have changed since then - it's people who've changed. Each star
consisted of a central circle and pointed rays with bundles of sinuous
parallel lines set between them.
Tatarsky noticed there were almost invisible little red and green veins
twinkling around the lines, as though he was watching a badly adjusted
computer monitor. The shiny surface of the photograph took on a brilliant
rainbow gleam and its glimmering began to occupy more of his attention than
the actual image. 'It's started,' thought Tatarsky. 'Now that's really
quick...'
Finding the page the photograph had come unstuck from, he ran his
tongue across the dried-up spot of casein glue and set it back in its place.
Then he carefully turned over the page and smoothed it down with the palm of
his hand, so the photograph would stick properly. Glancing at the next
photo, he almost dropped the folder on the floor.
The photograp