the  absurdity of these people constantly stopping  cars  on
the roads and demanding money. But the bodyguards'  black uniform was a real
mind-blower: the designer  (Morkovin said it was Yudashkin)  had brilliantly
combined  the  aesthetic  of the SS <i>Sonderkomande,</i> motifs from  anti-utopian
films about the totalitarian society of the future and nostalgic gay fashion
themes  from the  Freddie  Mercury period.  The  padded  shoulders, the deep
decollage  on  the chest and the Rabelaisian  codpiece blended together in a
heady cocktail that made you want to  steer clear of  anybody wearing such a
uniform. The message was crystal clear even to a total cretin.
     In the lift Morkovin took out a small key, inserted it into  a hole  on
the control panel and pressed the top button.
     'And  another thing,' he said, turning to face the mirror and smoothing
down his hair: 'don't worry about looking stupid. In fact, be careful not to
seem too smart.' 'Why?'
     'Because if you do, a certain question will  arise: if you're so smart,
how come you're looking for a job instead of hiring people yourself?'
     'Logical,' said  Tatarsky.  'And  pile on the cynicism.'  "That's  easy
enough.'
     The doors of  the lift opened to  reveal a corridor  carpeted in a grey
runner with yellow  stars. Tatarsky  remembered  from a photograph that  the
sidewalk on some  boulevard in Los  Angeles looked like  that.  The corridor
ended in  a black door with no nameplate, with a small  TV camera set  above
it. Morkovin walked to the middle of the corridor, took his phone out of his
pocket  and  entered  a  number. Two or  three  minutes passed  in  silence.
Morkovin waited  patiently. Finally  someone at  the other  end of  the line
answered.
     'Cheers,' said Morkovin. 'It's me. Yes, I've brought him. Here he is.'
     Morkovin turned and beckoned Tatarsky towards him from where he'd  been
standing timidly  by the doors of  the lift.  Tatarsky walked up to  him and
raised his eyes  dog-like to the camera lens. The person talking to Morkovin
must have said something funny, because  Morkovin suddenly giggled and shook
Tatarsky by the shoulder. "That's OK,' he said,  'we'll soon  take  off  the
rough edges.' A lock clicked open and Morkovin  pushed Tatarsky forward. The
door immediately closed behind them. They were in an entrance-hall where  an
antique bronze mirror with a handle hung on the wall below a golden Venetian
carnival  mask of  astounding  beauty. 'I've  seen  them  before somewhere,'
Tatarsky thought, 'a mask and a  mirror.  Or have  I? My mind's been  on the
blink all  day today  . .  .' Below the  mask there was  a desk  and sitting
behind the desk was a secretary of cold avian beauty.
     'Hello, Alia,' said Morkovin.
     The secretary flapped her hand at him and pressed a button on her desk.
There was the sound of a discreet buzzer and the tall sound-proofed door  at
the other end of the hall opened.
     For a  moment Tatarsky thought the  spacious office  with  blinds drawn
over  the windows was empty. At least there was no on sitting at the immense
desk with the gleaming metal supports. Above  the  desk, at the spot where a
portrait of  the leader would have hung in Soviet times, there was a picture
in a heavy round frame. The coloured rectangle set  at the centre of a white
field  was hard  to make out from  the door, but Tatarsky recognised it from
its colours  - he had one  just  like it  on his  baseball  shirt. It  was a
standard label with the American flag and the words:  'Made  in the USA. One
size fits all'.  Mounted on another wall was an  uncompromising installation
consisting of a line of fifteen tin cans with a portrait of Andy Warhol on a
typical salt-pork label.
     Tatarsky lowered his gaze. The floor was covered with a genuine Persian
carpet with an  incredibly  beautiful design that looked like  the  patterns
he'd seen some time in his childhood in an ancient  edition of  <i>The Thousand
and  One  Nights.</i>  Following the  lines of the design, Tatarsky's  eyes slid
along  a  capricious  spiral  to  the  centre  of  the  carpet,  where  they
encountered the occupant of the office.
     He was  a man still young, a  stocky, overweight  individual  with  the
remnants of a head of red hair combed backwards and a rather  pleasant face,
and he was lying on the carpet  in a totally relaxed posture. He was hard to
spot  because  the hue of  his  clothes  blended almost  perfectly  into the
carpet.  He was wearing a 'pleb's orgasm' jacket  - neither business uniform
nor  pyjamas,  but something quite  excessively  camivalesque,  the  kind of
outfit in which particularly calculating businessmen  attire themselves when
they want to make their partners feel things are going so well for them they
don't have to bother about business at all. A bright-coloured retro tie with
a lecherous monkey perched on a palm  tree spilled out of his jacket and ran
across the carpet like a startling pink tongue.
     However, it wasn't the young man's outfit that astonished Tatarsky, but
something else:  he knew his face.  In fact  he knew it very  well, although
he'd  never met him. He'd  seen that face in a hundred short television news
reports and advertising clips, usually playing some secondary  part; but who
the man was he  had no idea.  The last time it had happened  was the evening
before, when Tatarsky had been distractedly watching TV as he tried to think
about the Russian  idea. The office's owner had appeared in an advertisement
for some tablets or  other -  he was dressed  in a white doctor's coat and a
cap with a red cross,  and a blonde beard and moustache had been glued on to
his broad face, making him appear like a good-natured young Trotsky. Sitting
in  a  kitchen surrounded  by  a family in  the grip  of an incomprehensible
euphoria, he  had  said  in a didactic tone:  'All these  adverts can easily
leave you feeling all at sea. And often they're not even honest. It's not so
bad if you make a mistake buying a saucepan or a washing powder, but when it
comes to  medicines, you're taking risks with your  health. So  who will you
believe -  the heartless advertising or your  own family doctor? Of  course!
The answer's obvious! Nobody but your own family doctor, who recommends that
you take Sunrise pills!'
     'So that's it,' thought Tatarsky, 'he's our family doctor.'
     In the meantime the family doctor had  raised one hand in a  gesture of
greeting, and Tatarsky noticed he was holding a short plastic straw.
     'Join the club,' he said in a dull voice.
     'We're old members,' Morkovin replied.
     Morkovin's response  was evidently the usual one in this place, because
the owner of the office nodded his head indulgently.
     Morkovin took two straws  from the  table, handed  one  to Tatarsky and
then lay down on the  carpet. Tatarsky followed his example. Once seated  on
the  carpet he looked inquiringly  at the owner  of  the office, who  smiled
sweetly in  reply.  Tatarsky noticed  he had a watch  on  his wrist  with  a
bracelet made of unusual links  of  different sizes.  The  winding knob  was
decorated with a small  diamond, and there  were three  diamond spirals  set
round  the face of the watch. Tatarsky recalled an editorial about expensive
watches he'd read in some radical youth magazine and he gulped respectfully.
The owner of the office noticed his gaze and looked at his watch.
     'You like it?' he asked.
     'Of course,' said Tatarsky. 'A Piaget Possession,  if I'm not mistaken?
I think it costs seventy thousand?'
     'Piaget Possession?' The young man glanced at the dial. 'Yes, so it is.
I don't know how much it cost.'
     Morkovin gave Tatarsky a sideways glance.
     'There's nothing  that  identifies  someone  as belonging  to the lower
classes of society  so clearly  as knowing  all about expensive  watches and
cars. Babe,' he said.
     Tatarsky blushed and lowered his eyes.
     The section of carpet immediately in front of his face was covered in a
pattern  depicting fantastic  flowers with long  petals of  various colours.
Tatarsky  noticed that the nap of the carpet was thickly covered with minute
white pellets  like  pollen,  as though with frost.  He  glanced  across  at
Morkovin. Morkovin  stuck his small tube  into one nostril, closed the other
nostril with one finger and ran the free end of the tube across the petal of
a fantastical violet daisy. Tatarsky finally got the idea.
     For several minutes the  silence in the  room was  broken only  by  the
sound of intense snorting. Eventually the owner of the office raised himself
up on one elbow. 'Well?' he asked, looking at Tatarsky.
     Tatarsky  tore  himself  away from  the pale-purple rose  that  he  was
absorbed in processing. His resentment had completely evaporated.
     'Excellent,' he said. 'Simply excellent!'
     He found talking  easy and pleasurable;  he  might have  felt a certain
constraint when he  entered  this huge office,  but now  it  had disappeared
without trace. The  cocaine was  the  real  thing,  and  hardly cut at all -
except perhaps for the very slightest aftertaste of aspirin.
     'One thing I don't understand, though,' Tatarsky continued, 'is why all
this fancy technology? It's all very elegant, but isn't it a bit unusual!'
     Morkovin and the owner of the office exchanged glances.
     'Didn't you see the sign on our premises?' the owner asked:
     'The Institute of Apiculture?'
     'Yes,' said Tatarsky.
     'Well then. Here we are, making like bees.'
     All three of  them laughed, and they laughed for a long tune, even when
the reason for laughing had been forgotten.
     Finally the  fit  of  merriment passed.  The owner of the office looked
around as though  trying to recall what  he  was  there  for,  and evidently
remembered. 'OK,' he said, 'let's get down to business. Morky, you wait with
Alia. I'll have a word with the man.'
     Morkovin  hurriedly sniffed a couple of paradisaical cornflowers, stood
up and left the room. The owner of the  office  got to his  feet, stretched,
walked round the desk and sat down in the armchair.
     'Have a seat,' he said.
     Tatarsky sat in the armchair facing the desk. It was very soft, and  so
low  that he fell into  it like falling into a snowdrift. When he looked up,
Tatarsky  was  struck dumb.  The  table  towered over him like a tank over a
trench, and  the  resemblance was  quite  clearly not  accidental. The  twin
supports decorated with plates of embossed  nickel looked exactly like broad
caterpillar  tracks, and the picture in the round frame hanging on  the wall
was now exactly behind the head of the office's owner,  so it looked  like a
trapdoor  from  which  he had just emerged  -  the resemblance  was  further
reinforced by  the fact that only his head and shoulders could be seen above
the desk. He savoured the effect for a few seconds, then he rose, leaned out
across the desk and offered Tatarsky his hand:
     'Leonid Azadovsky.'
     'Vladimir Tatarsky,' said  Tatarsky, rising slightly as he squeezed the
plump,  limp  hand.  Tou're   no  Vladimir;  you're  called  Babylon,'  said
Azadovsky.
     'I know all about it. And I'm not Leonid. My old man was a  wanker too.
Know what he called  me? Legion. He probably  didn't even know what the word
means. It used to  make me miserable too, at  first. Then I  found out there
was something about me in the Bible, so I felt better about it. OK then ...'
     Azadovsky rustled the papers scattered around on his desk.
     'Now what have we here . . . Aha. I've had a look at your  work,  and I
liked  it. Good  stuff. We need people like you. Only in  a few places ... I
don't  completely believe  it.  here,  for  instance;  you  write about  the
"collective unconscious". Do you actually know what that is?'
     Tatarsky shuffled his fingers as he tried to find the words.
     'At the unconscious collective level,' he answered.
     'Aren't you afraid someone might turn up who knows exactly what it is?'
     Tatarsky  twitched his  nose.  'No, Mr Azadovsky,'  he said,  'I'm  not
afraid of that; and the  reason I'm not is that for a long time now everyone
who knows  what the "collective unconscious" is  has been selling cigarettes
outside the metro. One way  or another, I mean. I  used  to  sell cigarettes
outside the metro myself. I went into advertising because I was sick of it.'
     Azadovsky said nothing  for a few seconds while he  thought  over  what
he'd just heard. Then he chuckled.
     'Is there anything at all you believe in?' he asked.
     'No,' said Tatarsky.
     'Well, that's  good,' said Azadovsky,  taking  another  look  into  the
papers,  this time  at  some  form  with  columns  and sections. 'OK  .  . .
Political views - what's this we have here? It says "upper left" in English.
I  don't get  it. What a fucking  pain  - soon  every form and  document  we
have'll be written in English. So what are your political views?'
     'Left of right centrists,' Tatarsky replied.
     'And more specifically?'
     'More specifically ... Let's just say I like it when life has big tits,
but  I'm  not  in  the  slightest  bit  excited  by  the  so-called  Kantian
tit-in-itself, no matter how much milk there might be splashing about in it.
That's what makes me different from selfless idealists like Gaidar ...'
     The phone rang and Azadovksy held up his hand to stop the conversation.
He picked up the receiver and listened for a few minutes, his face gradually
hardening into a grimace of loathing.
     'So keep looking/ he barked, dropped the receiver on to its cradle  and
turned  towards Tatarsky. 'What was  that about Gaidar? Only keep it  short,
they'll be ringing again any minute/
     'To cut it  short,'  said  Tatarsky,  'I couldn't  give a toss for  any
Kantian  tit-in-itself  with all its  categorical  imperatives. On  the  tit
market the only tit that  gives  me a buzz is  the  Feuerbachian tit-for-us.
That's the way I see the situation.'
     "That's what  I think  too/Azadovksy said in all seriousness.  'Even if
it's not so big, so long as it's Feuerbachian ...'
     The phone rang again. Azadovsky picked up the receiver and listened for
a while, and his face blossomed into a broad smile.
     'Now that's what  I wanted  to hear! And the control shot? Great!  Good
going!'
     The news was obviously very good: Azadovsky stood up,  rubbed his hands
together, walked jauntily  over to a cupboard set  in the  wall, took out  a
large cage in which something started dashing about  furiously,  and carried
it over to the  desk. The cage  was  old, with traces of rust, and it looked
like the skeleton of a lampshade.
     'What's that?' asked Tatarsky.
     'Rostropovich/ replied Azadovsky.
     He opened  the little door, and a small white hamster emerged  from the
cage on to the desk. Casting a glance at Tatarsky from its  little red eyes,
it buried its face in its paws and began rubbing its  nose. Azadovsky sighed
sweetly, took something like a  toolbag out of  the  desk, opened it and set
out  a bottle  of Japanese glue, a pair of tweezers and  a small tin on  the
desktop.
     'Hold him,' he ordered. 'Don't be afraid, he won't bite.'
     'How should I hold him?' Tatarsky asked, rising from his armchair.
     Take hold of his paws and  pull them apart.  Like  a little Jesus. Aha,
that's right.'
     Tatarsky noticed there were several small  discs of  metal with toothed
edges on the hamster's chest, looking like  watch cog-wheels. When he looked
closer he  saw they were tiny  medals made with remarkable skill  -  he even
thought he could see tiny precious stones gleaming in them, accentuating the
similarity to  parts of a watch.  He  didn't recognise a single one  of  the
medals - they clearly belonged to a different era,  and they reminded him of
the dress  uniform  regalia  of  a general  from the times of Catherine  the
Great.
     'Who gave him those?' he asked.
     'Who could give them to him, if not me?'  Azadovsky chanted, extracting
a short little ribbon of blue watered silk from the tin. 'Hold him tighter.'
     He  squeezed a  drop of glue out on to a sheet of paper and deftly  ran
the ribbon across it before applying it to the hamster's belly.
     'Oh,' said Tatarsky, 'I think he's ...'
     'He's shit himself,' Azadovsky confirmed,  dipping  a diamond snowflake
clasped in the pincers into the glue. 'He's so happy. Hup ...'
     Tossing the tweezers down  on the desk, he leaned down over the hamster
and blew hard several times on his chest.
     'Dries instantly,' he announced. 'You can let him go.'
     The hamster began running fussily around the table - he would run up to
the edge, lower  his  nose over it as  though he was trying to make  out the
floor far below, twitch it rapidly and then set  off  for the opposite edge,
where the same procedure was repeated.
     'What did he get the medal for?' Tatarsky asked.
     'I'm in a good mood. Why, are you jealous?'
     Azadovsky caught the hamster, tossed it back into the cage,  locked the
door and carried it back to the cupboard.
     'Why does he have such a strange name?'
     'You know what,  Babylen,'  said  Azadovsky, sitting back  down in  his
chair, 'Rostropovich could ask you the same thing.'
     Tatarsky  remembered he'd been advised  not to say too much or  ask too
many  questions. Azadovsky put the medals and accessories away  in the desk,
crumpled  up the sheet  of  paper stained with glue and tossed  it  into the
waste bin.
     'To  cut it short,  we're taking  you on  for a trial period  of  three
months/' he said.  'We have our own advertising department now, but we don't
produce so much ourselves;  we're more into coordinating the work of several
of the major agencies. Sort of like we don't play, but we keep score. So for
the  time being  you'll be in the  internal reviews department  on the third
floor  from  the next  entrance. We'll keep an eye on  you and  think things
over,  and  if   you  suit,  we'll  move  you  on  to  something  with  more
responsibility. Have you seen how many floors we have here?'
     'Yes, I have,' said Tatarsky.
     'All right then. The potential for growth is unlimited. Any questions?'
     Tatarsky decided to ask the question that had been tormenting him since
the moment they met.
     'Tell me, Mr Azadovsky, yesterday  I saw this clip  about these pills -
wasn't it you playing the doctor?'
     'Yes, it was,' Azadovsky said drily. 'Is there some law against that?'
     He  looked  away  from Tatarsky,  picked up the  phone and  opened  his
notebook. Tatarsky realised that the audience was over. Shifting uncertainly
from one foot to the other, he glanced at the carpet.
     'D'you think I could ...'
     He  didn't need to finish. Azadovsky smiled,  pulled a straw out of the
vase and tossed it on to the desk.
     'Shit-stupid question,' he said, and began dialling a number.



        CHAPTER 12. Cloud in Pants


     The pivotal element of the office environment was the piercing voice of
the western Ukrainian cook that  emanated from the  small canteen almost all
day long. All  the  other elements of aural reality were  strung on  it like
beads on a  thread:  telephones ringing,  voices, the  fax squeaking and the
printer  humming.  The material  objects and people occupying  the room  all
condensed around this primary reality - or at least  that was the way things
had seemed to Tatarsky for quite a few months now.
     'So  there I am yesterday  driving down Pokrovka,'  a  cigarette critic
who'd just dashed in was telling the secretary in a high, thin tenor, 'and I
brake at the crossroads there for this queue. Beside me there's this Chaika,
and out of it gets this real heavy-looking Chechen, and he looks around like
he's  just shit on everyone from a  great height. He stands there, you know,
like  really getting into it; then suddenly  up pulls  this  real  gen-u-ine
Cadillac, and out gets  this girl in tattered jeans and  runners  and dashes
over to a kiosk to get some Pepsi-Cola. You can just imagine what's going on
with the Chechen! Imagine having to swallow that!'
     'Wow!'  replied  the secretary, without  looking  up from her  computer
keyboard.
     There were talking behind  Tatarsky too, and  very  loudly. One  of his
subordinates, a late-middle-aged  editor and old Communist Party publication
type, was hauling someone over the coals on the speaker-phone in  a rumbling
bass voice. Tatarsky could tell the editor's deafening volume and implacable
heartiness  were intended  for  his ears. This only  irritated  him, and his
sympathy  was   captured  by  the   thin,  sad   voice   replying  from  the
speaker-phone.
     'I corrected one but  not  the other,'  the voice said quietly. "That's
how it happened.'
     'Well, well" growled the editor. 'So what  on earth  do you think about
when you're working? You're  handling  two pieces -  one called "Prisoner of
Conscience" and the other called "Eunuchs of the Harem", right?'
     'Right.'
     'You put headings on the clipboard to change the font, and then on page
thirty-five you find "Prisoner of the Harem", right?'
     'Right.'
     'Then  shouldn't it be obvious enough that on  page seventy-four you're
going to have "Eunuchs of Conscience"? Or are you just a total tosser?'
     'I'm a total tosser,' agreed the sad voice.
     'You're  both  fucking  tossers,' thought  Tatarsky. He'd been  feeling
depressed since the morning -  probably because of the constant  rain.  He'd
been  sitting by the window  and staring at the roofs  of the cars  as  they
ploughed through the streams of  murky water. Old Ladas and Moskviches built
back  in Soviet  times stood  rusting  along  the  edge of the pavement like
garbage the river of time had tossed up on  to its muddy shore. The river of
time itself consisted for the most part of bright-coloured foreign cars with
water spurting up in fountains from under their tyres.
     Lying  on  the desk  in front of Tatarsky  was  a  pack  of  Gold  Yava
cigarettes, the new version of the old Soviet  favourite, set in a cardboard
display frame, and a heap of papers.
     'Just  take  a  Mercedes,  even,' he  thought  feebly. 'A great car, no
denying that. But somehow the way life's arranged round here all  you can do
with it is ride from one heap of shit to another ...'
     He leaned his head against the glass and looked down  at  the car park,
where  he could  see the white roof of the secondhand Mercedes he'd bought a
month earlier that was already starting to  give him trouble. 'Second-hand,'
he thought. 'A good name for a prosthesis shop ...'
     He sighed  and mentally switched  round  the  <i>'c' and</i>  the 'd' to  make
'Merdeces'.
     'But  it  doesn't  really matter,' his  train  of  thought ploughed  on
wearily, 'because if you keep riding around in these  heaps long enough, you
turn into such  a  shit yourself  that nothing around you leaves any kind of
mark on  you. Of course, you  don't turn into a shit just because you  buy a
Mercedes-6oo.  It's the other way round:  the reason you can afford to buy a
Mercedes-6oo is that you turn into a shit...'
     He looked out of the window again and jotted down: 'Merde-SS.
     In the sense of the occult group or movement.'
     It  was  time he got back to  work. Or rather,  it was  time he started
work.  He had  to write an  internal review on  the  Gold  Yava  advertising
campaign, then on the Camay  soap and Gucci  male fragrances  scenarios. The
Yava job was  a  real pain  because Tatarsky hadn't been  able to  work  out
whether or not they were expecting a positive review from him,  so he wasn't
sure which way he should direct his thoughts So he decided to start with the
scenarios. There  were  six pages of the soap text,  filled  with  close-set
writing.  Opening  it at the last page with a gesture of  squeamish disgust,
Tatarsky  read the final  paragraph:  'It's  getting  dark.  The heroine  is
falling  asleep  and she dreams  of waves of bright,  gleaming hair greedily
drinking in  a blue  liquid pouring  down  on them  from  the sky,  full  of
proteins, vitamin B-5 and infinite happiness.'
     He  frowned, picked up  the red pencil from his desk and wrote in above
the text: 'Too literary. How many times do I have to tell you: we don't need
writers  here, we need  cre-atives. Infinite  happiness can't be conveyed by
means of an image sequence. Scrap it!'
     The scenario for Gucci was much shorter:
     <i>Opening shot - the door of  a country lavatory. Flies buzzing. The door
slowly opens and we see a skinny man with a horseshoe moustache who looks as
though  he  has a  hangover  squatting  over  the  hole.  Caption  onscreen:
''Literary critic  Pavel Bisinsky'. The man looks up towards the camera, and
as though  continuing a conversation  that's been going on  for a long time,
says: 'The argument over whether Russia is  a  part of Europe is  a very old
one.  In  principle  a real  professional  has no difficulty in telling what
Pushkin  thought on this matter at  any  period  of his  life, within a  few
months  either way. For instance, in a letter of</i> 1833 <i>to Prince Vyazemsky he
wrote . . .'</i>
     <i>At this point  there is  a loud cracking  sound, the boards beneath the
man break and he plunges into the cesspit. We hear a loud splash. The camera
closes in  on the  pit,  rising  higher  at the same  time (camera  movement
modelled on the aerial shot of the Titanic)  and shows us the surface of the
dark sludge from above. The  literary critic's head  emerges at the surface,
he  looks upwards  and  continues where  he was  interrupted  by his  sudden
tumble.</i>
     <i>'Perhaps the origins of  the debate should be sought in the division of
the church. Krylov had a point when he said to Chaadaev: "Sometimes you look
around  and  it  seems  as  though  you don't live in Europe,  but  in  some
kindof'.. ."'</i>
     <i>Something jerks the critic  violently  downwards, and  he sinks to  the
bottom with a  gurgling sound. There is silence, broken only by the  buzzing
of the flies. Voice-over:</i>
     <I>GUCCIFORMEN BE A EUROPEAN: SMELL BETTER.</I>
     Tatarsky  took  up his blue pencil. 'Very  good/ he wrote in  under the
text. 'Approved. But replace the flies  with  Michael Jackson/Sex-Shop Dogs,
change the critic  for  a new  Russian and Pushkin, Krylov and  Chaadaev for
another new Russian. Cover the walls of the lavatory with pink silk. Rewrite
the  monologue  so the speaker is recalling a fight in a restaurant  on  the
Cote d'Azur. It's  time to  have done  with literary history and think about
our real clientele.'
     The scenario  had inspired Tatarsky  and he  decided  finally to settle
accounts with Yava. He picked up the item to be reviewed  and looked it over
closely once again. It was  a pack of cigarettes with an empty cardboard box
of  the same dimensions glued to it. There was a bird's-eye view of New York
on the cardboard, with a pack of  Gold Yava swooping over it like  a missile
warhead. The caption under the picture was:
     'Counter-Strike'. Tatarsky  pulled over a  clean  sheet  of  paper  and
hesitated for a while  over which pencil to  choose, the red or the blue. He
laid  them side by side, closed his  eyes, waved  his hand around above them
and jabbed downwards with his forefinger. He hit the blue one.
     <i>We must  certainly acknowledge that the use in advertising  of the idea
and the symbolism of the counter-strike is a fortunate choice. It  suits the
mood of  the broad masses of the lumpen intelligentsia, who are  the primary
consumers of these cigarettes.  For a long time already the mass media  have
been agitating for some healthy  national 'response' in opp-position  to the
violent  domination of American pop culture and  Neanderthal liberalism. The
problem is to  locate the basis  of this response. In an internal review not
intended for outsiders' eyes, we can state that it simply doesn't exist. The
authors of this  advertising concept attempt  to  plug this  semantic breach
with a pack of Gold  Yava, which  will undoubtedly trigger a highly positive
crystallisation  in  the potential consumer. It  will  take the  form of the
consumer unconsciously believing  that every  cigarette he smokes brings the
planetary triumph of the Russian idea a little closer . ..</i>
     After a moment's hesitation Tatarsky changed the first letter of 'idea'
to a capital.
     <i>On the  other  hand, we have to take into account the overall impact of
all  the  symbolism  that  is  incorporated in the brand  essence.  In  this
connection it would seem that the combination of the slogan 'Counter-Strike'
with the logo of  British-American Tobacco Co.,  the company  that  produces
these  cigarettes now, could induce a kind  of mental  short-circuit  in one
section  of the  target group.  The question that quite logically arises  is
whether the pack  is descending on New  York or actually being launched from
there. If the  latter is  the  case (and  this would appear  to be the  more
logical assumption, since the pack is shown with its lid upwards) it is  not
clear why this is a 'counter-strike'.</i>
     Outside  the window the  bells in the tower of  a  small church  nearby
began chiming  rapidly.  Tatarsky listened  thoughtfully for several seconds
and then wrote:
     <i>The  consumer might be  led  to  conclude that  Western  propaganda  is
superior in  a general sense,  and that it is impossible for  an introverted
society to compete with an extroverted one in the provision of images.</i>
     Re-reading  the  last sentence,  Tatarsky  saw  that  it  stank of  the
Slavophilic complex. He crossed it out and rounded off the theme decisively:
     <i>However, only the least materially well-off section of the target group
is capable of drawing such  analytical conclusions,  and therefore this slip
is unlikely to  have any adverse  effect  on sales.  The  project should  be
approved.</i>
     The  phone  on  his  desk  rang  and Tatarsky  picked  up the receiver:
'Hello.'
     "Tatarsky! On the boss's carpet at the double" said Morkovin.
     Tatarsky  told  the secretary  to  type up what  he'd written  and went
downstairs. It was still raining.  He pulled his collar up and dashed across
the yard  to the  other wing of the building. The rain was  heavy and he was
almost soaked through before he'd run as far as the entrance  to  the marble
hall.  'Surely  they  could have  built an  internal connection/ he  thought
irritably. 'It's the same building, after  all. Now I'll make  a mess of the
entire carpet.' But the sight of the guards  with their sub-machine guns had
a calming effect on him. One of  the guards with  a Scorpion on his shoulder
was waiting for him by the lift, toying with a key on a chain.
     Morkovin  was sitting in Azadovsky's reception room.  When he saw  that
Tatarsky was soaked, he gave a  laugh of satisfaction. 'Nostrils flaring are
they? Forget it. Leonid's away; there won't be any bee-keeping today.'
     Tatarsky sensed something was missing in the  reception room. He looked
around and saw the  round mirror and  golden mask  had  disappeared from the
wall.
     'Where's he gone then?'
     'Baghdad.'
     'What for?'
     'The ruins of Babylon are near there. He got some kind of idea into his
head about  climbing that tower they still have there.  Showed  me a  photo.
Real heavy stuff.'
     Tatarsky  gave no sign of  being  affected in any way by what he'd just
heard. Trying to make his movements look normal, he picked up the cigarettes
lying on the desk and lit one.
     'What makes him so interested in that?' he asked.
     'Says his soul's thirsting for the heights. Why've you gone so pale?'
     'I haven't had a cigarette for two days/ said  Tatarsky.  'I was trying
to give up.'
     'Buy a nicotine patch.'
     Tatarsky was already back in control of himself.
     'Listen,' he said,  'yesterday I saw Azadovsky  in another two clips. I
see him every time I turn on the TV.  One day he's  dancing in the  corps de
ballet,  the next he's reading the weather forecast. What does it all  mean?
Why's he on so often? Does he just like being filmed?'
     'Yeah,' said Morkovin, 'it's a weakness of his. My advice to you is not
to stick your nose into that for the time being. Some time maybe you'll find
out all about it. OK?'
     'OK.'
     'Let's get  down to  business. What's  the latest on  our  Kalash-nikov
scenario? Their brand manager was just on the phone.'
     'Nothing new. It's still the same: two old guys shoot  down Batman over
the Moskvoretsky market. Batman falls on to this kebab brazier and flaps his
webbed  wing in  the  dust;  then he's hidden by this group  of old women in
sarafans dancing and singing folk songs.'
     'But why two old guys?'
     'One has  a  short-barrel version and  the  other  has a standard. They
wanted the whole range.'
     Morkovin thought for a moment.
     'Probably a father and son would do better than just two old guys. Give
the father the standard and the son the short  barrel. And  let's  have  not
just Batman, but Spawn and Nightman and the whole fucking gang. The budget's
huge; we have to cover it.'
     'Thinking logically,' Tatarsky said, 'the son should  have the standard
and the father should have the sawn-off.'
     Morkovin thought again for a moment.
     "That's  right,'  he  agreed.  'Good thinking. Only we won't  have  the
mother with a holster, that would be overkill. OK, that wasn't what I called
you over for. I've got some good news.'
     He paused tantalisingly.
     'What news is that?' Tatarsky asked with feeble enthusiasm.
     'The  first  section  has  finally  checked  you out.  So you're  being
promoted  - Azadovsky  told me to put  you in the  picture. So  I'll do that
right now.'
     The canteen  was empty and quiet. The  television hanging on a  pole in
the corner was showing  a news broadcast with the sound turned off. Morkovin
nodded for Tatarsky to sit at the table by the television, then went over to
the  counter and returned with  two glasses  and a bottle of  Smimoff Citrus
Twist.
     'Let's have a drink. You're soaked; you could catch a cold/
     He sat down at the table, then shook the bottle  with some special kind
of  movement and gazed for a long time at the small bubbles that appeared in
the liquid.
     'Well,  would  you  believe  it!'  he  said  in  astonishment.  'I  can
understand it  in some kiosk out on the street. .  . But even  in here  it's
fake. I can tell for sure  it's  homebrew out  of Poland ... Just look at it
fizz! So that's what an upgrade can do ...'
     Tatarsky realised that the final phrase referred  not to the vodka, but
the television, and he switched his gaze from the opaque bubbly vodka to the
screen, where a ruddy-faced, chortling Yeltsin was sawing rapidly at the air
with a hand missing two fingers.
     'Upgrade?' queried Tatarsky. 'Is that some kind of cardiac stimulator?'
     'Who on earth spreads all of those rumours?' said Morkovin, shaking his
head.  'What  for?  They've  just  stepped  up the frequency to six  hundred
megahertz, that's all. But we're taking a serious risk.'
     'You've lost me again,' said Tatarsky.
     'It used  to take two days to render a report like this; but  now we do
it  in a single night, which means  we can program more  gestures and facial
expressions.'
     'But what is it we render?'
     'We render  him,'  said Morkovin with  a nod in the  direction  of  the
television. 'And all the rest of them. 3-D.'
     -3-D?'
     'Three-dimensional modelling, if  you  want  the precise term. The guys
call it "fiddly-dee".'
     Tatarsky gaped  at his friend, trying to work out whether he was joking
or serious. His friend withstood his gaze in silence.
     'What the hell is all this you're telling me?'
     'I'm telling you what Azadovsky told me to tell you. I'm putting you in
the picture.'
     Tatarsky looked at  the screen. Now  it was showing  the rostrum in the
Duma,  occupied by  a dour-looking orator who seemed  to  have just surfaced
from the agitated and murky millpond of folk fury. Suddenly Tatarsky had the
impression that the Duma deputy really wasn't alive: his body was completely
motionless; only his lips and occasionally his eyebrows moved at all.
     'Him as well,' said  Morkovin. 'Only his  rendering's  coarser; there's
too many of them. He's episodic. That's a dummy.'
     'What?'
     'Oh, that's what we call the Duma 3-Ds. Dynamic video bas-relief -  the
appearance is rendered always  at the same  angle. It's the same technology,
but it  cuts  the work  down by two orders of magnitude. There's two types -
stiffs and semi-stiffs. See the  way he moves his hands and head? That means
he's a stiff. And that one over there, sleeping across his newspaper  - he's
a  semi-stiff.  They're  much smaller - you can squeeze one of  them on to a
hard disk. Yes, by the way, our legislature department recently won a prize.
Azadovsky was watching the news from the State Duma, and all the semi-stiffs
were saying how  television's  whorish  and  calculating,  all that  kind of
stuff. Naturally,  Azadovsky  took offence - he heard the word "calculating"
and thought that they were trying to poke their  noses into our business. So
he decided to get to  the  bottom of this. He even got as far as picking  up
the phone and he was already dialling the number  when  he remembered  there
was nothing  to get to the bottom of!  We must  be doing a  good  job if  we
manage to impress ourselves.'
     'You mean they're all...?'
     'Every last one of them.'
     'Oh come off it,' Tatarsky said uncertainly. 'What about all the people
who see them every day?'
     'Where?'
     'On TV ... Oh, right... Well, I mean... After all, there are people who
meet them every day.'
     'Have you seen those people?'
     'Of course.'
     'Where?'
     Tatarsky thought about it. 'On TV,' he said.
     'You get my point, then?'
     'I'm beginning to,' Tatarsky replied.
     'Speaking strictly theoretically, you could  meet someone who tells you
he's  seen  them himself or even knows them.  There's  a special service for
that called The  People's  Will.  More than a hundred of them, former  state
security agents, and  all Azadovsky's  men. That's their job: to  go  around
telling people they've just seen our leaders. One at his three-storey dacha,
one with an under-age whore, one  in a yellow Lamborghini on the Rubliovskoe
Highway.  But The People's  Will  mostly works  the beer halls  and  railway
stations, and you don't hang around those places.'
     'Are you telling me the truth?' Tatarsky asked.
     "The truth, cross my heart.'
     'But it's such a massive scam.'
     'Aagh, no,'  Morkovin  said  with a  grimace, 'please, not that. By his
very nature every politician is just a television broadcast.  Even  if we do
sit a live human being in front of the camera, his  speeches are going to be
written by  a team of speechwriters, his jackets are going to be chosen by a
group of stylists, and his decisions  are going to be taken by the Interbank
Committee. And what if he suddenly has a stroke - are we supposed to set  up
the whole shebang all over again?'
     'OK, let's say you're right,' said Tatarsky. 'But how is it possible on
such a huge scale?'
     'Are you  interested in the  technology? I can  give  you  the  general
outline.  First you need a source figure - a wax model or a human being. You
use it to model the corporeal cloud. D'you know what a corporeal cloud is?'
     'Isn't it some kind of astral thing?'
     'No. Some blockheads or other have been feeding you a load of nonsense.
A corporeal cloud is the same thing as a digital cloud-form. Just a cloud of
points in space. You define it either with a probe or with a  laser scanner.
Then the points are linked up -  you impose a digital grid on them and close
up  the cracks. That  involves  a whole  bundle  of  procedures  -stitching,
clean-up, and so on.'
     'But what do they stitch it up with?'
     'Numbers. They stitch up numbers with other numbers. I don't understand
it all by a  long way -1 studied the humanities, you know that. Anyway, when
we've stitched everything up  and cleaned it all up, we end up with a model.
There  are two types - one's called  polygonal, and the other's called NURBS
patch.  A  polygonal  model  consists of triangles,  and a NURBS  -  that is
'non-union  rational  bi-spline'  - consists of  curves. That's the advanced
technology for serious 3-Ds. The Duma dummies are all polygonals - it's less
hassle and it keeps the faces more  folksy.  So when the  model's ready, you
put a skeleton inside it, and  that's digital too. It's like a set of sticks
on ball-joints -  on the monitor  it actually