; and the
thoughts in his head were like trucks loaded with building materials,
rushing towards Babylon, making it more and more substantial.
'They called the confusion of tongues the Tower of Babel/ he thought.
'But just what is the Tower of Babel?'
He swayed on his feet, feeling the earth swing round smoothly beneath
him. He only stayed upright because the axis of the earth's rotation ran
precisely through the top of his head.
The confusion of tongues coincides in time with the creation of the
tower. When there is a confusion of tongues, then the Tower of Babel starts
to rise. Or maybe it doesn't rise;
maybe it's just that the entrance to the ziggurat opens up. Yes, of
course. There's the entrance right there.
A pair of large gates decorated with three-dimensional red stars had
appeared in the barbed-wire fence along which Tatarsky was walking. Above
them blazed a powerful lamp surmounted by a cowl, and the bright-blue light
illuminated the numerous graffiti covering the green sheet-metal of the
gates. Tatarsky stopped.
For a minute or two he studied the traditional mid-Russian attempts to
write the names of the surrounding villages in Latin script, various names
surmounted by crude crowns, symbolic representations of a penis and a vulva,
the English verbs 'to fuck' and 'to suck' in the third person singular of
the present tense, but all peppered with incomprehensible apostrophes and
abundant logos from the music business. Then his gaze fell on something
strange.
It was a large inscription - significantly larger than all the rest,
stretching right across the gates - written in fluorescent orange paint (it
gleamed brightly in the rays of the electric lamp): THIS GAME HAS NO NAME.
The moment Tatarsky read it, all the other ethnographic material ceased
to register in his awareness; his consciousness held nothing but these
glittering words. He seemed to understand their meaning at a very deep
level, and although he could hardly have explained it to anyone else, that
meaning undoubtedly required him to climb over the gates. It proved not to
be difficult.
Behind the gates was an abandoned building site, a wide area of waste
ground with only sparse indications of any human presence. At the centre of
the site stood an unfinished building - either the foundations of some
intergalactic radio telescope or a strangely designed multi-storey parking
lot:
the construction work had been broken off at a stage when only the
load-bearing structures and walls were in place. The structure looked like a
stepped cylinder made up of several concrete boxes standing one on top of
another. Round them wound a spiral roadway on reinforced concrete supports,
which ended at the top box, surmounted by a small cubic tower with a red
signal lamp.
Tatarsky thought it must be one of those military construction projects
begun in the seventies that had failed to save the empire, but had shaped
the aesthetic of 'Star Wars'. He recalled Darth Vader and his asthmatic
wheezing and marvelled at what a wonderful metaphor he was for the career
communist: probably somewhere on his starship he had a dialysis machine and
two teams of cardiologists, and Tatarsky recalled vaguely that there had
been hints at something of the kind in the film. But in his present state
thinking about Darth Vader was dangerous.
The unfinished building was illuminated by three or four floodlights
that plucked patches of it out of the gloom - sections of the concrete wall,
the spiral road and the upper tower with its winking signal light. If not
for that red beacon, the building's incompleteness could have been taken in
the darkness for the dilapidation of age, and it might have been a thousand
or even a full ten thousand years old. But then, thought Tatarsky, the
beacon could be powered by some unimaginable ancient electricity transmitted
under the ground from Egypt or Babylon.
Recent traces of man were only visible by the gates, where he was
standing. There was something like the branch office of a military unit here
- several living trailers, a boom, a board with a fire bucket and a crowbar,
and a stand with a poster showing identical soldiers with a strange
self-absorption imprinted on their faces demonstrating various training
formations. Tatarsky was not in the least bit surprised when he saw an
immense mushroom with a tin-sheet cap and a telephone hanging on its
stalk-post - he realised it must be the sentry post. At first he was sure
there was no sentry on duty, but then he saw that the mushroom's conical cap
was painted red and decorated with symmetrical white spots.
'Nothing's quite as simple as it seems,' he whispered.
That very moment a quiet, mocking voice spoke somewhere close beside
him: 'This game has no name. It will never be the same.'
Tatarsky swung round. There was no one anywhere near him, and he
realised it was an auditory hallucination. He felt a bit scared, but despite
everything, what was taking place held a strangely delightful promise.
'Onwards,' he whispered, leaning forward and slipping quickly through
the murk towards the road that led to the ziggurat. 'After all,' he thought,
'it's just a multi-storey carpark.'
'With hanging gardens,' the voice in his head added quietly.
The fact that the voice spoke in Russian convinced Tatarsky it was a
hallucination, but it reminded him once again of the confusion of tongues.
As though in response to his thought the voice pronounced a long phrase in a
strange language with a large number of sibilants. Tatarsky decided to
ignore it, especially since he had already set foot on the spiral ascent.
From the distance he had failed to appreciate the true dimensions of
the building. The road was wide enough for two trucks to pass each other
('Or chariots,' the voice added gleefully, 'chariots with four-in-hand! Now
those were chariots!').
It was constructed of concrete slabs, with the the joints between them
left unsealed. Tall plants protruded from the joints - Tatarsky didn't know
what they were called, but he had known since he was a child that he could
use their tough stems in his shoes instead of shoe laces. From time to time
wide gaps appeared in the wall to his right, leading into the body of the
ziggurat. Inside there were wide open spaces littered with building waste.
The road constantly disappeared round the comer ahead, seeming to break off
in mid-air, and Tatarsky walked carefully, clinging to the wall with one
hand. On one side the tower was illuminated by the floodlights from the
building site, and on the other by the moon, suspended in a gap in a high
cloud. He could hear an open door banging in the wind somewhere up above,
and the same wind brought the distant sound of dogs barking. Tatarsky
slackened his pace until he was walking really slowly.
Something crunched under his foot. It was an empty cigarette pack. When
he picked it up and moved into a patch of light, he saw it was a pack of
Parliament Menthol. But there was something else much more surprising about
it: on the front of the pack there was an advertising hologram showing three
palm trees.
'It all fits,' he whispered and carried on, keeping a careful eye on
the ground beneath his feet.
The next discovery was waiting one tier higher - he spotted the coin
gleaming in the moonlight from a distance. He'd never seen one like it
before: a Republic of Cuba three-peso piece with a portrait of Che Guevara.
Tatarsky was not at all surprised that a Cuban coin should be lying on a
military construction site - he remembered the final sequence of the film
Golden Eye, with that immense Soviet-made antenna rising up out of the water
somewhere on the Isle of Freedom. This was obviously the payment received
for its construction. He replaced the coin in the empty Parliament pack and
put it in his pocket, completely confident that there was something else
waiting for him.
He wasn't mistaken. The road was approaching its end at the very top
box, in front of which lay a heap of building waste and broken crates.
Tatarsky noticed a strange little cube lying in among the waste and picked
it up. It was a pencil sharpener in the shape of a television, and someone
had drawn a large eye on its plastic screen with a ballpoint pen. The
sharpener was old - they used to make them like that in the seventies -and
it was remarkable that it was so well preserved.
Cleaning off the mud clinging to the sharpener, Tatarsky slipped it
into his inside pocket and looked round, wondering what to do next. He was
afraid to go into the box: it was dark in there and he could easily break
his neck if he fell into some hole or other. Somewhere up above, a door
banged once again in the wind, and Tatarsky remembered there was a small
tower on the summit of the building, with a red beacon lamp. He couldn't see
the tower from where he was standing, but there was a short fire-ladder
leading upwards.
The small tower turned out to be the housing where the lift motors
should have been. The door was open. On the wall right inside the door there
was a light-switch. When Tatarsky turned on the light he saw the lingering
traces of a soldier's harsh life: a wooden table, two stools and and empty
beer bottles in the corner. It was obvious that these were the traces of a
soldier's life, and not any other, from the magazine photographs of women
stuck to the walls. Tatarsky studied them for a while. He thought that one
of them, running across the sand of a tropical beach entirely naked and with
a golden suntan, looked very beautiful. It wasn't even so much her face and
figure, but the incredible, indefinable freedom of her movement, which the
photographer had managed to capture. The sand, the sea and the leaves of the
palm trees on the photograph were all so vivid that Tatarsky heaved a heavy
sigh -the meagre Moscow summer was already over. He closed his eyes and for
a few seconds he fancied he could hear the distant murmur of the sea.
He sat down at the table, laid out his trophies on it and looked them
over once again. The palms on the empty Parliament pack and on the
photograph were very similar, and he thought they must grow in the same
place, in a part of the world he would never get to see - not even in the
Russian style, from inside a tank - and if he ever did, it would only be
when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea
or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this
thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly
discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been
searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the
pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:
The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river
Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October
'93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament
(digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is
a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:
Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland
Parliament slogan:
THE MOTHERLAND'S#1 SMOKE!
"Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.
Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes
from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed
through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the
sand as a souvenir, but he decided against it. He turned out the light, went
out on to the roof and stopped to allow his eyes to grow accustomed to the
darkness.
'What now?' he thought. To the station.'
CHAPTER 5. Poor Folk
The adventure in the forest outside Moscow proved positively
stimulating to Tatarsky's professional abilities. Scenarios and concepts now
came to him far more easily, and Pugin even paid him a small advance for his
slogan for Parliament:
he said Tatarsky had hit the bull's-eye, because until '93 a pack of
Parliament had cost the same as a pack of Mariboro, but after those famous
events Parliament had rapidly become the most popular cigarette in Moscow,
and now they cost twice as much. Subsequently, however, 'the smoke of the
Motherland' was dispersed without a trace into the thick gloom of a winter
that arrived unexpectedly early. The only dubious echo of the slogan left in
the snowbound advertising space of Moscow was the phrase: 'From ship to
ball', another borrowing - by an unknown colleague of Tatarsky's - from the
poet Griboedov. It was to be glimpsed at one time on large hoarding
advertisements for menthol cigarettes - a yacht, blue sea and sky, a peaked
cap with a sunburst and a pair of long legs. Tatarsky felt a pang of
jealousy at this, but not a very powerful one - the girl in the menthol
advert had been chosen to suit the taste of such a wide target group that
the text seemed spontaneously to read as: 'From ship to balls'.
For some reason the wave of fly-agaric energy that had swept through
his nervous system found its finest outlet in texts for cigarettes -
probably for the same reason that the first truly successful experience of
love or narcotics determines your preferences for the rest of your life. His
next great success (not only in his own opinion, but in the opinion of
Pugin, who surprised him once again by paying him) was a text written for
Davidoff cigarettes, which was symbolic, because his career had started with
them. The text was based on an advertisement for Davidoff Classic that was
on all the hoardings in the city centre: dark tones, a close-up of a wasting
face with the burden of unbearable knowledge glinting in the eyes, and the
inscription:
THE MORE YOU KNOW: DAVIDOFF CLASSIC
At the first sight of the wise, wrinkled face, Tatarsky immediately
began wondering just what it was that this foreign smoker knew. The first
explanation to come to mind was rather sombre: a visit to the cancer clinic,
an X-ray and a dreadful diagnosis.
Tatarsky's project was in total contrast: a light background, a
youthful face expressive of ignorant happiness, a white pack with slim gold
letters and the text:
'FOR IN MUCH WISDOM IS MUCH SORROW AND HE WHO INCREASES KNOWLEDGE
INCREASES GRIEF.' DA VIDOFF LIGHTS
Pugin said Davidoff's agent would be unlikely to be interested, but
some other cigarette market leader might very well take it. 'I'll have a
word with Azadovsky/ he said casually. 'He's got an exclusive on sixteen
brands.' It seemed to Tatarsky he'd heard that name before. He jotted the
phrase down in his notebook and casually dropped it into several
conversations with clients, but his natural shyness found expression in the
fact that he usually halved the number of brands.
At the beginning of winter Tatarsky had his one-room flat redecorated
after a fashion (against the background of cornflower-blue Soviet-era tiles
that were coming away from the wall, the expensive Italian mixer-tap looked
like a gold tooth in the mouth of a leper, but he had no money for major
renovations). He also bought a new computer, although he had no particular
need for it - he'd simply begun to have difficulties getting texts printed
out that he'd typed in his favourite word-processing program: one more
muffled groan under the iron boot of Microsoft. Tatarsky didn't feel
seriously aggrieved, although he did note the profoundly symbolic nature of
the event: his interface program - a medium by its very nature - was
becoming the most important message, taking over an incredible amount of
computer memory space and resources, and that reminded him very much of a
brazen new Russian running the funds for teachers' salaries through the
accounts in his bank.
The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business,
the more questions he had to which he couldn't find the answer, neither in
Al Rice's Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book
on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky
that all the themes that Al Rice hadn't touched on were analysed in
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts
Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a
second in George Orwell's 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to
perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of
oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had
nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and
become a world-famous advertising guru filled Tatarsky with a mystical,
rapturous admiration for his own profession.
But the book he found particularly helpful was by Rosser Reeves: he
discovered two terms in it - 'penetration' and 'involvement' - that proved
very useful when it came to throwing curves. The first project he managed to
design on the basis of these two concepts was for Nescafe Gold.
'It has long been recognised,' Tatarsky wrote just twenty minutes after
he first learned about it, that there are two basic indicators of the
effectiveness of an advertising campaign: penetration and involvement.
'Penetration' is the percentage of people who remember the advertisement.
'Involvement' is the percentage of people the advertisement has persuaded to
consume the product. The problem is, however, that a brilliantly scandalous
advertisement, capable of producing high-level penetration, is absolutely no
guarantee of high levels of involvement. Likewise a campaign that cleverly
demonstrates the virtues of a product and is capable of producing high
levels of involvement is no guarantee of high-level penetration. Which is
why we propose taking a new approach and creating a kind of binary
advertising, in which the functions of penetration andinvolvement will be
performed by different sets of information. Let's examine how this approach
would work in an advertising campaign for Nescafe Gold coffee.
The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting
the brand name 'Nescafe Gold' in the consciousness of the largest possible
number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified
to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several
large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as
possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services
receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that
explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the
police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large
number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags.Next morning this is
reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following
which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is
directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this
comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according
to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the
basic slogan:
'Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!' Here is the scenario/or the
advertising clip:
A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting
on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the
square a Mercedes-600 and two jeeps are parked outside a chic town house.
The young man glances at his watch. Change of camera angle: several men in
severe dark suits and dark glasses emerge from the mansion - the security
guards. They surround the Mercedesfrom all sides and one of them gives a
command over his walkie-talkie. A small fat man with a depraved face emerges
from the mansion and looks around in a frightened manner, then he runs down
the steps to the Mercedes and disappears behind the dark-tinted glass of the
car, and the guards get into the jeeps. The Mercedes starts to move off and
suddenly there are three powerful explosions in rapid succession. The cars
are scattered in flying debris; the street where they have just been
standing is hidden by smoke. New camera angle: the young man on the bench
takes a thermos flask and a red mug with a gold band out of his sports bag.
He pours some coffee into the mug, takes a sip and closes his eyes in
ecstasy. Voice-over: 'He brewed it rough and dark. Nescafe Gold. The real
taste explosion.'
The term 'involvement' didn't only come in useful at work. It also
forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what
and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.
He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted
to cult pom films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge
from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of
indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey
his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone
adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn't
even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson
could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short,
Blo's article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.
But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long
time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were
good for was to tempt suburban Moscow's kids out of the Eden of childhood.
In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult pom films, and
was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members
of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo
himself very well.
He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was
Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneoulsy under
three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky
had invented the name 'Blo' together, borrowing the title of a bottle of
bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they'd found under the bath (they were
looking for the vodka Ed's wife had hidden). The word 'Blo' summoned up the
idea of inexhaustible reserves of vital energy and at the same time
something non-humanoid, which was why Ed used it carefully. He only used it
for signing articles imbued with such boundless freedom and am-bivalence, so
to speak, that a common signature such as Tvanov' or 'Petrov' would have
been absurd. There was a great demand for this ambivalence in Moscow's
glossy magazines, so great indeed that it posed the question of just who was
controlling its penetration. To be honest, even thinking about the topic was
a bit frightening, but after reading Sasha Blo's article, Tatarsky suddenly
realised that it wasn't being implanted by some demonic spy or some fallen
spirit who had assumed human form, but by Ed and himself.
Of course, not just by them alone - Moscow probably had two or three
hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and
crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long
sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol,
as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with
nappies and Moscow's own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren't obsessed with
arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism:
they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, or even any real readiness
to drop a tab of acid occasionally - despite their casual use of the term
'acid' every day of the week. What they did have were problems with
digestion, money and housing, and in appearance they resembled not Gary
Oldman, as the first acquaintance with their writing led you to believe, but
Danny de Vito.
Tatarsky could not gaze trustingly into the distant expanses sketched
for him by Sasha Blo, because he understood the physiological genesis of
those expanses in the bald head of downtrodden Ed, who was chained to his
computer in just the same way as they used to chain Austrian soldiers to
their machine-guns during the First World War. Believing in his product was
harder than achieving arousal from telephone sex, when you knew that the
voice hoarse with passion speaking to you didn't belong to the blonde
promised by the photograph, but to an old woman with a cold who was knitting
a sock as she read off a set of standard phrases from a crib soaked by the
drops falling from her running nose.
'But how do we - that is, Ed and me - know what to involve other people
in?' wrote Tatarsky in his notebook.
From one point of view, of course, it's obvious: intuition. No need to
inquire about what to do and how to do it - when you reach a certain degree
of despair, you just start to intuit things for yourself. You sense the
dominant tendency, so to speak, with your empty stomach. But where does the
tendency come from? Who thinks it up, if-- as I'm convinced- everyone in the
world is simply trying to catch it and sell it, like Ed and me, or to guess
what it is and print it, like the editors, of those glossy magazines?
His thoughts on this theme were morose and they were reflected in his
scenario for a clip for the washing powder Ariel, written soon after this
event.
The scenario is based on motifs from Shakespeare. Loud music, solemn
and menacing. The opening shot shows a cliff on the seashore. Night. Down
below, menacing waves rear up in the dim moonlight. In the distance is an
ancient castle, also illuminated by the moon. Standing on the top of the
cliff is a girl of incredible beauty. She is Miranda. She is wearing a
medieval dress of red velvet and a tall pointed cap with a trailing veil.
She raises her arms towards the moon and utters a strange incantation three
times. When she pronounces it for the third time there is a rumble of
distant thunder. The music grows louder and more menacing. A wide beam of
light emerges from the moon, which is visible in a break in the clouds, and
extends until it reaches the rocks at Miranda's feet. Her face expresses
confusion - she is clearly afraid of what is about to happen, and yet she
wants it. A shadow slides down the beam of light, coming closer, and as the
melody reaches its climax, we see a proud spirit in all his evil beauty -
his robes are flowing in the wind and his long hair is silvered by the
moonlight. On his head is a slim wreath set with diamonds. He is Ariel. He
flies close to Miranda, halts in mid-air and holds out his hand to her.
After a moment's struggle Miranda reaches out her own hand to his. Next
frame: close-up of two hands approaching each other. Lower left - Miranda's
pale weak hand: upper right - the spirit's hand, transparent and glowing.
They touch each other, the spirit instantly transforms into a box of Ariel
and everything is flooded in blinding light. Next frame: two boxes of
washing powder. On one it says Ariel. On the other, in pale-grey letters, it
says Ordinary Caliban. Miranda's voice-over: 'Ariel. Temptingly
tempestuous'.
Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black
and white photograph that hung above Tatarsky's desk. It was an
advertisement for some boutique, showing a young man with long hair and
carefully tended stubble in a luxurious wide-cut coat carelessly hung across
his shoulders - the wind filled out the form of the coat so that it echoed
the sail of a boat visible on the horizon. The waves breaking against the
rocks and splashing up on to the shore fell just short of his shiny shoes.
His face was set in a harsh, sullen grimace, and somehow he resembled the
birds with outstretched wings (maybe eagles, maybe seagulls) soaring into
the twilit sky from a supplement to the latest version of Photoshop (after
taking a closer look at the photograph, Tatarsky decided that the boat on
the horizon must have come sailing in from there too).
After contemplating it for days Tatarsky finally understood: all the
cliches to which the photograph was alluding had been born together with
romanticism in the nineteenth century; their remains, together with those of
the Count of Monte Cristo, had survived into the twentieth, but on the
threshold of the twenty-first the count's legacy had already been completely
squandered. The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many
times to be able to do any more business on it. Now, no matter how sincerely
you wished to deceive yourself, it was virtually impossible to believe in
any correspondence between the image that was being sold and its implied
inner content. It was an empty form that had long ago ceased to mean what it
should have meant. Everything was moth-eaten: the thoughts provoked by the
sight of the conventional Niebelung in the studio photograph were not about
the proud Gothic spirit implied by the frothing waves and sideburns, but
about whether the photographer charged a lot, how much the model got paid
and whether the model had to pay a fine when his personal lubricant stained
the seat of the trousers from the company's spring collection.
Tatarsky's deductions led him into a state of total and utter
confusion. On the one hand, it seemed that he and Ed crafted a false
panorama of life for others (like a battle scene in a museum, where the
floor in front of the spectator is scattered with sand and worn-out boots
and shells, but the tanks and the explosions are only drawn on the wall),
guided solely by their intuition as to what the punters would swallow. On
the other hand, his own life was a frustrating attempt to move a bit closer
to the contents of this panorama. In essence it was an attempt to run into
the picture drawn on the wall. Being a co-author of this picture made the
attempt more than grotesque. Of course - or so it seemed to Tatarsky - a
rich man could escape the bounds of false reality. He could move beyond the
limits of the panorama that was compulsory for the poor. Tatarsky didn't
actually know much about what the world of the rich was like. There were
only vague images circling around in his consciousness, cliches from
advertising, which he himself had been rebroadcasting for such a long time
he couldn't possibly believe in them. What was clear to him was that you
could only find out what prospects opened up to a man with a substantial
bank account from the rich themselves, and on one occasion - by pure chance
- Tatarsky managed to do just that.
While he was drinking away a small fee in the Poor Folk bar, he
eavesdropped on a conversation between two TV chat-show hosts - it was after
midnight and they were continuing a drinking spree begun earlier somewhere
else. Tatarsky was sitting just a couple of metres away from them, but they
paid no more attention to him than if he'd been a stuffed model of a
copywriter nailed to the counter in order to brighten up the decor.
Although both of the showmen were thoroughly drunk, they'd lost none of
that strange holographic gleam m every fold of their clothes, as though
their physical bodies were not actually sitting at the next table but were
simply being shown on a huge television standing next to Tatarsky. When he
noticed this inexplicable but undoubtedly real effect, Tatarsky found
himself thinking how long it would take them in limbo to scrape away all the
human attention that had eaten into the pores of their souls. The showmen
were talking shop, and Tatarsky gathered that one of them was having
problems with his contract.
'If they'd just extend it for next year/ he said, clenching his fists.
'Say they do,' the other replied. 'At the end of the year it'll be the
same thing all over again. And you'll be living on tranquillizers again ...
And then what?'
'Then what? Then I've got a serious plan.' He slumped over the table
and poured himself some vodka. 'I'm just five hundred thousand short,' he
said. 'That's what I've got to make.'
'What plan?' 'You won't tell anyone? Listen ...'
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, rummaged around for a
long while and finally pulled out a sheet of glossy paper folded into four.
'There/ he said, 'it says it on here... The kingdom of Bhutan. The only
country in the world where television is forbidden. Unnerstand? Completely
forbidden. It says here that not far from the capital they have an entire
colony where big TV moguls live. If you spend all your life working in
television, the very coolest thing you can do when you retire is move to
Bhutan.'
'Is that what you need the five hundred grand for?' 'No, I need the
five hundred grand so no one will come looking for me in Bhutan afterwards.
Can you just imagine it? Forbidden. Not a single television set anywhere
except in counter-espionage! And the embassies!'
His companion took the sheet of paper from him, unfolded it and started
reading.
'You unnerstand?' - the first showman carried on speaking regardless -
'If anyone is keeping a television at home and the authorities find out
about it, the police come round, unnerstand? And they cart the queer fucker
off to prison. Or maybe they even shoot him.'
He pronounced the word 'queer' with that sabre-whistle intake of breath
you only ever hear from latent homosexuals who have deprived themselves of
the joys of love in the name of a perverse misinterpretation of the social
contract. His companion understood everything and didn't take offence -he
was looking through the article.
'Ah,' he said, 'out of a magazine. It's interesting all right... So who
wrote it? Where is it now... Some guy called Edward Debirsian...'
Tatarsky almost knocked over his table as he stood up to go to the
toilet. He wasn't surprised that TV personalities should feel that way about
their work, although the degree of these people's spiritual degradation did
make it possible to allow that some of them might actually like their jobs.
It was something else that had finally finished him off. Sasha Blo had a
particular foible: any material that he liked, he would sign with his own
real name. And what he liked more than anything else on earth was to pass
off the products of his own untrammelled imagination as a narrative of real
events - but it was a luxury he allowed himself only very rarely.
Tatarsky laid down a line of cocaine on the cold white cheek of the
toilet tank and, without even bothering to crush the lumps, snorted it
through a rolled-up hundred-rouble bill (he was already out of dollars),
then took out his notebook and wrote:
In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is
drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from
the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening.
Unfortunately, the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even that is
not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only
drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But
drawn by whom and on what?
He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an
answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly,
rounded letters of a brief slogan: 'Trapped? Masturbate!'
Going back to the bar, he sat further away from the TV personalities
and attempted to lean back and enjoy it. But it didn't work for him - it
never did. The repulsive Moscow cocaine, cut almost to nothing by the
unwashed hands of a long chain of dealers, deposited an entire bouquet of
medicinal smells in his nasopharynx - everything from streptocide to aspirin
- and triggered an intense, stressful trembling in his body. They did say
the powder they took a hundred and fifty dollars a gramme for in Moscow was
not cocaine at all, but a mixture of Estonian speed with an assortment of
Russian pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn't enough, for some reason half of
the dealers always wrapped the powder in a glossy advertisement for the
Toyota Camry cut out of some magazine, and Tatarsky was tormented by the
unbearable suspicion that they made a fat living not just at the expense of
other people's health, but by providing a PR service as well. Every time
Tatarsky asked himself why he and others paid all that money in order to
subject themselves once again to a humiliating and unhygienic procedure, the
only explanation he could come up with went as follows: people weren't
sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar
bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important
than the powder itself. If cocaine was sold in chemists' shops for twenty
kopecks a gramme as a mouthwash for toothache, he thought, then nobody but
punks would sniff it - the way it was, in fact, at the beginning of the
century. But if some ether-based glue sniffed by juvenile junkies cost a
thousand dollars a bottle, all the gilded youth of Moscow would be delighted
to sniff it, and at presentations and buffet luncheons it would be tres chic
to waft the volatile chemical vapours around yourself, complain about your
brain neurons dying off and disappear for long periods into the toilet.
Youth fashion magazines would devote revelatory cover stories (written, of
course, by Sasha Blo) to the aesthetics of the plastic bag that was placed
over the head for this procedure.
'Oho!' Tatarsky exclaimed, smacked himself on the forehead, took out
his notebook, opened it at the letter 'C', and noted down:
Youth market colognes (all manufacturers). Link them with money and the
Roman emperor Vespasian (tax on lavatories, the saying 'Money doesn't
smell'). Example:
MONE Y DOES SMELL! "BENJAMIN" THE NEW COLOGNE FROM HUGO BOSS
Putting away his notebook, he felt that the peak of the loathsome
sensation had passed and he was quite strong enough to walk as far as the
bar and get himself a drink. He wanted tequila, but when he reached the
barman for some reason he ordered Smimoff, which he normally couldn't stand.
He downed one shot right there at the bar, then took another and went back
to his table. In the meantime he'd acquired a companion, a man of about
forty with long, greasy hair and a wild beard, dressed in a crazy kind of
embroidered jacket - in appearance he was a typical former hippy, one of
those who had failed to find a place for themselves either in the past or in
the present. Hanging round his neck was a large bronze cross.
'Excuse me,' said Tatarsky, 'I was sitting here.'
'So be my guest,' said his new neighbour. 'Don't need the entire table,
do you?'
Tatarsky shrugged and sat facing him.
'My name's Grigory,' his neighbour said affably.
Tatarsky raised his weary eyes to look at him. 'Vova/ he said.
Catching his glance, Grigory frowned and shook his head in sympathy.
'You've got the shakes bad,' he said. 'Snorting?'
'A bit,' said Tatarsky. 'Just now and again.'
'Fool,' said Grigory. 'Just think about it: the mucous membrane of the
nose - it's as good as the exposed surface of the brain . . . And did you
ever think about where that powder came from and who's been