looks like a skeleton, but
without the ribs - and you animate the skeleton like they do for a cartoon
film: move an arm this way, move a leg that way. Only we don't actually do
it by hand any more. We have special people who work as skeletons.'
'Work as skeletons?'
Morkovin glanced at his watch. "They're shooting right now in studio
number 3. Let's go take a look. It'll take me all day to try to explain
things to you.'
Several minutes later Tatarsky timidly followed Morkovin into a space
that resembled the studio of a conceptual artist who has received a large
grant for working with plywood. It was a hall two storeys high filled with
numerous plywood constructions of various shapes and indefinite function
-there were staircases leading into nowhere, incomplete rostrums, plywood
surfaces sloping down to the floor at various angles, and even a long
plywood limousine. Tatarsky didn't see any cameras or studio lights, but
there were large numbers of mysterious electrical boxes looking like musical
equipment heaped up by the wall, and sitting beside them on chairs were four
men who seemed to be engineers. Standing on the floor beside them were a
half-empty bottle of vodka and a large number of beer cans. One of the
engineers, wearing earphones, was staring into a monitor. They waved in
friendly greeting to Morkovin, but no one took his attention off his work.
'Hey, Arkasha,' the man in the earphones called out. 'Don't laugh now,
but we'll have to go again.'
'What?' said a hoarse voice somewhere in the centre of the hall.
Turning towards the voice, Tatarsky saw a strange device: a plywood
slope like the ones you see in children's playgrounds, only higher. The
sloping surface broke off above a hammock supported on wooden poles, and an
aluminium stepladder led up to its summit. A heavy, elderly man with the
face of a veteran policeman was sitting on the floor beside the hammock. He
was wearing tracksuit trousers and a tee shirt with an inscription in
English: 'Sick my duck'. Tatarsky thought the inscription too sentimental
and not quite grammatically correct.
'You heard, Arkasha. Let's go for it again.'
'How many more times?' Arkasha mumbled. Tm getting dizzy.'
'Try another shot to loosen you up. So far it's still kind of tight. I
mean it; take one.'
'The last glass hasn't hit me yet,' Arkasha replied, getting up off the
floor and wandering over to the engineers. Tatarsky noticed there were black
plastic discs attached to his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles; and there
were more of them on his body - Tatarsky counted fourteen in all.
'Who's that?' he asked in a whisper.
'That's Arkady Korzhakov. No, don't go getting any ideas. Not Yeltsin's
old bodyguard. He's just got the same name. Works as Yeltsin's skeleton.
Same weight, same dimensions;
and he's an actor, too. Used to do Shakespeare at the Young People's
Theatre.'
'But what does he do?'
'You'll see in a moment. Like some beer?'
Tatarsky nodded. Morkovin brought over two cans of Tuborg. It gave
Tatarsky a strange feeling to see the familiar figure in the white shirt on
the can - Tuborg man was still wiping the sweat from his forehead in the
same old way, afraid of continuing his final journey.
Arkasha downed a glass of vodka and went back to the slope. He
scrambled up the slope and stood motionless at the top of the plywood
structure.
'Shall I start?' he asked.
'Hang on,' said the man in the earphones, 'we'll just recalibrate.'
Arkasha squatted down on his haunches and took hold of the edge of the
plywood surface with his hand, so that he resembled a huge fat pigeon.
'What are those washers he's got on him?' asked Tatarsky.
"Those are sensors,' replied Morkovin. 'Motion-capture technology. He
wears them at the points where the skeleton has its ball-joints. When
Arkasha moves, we record their trajectory. Then we filter it a little bit,
superimpose it on the model and the machine works it all out. It's a new
system, called Star Trak. The hottest thing on the market right now. No
wires, thirty-two sensors, works anywhere you like, but the price - you can
imagine ...'
The man in the earphones turned away from the monitor.
'Ready,' he said. 'Right I'll run through it from the top. First you
hug him, then you invite him to walk down, then you stumble. Only when you
lower your arm, make it grander, more majestic. And fall flat, full length.
Got it?'
'Got it,' Arkasha mumbled, and rose carefully to his feet. He was
swaying slightly.
'Let's go.'
Arkasha turned to his left, opened his arms wide and slowly brought
them together in empty space. Tatarsky was amazed at the way his movements
were instantly filled with stately grandeur and majestic pomp. At first it
put Tatarsky in mind of of Stanislavsky's system, but then he realised
Arkasha was simply having difficulty balancing on such a tiny spot high
above the floor and was struggling not to fall. When he opened his arms
again, Arkasha gestured expansively for his invisible companion to descend
the slope, took a step towards it, swayed on the edge of the plywood
precipice and went tumbling clumsily downwards. As he fell he somersaulted
twice, and if his heavy frame had not landed in the hammock there would
certainly have been broken bones. Having fallen into the hammock, Arkasha
carried on lying there, with his arms wrapped round his head. The engineers
crowded round the monitor and began arguing about something in quiet voices.
'What's it going to be?' Tatarsky asked.
Without saying a word, Morkovin held out a photograph. Tatarsky saw
some kind of hall in the Kremlin with malachite columns and a wide, sweeping
marble staircase with a red-carpet-runnner.
'Listen, why do we show him pissed if he's only virtual?'
'Improves the ratings.'
'This improves his ratings?'
'Not his rating. What kind of rating can an electromagnetic wave have?
The channel's ratings. Never tried to figure out why it's forty thousand a
minute during prime time news?'
'I just did. How long has he been ... like this?'
'Since that time he danced in Rostov during the election campaign. When
he fell off the stage. We had to get him coded double quick. Remember that
by-pass operation he had? There were no end of problems. By the time they
finished digitising him, he stank so bad that everyone was working in
respirators.
'But how do they do the face?' Tatarsky asked. The movement and the
expression?'
'Same thing. Only it's an optical system, not a magnetic one. "Adaptive
optics". And for the hands we have the "Cyber Glove" system. Slice two
fingers off one of them - and Boris is your uncle.'
'Hey, guys,' said one of the engineers, 'keep it down a bit, can you?
Arkasha's got another jump to do. Let him rest up.'
'What?' said Arkasha, sitting up in the hammock. 'You lost your
marbles, have you?'
'Let's go,' said Morkovin.
The next space Morkovin took Tatarsky into was called the 'Virtual
Studio'. Despite the name, inside there were genuine cameras and studio
lights that gave off a pleasant warmth. The studio was a large room with
green walls and floor. They were filming several people got up in
fashionable rural outfits. They were standing round an empty space and
nodding thoughtfully, while one of them rolled a ripe ear of wheat between
his hands. Morkovin explained that they were prosperous farmers, who were
cheaper to shoot on film than to animate.
'We tell them more or less which way to look,' he said, 'and when to
ask questions. Then we can match them up with anyone we like. Have you seen
Starship Troopers? Where the star-ship troopers fight the bugs?'
'Yeah.'
'It's the same thing. Only instead of the troopers we have farmers or
small businessmen, inside of the automatics we have bread and salt, and
instead of the bug we have Zyuganov or Lebed. Then we match them up, paste
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour or the Baikonur launch-pad in the
background, copy it to Betacam and put it out on air ... Let's go take a
look at the control room as well.'
The control room, located behind a door with the coy inscription
'Engine Room', failed to make any particular impression on Tatarsky. The two
guards with automatic rifles standing by the door made an impression all
right, but the actual premises seemed uninteresting. They consisted of a
small room with squeaky parquet flooring and dusty wallpaper with green
gladioli that could clearly remember Soviet times very well. There was no
furniture in the room, but hanging on one wall was a colour photograph of
Yuri Gagarin holding a dove in his hands, and the wall opposite was covered
with metal shelving holding numerous identical blue boxes, on which the only
decoration was the Silicon Graphics logo, looking like a snowflake. In
appearance the boxes were not much different from the device Tatarsky had
seen once in Draft Podium. There were no interesting lamps or indicators on
these boxes - any old run-of-the-mill transformer might have looked just the
same - but Morkovin behaved with extreme solemnity.
'Azadovsky said you like life to have big tits,' he said. 'Well, this
is the biggest of the lot. And if it doesn't excite you yet, that's just
because you're not used to it yet.'
'What is it?'
'A 100/400 render-server. Silicon Graphics turns them out specially for
this kind of work - high end. In American terms it's already outdated, of
course, but it does the job for us. All of Europe runs on these, anyway. It
can render up to one hundred primary and four hundred secondary
politicians.'
'A massive computer,' Tatarsky said without enthusiasm.
'It's not even a computer. It's a stand with twenty-four computers
controlled from a single keyboard. Four 1,5-giga-hertz processors in every
one. Each block calculates the frames in turn and the entire system works a
bit like an aviation cannon with revolving barrels. The Americans took big
bucks off us for this baby! But what can you do? When everything was just
starting up, we didn't have anything like it. Now, you know yourself, we
never will have. The Americans, by the way, are our biggest problem. They
keep cutting us back like we were some kind of jerks.'
'How d'you mean?'
'The processor frequency. First they cut us back by two hundred
megahertz for Chechnya. It was really for the pipeline - you realise that,
anyway. Then because we stole those loans. And so on, for any old reason at
all. Of course, we push things to the limit at night, but they watch TV in
the embassy like everyone else. As soon we step up the frequency they pick
it up and send round an inspector. It's plain shameful. A great country like
this stuck on four hundred megahertz - and not even our own.'
Morkovin went over to the stand, pulled out a slim blue box and lifted
up its lid to expose a liquid-crystal monitor. Below it was a keyboard with
a track-ball.
'Is that the keyboard it's controlled from?' Tatarsky asked.
'Of course not,' said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of his hand. 'You
need clearance to be able to get into the system. All the terminals are
upstairs. This is just a check monitor. I want to see what we're rendering
at the moment.'
He prodded at the keys and a window with a progress indicator appeared
at the bottom of the screen. It also had several incomprehensible messages
in English in it: memory used 5184 M, time elapsed 23:11:12 and something
else in very fine script. Then the pathway selected appeared in large
letters:
C:/oligarchs/berezka/excesses /field_disgr/slalom.prg.
'I see,' said Morkovin. 'It's Berezovsky in Switzerland.'
Small squares containing fragments of an image began covering the
screen, as though someone was assembling a jigsaw. After a few seconds
Tatarsky recognised the familiar face with a few black holes in it still not
rendered - he was absolutely astounded by the insane joy shining in the
already computed right eye.
'He's off skiing, the bastard,' said Morkovin, 'and you and me are
stuck in here breathing dust.'
'Why's the folder called "excesses"? What's so excessive about skiing?'
'Instead of those sticks with flags on them the storyboard has him
skiing round naked ballerinas,' Morkovin replied. 'Some of them have blue
ribbons and some of them have red ones. We filmed the girls out on the
slope. They were delighted to get a free trip to Switzerland. Two of them
are still doing the rounds over there.'
He turned off the control monitor, closed it and pushed the unit back
into place. Tatarsky was suddenly struck by an alarming thought. 'Listen,'
he said, 'you say the Americans are doing the same?'
'Sure. And it started a lot earlier. Reagan was animated all his second
term. As for Bush - d'you remember that time he stood beside a helicopter
and the hair he'd combed across his bald patch kept lifting up and waving in
the air? A real masterpiece. I don't reckon there's ever been anything in
computer graphics to compare with it. America ...'
'But is it true their copywriters work on our politics?'
'That's a load of lies. They can't even come up with anything any good
for themselves. Resolution, numbers of pixels, special effects - no problem.
But it's a country with no soul. All their political creatives are pure
shit. They have two candidates for president and only one team of
scriptwriters. It's just full of guys who've been given the push by Madison
Avenue, because the money's bad in politics. I've been looking through their
election campaign material for ages now, and it's dreadful. If one of them
talks about a bridge to the past, then a couple of days later the other
one's bound to start talking about a bridge to the future. For Bob Dole all
they did was rewrite the Nike slogan from "just do it" to "just don't do
it". And the best they can come up with is a blow job in the Oral Office . .
. Nah, our scriptwriters are ten times as good. Just look what rounded
characters they write. Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Lebed. As good as Chekhov. The
Three Sisters. Anyone who says Russia has no brands of its own should have
the words rammed down their throat. With the talent we have here, we've no
need to feel ashamed in front of anyone. Look at that, for instance, you
see?'
He nodded at the photograph of Gagarin. Tatarsky took a closer look at
it and realised it wasn't Gagarin at all, but General Lebed in dress
uniform, and it wasn't a dove in his hands but a white rabbit with its ears
pressed back. The photograph was so similar to its prototype that it
produced a kind of trompe I'oeil effect: for a moment the rabbit in Lebed's
hands actually seemed to be an indecently obese pigeon.
'A young miner did that,' said Morkovin. 'It's for the cover of our
Playboy. The slogan to go with it is: "Russia will be glossy and sassy". For
the hungry regions it's spot on, a bull's eye - instant association with
"sausage". The young guy probably only used to eat every other day, and now
he's one of the top creatives. He still tends to focus on food a lot,
though...'
'Hang on,' said Tatarsky, 'I've got a good idea. Let me just write it
down.'
He took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote:
Silicon Graphics I big tits - new concept/or the Russian market.
Instead of a snowflake the outline of an Immense tit that looks like its
been filled out with a silicon implant (casually drawn with a pen, for
'graphics'). In the animation (the clip) an organic silicon worm crawls out
of the nipple and curves itself into a $ sign (model on Spedes-II). Think
about it.
'A rush of sweaty inspiration?' Morkovin asked. 'I feel envious. OK,
the excursion's over. Let's go to the canteen.'
The canteen was still empty. The television was playing away with no
sound, and their two glasses and unfinished bottle of Smirnoff Citrus Twist
were still standing on the table below it. Morkovin filled the glasses,
clinked his own glass against Tatarsky's without saying a word and drank up.
The excursion had left Tatarsky feeling vaguely uneasy.
'Listen,' he said, 'there's one thing I don't understand. OK, so
copywriters write all their texts for them; but who's responsible for what's
in the texts? Where do we get the subjects from? And how do we decide which
way national policy's going to move tomorrow?'
'Big business,' Morkovin answered shortly. 'You've heard of the
oligarchs?'
'Uhuh. You mean, they get together and sort out things? Or do they send
in their concepts in written form?'
Morkovin put his thumb over the opening of the bottle, shook it and
began gazing at the bubbles - he obviously found something fascinating in
the sight. Tatarsky said nothing as he waited for an answer.
'How can they all get together anywhere,' Morkovin replied at long
last, 'when all of them are made on the next floor up? You've just seen
Berezovsky for yourself.'
'Uhuh,' Tatarsky responded thoughtfully. 'Yes, of course. Then who
writes the scripts for the oligarchs?'
'Copywriters. All exactly the same, just one floor higher.'
'Uhuh. And how do we decide what the oligarchs are going to decide?'
'Depends on the political situation. "Decide" is only a word, really.
In actual fact we don't have too much choice about it. We're hemmed in tight
by the iron law of necessity. For both sets of them. And for you and me
too.'
'So you mean there aren't any oligarchs, either? But what about that
board downstairs: the Interbank Committee ...?'
'That's just to stop the filth from trying to foist their protection on
us. We're the Interbank Committee all right, only all the banks are
intercommittee banks. And we're the committee. That's the way it is.'
'I get you,' said Tatarsky. 'I think I get you, anyway... That is, hang
on there . . . That means this lot determine that lot, and that lot... That
lot determine this lot. But then how . . . Hang on ... Then what's holding
the whole lot up?'
He broke off in a howl of pain: Morkovin had pinched him on the wrist
as hard as he could - so hard he'd even torn off a small patch of skin.
'Don't you ever,' he said, leaning over the table and staring darkly
into Tatarsky's eyes, 'not ever, think about that. Not ever, get it?'
'But how?' Tatarsky asked, sensing that the pain had thrown him back
from the edge of a deep, dark abyss. 'How can I not think about it?'
"There's this technique,' said Morkovin. 'Like when you realise that
any moment now you're going to think that thought all the way through, you
pinch yourself or you prick yourself with something sharp. In your arm or
your leg - it doesn't matter where. Wherever there are plenty of nerve
endings. The way a swimmer pricks his calf when he gets cramp. In order not
to drown. And then gradually you build up something like a callus around the
thought and it's no real problem to you to avoid it. Like, you can feel it's
there, only you never think it. And gradually you get used to it. The eighth
floor's supported by the seventh floor, the seventh floor's supported by the
eighth floor; and everywhere, at any specific point and any specific moment,
things are stable. Then, when the work comes piling in, and you do a line of
coke, you'll spend the whole day on the run fencing concrete problems. You
won't have time left for the abstract ones.'
Tatarsky drained the rest of the vodka in a single gulp and pinched his
own thigh several times. Morkovin gave a sad laugh.
'Take Azadovsky,' he said, 'why d'you think he winds everyone up and
comes on heavy like that? Because it never even enters his head that there's
something strange in all of this. People like that are only born once in a
hundred years. He's got a real sense of life on an international scale ...'
'All right,' said Tatarsky, pinching his leg again. 'But surely someone
has to control the economy, not just wind people up and come on heavy? The
economy's complicated. Doesn't it take some kind of principles to regulate
it?'
'The principle's very simple,' said Morkovin. 'Monetarism. To keep
everything in the economy normal, all we have to do is to control the gross
stock of money we have. And everything else automatically falls into place.
So we mustn't interfere in anything.'
'And how do we control this gross stock?'
'So as to make is as big as possible.'
'And that's it?'
'Of course. If the gross stock of money we have is as big as possible,
that means everything's hunky-dory.'
'Yes,' said Tatarsky, 'that's logical. But still someone has to run
everything, surely?'
'You want to understand everything far too quickly,' Morkovin said with
a frown. 'I told you, just wait a while. That, my friend, is a great problem
- trying to understand just who's running things. For the time being let me
just say the world isn't run by a "who", it's run by a "what". By certain
factors and impulses it's too soon for you to be learning about. Although in
fact. Babe, there's no way you could not know about them. That's the paradox
of it all...'
Morkovin fell silent and began thinking about something. Tatarsky lit a
cigarette - he didn't feel like talking any more. Meanwhile a new client had
appeared in the canteen, one that Tatarsky recognised immediately: it was
the well-known TV political analyst Farsuk Seiful-Farseikin. In real life he
looked a bit older than he did on the screen. He was obviously just back
from a broadcast: his face was covered with large beads of sweat, and the
famous pince-nez was set crooked on his nose. Tatarsky expected Farseikin to
dash over to the counter for vodka, but he came over to their table.
'Mind if I turn on the sound?' he asked, nodded towards the television.
'My son made this clip. I haven't seen it yet.'
Tatarsky looked up. Something strangely familiar was happening on the
screen: there was a choir of rather dubious-looking sailors standing in a
clearing in a birch forest (Tatarsky recognised Azadovsky right away - he
was standing in the middle of the group, the only one with a medal gleaming
on his chest). With their arms round each other's shoulders, the sailors
were swaying from side to side and gently singing in support of a
yellow-haired soloist who looked like the poet Es-enin raised to the power
of three. At first Tatarsky thought the soloist must be standing on the
stump of a gigantic birch tree, but from the ideally cylindrical form of the
stump and the small yellow lemons drawn on it, he realised it was a soft
drinks can magnified many times over and painted to resemble either a birch
tree or a zebra. The slick image-sequencing testified that this was a very
expensive clip.
'Bom-bom-bom,' the swaying sailors rumbled dully. The soloist stretched
out his hands from his heart towards the camera and sang in a clear tenor:
My motherland gives me
For getting it right
My fill of her fizzy,
Her birch-bright Sprite!
Tatarsky crushed his cigarette into the ashtray with a sharp movement.
'Motherfuckers/ he said.
'Who?' asked Morkovin.
'If only I knew ... So tell me then, what area do they want to move me
into?'
'Senior creative in the kompromat department; and you'll be on standby
when we have a rush on. So now we'll be standing, shoulder to shoulder, just
like those sailors . . . Forgive me, brother, for dragging you into in all
this. Life's much simpler for the punters, who don't know anything about it.
They even think there are different TV channels and different TV companies
... But then, that's what makes them punters.'
CHAPTER 13. The Islamic Factor
It happens so often: you're riding along in your white Mer-cedes and
you go past a bus stop. You see the people who've been standing there,
waiting in frustration for their bus for God knows how long, and suddenly
you notice one of them gazing at you with a dull kind of expression that
just might be envy. For a second you really start to believe that this
machine stolen from some anonymous German burgher, that still hasn't been
fully cleared through the customs in fraternal Belorussia but already has a
suspicious knocking in the engine, is the prize that witnesses to your full
and total victory over life. A warm shiver runs up and down your spine, you
proudly turn your face away from the people standing at the bus stop, and in
your very heart of hearts you know that all your trials were not in vain:
you've really made it.
Such is the action of the anal wow-factor in our hearts; but somehow
Tatarsky failed to experience its sweet titillation. Perhaps the difficulty
lay in some specific after-the-rain apathy of the punters standing at their
bus stops, or perhaps Tatarsky was simply too nervous: there was a review of
his work coming up, and Azadovsky himself was due to attend. Or perhaps the
reason lay in the increasingly frequent breakdowns of the social radar
locating unit in his mind.
'If we regard events purely from the point of view of image animation,'
he thought, glancing round at his neighbours in the traffic jam, 'then we
have all our concepts inverted. For the celestial Silicon that renders this
entire world, a battered old Lada is a much more complicated job than a new
BMW that's been blasted with gales for three years in aerodynamic tunnels.
The whole thing comes down to creatives and scenario writers. But what bad
bastard could have written this scenario? And who's the viewer who sits and
stuffs his face while he watches this screen? Most important of all, could
it all really only be happening so that some heavenly agency can rake in
something like money from something like advertising? Certainly looks like
it. It's a well-known fact that everything in the world is based on
similitudes.'
The traffic jam finally began to ease. Tatarsky lowered the window. His
mood was completely spoiled; he needed live human warmth. He pulled out of
the stream of cars and braked at the bus stop. The broken glass panel in the
side of the shelter had been patched over with a board carrying an
advertisement for some TV channel showing an allegorical representation of
the four mortal sins holding remote controls. An old woman was sitting
motionless on the bench under the shelter with a basket on her knees, and
sitting beside her was a curly-headed man of about forty, clutching a bottle
of beer. He was dressed in a shabby, padded military coat. Noting that the
man still seemed to possess a fair amount of vital energy, Tatarsky stuck
out his elbow.
'Excuse me, soldier,' he said, 'can you tell me where the Men's Shirts
shop is around here?'
The man looked up at him. He must have understood Tatarsky's real
motivation, because his eyes were immediately flooded with an ice-cold fury.
The brief exchange of glances was most informative - Tatarsky realised that
the man realised, and the man realised Tatarsky realised he'd been realised.
'Afghanistan was way heavier,' said the man.
'I beg your pardon, what did you say?'
'What I said was', the man replied, shifting his grip to the neck of
the bottle, 'that Afghanistan was way heavier. And don't you even try to beg
my pardon.'
Something told Tatarsky the man was not approaching his car in order to
tell him the way to the shop, and he flattened the accelerator against the
floor. His instinct had not deceived him - a second later something struck
hard against the rear windsow and it shattered into a spider's web of
cracks, with white foam trickling down over them. Driven by his adrenalin
rush, Tatarsky accelerated sharply. 'What a fucker,' he thought, glancing
round. 'And they want to build a market economy with people like that.'
After he parked in the yard of the Interbank Committee, a red
Range-Rover pulled up beside him - the latest model, with a set of
fantastical spotlights perched on its roof and its door decorated with a
cheerful drawing of the sun rising over the prairie and the head of an
Indian chief clad in a feather headdress. 'I wonder who drives those?'
Tatarsky thought, and lingered at the door of his car for a moment.
A fat, squat man wearing an emphatically bourgeois striped suit
clambered out of the Range-Rover and turned round, and Tatarsky was amazed
to recognise Sasha Blo - fatter than ever, even balder, but still with that
same old grimace of tormented failure to understand what was really going
on.
'Sasha,' said Tatarsky, 'is that you?'
'Ah, Babe,' said Sasha Blo. 'You're here too? In the dirt department?'
'How d'you know?'
'Elementary, my dear Watson. That's where everybody starts out. Till
they get their hand in. There aren't all that many creatives on the books.
Everyone knows everyone else. So if I haven't seen you before and now you're
parking at this entrance, it means you're in kompromat. And you've only been
there a couple of weeks at most.'
'It's been a month already,' Tatarsky answered. 'So what're you doing
now?'
'Me? I'm head of the Russian Idea department. Drop in if you have any
ideas.'
'I'm not much good to you" Tatarsky answered. 'I tried thinking about
it, but it was a flop. You should try driving around the suburbs and asking
the guys on the street.'
Sasha Blo frowned in dissatisfaction.
'I tried that at the beginning,' he said. 'You pour the vodka, look
into their eyes, and then it's always the same answer:
"Bugger off and crash your fucking Mercedes." Can't think of anything
cooler than a Mercedes . . . And it's all so destructive .. .'
'That's right,' sighed Tatarsky and looked at the rear window of his
car. Sasha Blo followed his glance.
'Is it yours?'
'Yes it is,' Tatarsky said with pride.
'I see' said Sasha Blo, locking the door of his Range-Rover; 'forty
minutes of embarrassment gets you to work. Well, don't let it get you down.
Everything's still ahead of you.'
He nodded and ran off jauntily towards the door, flapping a fat, greasy
attache case as he went. Tatarsky gazed after him for a long moment, then
looked at the rear window of his car again and took out his notebook. "The
worst thing of all', he wrote on the last page, 'is that people base their
intercourse with each other on senselessly distracting chatter, into which
they cold-bloodedly, cunningly and inhumanly introduce their anal impulse in
the hope that it will become someone else's oral impulse. If this happens,
the winner shudders or-giastically and for a few seconds experiences the
so-called "pulse of life".'
Azadovsky and Morkovin had been sitting in the viewing hall since early
morning. Outside the entrance several people were walking backwards and
forwards, sarcastically discussing Yeltsin's latest binge. Tatarsky decided
they must be copywriters from the political department practising corporate
non-action. They were called in one by one; on average they spent about ten
minutes with the bosses. Tatarsky realised that the problems discussed were
of state significance -he heard Yeltsin's voice emanate from the hall at
maximum volume several times. The first time he burbled:
'What do we want so many pilots for? We only need one pilot, but ready
for anything! The moment I saw my grandson playing with Play Station I knew
straightaway what we need ...'
The second time they were obviously playing back a section from an
address to the nation, because Yeltsin's voice was solemn and measured: 'For
the first time in many decades the population of Russia now has the chance
to choose between the heart and the head. Vote with your heart!'
One project was wound up - that was obvious from the face of the tall
man with a moustache and prematurely grey hair who emerged from the hall
clutching a crimson loose-leaf folder with the inscription 'Tsar'. Then
music began playing in the hall - at first a balalaika jangled for a long
time, then Tatarsky heard Azadovsky shouting: 'Bugger it! We'll take him off
the air. Next.'
Tatarsky was the last in the queue. The dimly lit hall where Azadovsky
was waiting looked luxurious but somewhat archaic, as though it had been
decorated and furnished back in the forties. For some reason Tatarsky bent
down when he entered. He trotted across to the first row and perched on the
edge of the chair to the left of Azadovsky, who was ejecting streams of
smoke into the beam of the video-projector. Azadovsky shook his hand without
looking at him - he was obviously in a bad mood. Tatarsky knew what the
problem was: Morkovin had explained it to him the day before.
'They've dropped us to three hundred megahertz,' he said gloomily. 'For
Kosovo. Remember how under the communists there were shortages of butter?
Now it's machine time. There's something fatal about this country. Now
Azadovsky's watching all the drafts himself. Nothing's allowed on the main
render-server without written permission, so give it your best shot.'
It was the first time Tatarsky had seen what a draft - that is a rough
sketch before it's been rendered in full - actually looked like. If he
hadn't written the scenario himself, he would never have guessed that the
green outline divided by lines of fine yellow dots was a table with a game
of Monopoly set up on it. The playing pieces were identical small red
arrows, and the dice were two blue blobs, but the game had been modelled
honestly - in the lower section of the screen pairs of numbers from one to
six flickered on and off, produced by the random number generator. The
players themselves didn't exist yet, though their moves corresponded to the
points scored. Their places were occupied by skeletons of graduated lines
with little circles as ball-joints. Tatarsky could only see their faces,
constructed of coarse polygons - Salaman Raduev's beard was like a rusty
brick attached to the lower section of his face and a round bullet scar on
his temple looked like a red button. Bere-zovsky was recognisable from the
blue triangles of his shaved cheeks. As was only to be expected, Berezovsky
was winning.
'Yes,' he said, 'in Mother Russia, Monopoly's a bit dicey. You buy a
couple of streets, and then it turns out there are people living on them.'
Raduev laughed: 'Not just in Russia. It's like that everywhere. And
I'll tell you something else, Boris: not only do people live there; often
they actually think the streets are theirs.'
Berezovsky tossed the dice. Once again he got two sixes.
"That's not quite how it is/ he said. 'Nowadays people find out what
they think from the television. So if you want to buy up a couple of streets
and still sleep well, first you have to buy a TV tower.'
There was a squeak, and an animated insert appeared in the comer of the
table: a military walkie-talkie with a long aerial. Raduev lifted it to his
head-joint, said something curt in Chechen and put it back.
'I'm selling off my TV announcer,' he said, and flicked a playing piece
into the centre of the table with his finger. 'I don't like television.'
'I'm buying,' Berezovsky responded quickly. 'But why don't you like it?
'I don't like it because piss comes into contact with skin too often
when you watch it,' said Raduev, shaking the dice in the green arrows of his
fingers. 'Every time I turn on the television, there's piss coming into
contact with skin and causing irritation.'
'You must be talking about those commercials for Pampers, are you? But
it's not your skin, Salaman.'
'Exactly,' said Raduev irritably, 'so why do they come into contact in
my head? Haven't they got anywhere else?'
The upper section of Berezovsky's face was covered by a rectangle with
a pair of eyes rendered in detail. They squinted in concern at Raduev and
blinked a few times, then the rectangle disappeared.
'Anyway, just whose piss is it?' Raduev asked as if the idea had only
just entered his head.
'Drop it, Salaman,' Berezovsky said in a reconciliatory tone. 'Why
don't you take your move?'
'Wait, Boris; I want to know whose piss and skin it is coming into
contact in my head when I watch your television.'
'Why is it my television?'
'If a pipe runs across my squares, then I'm responsible for the pipe.
You said that yourself. Right? So if all the TV anchormen are on your
squares, you're responsible for TV. So you tell me whose piss it is
splashing about in my head when I watch it!'
Berezovsky scratched his chin. 'It's your piss, Salaman,' he said
decisively. 'How come?'
'Who else's can it be? Think it out for yourself. In Chechnya they call
you "the man with a bullet in his head" for your pluck. I don't think anyone
who decided to pour piss all over you while you're watching TV would live
very long.' 'You think right.' 'So, Salaman, that means it's your piss.' 'So
how does it get inside my head when I'm watching TV? Does it rise up from my
bladder?'
Berezovsky reached out for the dice, but Raduev put his hand over them.
'Explain,' he demanded. "Then we'll carry on playing.'
An animation rectangle appeared on Berezovsky's forehead, containing a
deep wrinkle. 'All right,' he said,' I'll try to explain.' 'Go on.'
'When Allah created this world/ Berezovsky began, casting a quick
glance upwards, 'he first thought it; and then he created objects. All the
holy books tell us that in the beginning was the word. What does that mean
in legal terms? In legal terms it means that in the first place Allah
created concepts. Coarse objects are the lot of human beings, but in stead
of them Allah' - he glanced upwards quickly once again - 'has ideas. And so
Salman, when you watch advertisements for Pampers on television, what you
have in your head is not wet human piss, but the concept of piss. The idea
of piss comes into contact with the concept of skin. You understand?'
'More or less,' said Raduev thoughtfully. 'But I didn't understand
everything. The idea of piss and the concept of skin come into contact
inside my head, right?' 'Right.'
'And instead of things, Allah has ideas. Right?' 'Right,' said
Berezovsky, and frowned. An animation patch appeared on his blue-shaven
cheeks, showing his jaw muscles clenched tightly.
'That means what happens inside my head is Allah's piss coming into
contact with Allah's skin, blessed be his name? Right?'
'You probably could put it like that,' said Berezovsky, and the insert
with the wrinkle appeared again on his forehead (Tatarsky had indicated this
point in the scenario with the words: 'Berezovsky senses the conversation is
taking a wrong turning.')
Raduev stroked the rusty brick of his beard.
'Al-Halladj spoke truly,' he said, 'in saying that the greatest wonder
of all is a man who sees nothing wonderful around him. But tell me, why does
it happen so often? I remember one time when piss came into contact with
skin seventeen times in one hour.'
"That was probably to settle up with Galiup Media,' Berezovsky replied
condescendingly. 'The customer must've been a tough guy. So they had to
account for his money before his protection could account for them. But what
of it? If we sell the time, we show the material.'
Raduev's skeleton swayed towards the table. 'Hang on, hang on. Are you
telling me that piss comes into contact with skin every time they give you
money?'
'Well, yes.'
Raduev's skeleton was suddenly covered with a crudely drawn torso
dressed in a Jordanian military uniform. He put his hand down behind the
back of his chair, pulled out