Victor Pelevin. Babylon
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Copyright Victor Pelevin 1999
Translation Copyright Andrew Bromfield 2000
FABER AND FABER
Origin: Pokolenie "P"
OCR: Scout
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All trade marks mentioned in the text are the property of their owners.
All rights are reserved. Names of goods and politicians do not indicate
actual commercial products; they refer only to projections of elements of
the politico-commercial informational field that have been forcibly induced
as perceptual objects of the individual mind. The author requests that they
be understood exclusively in this sense. Any other coincidences are purely
accidental. The author's opinions do not necessarily coincide with his point
of view.
CHAPTER 1. Generation 'P'
Once upon a time in Russia there really was a carefree, youthful
generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea and the sun, and chose
Pepsi.
It's hard at this stage to figure out exactly how this situation came
about. Most likely it involved more than just the remarkable taste of the
drink in question. More than just the caffeine that keeps young kids
demanding another dose, steering them securely out of childhood into the
clear waters of the channel of cocaine. More, even, than a banal bribe: it
would be nice to think that the Party bureaucrat who took the crucial
decision to sign the contract simply fell in love with this dark, fizzy
liquid with every fibre of a soul no longer sustained by faith in communism.
The most likely reason, though, is that the ideologists of the USSR
believed there could only be one truth. So in fact Generation T' had no
choice in the matter and children of the Soviet seventies chose Pepsi in
precisely the same way as their parents chose Brezhnev.
No matter which way it was, as these children lounged on the seashore
in the summer, gazing endlessly at a cloudless blue horizon, they drank warm
Pepsi-Cola decanted into glass bottles in the city of Novorossiisk and
dreamed that some day the distant forbidden world on the far side of the sea
would be part of their own lives.
Babylen Tatarsky was by default a member of Generation 'P', although it
was a long time before he had any inkling of the fact. If in those distant
years someone had told him that when he grew up he would be a copywriter,
he'd probably have dropped his bottle of Pepsi-Cola on the hot gravel of the
pioneer-camp beach in his astonishment. In those distant years children were
expected to direct their aspirations to-
wards a gleaming fireman's helmet or a doctor's white coat. Even that
peaceful word 'designer' seemed a dubious neologism only likely to be
tolerated until the next serious worsening in the international situation.
In those days, however, language and life both abounded in the strange
and the dubious. Take the very name 'Babylen', which was conferred on
Tatarsky by his father, who managed to combine in his heart a faith in
communism with the ideals of the sixties generation. He composed it from the
title of Yev-tushenko's famous poem 'Baby Yar' and Lenin. Tatarsky's father
clearly found it easy to imagine a faithful disciple of Lenin moved by
Yevtushenko's liberated verse to the grateful realisation that Marxism
originally stood for free love, or a jazz-crazy aesthete suddenly convinced
by an elaborately protracted saxophone riff that communism would inevitably
triumph. It was not only Tatarsky's father who was like that -the entire
Soviet generation of the fifties and sixties was the same. This was the
generation that gave the world the amateur song and ejaculated the first
sputnik - that four-tailed spermatozoon of the future that never began -
into the dark void of cosmic space.
Tatarsky was sensitive about his name, and whenever possible he
introduced himself as Vladimir or Vova. Then he began lying to his friends,
saying that his father had given him a strange name because he was keen on
Eastern mysticism, and he was thinking of the ancient city of Babylon, the
secret lore of which was destined to be inherited by him, Babylen. His
father had invented his alloy of Yevtushenko and Lenin because he was a
follower of Manicheism and pantheism and regarded it as his duty to balance
out the principle of light with the principle of darkness. Despite this
brilliantly elaborated fable, at the age of eighteen Tatarsky was delighted
to be able to lose his first passport and receive a new one in the name of
Vladimir.
After that his life followed an entirely ordinary pattern. He went to a
technical institute - not, of course, because he had any love for technology
(he specialised in some kind of electric furnace), but because he didn't
want to go into the army. However, at the age of twenty-one something
happened to him that changed the course of his life for ever.
Out in the countryside during the summer he read a small volume of
Boris Pasternak. The poems, which had previously left him entirely cold, had
such a profound impact that for several weeks he could think of nothing else
- and then he began writing verse himself. He would never forget the rusty
carcass of a bus, sunk at a crooked angle into the ground on the edge of the
forest outside Moscow at the precise spot where the very first line of his
life came to him: "The sardine-clouds swim onwards to the south.' (He later
came to realise this poem had a distinctly fishy odour.) In short, his was
an absolutely typical case, which ended in typical fashion when Tatarsky
entered the Literary Institute. He couldn't get into the poetry department,
though, and had to content himself with translations from the languages of
the peoples of the USSR. Tatarsky pictured his future approximately as
follows: during the day - an empty lecture hall in the Literary Institute, a
word-for-word translation from the Uzbek or the Kirghiz that had to be set
in rhyme by the next deadline; in the evenings - his creative labours for
eternity.
Then, quite unobtrusively, an event of fundamental significance for his
future occurred. The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve at
about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so
much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,
that's what must have happened in this case); so any more translations from
the languages of the peoples of the USSR were quite simply out of the
question. It was a blow, but Tatarsky survived it. He still had his work for
eternity, and that was enough for him.
Then events took an unforeseen turn. Something began happening to the
very eternity to which he had decided to devote his labours and his days.
Tatarsky couldn't understand this at all. After all, eternity - at least as
he'd always thought of it - was something unchangeable, indestructible and
entirely independent of the transient fortunes of this earthly realm. If,
for instance, the small volume of Pasternak that had changed his life had
already entered this eternity, then there was no power capable of ejecting
it.
But this proved not to be entirely true. It turned out that eternity
only existed for as long as Tatarsky sincerely believed in it, and was
actually nowhere to be found beyond the bounds of this belief. In order for
him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief,
because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia; and
something strange had started happening to everyone else, including the very
people who had taught Tatarsky to keep his eyes fixed firmly on eternity.
It wasn't as though they'd shifted their previous point of view, not
that - just that the very space into which their gaze had been directed
(after all, a point of view always implies gazing in some particular
direction) began to curl back in on itself and disappear, until all that was
left of it was a microscopic dot on the windscreen of the mind. Glimpses of
entirely different landscapes began to fill in their surroundings.
Tatarsky tried to fight it and pretend that nothing was actually
happening. At first he could manage it. By keeping close company with his
friends, who were also pretending that nothing was happening, for a time he
was able to believe it was true. The end came unexpectedly.
When Tatarsky was out walking one day, he stopped at a shoe shop that
was closed for lunch. Swimming about in the summer heat behind the glass
wall of the shop window was a fat, pretty salesgirl whom Tatarsky promptly
dubbed Maggie, and there in the midst of a chaos of multicoloured Turkish
handicrafts stood a pair of unmistakably Soviet-made shoes.
Tatarsky felt a sensation of instantaneous, piercing recognition. The
shoes had pointed toes and high heels and were made of good leather. They
were a light yellowish-brown, stitched with a light-blue thread and
decorated with large gold buckles in the form of harps. It wasn't that they
were simply in bad taste, or vulgar; they were the clear embodiment of what
a certain drunken teacher of Soviet literature from the Literary Institute
used to call 'our gestalt', and the sight was so pitiful, laughable and
touching (especially the harp buckles) that tears sprang to Tatarsky's eyes.
The shoes were covered by a thick layer of dust: the new era obviously had
no use for them.
Tatarsky knew the new era had no use for him either, but he had managed
to accustom himself to the idea and even take a certain bitter-sweet
satisfaction in it. The feeling had been decoded for him by the words of
Marina Tsvetaeva:
'Scattered along the dusty shelves of shops (No one has bought them and
no one buys!) My poems, like precious wines, will have their day': if there
was something humiliating in this feeling, then it was not he, but the world
around him that was humiliated. But in front of that shop window his heart
sank in the sudden realisation that the dust settling on him as he stood
there beneath the vault of the heavens was not the dust that covered a
vessel containing precious wine, but the same dust as covered the shoes with
the harp buckles;
and he realised something else too: the eternity he used to believe in
could only exist on state subsidies, or else - which is just the same thing
- as something forbidden by the state. Worse even than that, it could only
exist in the form of the semi-conscious reminiscences of some girl called
Maggie from the shoe shop. This dubious species of eternity had simply been
inserted into her head, as it had into his, in the same packaging as natural
history and inorganic chemistry. Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin
had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been
populated by entirely different individuals. But even that was not
important, because Tatarsky understood quite clearly that no matter how
things panned out, Maggie simply couldn't care less about eternity, and when
she finally and completely stopped believing in it, there wouldn't be any
more eternity, because where could it be then? Or, as he wrote in his
notebook when he got home: 'When the subject of eternity disappears, then
all of its objects also disappear, and the only subject of eternity is
whoever happens to remember about it occasionally.'
He didn't write any more poems after that: with the collapse of Soviet
power they had simply lost their meaning and value.
CHAPTER 2. Draft Podium
No sooner had eternity disappeared than Tatarsky found himself in the
present, and it turned out that he knew absolutely nothing about the world
that had sprung up around him during the last few years.
It was a very strange world. Externally it had not changed too much,
except perhaps that there were more paupers on the streets, but everything
in his surroundings - the houses, the trees, the benches on the streets -
had somehow suddenly grown old and decrepit. It wasn't possible to say that
the essential nature of the world had changed, either, because now it no
longer had any essential nature. A frighteningly vague uncertainty dominated
everything. Despite that, however, the streets were flooded with Mercedes
and Toyotas carrying brawny types possessed of absolute confidence in
themselves and in what was happening, and there was even, if one could
believe the newspapers, some kind of foreign policy.
Meanwhile the television was still showing the same old repulsive
physiognomies that had been sickening the viewers for the last twenty years.
Now they were saying exactly the same things they used to jail other people
for, except that they were far bolder, far more decisive and radical.
Tatarsky often found himself imagining Germany in 1946, with Doktor Goebbels
shrieking hysterically on the radio about the abyss into which fascism had
led the nation, with the former Kom-mandant of Auschwitz heading the
Commission for the Detention of Nazi Criminals, and SS generals explaining
in clear and simple words the importance of liberal values, while the whole
cabal was led by the newly enlightened Gauleiter of Eastern Prussia.
Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but
he still couldn't understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for
an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.
But then, Tatarsky had never been a great moral thinker, so he was less
concerned with the analysis of events (what was actually going on) than with
the problem of surviving them. He had no contacts that could help him, so he
dealt with things in the simplest way possible, by taking a job as a sales
assistant in a trading kiosk not far from where he lived.
The work was simple enough, but quite hard on the nerves. Inside the
kiosk it was half-dark and cool, like inside a tank;
Tatarsky was connected with the world by a tiny little window, scarcely
large enough to allow him to push a bottle of champagne through it. He was
protected against possible unpleasantness by a grille of metal rods crudely
welded to the walls. In the evening he handed over the takings to an elderly
Chechen who wore a heavy gold ring; sometimes he might even manage to
squeeze out a little bit for himself over and above his wages. From time to
time novice bandits would come up to the kiosk and demand money for their
protection in squeaky, still-breaking voices. Tatarsky wearily directed them
to Hussein. Hussein was a short, skinny young guy whose eyes were always
oily from the opiates he took; he usually lay on a mattress in a half-empty
trailer at the end of the string of kiosks, listening to Sufi music. Apart
from the mattress, the trailer contained a table, a safe that held a large
amount of money and a complicated version of the Kalash-nikov automatic
rifle with a grenade-thrower mounted under the barrel.
While he was working in the kiosk (it went on for a little less than a
year), Tatarsky acquired two new qualities. The first was a cynicism as
boundless as the view from the Ostankino television tower; the second was
something quite remarkable and inexplicable. Tatarsky only had to glance at
a customer's hands to know whether he could short-change him and by exactly
how much, whether he could be insulting to him, whether there was any
likelihood of being passed a false banknote and whether he could pass on a
false note himself. There was no definite system involved in all this.
Sometimes a fist like a hairy water-melon would appear in the little window,
but it was obvious that Tatarsky could quite safely send its owner to hell
and beyond. Then sometimes Tatarsky's heart would skip a beat in fright at
the sight of a slim female hand with manicured nails.
One day a customer asked Tatarsky for a pack of Davidoff. The hand that
placed the crumpled hundred-thousand-rouble note on the counter was not very
interesting. Tatarsky noted the slight, barely visible trembling of the
fingers and realised his customer was a stimulant abuser. He could easily
be, for instance, some middle-level bandit or businessman, or - as was often
the case - something halfway between the two.
'What kind of Davidoff? Standard or lights?' Tatarsky asked.
'Lights,' the customer replied and leaned down to glance in through the
little window.
Tatarsky started in surprise - the customer was a fellow student from
his year at the Literary Institute, Sergei Morkovin, one of the outstanding
characters of their year. He'd hardly changed at all, except that a neat
parting had appeared in his hair, and a few grey hairs had appeared in the
parting.
'Vova?' Morkovin asked in astonishment. 'What are you doing here?'
Tatarsky couldn't think of a good answer.
'I get it,' said Morkovin. 'Come on, you're out of this dump.'
It didn't take long for Tatarsky to be persuaded. He locked up the
kiosk and, casting a fearful glance in the direction of Hussein's trailer,
followed Morkovin to his car. They went to an expensive Chinese restaurant
called The Shrine of the Moon, ate dinner and did some heavy drinking, and
Morkovin told Tatarsky what he'd been up to recently. What he'd been up to
was advertising.
'Vova,' he said, grabbing Tatarsky by the arm, his eyes gleaming, 'this
is a very special time. There's never been a time like it and there never
will be again. It's a gold-rush, just like the Klondyke. In another two
years everything'll be all sewn up, but right now there's a real chance to
get in on the ground floor straight off the street. You know, in New York
they spend half a lifetime just trying to get to meet the right people over
lunch, but here ...'
There was a lot in what Morkovin said that Tatarsky simply didn't
understand. The only thing that was really clear to him from the
conversation was the outline of how business functioned in an era of
primitive accumulation and the way it was interlinked with advertising.
'Most of the time,' said Morkovin, 'it goes like this: a guy borrows
money on credit. He uses the credit to rent an office and buy a Jeep
Cherokee and eight crates of Smimoff. When the Smimoff runs out, it turns
out the jeep's wrecked, the office is awash with puke and the loan is due
for repayment. So he borrows money again - three times more than before. He
uses it to pay back the first loan, buys a Jeep Grand Cherokee and sixteen
crates of Absolut vodka. When the Absolut...'
'OK, I get the picture,' Tatarsky interrupted. 'So what's the ending?'
'There's two endings. If the bank the guy owes to is one of the mafia
banks, then some time or other he gets killed; and since there aren't any
others, that's what usually happens. On the other hand, if the guy's in the
mafia himself, then the last loan gets shifted on to the State Bank, and the
guy declares himself bankrupt. The bailiffs come round to his office,
inven-torise the empty bottles and the puke-covered fax, and in a little
while he starts up all over again. Nowadays, of course, the State Bank's got
its own mafia, so the situation's a bit more complicated, but the basic
picture's still the same.'
'Aha,' Tatarsky said thoughtfully. 'But I still don't see what all this
has to do with advertising.'
'That's where we come to the most important part. When there's still
about half the Smimoff or Absolut left, the jeep's still on the road and
death seems a distant and abstract prospect, a highly specific chemical
reaction occurs inside the head of the guy who created the whole mess. He
develops this totally boundless megalomania and orders himself an
advertising clip. He insists his clip has to blow away all the other
cretins' clips. The psychology of it's easy enough to understand. The guy's
opened up some little company called Everest and he's so desperate to see
his logo on Channel One, somewhere between BMW and Coca-Cola, that he could
top himself. So just as soon as this reaction takes place in the client's
head, we pop out of the bushes.'
Tatarsky liked the sound of that 'we' very much.
"The situation's like this/ Morkovin went on. 'There are only a few
studios that make the videos, and they're desperate for writers with nous,
because these days everything depends on the writer. The job itself works
like this: the people from the studio find a client who wants to get himself
on TV. You take a look at him. He tells you something. You listen to what he
wants to say. Then you write the scenario. It's usually about a page long,
because the clips are short. It might only take you a couple of minutes, but
you don't go back to him for at least a week - he has to think you've spent
all that time dashing backwards and forwards across your room, tearing your
hair out and thinking, thinking, thinking. He reads what you've written and,
depending on whether he likes the scenario or not, he orders a video from
your people or gets in touch with someone else. That's why, as far as the
studio you work for is concerned, you're the top man. The order depends on
you. And if you can hypnotise the client, you take ten per cent of the total
price of the video.'
'And how much does a video cost?'
'Usually from fifteen to thirty grand. Say twenty on average.'
'What?' Tatarsky asked in disbelief.
'0 God, not roubles. Dollars.'
In a split second Tatarsky had calculated what ten per cent of twenty
thousand would be. He swallowed hard and stared at Morkovin with dog-like
eyes.
'Of course, it's not going to last,' said Morkovin. 'In a year or two,
everything's going to look entirely different. Instead of all these
pot-bellied nobodies taking loans for their petty little businesses,
there'll be guys borrowing millions of bucks at a time. Instead of jeeps for
crashing into lamp-posts there'll be castles in France and islands in the
Pacific. Instead of five hundred grammes the former party secretaries will
be demanding five hundred grand. But basically what's going on in this
country of ours won't be any different, which means that the basic principle
of our work will never change.'
'My God,' said Tatarsky. 'Money like that. . . It's kind of
frightening.'
'Ifs Dostoievsky's old eternal question/ Morkovin said, laughing. 'Am I
a timid cowering creature or have I got moral rights?'
'Seems to me you've already answered that question.'
'Yes,' said Morkovin, 'I reckon I have.'
'And what is your answer?'
'It's very simple. I'm a timid cowering creature with inalienable
rights.' The next day Morkovin took Tatarsky to a strange place called Draft
Podium (after several minutes of intense mental effort Tatarsky abandoned
the attempt to guess what that meant). It was located in the basement of an
old brick-built house not far from the centre of town. Entry was via a heavy
steel door, which led into a small office space crammed with equipment.
Several young men were waiting there for Tatarsky. Their leader was a
stubble-cheeked guy by the name of Sergei, who looked like Dracula in his
younger days. He explained to Tatarsky that the small cube of blue plastic
standing on an empty cardboard box was a Silicon Graphics computer that cost
one hell of a lot of money, and the Soft Image program that was installed on
it cost twice as much. The Silicon was the most important treasure in this
subterranean cave. The room also contained a few more simple computers,
scanners and some kind of VCR with lots of dials and lights. One detail that
made a great impression on Tatarsky was that the VCR had a wheel on it with
a handle, like the wheel on a sewing machine, and you could use it to wind
on the frames on the tape by hand.
Draft Podium had a certain very promising client in its sights. 'The
mark's about fifty,' said Sergei, dragging on a menthol cigarette. 'Used to
work as a teacher of physics. Just when things started coming apart he set
up a co-operative baking bird's milk' cakes and in two years made so much
money that now he rents an entire confectionery plant in Lefortovo. Recently
he took out a big loan. The day before yesterday he went on the sauce, and
he usually stays on it about two weeks.'
'Where do you get that kind of information?' Tatarsky asked.
'His secretary/ said Sergei. 'So anyway, we have to get to him with the
scenario now, before he has time to sober up. When he sobers up, he gets
greedy. We're meeting tomorrow at one in his office.'
The next day Morkovin arrived at Tatarsky's place early. He brought
with him a large, bright-yellow plastic bag containing a maroon jacket made
of material that looked like the fabric they use for Russian army
greatcoats. The intricate crest gleaming on the breast pocket was
reminiscent of the emblem on a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. Morkovin said
it was a 'club jacket'. Tatarsky didn't understand what he meant, but he did
as he was told and put it on. Then Morkovin took a foppish notebook in a
leather cover out of the bag, together with an incredibly thick ballpoint
pen with the word 'Zoom' on it and a pager - at that time they'd only just
appeared in Moscow.
'You have to hang this thing on your belt,' he said. 'You're meeting
the client at one, and at twenty past one I'll give you a call on the pager.
When it beeps, take it off your belt and look at it like it's something
important. All the time the client's talking, keep making notes in the
notebook.'
'What's it all for?' Tatarsky asked.
'It's obvious enough, isn't it? The client's paying big money for a
sheet of paper and a few drops of black ink out of a printer. He has to be
absolutely certain plenty of others have paid money for the same thing
before him.'
'Seems to me,' said Tatarsky, 'all these jackets and pagers are just
the thing to raise doubts in his mind.'
'Don't go complicating things,' said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of
his hand. 'Life's simpler and stupider than that. And then there's this ...'
He took a slim case out of his pocket, opened it and held it out to
Tatarsky. It contained a heavy watch that was almost beautiful in a
repulsive kind of way, made of gold and steel.
'It's a Rolex Oyster. Careful, you'll chip off the gold plate; it's a
fake. I only take it out on business. When you're talking with the client,
flash it around a bit, you know. It helps.'
Tatarsky felt inspired by all this support. At half past twelve he
emerged from the metro. The guys from Draft Podium were waiting for him not
far from the entrance. They'd arrived in a long black Mercedes. Tatarsky had
already learned enough about business to know the car had been hired for
about two hours. Sergei was unshaven as ever, but now there was something
sullenly stylish about his stubble - probably due to the dark jacket with
the incredibly narrow lapels and the bow tie. Sitting beside him was Lena,
who looked after contracts and kept the books. She was wearing a simple
black dress (no jewellery and no make-up) and in her hand she was holding an
attache case with a golden lock. When Tatarsky climbed into the car, the
three of them exchanged glances and Sergei spoke to the chauffeur.
'Drive on.'
Lena was nervous. All the way there she kept giggling as she told them
about some guy called Azadovsky - apparently her friend's lover. This
Azadovsky inspired her with an admiration that bordered on rapture: he'd
arrived in Moscow from Ukraine and moved in with her friend, got himself
registered in her flat, then invited his sister and her two children up from
Dnepropetrovsk. He'd registered them in the flat and immediately, without
the slightest pause, swapped the flat for a different one through the courts
and dispatched Lena's sister to a room in a shared apartment.
'He's a man who'll really go far!' Lena kept repeating.
She was especially impressed by the fact that, once the operation had
been completed, the sister and her children were immediately banished back
to Dniepropetrovsk; there was so much detail in the way the tale was told
that by the end of the journey Tatarsky began to feel as though he'd lived
half his life in the flat with Azadovsky and his nearest and dearest;
but then, Tatarsky was just as nervous as Lena.
The client (Tatarsky never did find out what his name was) looked
remarkably like the image that had taken shape in Tatarsky's mind following
the previous day's conversation. He was a short, thickset little man with a
cunning face, from which the grimace of a hangover was only just beginning
to fade - evidently he'd taken his first drink of the day not long before
the meeting.
Following a brief exchange of pleasantries (Lena did most of the
talking; Sergei sat in the corner with his legs crossed, smoking) Tatarsky
was introduced as the writer. He sat down facing the client, clanging the
Rolex against the edge of the desk as he did so, and opened up his notebook.
It immediately became clear that the client had nothing in particular to
say. Without the assistance of a powerful hallucinogen it was hard to feel
inspired by the details of his business - he droned on most of the time
about some kind of oven-trays with a special non-stick coating. Tatarsky
listened with his face half-turned away, nodding and doodling meaningless
flourishes in his notebook. He surveyed the room out of the comer of his eye
- there was nothing interesting to be seen there, either, if you didn't
count the misty-blue reindeer-fur hat, obviously very expensive, that was
lying on the upper shelf in an empty cupboard with glass doors.
As promised, after a few minutes the pager on his belt rang. Tatarsky
unhooked the little black plastic box from his belt. The message on the
display said: 'Welcome to route 666.'
'Some joker, eh?' thought Tatarsky.
'Is it from Video International?' Sergei asked from the comer.
'No,' Tatarsky replied, following his lead. 'Those blockheads don't
bother me any more, thank God. It's Slava Zaitsev's design studio. It's all
off for today.'
'Why's that?' Sergei asked, raising one eyebrow. 'Surely he doesn't
think we're that desperate for his business ...'
'Let's talk about that later,' said Tatarsky.
Meanwhile the client was scowling thoughtfully at his reindeer-fur hat
in the glass-fronted cupboard. Tatarsky looked at his hands. They were
locked together, and his thumbs were circling around each other as though he
was winding in some invisible thread. This was the moment of truth.
'Aren't you afraid that it could all just come to a full stop?'
Tatarsky asked. 'You know what kind of times these are. What if everything
suddenly collapses?'
The client frowned and looked in puzzlement, first at Tatarsky and then
at his companions. His thumbs stopped circling each other.
'I am afraid,' he answered, looking up. 'Who isn't? You ask some odd
questions.'
'I'm sorry,' said Tatarsky. 'I didn't mean anything by it.'
Five minutes later the conversation was over. Sergei took a sheet of
the client's headed notepaper with his logo - it was a stylised bun framed
in an oval above the letters 'LCC'. They agreed to meet again in a week's
time; Sergei promised the scenario for the video would be ready by then.
'Have you totally lost your marbles, or what?' Sergei asked Tatarsky,
when they came out on to the street. 'Nobody asks questions like that.'
The Mercedes took all three of them to the nearest metro station.
When he got home, Tatarsky wrote the scenario in a few hours. It was a
long time since he'd felt so inspired. The scenario didn't have any specific
storyline. It consisted of a sequence of historical reminiscences and
metaphors. The Tower of Babel rose and fell, the Nile flooded, Rome burned,
ferocious Huns galloped in no particular direction across the steppes - and
in the background the hands of an immense, transparent clock spun round.
'One generation passeth away and another generation cometh,' said a
dull and demonic voice-over (Tatarsky actually wrote that in the scenario),
'but the Earth abideth for ever.' But eventually even the earth with its
ruins of empires and civilisations sank from sight into a lead-coloured
ocean;
only a single rock remained projecting above its raging surface, its
form somehow echoing the form of the Tower of Babel that the scenario began
with. The camera zoomed in on the cliff, and there carved in stone was a bun
and the letters 'LCC', and beneath them a motto that Tatarsky had found in a
book called Inspired Latin Sayings:
MEDIIS TEMPESTATIBUS PLACIDUS CALM IN THE MIDST OF STORMS LEFORTOVO
CONFECTIONERY COMBINE
In Draft Podium they reacted to Tatarsky's scenario with horror.
'Technically it's not complicated,' said Sergei. 'Rip off the
image-sequence from a few old films, touch it up a bit, stretch it out. But
it's totally off the wall. Even funny in a way.'
'So it's off the wall/ Tatarsky agreed. 'And funny. But you tell me
what it is you want. A prize at Cannes or the order?'
A couple of days later Lena took the client several versions of a
scenario written by somebody else. They involved a black Mercedes, a
suitcase stuffed full of dollars and other archetypes of the collective
unconscious. The client turned them all down without explaining why. In
despair Lena showed him the scenario written by Tatarsky.
She came back to the studio with a contract for thirty-five thousand,
with twenty to be paid in advance. It was a record. She said that when he
read the scenario the client started behaving like a rat from Hamlin who'd
heard an entire wind orchestra.
'I could have taken him for forty grand/ she said. 'I was just too slow
on the uptake.'
The money arrived in their account five days later, and Tatarsky
received his honestly earned two thousand. Sergei and his team were already
planning to go to Yalta to film a suitable cliff, on which the bun carved in
granite was supposed to appear in the final frames, when the client was
found dead in his office. Someone had strangled him with a telephone cord.
The traditional electric-iron marks were discovered on the body, and some
merciless hand had stopped the victim's mouth with a Nocturne cake (sponge
soaked in liqueur, bitter chocolate in a distinctly minor key, lightly
sprinkled with a tragic hoar-frosting of coconut).
'One generation passeth away and another generation cometh/ Tatarsky
thought philosophically, 'but thou lookest out always for number one.'
And so Tatarsky became a copywriter. He didn't bother to explain
himself to any of his old bosses; he simply left the keys of the kiosk on
the porch of the trailer where Hussein hung out: there were rumours that the
Chechens demanded serious compensation when anyone left one of their
businesses.
It didn't take him long to acquire new acquaintances and he started
working for several studios at the same time. Big breaks like the one with
Lefortovo's calm-amid-storms Confectionery Combine didn't come very often,
unfortunately.
Tatarsky soon realised that if one in ten projects worked out well,
that was already serious success. He didn't earn a really large amount of
money, but even so it was more than he'd made in the retail trade. He would
recall his first advertising job with dissatisfaction, discerning in it a
certain hasty, shamefaced willingness to sell cheap everything that was most
exalted in his soul. When the orders began coming in one after another, he
realised that in this particular business it's always a mistake to be in a
hurry, because that way you bring the price way down, and that's stupid:
everything that is most sacred and exalted should only be sold for the
highest price possible, because afterwards there'll be nothing left to trade
in. Tatarsky realised, however, that this rule did not apply to everyone.
The true virtuosos of the genre, whom he saw on TV, somehow managed to sell
off all that was most exalted every day of the week, but in a way that
provided no formal grounds for claiming they'd sold anything, so the next
day they could start all over again with nothing to worry about. Tatarsky
couldn't even begin to imagine how they managed that.
Gradually a very unpleasant tendency began to emerge: a client would be
presented with a project conceived and developed by Tatarsky, politely
explain that it was not exactly what was required, and then a month or two
later Tatarsky would come across a clip that was quite clearly based on his
idea. Trying to discover the truth in such cases was a waste of time.
After listening to his new acquaintances' advice, Tatarsky attempted to
jump up a rung in the advertising hierarchy and began developing advertising
concepts. The work was much the same as he had been doing before. There was
a certain magic book, and once you'd read it there was no more need to feel
shy of anyone at all or to have any kind of doubts. It was called
Positioning: A Battle for your Mind, and it was written by two highly
advanced American shamans. Its essential message was entirely inapplicable
to Russia - as far as Tatarsky could judge, there was no battle being waged
by trademarks for niches in befuddled Russian brains; the situation was more
reminiscent of a smoking landscape after a nuclear explosion - but even so
the book was useful. If was full of stylish expressions like 'line
extension' that could be stuck into concepts and dropped into spiels for
clients. Tatarsky realised what the difference was between the era of
decaying imperialism and the era of primitive capital accumulation. In the
West both the client who ordered advertising and the copywriter tried to
brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter's job was to screw with
the client's brains. Tatarsky realised in addition that Morkovin was right
and this situation was never going to change. One day, after smoking some
especially good grass, he uncovered by pure chance the basic economic law of
post-socialist society: initial accumulation of capital is also final.
Before going to sleep Tatarsky would sometimes re-read the book on
positioning. He regarded it as his little Bible; the comparison was all the
more appropriate because it contained echoes of religious views that had an
especially powerful impact on his chaste and unsullied soul: The romantic
copywriters of the fifties, gone on ahead of us to that great advertising
agency in the sky ...'
CHAPTER 3. Tikhamat-2
Lenin's statues were gradually carted out of town on military trucks
(they said some colonel had thought up the idea of melting them down for the
non-ferrous metal content and made a lot of money before he was rumbled),
but his presence was merely replaced by a frightening murky greyness in
which the Soviet soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwards on
itself. The newspapers claimed the whole world had been living in this grey
murk for absolutely ages, which was why it was so full of things and money,
and the only reason people couldn't understand this was their 'Soviet
mentality'.
Tatarsky didn't really understand completely what this Soviet mentality
was, although he used the expression frequently enough and enjoyed using it;
but as far as his new employer, Dmitry Pugin, was concerned, he wasn't
supposed to understand anything anyway. He was merely required to possess
this mentality. That was the whole point of what he did: adapt Western
advertising concepts to the menta