Babylon (18 page)

   ‘What’s that, a name?’

   "This game has no name,’ the voice replied. ‘It’s more of an official position.’

   Tatarsky remembered where it was he’d heard the voice - on the military building site in the woods outside Moscow. This time he could see the speaker, or rather, he was able to imagine him instantly and without the slightest effort. At first he thought it was the likeness of a dog sitting there in front of him - something like a greyhound, but with powerful paws with claws and a long vertical neck. The beast had an elongated head with conical ears and a very pleasant-looking, if slightly cunning, little face crowned by a coquettish mane of fur. There seemed to be a pair of wings pressed against its sides. After a short while Tatarsky realised the beast was so large and so strange that the word ‘dragon’ would suit him best, especially since he was covered in shimmering rainbow scales (but then, just at that moment almost every object in the room was shimmering with every hue of the rainbow). Despite its distinctly reptilian features, the being radiated goodwill so powerfully that Tatarsky wasn’t at all frightened.

   ‘Yes, everything is reduced to words.’ repeated the Sirruf. ‘As far as I am aware, the most profound revelation ever to visit a human being under the influence of drugs was occasioned by a critical dose of ether. The recipient summoned up the strength to write it down, even though it cost a supreme effort. What he wrote was: "The universe is permeated by a smell of oil.’ You’ve got a long way to go before you reach depths like that. Well, anyway, that’s all beside the point. Why don’t you tell me where you got the stamp from?’

   Tatarsky remembered the collector from the Poor Folk bar and his album. He was about to reply, but the Sirruf interrupted him:

   ‘Grisha the stamp-collector. I thought as much. How many of them did he have?’

   Tatarsky remembered the page of the album and the three lilac-coloured rectangles in the plastic pocket.

   ‘I see,’ said the Sirruf. ‘So there are two more.’

   After that he disappeared, and Tatarsky returned to his normal state. He understood now what happens to a person who has the
delirium tremens
he’d read so much about in the classics of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He had no control at all over his hallucinations, and he simply couldn’t tell which way he would be tossed by the next thought. He began to feel afraid. He got up and walked quickly into the bathroom, put his head under a stream of water and held it there until the cold became painful. He dried his hair on a towel, went back into the room and took another look at its reflection in the window pane. The familiar interior appeared to him now like a Gothic stage set for some menacing event due to occur at any moment, and the divan appeared like some sacrificial altar for large animals.

   ‘Why on earth did I have to go and swallow that garbage?’ he thought in anguish.

   ‘Absolutely no reason whatsoever,’ said the Sirruf, resurfacing in some obscure dimension of his consciousness. ‘It really isn’t good for man to go taking drugs. Especially psychedelics.’

   ‘Yes, I know that myself.’ Tatarsky replied quietly. ‘Now I do.’

   ‘Man has a world in which he lives.’ the Sirruf said didactically. ‘Man is man because he can see nothing except that world. But when you take an overdose of LSD or dine on panther fly-agarics, you’re stepping way out of line - and you’re taking a grave risk. If you only realised how many invisible eyes are watching you at that moment you would never do it; and if you were to see even just a few of those who are watching you, you’d die of fright. By this act you declare that being human is not enough for you and you want to become someone else. But in the first place, in order to cease being human, you have to die. Do you want to die?’

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky, earnestly pressing his hand to his heart.

   ‘And who is it you want to be?’

   ‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky said, crushed.

   ‘You see what I mean? Just one more tab from happy Holland might not have meant too much, but what you swallowed was something quite different. It’s a numbered issue, an official service document, by eating which you shift across into a different realm where there are absolutely no idle pleasures or amusements. And which you’re not supposed to go wandering about in without an official commission. And you don’t have any commission. Do you?’

   ‘No,’ agreed Tatarsky.

   ‘We’ve settled things with Grisha. He’s a sick man, a collector; and he came by the pass by accident… But what did you eat it for?’

   ‘I wanted to feel the pulse of life,’ Tatarsky said with a sob.

   ‘The pulse of life? Very well, feel it,’ said the Sirruf.

   When Tatarsky came to his senses, the only thing in the world he wanted was that the experience he’d just been through and had no words to describe, merely a feeling of black horror, should never happen to him again. For that he was prepared to give absolutely anything.

   ‘Again, perhaps?’ asked the Sirruf.

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘please, don’t. I’ll never, never eat that garbage again. I promise.’

   ‘You can promise the local policeman. If you live till morning, that is.’

   ‘What d’you mean?’

   ‘Just what I say. Do you at least realise that was a pass for five people? And you’re here alone. Or are there really five of you?’

   When Tatarsky recovered his senses again he felt he really didn’t have much chance of surviving the night. There had just been five of him, and every one of them had felt so bad that Tatarsky had instantly realised what a blessing it was to exist in the singular.’ and he was astonished how people could be so blind as not to appreciate their good fortune.

   ‘Please.’ he said, ‘please, don’t do that to me again.’

   ‘I’m not doing anything to you,’ replied the Sirruf. ‘You’re doing it all yourself.’

   ‘Can I explain?’ Tatarsky asked piteously. ‘I realise I’ve made a mistake. I realise it’s not right to look at the Tower of Babel. But I didn’t…’

   ‘What has the Tower of Babel got to do with it?’ the Sirruf interrupted.

   ‘I’ve just seen it.’

   ‘You can’t see the Tower of Babel, you can only ascend it.’ replied the Sirruf. ‘I tell you that as its guardian. And what you saw was the complete opposite. One could call it the Carthaginian Pit. The so-called
tofet.’

   ‘What’s a tofet?’

   ‘It’s a place of sacrificial cremation. There were pits of the kind in Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and so forth, and they really did burn people in them. That, by the way, is why Carthage was destroyed. These pits were also known as Gehenna - after a certain ancient valley where the whole business started. I might add that the Bible calls it the "abomination of the Ammonites" - but you haven’t read the Bible anyway, you only search through it for new slogans.’

   ‘I don’t understand.’

   ‘Very well. You can regard the tofet as an ordinary television.’

   ‘I still don’t understand. Do you mean I was inside a television?’

   ‘In a certain sense. You saw the technological space in which your world is being consumed by fire. Something like a garbage incinerator.’

   Once again Tatarsky glimpsed the figure holding the glittering strings on the periphery of his field of vision. The vision lasted for only a fraction of a second.

   ‘But isn’t he the god Enkidu?’ he asked. ‘I was just reading about him. I even know what those strings are he has in his hands. When the beads from the great goddess’s necklace decided they were people and they settled right across the reservoir…’

   ‘In the first place, he isn’t a god, quite the opposite. Enkidu is one of his less common names, but he is better known as Baal. Or Baloo. In Carthage they tried to sacrifice to him by burning their children, but there was no point, because he makes no allowances and simply cremates everyone in turn. In the second place, the beads didn’t decide they were people, it was people who decided they were beads. That’s why the entity you call Enkidu gathers up those beads and cremates them, so that some day people will realise they aren’t beads at all. Do you follow?’

   ‘No. What are the beads, then?’

   The Sirruf said nothing for a moment.

   ‘How can I explain it to you? The beads are what that Che Guevara of yours calls "identity".’

   ‘But where did these beads come from?’

   ‘They didn’t come from anywhere. They don’t actually exist.’

   ‘What is it that burns then?’ Tatarsky asked doubtfully.

   ‘Nothing.’

   ‘I don’t understand. If there’s fire, then there must be something burning. Some kind of substance.’

   ‘Have you ever read Dostoievsky?’

   ‘I can’t stand him, to be honest.’

   ‘A pity. In one of his novels there was an old man called Zosima who was horrified by intimations of
the material fire.
It’s not clear quite why he was so afraid. The material fire is your world. The fire in which you burn has to be maintained. And you are one of the service personnel.’

   ‘Service personnel?’

   ‘You are a copywriter, aren’t you? That means you are one of those who force people to gaze into the consuming fire.’

   ‘The consuming fire? But what is it that’s consumed?’

   ‘Not what, but who. Man believes that he is the consumer, but in reality the fire of consumption consumes him. What he receives in return are certain modest joys. It’s like the safe sex that you all indulge in ceaselessly, even when you are alone. Environmentally friendly garbage incineration. But you won’t understand it anyway.’

   ‘But who’s the garbage, who is it?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘Is it man?’

   ‘Man by nature is almost as great and beautiful as Sirruf.’ the Sirruf replied. ‘But he is not aware of it. The garbage is this unawareness. It is the identity that has no existence in reality. In this life man attends at the incineration of the garbage of his identity…’

   ‘Why should man gaze into this fire if his life is burning in it?’

   ‘You have no idea of what to do with these lives anyway; and whichever way you might turn your eyes, you are still gazing into the flames in which your life is consumed. There is mercy in the fact that in place of crematoria you have televisions and supermarkets; but the truth is that their function is the same. And in any case, the fire is merely a metaphor. You saw it because you ate a pass to the garbage incineration plant. All most people see in front of them is a television screen…’

   And with that he disappeared.

   ‘Hey there,’ Tatarsky called.

   There was no reply. Tatarsky waited for another minute before he realised he’d been left alone with his own mind, ready to wander off in any direction at all. He had to occupy it with something quickly.

   ‘Phone,’ he whispered. ‘Who? Gireiev! He knows what to do.’

   For a long time no one answered. Eventually, on the fifteenth or twentieth ring, Gireiev’s morose voice responded.

   ‘Hello.’

   ‘Andrey? Hello. This is Tatarsky.’

   ‘Do you know what time it is?’

   ‘Listen,’ Tatarsky said hastily, ‘I’m in trouble. I’ve done too much acid. Someone in the know tells me it was five doses. Anyway, to cut it short, I’m coming apart at all the seams. What can I do?’

   ‘What can you do? I don’t know what you can do. In cases like that I recite a mantra.’

   ‘Can you give me one?’

   ‘How can I give you one? It has to be conferred.’

   ‘Aren’t there any you can just give me without any conferring?’

   Gireiev thought. ‘Right, just hang on a minute,’ he said, and put the receiver down on the table.

   For several minutes Tatarsky tried to make sense of the distant sounds borne to him along the wires on an electric wind. At first he could hear fragments of conversation; then an irritated woman’s voice broke in for a long time; then everything was drowned out by the abrupt and demanding sound of a child crying.

   ‘Write this down,’ Gireiev said at last. ‘ Om melafefon bva kha sha. I’ll give you it letter by letter: o, em…’

   ‘I’ve got it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘What does it mean?’

   ‘That’s not important. Just concentrate on the sound, OK? Have you got any vodka?’

   ‘I think I had two bottles.’

   ‘You can drink them both. It goes well with this mantra. In an hour it’ll be all over. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

   ‘Thanks. Listen, who’s that crying there?’

   ‘My son,’ Gireiev answered.

   ‘You have a son? I didn’t know. What’s his name?’

   ‘Namhai,’ Gireiev replied in a disgruntled voice. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

   Tatarsky put down the receiver and dashed into the kitchen, rapidly whispering to himself the incantation he’d just been given. He took out a bottle of Absolut and drank it all in three glassfuls, followed it up with some cold tea and then went into the bathroom - he was afraid to go back into the room. He sat on the edge of the bath, fixed his eyes on the door and began to whisper:

   ‘ Om melafefon bva kha sha, om melafefon bva kha sha…’

   The phrase was so difficult to pronounce, his mind simply couldn’t cope with any other thoughts. Several minutes went by and a warm wave of drunkenness spread throughout his body. Tatarsky had almost relaxed when suddenly he noticed the familiar glimmering on the periphery of his field of vision. He clenched his fists and began whispering the mantra more quickly, but it was already too late to halt the new glitch.

   Something like a firework display erupted at the spot where the bathroom door had just been, and when the red and yellow blaze died down a little, he saw a burning bush in front of him. Its branches were enveloped in bright flame, as though it had been doused in blazing petrol, but the broad dark-green leaves were not consumed in the fire. No sooner had Tatarsky studied the bush in detail than a clenched fist was extended towards him from out of its heart. Tatarsky swayed and almost fell backwards into the bath. The fist unclenched and on the palm extended in front of his face Tatarsky saw a small, wet, pickled cucumber covered in green pimples.

   When the bush disappeared, Tatarsky could no longer recall whether he had taken the cucumber or not, but there was a distinctly salty taste in his mouth. Perhaps it was blood from a bitten lip.