Babylon (3 page)

   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…’

   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 mentality of the Russian consumer. The work was ‘freelance’ - Tatarsky used the term as though it still had its original sense, having in mind first of all the level of his pay.

   Pugin, a man with a black moustache and gleaming black eyes very like a pair of buttons, had turned up by chance among the guests at a mutual acquaintance’s house. Hearing that Tatarsky was in advertising, he’d shown a moderate interest. Tatarsky, on the other hand, had immediately been fired with an irrational respect for Pugin - he was simply amazed to see him sitting there drinking tea still in his long black coat.

   That was when the conversation had turned to the Soviet mentality. Pugin confessed that in the old days he had possessed it himself, but he’d lost it completely while working for a few years as a taxi-driver in New York. The salty winds of Brighton Beach had blown all those ramshackle Soviet constructs right out of his head and infected him with a compulsive yearning for success.

   ‘In New York you realise especially clearly.’ Pugin said over a glass of the vodka they moved on to after the tea, ‘that you can spend your entire life in some foul-smelling little kitchen, staring out into some shit-dirty little yard and chewing on a lousy burger. You’ll just stand there by the window, staring at all that shit, and life will pass you by.’

   ‘That’s interesting,’ Tatarsky responded thoughtfully, ‘but why go to New York for that? Surely-’

   ‘Because in New York you understand it, and in Moscow you don’t,’ Pugin interrupted. ‘You’re right, there are far more of those stinking kitchens and shitty little yards over here. Only here there’s no way you’re going to understand that’s where you’re going to spend the rest of your life until it’s already over. And that, by the way, is one of the main features of the Soviet mentality.’

   Pugin’s opinions were disputable in certain respects, but what he actually had to offer was simple, clear and logical. As far as Tatarsky was able to judge from the murky depths of his own Soviet mentality, the project was an absolutely textbook example of the American entrepreneurial approach.

   ‘Look,’ said Pugin, squinting intensely into the space above Tatarsky’s head, ‘the country hardly produces anything at all; but people have to have something to eat and wear, right? That means soon goods will start pouring in here from the West, and massive amounts of advertising will come flooding in with them. But it won’t be possible simply to translate this advertising from English into Russian, because the… what d’you call them… the
cultural references
here are different… That means, the advertising will have to be adapted in short order for the Russian consumer. So now what do you and I do? You and I get straight on the job well in advance - get my point? Now, before it all starts, we prepare outline concepts for all the serious brand-names. Then, just as soon as the right moment comes, we turn up at their offices with a folder under our arms and do business. The most important thing is to get a few good brains together in good time!’

   Pugin slapped his palm down hard on the table - he obviously thought he’d got a few together already - but Tatarsky suddenly had the vague feeling he was being taken for a ride again. The terms of employment on offer from Pugin were extremely vague - although the work itself was quite concrete, the prospects of being paid remained abstract.

   For a test-piece Pugin set him the development of an outline concept for Sprite - at first he was going to give him Marlboro as well, but he suddenly changed his mind, saying it was too soon for Tatarsky to try that. This was the point - as Tatarsky realised later - at which the Soviet mentality for which he had been selected raised its head. All his scepticism about Pugin instantly dissolved in a feeling of resentment that Pugin wouldn’t trust him with Marlboro, but this resentment was mingled with a feeling of delight at the fact that he still had Sprite. Swept away by the maelstrom created by these conflicting feelings, he never even paused to think why some taxi-driver from Brighton Beach, who still hadn’t given him so much as a kopeck, was already deciding whether he was capable of applying his mind to a concept for Marlboro.

   Tatarsky poured into his conception for Sprite every last drop of his insight into his homeland’s bruised and battered history. Before sitting down to work, he re-read several selected chapters from the book
Positioning: A Battle for your Mind,
and a whole heap of newspapers of various tendencies. He hadn’t read any newspapers for ages and what he read plunged him into a state of confusion; and that, naturally, had its effect on the fruit of his labours.