Babylon (31 page)

   
The method is extremely simple. Since every television channel’s programming contains a fairly high level of synapse-disrupting material per unit of time
…

   There was a boom outside the window, and shrapnel drummed across the roof. Tatarsky drew his head down into his shoulders. Having re-read what he’d written, he deleted ‘synapse-disrupting’ and replaced it with ‘neuro-destrucnve’.

   …
the goal of schizosuggestology will be achieved simply as a result of holding the individual to be neutralised in front of a television screen for a long enough period of time. It is suggested that in order to achieve this result one can take advantage of a typical feature of a member of the Intelligentsia - sexual frustration.

   
Internal ratings and data from secret surveys indicate that the biggest draw for the member of the intelligentsia is the erotic night-time channels. But the effect achieved would be maximised if instead of a certain set of television broadcasts the television receiver itself were to achieve the status of an erotic stimulus in the consciousness of the subject being processed. Bearing in mind the patriarchal nature of Russian society and the determinative role played by the male section of the population in the formation of public opinion, it would seem most expedient to develop the subconscious associative link: ‘television-female sexual organ’. This association should be evoked by the television itself regardless of its make or the nature of the material being transmitted in order to achieve optimal results from schizomanipulation.

   
The cheapest and technically simplest means of achieving this goal is the massive oversaturation of air time with television adverts for women’s panty-liners. They should be constantly doused with blue liquid (activating the associations: ‘blue screen, waves in the ether, etc.’), while the clips themselves should he constructed in such a way that the panty-liner seems to crawl on to the screen itself, implanting the required association in the most direct manner possible.

   Tatarsky heard a light ringing sound behind him and he swung round. To the accompaniment of a strange-sounding, somehow northern music, a golden woman’s torso of quite exceptional, inexpressible beauty appeared on the television screen, rotating slowly. ‘Ishtar,’ Tatarsky guessed; ‘who else could it be?’ The face of the statue was concealed from sight behind the edge of the screen, but the camera was slowly rising and the face would come into sight in just a moment. But an instant before it became visible, the camera moved in so close to the statue that there was nothing left on the screen but a golden shimmering. Tatarsky clicked on the remote, but the image on the television didn’t change - the television itself changed instead. It began distending around the edges, transforming itself into the likeness of an immense vagina, with a powerful wind whistling shrilly as the air was sucked right into its black centre.

   ‘I’m asleep,’ Tatarsky mumbled into his pillow. ‘I’m asleep…’

   He carefully turned over on to his other side, but the shrill sound didn’t disappear. Raising himself up on one elbow, he cast a gloomy eye over the thousand-dollar prostitute snoring gently beside him: in the dim light it was quite impossible to tell she wasn’t Claudia Schiffer. He reached out for the mobile phone lying on the bedside locker and croaked into it: ‘Allo.’

   ‘What’s this, been hitting the sauce again?’ Morkovin roared merrily. ‘Have you forgotten we’re going to a barbecue? Get yourself down here quick, I’m already waiting for you. Azadovsky doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

   ‘On my way,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’ll just grab a shower.’

   The autumn highway was deserted and sad, and the sadness was only emphasised by the fact that the trees along its edges were still green and looked just as though it was still summer; but it was clear that summer had passed by without fulfilling a single one of its promises. The air was filled with a vague presentiment of winter, snowfalls and catastrophe - for a long time Tatarsky was unable to understand the source of this feeling, until he looked at the hoardings installed at the side of the road. Every half-kilometre the car rushed past a Tampax advertisement, a huge sheet of plywood showing a pair of white roller skates lying on virginal white snow. That explained the presentiment of winter all right, but the source of the all-pervading sense of alarm still remained unclear. Tatarsky decided that he and Morkovin must have driven into one of those psychological waves of depression that had been drifting across Moscow and its surroundings ever since the beginning of the crisis. The nature of these waves remained mysterious, but Tatarksy had no doubt whatever that they existed, so he was rather offended when Morkovin laughed at him for mentioning them.

   ‘As far the snow goes you were spot on,’ he said; ‘but as far as these wave things are concerned… Take a closer look at the hoardings. Don’t you notice anything?’

   Morkovin slowed down at the next hoarding and Tatarsky suddenly noticed a large graffito written in blood-red spray paint above the skates and the snow: ‘Arrest Yeltsin’s gang!’

   ‘Right!’ he said ecstatically. ‘There was the same kind of thing on all the others! On the last one there was a hammer and sickle, on the one before that there was a swastika, and before that, something about wops and nig-nog s… Incredible. Your mind just filters it out - you don’t even notice. And the colour, what a colour! Who dreamed it all up?’

   ‘You’ll laugh when you hear,’ answered Morkovin, picking up speed. ‘It was Malyuta. Of course, we rewrote almost all the texts - they were much too frightening - but we didn’t change the idea. As you’re so fond of saying, an associative field is formed: ‘days of crisis - blood could flow - Tampax -your shield against excesses’. Figure it out: nowadays there are only two brands selling the same volumes they used to in Moscow, Tampax and Parliament Lights.’

   ‘Fantastic,’ said Tatarsky, and clicked his tongue. ‘It just begs for the slogan: ‘Tampax ultra-safe. The reds shall not pass!’ Or personalise it: not the reds, but Zyuganov - and according to Castaneda, menstruation is a crack between the worlds. If you want to stay on the right side of the crack… No, like this: Tampax. The right side of the crack…

   ‘Yes,’ said Morkovin thoughtfully, ‘we should pass these ideas on to the oral department.’

   ‘We could bring up the theme of the white movement as well. Imagine it: an officer in a beige service jacket on a hillside in the Crimea, something out of Nabokov… They’d sell five times as many.’

   ‘What does that matter?’ said Morkovin. ‘Sales are just a side effect. It’s not Tampax we’re promoting; it’s alarm and uncertainty.’

   ‘What for?’

   ‘We have a crisis on our hands, don’t we?’

   ‘Oh, right,’ said Tatarsky, ‘of course. Listen, about the crisis - I still don’t understand how Semyon Velin managed to delete the entire government. It was all triple protected.’

   ‘Semyon wasn’t just a designer.’ replied Morkovin. ‘He was a programmer. D’you know the scale he was working on? They found thirty-seven million in greenbacks in his accounts afterwards. He even switched Zyuganov’s jacket from Pierre Cardin to St Lauren. Even now nobody can figure out how he managed to break into the oral directory from our terminal. And as for what he did with neckties and shirts… Azadovsky was sick for two whole days after he read the report.’

   ‘Impressive.’

   ‘Sure it was. Our Semyon had a roving eye, but he knew what he was getting into. So he decided he needed some insurance. He wrote a program that would delete the entire directory at the end of the month if he didn’t cancel it personally, and he planted it in Kirienko’s file. After that the program infected the entire government. We have anti-virus protection, of course, but Semyon thought up this fucking program that wrote itself on to the ends of sectors and assembled itself at the end of the month, so there was no way it could be picked up from the control sums. Just don’t ask me what all that means - I don’t understand it myself - I just happened to overhear someone talking about it. To cut it short, when they were taking him out of town in your Mercedes, he tried to tell Azadovsky about it, but he wouldn’t even talk to him. Then everything defaulted. Azadovsky was tearing his hair out.’

   ‘So will there be a new government soon?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘I’m already tired of doing nothing.’

   ‘Soon, very soon. Yeltsin’s ready - tomorrow we’ll discharge him from the Central Kremlin Hospital. We had him digitised again in London. From the wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s - they’ve got it in the store room. It’s the third time we’ve had to restore him - you wouldn’t believe the amount of hassle he’s given everyone - and we’re finishing off the NURBS for all the others. Only the government’s turning out really leftist; I mean, it’s got communists in it. It’s those schemers in the oral department. But that doesn’t really bother me much - it’ll only make things easier for us. And for the people too: one identity for the lot and ration cards for butter. Only so far Sasha Blo’s still holding us back with the Russian Idea.’

   ‘Hold hard there,’ Tatarsky said, suddenly cautious; ‘don’t frighten me like that. Who’s going to be next? After Yeltsin?’

   ‘What d’you mean, who? Whoever they vote for. We have honest elections here, like in America.’

   ‘And what in hell’s name do we need them for?’

   ‘We don’t need them in anybody’s name. But if we didn’t have them they’d never have sold us the render-server. They’ve got some kind of amendment to the law on trade - in short, everything has to be the way it is there. Total lunacy, of course, the whole thing…’

   ‘Why should they care what we do? What do they want from us?’

   ‘It’s because elections are expensive,’ Morkovin said gloomily. ‘They want to finally destroy our economy. At least, that’s one of the theories… Anyway, we’re moving in the wrong direction. We shouldn’t be digitising these deadheads; we need to make new politicians, normal young guys. Develop them from the ground up through focus-groups - the ideology and the public face together.’

   ‘Why don’t you suggest it to Azadovsky?’

   ‘You try suggesting anything to him… OK, we’ve arrived.’

   There was an earth road adorned on both sides with Stop signs branching off from the road they were on. Morkovin turned on to it, slowed down and drove on through the forest. The road soon led them to a pair of tall gates in a brick wall. Morkovin sounded his horn twice, the gates opened and the car rolled into a huge yard the size of a football pitch.

   Azadovsky’s dacha created a strange impression. Most of all it resembled the Cathedral of St Basil the Holy Fool, doubled in size and overgrown with a multitude of domestic accretions. The corkscrew attics and garrets were decorated with little balconies with balustrades of short fat columns, and all the windows above the second floor were hidden completely behind shutters. There were several Rottweilers strolling around the yard and a ribbon of blue-grey smoke was rising from the chimney of one of the extensions (evidently they were stoking up the bath-house). Azadovksy himself, surrounded by a small entourage including Sasha Blo and Malyuta, was standing on the steps leading up into the house. He was wearing a Tyrolean hat with a feather, which suited him very well and even lent his plump face a kind of bandit nobility.

   ‘We were just waiting for you.’ he said when Tatarsky and Morkovin walked up. ‘We’re going out among the people. To drink beer at the station.’

   Tatarsky felt an urgent desire to say something his boss would like.

   ‘Just like Haroun el-Raschid and his viziers, eh?’

   Azadovsky stared at him in amazement.

   ‘He used to change his clothes and walk around Baghdad.’ Tatarsky explained, already regretting he’d started the conversation. ‘And see how the people lived. And find out how his rating was doing.’

   ‘Around Baghdad?’ Azadovsky asked suspiciously. ‘Who was this Haroun guy?’

   ‘He was the Caliph. A long time ago, about five hundred years.’

   ‘I get it. You wouldn’t do too much strolling around Baghdad these days. It’s just like here, only you have to take three jeeps full of bodyguards. Right, is everyone here? Wagons roll!’

   Tatarsky got into the last car, Sasha Blo’s red Range-Rover. Sasha was already slightly drunk and obviously feeling elated.

   ‘I keep meaning to congratulate you.’ he said. ‘That material of yours about Berezovsky and Raduev - it’s the best
kompromat
there’s been all autumn. Really. Especially the place where they plan to pierce the mystical body of Russia with their television-drilltowers at the major sacred points. And those inscriptions on the Monopoly money: ‘In God we Monopolise!’ And putting that Jewish prayer cap on Raduev - that must have taken some thinking up…’

   ‘OK, OK,’ said Tatarsky, thinking gloomily to himself:

   "That jerk Malyuta was asked not to touch Raduev. Now the mazuma goes back. And I’ll be lucky if they didn’t have the meter running on it.”

   ‘Why don’t you tell me when your department’s going to throw up a decent idea?’ he asked. ‘What stage is the project at?’

   ‘It’s all supposed to be strictly secret. But without getting specific, the idea’s coming on, and it’ll make everyone sick as parrots. We just have to think through the role of Attila and polish up the stylistic side - so we have something like an ongoing counterpoint between the pipe organ and the balalaika.’

   ‘Attila? The one who burnt Rome? What’s he got to do with it?’

   ‘Attila means "the man from Itil". In Russian, a Volga man. Itil is the ancient name for the Volga. D’you get my drift?’

   ‘Not really.’

   ‘We’re the third Rome - which, typically enough, happens to lie on the Volga. So there’s no need to go off on any campaigning. Hence our total historical self-sufficiency and profound national dignity.’

   Tatarsky sized up the idea. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s neat.’

   Glancing out of the window, he caught sight of a gigantic concrete structure above the edge of the trees, a crooked spiral rising upwards, crowned with a small grey tower. He screwed up his eyes and then opened them again - the concrete monolith hadn’t disappeared, only shifted backwards a little. Tatarsky nudged Sasha Blo so hard in the ribs that the car swerved across the road.