Babylon (33 page)

   ‘Have you ever wondered where that heavy, piercing hate in the anchormen’s eyes comes from?’ he eventually asked.

   ‘Come off it,’ said Tatarsky. "They don’t even look at the camera; it just seems like they do. There’s a special monitor right under the camera lens that shows the text they’re reading out and special symbols for intonation and facial expression. I think there are only six of them; let me just try to remember… irony, sadness, doubt, improvisation, anger and joke. So nobody’s radiating any kind of hate - not their own or even any official kind. That much I know for certain.’

   ‘I’m not saying they radiate anything. It’s just that, when they read their text, there are several million people staring straight into their eyes, and as a rule they’re very angry and dissatisfied with life. Just think about what kind of cumulative effect it generates when so many deceived consciousnesses come together in a single second at the same point. D’you know what resonance is?’

   ‘More or less.’

   ‘Well then: if a battalion of soldiers marches across a bridge in step, then the bridge can easily collapse - there have been cases - and so when a column crosses a bridge, the soldiers are ordered to march out of step. When so many people stare into this box and see the same thing, can you imagine what kind of resonance that sets up in the noosphere?’

   ‘Where?’ Tatarsky asked, but at that moment the mobile phone in his pocket rang and he raised a hand to halt the conversation. He could hear loud music and indistinct voices in the earpiece.

   ‘Babe!’ Morkovin’s voice cut through the music. ‘Where are you? Are you alive?’

   ‘I’m alive,’ replied Tatarsky. ‘I’m in Rastorguevo.’

   ‘Listen,’ Morkovin went on merrily, ‘we’ve given those fucking tossers a good working over, and now we’ll probably send them off to jail, give them ten years. After the interrogation Azadovsky was laughing like mad! Said you’d released all his stress. Next time you’ll get a medal together with Rostropovich. Shall I send some wheels round for you?’

   No, they’re not going to fire me, Tatarsky thought, feeling a pleasant warm glow spreading through his body. Definitely not. Or do me in me either.

   ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go home. My nerves are shot.’

   ‘Yeah? I can understand that,’ Morkovin agreed. ‘Away with you then, get yourself fixed up. But I’ve got to be going - the bugle’s sounding loud and clear. Only don’t be late tomorrow - we have a very important occasion. We’re going to Ostankino TV headquarters. You’ll see Azadovsky’s collection there, by the way - the Spanish section. Cheers for now.’

   Tatarsky hid the phone in his pocket and looked around the room with unseeing eyes. ‘So they take me me for a hamster, then,’ he said pensively.

   ‘What?’

   ‘Nothing. What was that you were saying?’

   ‘To keep it short,’ Gireiev continued, ‘all the so-called magic of television is nothing but psychoresonance due to the fact that so many people watch it at the same time. Any professional knows that if you do watch television-’

   ‘I can tell you, professionals never do watch it,’ Tatarsky interrupted, examining a patch he’d only just noticed on his friend’s trouser-leg.

   ‘-if you do watch television, you have to look at a point somewhere in the corner of the screen, but never under any circumstances into the eyes of the announcer, or else you’ll start to develop gastritis or schizophrenia. But the safest thing is to turn it upside down the way I do. That’s the same thing as not marching in step; and in general, if you’re interested, there’s a fifth Buddhist method for watching television, the highest and the most secret one of all…’

   It often happens: you’re talking with someone, and you kind of like what he’s saying, and there seems to be some truth in it. Then suddenly you notice he’s wearing an old tee shirt, his slippers are darned, his trousers are patched at the knee and the furniture in his room is worn and cheap. You look a bit closer and all around you you see signs of humiliating poverty you didn’t notice before, and you realise everything your interlocutor has done and thought in his life has failed to lead him to that single victory that you wanted so badly on that distant May morning when you gritted your teeth and promised yourself you wouldn’t lose, even though it still wasn’t really very clear just who you were playing with and what the game was. And although it hasn’t become the slightest bit clearer since then, you immediately lose interest in what he’s saying. You want to say goodbye to him in some pleasant fashion, get away as quickly as possible and finally get down to business.

   That is how the displacing wow-factor operates in our hearts; but when Tatarsky was struck by its imperceptible blow, he gave no sign that he’d lost interest in the conversation with Gireiev, because an idea had struck him. He waited until Gireiev stopped speaking; then he stretched, yawned and asked as though it was a casual question: ‘By the way, have you got any of those fly-agarics left?’

   ‘Yes,’ said Gireiev, ‘but I won’t take any with you. I’m sorry, but you know, after what happened the last time…’

   ‘But will you give me some?’

   ‘Why not? Only don’t eat them here, please.’

   Gireiev got up from the table, opened the crooked cupboard hanging on the wall and took out a bundle wrapped in newspaper.

   "This is a good dose. Where are you going to take them - in Moscow?’

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky; ‘in the town I always get a bad trip. I’ll go into the forest. Since I’m already out in the countryside.’

   ‘You’re right. Hang on, I’ll give you some vodka. Softens the effect. They can bugger up your brains if you take them neat. Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ve got some Absolut.’

   Gireiev picked up an empty Hennessy bottle from the floor, twisted out the cork and began carefully pouring in vodka from a litre bottle of Absolut he’d taken from the same cupboard the mushrooms had been in.

   ‘Listen, you’ve got something to do with television,’ he said; ‘there was a good joke going round about you. Have you heard the one about the blow job with singing in the dark?’

   ‘No.’

   ‘Well, this guy comes to a brothel. He looks at the price-list and sees the most expensive service: a blow job with singing in the dark for fifteen hundred bucks; and he thinks. That’s strange. What could that be? And he buys a ticket. When his turn comes, he finds himself in a dark room and everything seems to go as promised - someone sucks his dick while singing. Afterwards he goes outside and thinks. But that’s impossible! So he goes to a department store and buys a flashlight. Then he borrows another fifteen hundred and goes back to the brothel. To cut it short, everything happens all over again. And just as he’s about to come, he whips out the flashlight and turns it on; and he sees that he’s standing in a giant round room. There’s a stool by the wall, and on top of the stool there’s a giant glass eye.’

   Gireiev stopped.

   ‘So what’s next?’ Tatarsky asked.

   ‘That’s it. Some people just don’t get it. I mean the joke. A blow job in the dark is something that everyone gets.’

   ‘Ah… Now I do get it… What d’you think - is that the same eye that’s on the dollar bill?’

   ‘I never thought about it,’ Gireiev answered.

   ‘Frankly, this kind of humour’s too glum for me. You have to believe in something.’

   Gireiev shrugged. ‘Hope dies last,’ he said. ‘What’s that you’re writing down? The joke?’

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘an idea for work.’
Idea for a poster,
he jotted down in his notebook:

   
A dirty room covered in cobwebs. On the table a still for moonshine, by the table an alcoholic dressed in rags, vsho is pouring his product from a large Absolut bottle into a small Hennessy bottle. Slogan:

   
Offer to Absolut and Hennessy distributors first, and if they don’t take it, to Finlandia, Smirnoff and Johnny Walker.

   "There you go.’ said Gireiev, holding out the bundle and the bottle to Tatarsky. ‘Only let’s agree between ourselves that when you eat them, you don’t come back here. I still haven’t forgotten that time in autumn.’

   ‘I promise.’ said Tatarsky. ‘By the way, where’s that unfinished radar tower around here? I saw it from the car when we were driving here.’

   ‘It’s quite near. You go across the field and then the road through the forest starts. When you see a wire fence, just follow it. It’s about three kilometres. Why, do you want to go wandering around it?’

   Tatarsky nodded.’I’m not so sure about that,’ said Gireiev. ‘It’s not so bad when you’re clean, but if you’re on the mushrooms… The old men say it’s a bad place; but then, where can you find a good place around Moscow?’

   In the doorway Tatarsky turned back and hugged Gireiev round the shoulders. ‘You know, Andriusha.’ he said, ‘I don’t want this to sound sentimental, but thank you very, very much!’

   ‘What for?’ asked Gireiev.

   ‘For sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life. Without that the real one would be so disgusting!’

   ‘Thank you,’ Gireiev replied, ‘thank you.’ He was obviously touched.

   ‘Good luck in business.’ Tatarsky said, and left.

   The fly-agarics kicked in when he’d already been walking along the wire-netting fence for half an hour. First came the familiar symptoms: the pleasant trembling and itching in the fingers. Then looming up out of the bushes came the pillar with the notice: ‘Campfires forbidden!’ that he’d once taken for Hussein. As was only to expected, in the daylight there was no noticeable resemblance. Even so, Tatarsky felt a certain nostalgia as he recalled the story of Semurg the king of the birds.

   ‘Semurg, Sirruf.’ said a familiar voice in his head: ‘what difference does it make? Just different dialects. So you’ve been guzzling garbage again?’

   ‘Now it’s started,’ thought Tatarsky; ‘the beastie’s here.’

   But the Sirruf gave no further indication of its presence all the way to the tower. The gates that Tatarsky had climbed over were open. There was no one to be seen on the construction site; the trailers were locked and the telephone that used to hang on the sentry’s mushroom shelter had disappeared.

   Tatarsky climbed to the summit of the structure without any adventures. In the lift-tower everything was still the same as it had been: empty bottles and a table in the centre of the room.

   ‘Well,’ he asked out loud, ‘where’s the goddess here?’

   There was no reply, nothing but the sound of the autumn forest rustling in the wind somewhere below. Tatarsky leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and began to listen. For some reason he decided it was willows that were whispering in the wind, and he recalled a line from a play he’d heard on the radio: ‘It’s the sisters of sorrow, who live in the willows.’ And immediately he could hear snatches of women’s voices in the quiet murmuring of the trees, sounding like a dim echo of words spoken to him long, long ago that had lost their way among the cul-de-sacs of memory.

   ‘But do they know,’ the quiet voices whispered, ‘that this famous world of theirs consists of nothing but the condensation of darkness - neither breathing in, nor breathing out; neither right, nor left; neither fifth, nor tenth? Do they know that their extensive fame is known to no one?’

   ‘Everything is the precise opposite of what they think,’ the quiet voices whispered; ‘there is no truth or falsehood; there is one infinitely clear, pure and simple thought in which the spirit of man swirls like a drop of ink that has fallen into a glass of water. When man ceases to swirl in this simple purity, absolutely nothing happens and life turns out to be merely the rustling of curtains in the window of a long-ruined tower, and every thread in those curtains thinks that the great goddess is with it. And the goddess truly is with it.’

   ‘Once, my love, all of us were free - why did you have to create this terrible, ugly world?’

   ‘Was it I who created it?’ whispered Tatarsky.

   No one replied. Tatarsky opened his eyes and looked out through the doorway. Above the horizontal of the forest hung a cloud shaped like a heavenly mountain - it was so large that the infinite height of the sky, forgotten already in childhood, was suddenly visible again. On one of the slopes of the cloud there was a narrow conical projection, like a tower seen through mist. Something trembled inside Tatarsky - he recalled that once the ephemeral celestial substance of which these white mountains and this tower consisted had also been within him. And then - long, long ago, probably even before he was born - it had cost no effort at all for him to become such a cloud and float up to the very summit of the tower. But life had squeezed this strange substance out of his soul and there was only just enough of it left to allow him to recall it for a second and instantly lose the recollection.

   Tatarsky noticed that the floor under the table was covered with a panel made from boards nailed together. Peering through a gap between them, he saw the blackness of a dark multi-storey abyss. ‘Of course,’ he recalled, ‘it’s the lift-shaft; and this is the engine room, just like the room with that render-server. Only there aren’t any automatic rifles.’ He sat at the table and gingerly placed his feet on the boards. At first he felt a bit afraid that the boards under his feet would break and that he and they would go tumbling down together into the deep shaft with the stratified garbage of the years lying at its bottom. But the boards were thick and secure.

   The chamber had obviously been visited by someone, most likely the local tramps. There were freshly trampled cigarette butts on the floor, and on the table there was a fragment of newspaper with the television programmes for the week. Tatarsky read the title of the final programme before the jagged line of the torn edge: 0:00 -
The Golden Room

   ‘What kind of programme’s that?’ he thought. ‘Must be something new.’ He rested his chin on his folded hands and gazed at the photograph of the woman running along the sand, which was still hanging in the same place. The daylight exposed the blisters and blots the damp had produced on the paper. One of the blots lay directly over the face of the goddess, and in the daylight it appeared warped, pock-marked and old.