Babylon (36 page)

   ‘What is this? What’s happening?’

   ‘Take it easy,’ said Farseikin. ‘Nothing’s happening any more. It’s already happened.’

   ‘But why?’ asked Tatarsky.

   Farseikin shrugged. ‘The great goddess had grown weary of her mismatch.’

   ‘How do you know?’

   ‘At the sacred divination in Atlanta the oracle foretold that in our country Ishtar would have a new husband. We’d been having problems with Azadovsky for ages, but it took us a long time to figure out who the new husband could be. All that was said about him was that he was a man with the name of a town. We thought and thought about it, we searched, and then suddenly they brought in your file from the first section. Everything adds up: you’re the one.’

   ‘Me???’

   Instead of replying, Farseikin gave a sign to Sasha Blo and Malyuta. They went over to Azadovsky’s body, took hold of his legs and dragged him out of the altar room into the changing room.

   ‘Me?’ Tatarsky repeated. ‘But why me?’

   ‘I don’t know. Ask yourself that one. For some reason the goddess didn’t choose me. How fine it would have sounded: "He who has abandoned his name"…’

   ‘Abandoned his name?’

   ‘I come from a Volga German background; but when I was due to graduate from university, an order came in from state TV for a nig-nog to be their Washington correspondent. I was the Komsomol secretary, which meant I was first in line for America. So they changed my name for me in the Lubyanka. Anyway, that’s not important. It’s you that’s been chosen.’

   ‘And would you have accepted?’

   ‘Why not? It certainly sounds impressive: husband of the great goddess! It’s a purely ritual post, no responsibilities at all, but the opportunities are absolutely immense. No limits at all, you could say. Of course, it all depends on how imaginative you are. Every morning the deceased here had his cleaning-lady scatter cocaine across his carpet from a bucket; and he built himself a bunch of dachas, bought a load of pictures… And that was all he could think of. As I said: a mismatch.’

   ‘And can I refuse?’

   ‘I think not,’ said Farseikin.

   Tatarsky glanced through the open door, behind which there was something strange going on. Malyuta and Sasha Blo were packing Azadovsky into a container in the form of a large green sphere. His body, hunched over in an unnatural fashion, was already in the container, but one hairy leg with a red flip-flop still protruded from the container’s small door and stubbornly refused to fit inside.

   ‘What’s the sphere for?’

   ‘The corridors here are long and narrow,’ answered Farseikin. ‘Carrying him would be the devil’s own job; and when you roll it outside, nobody takes the slightest notice. Semyon Velin thought it up before he died. What a designer he was… And we lost him because of this idiot as well. I wish Semyon could see all this!’

   ‘But why is it green?’

   ‘I don’t know. What difference does it make? Don’t go looking for symbolic significance in everything. Babe - you might regret it when you find it.’

   There was a quiet crunching sound in the changing room and Tatarsky winced.

   ‘Will they strangle me some time too?’ he asked.

   Farseikin shrugged: ‘As you’ve seen, the consorts of the great goddess are sometimes changed, but that goes with the job. If you don’t get too full of yourself, you could easily reach old age. Even retire. The main thing is, if you have any doubts about anything, you just come to me; and follow my advice. The first thing I’d advise you to do is get rid of that cocaine-polluted carpet. There are rumours going round town. That’s something we can do without.’

   ‘I’ll get rid of the carpet; but how do we explain to all the others about me moving into his office?’

   ‘No need to explain anything to them. They understand all right, or they wouldn’t be working for us.’

   Malyuta put his head out of the changing room. He was already changed. He glanced at Tatarsky for a moment then looked away and held out Azadovsky’s mobile phone to Farseikin.

   ‘Shall we roll it out?’ he asked briskly.

   ‘No,’ said Farseikin. ‘Roll it in. Why d’you ask such stupid questions?’

   Tatarsky waited until the metallic rumbling in the long burrow of the corridor had died away and asked in a low voice:

   ‘Farsuk Karlovich, will you tell me something, in confidence?’

   ‘What?’

   ‘Who actually controls all of this?’

   ‘My advice to you is not to stick your nose in,’ said Farseikin. ‘That way you’ll stay a living god for longer; and to be honest about it, I don’t know. Even after all the years I’ve been in the business.’

   He went over to the wall beside the altar, unlocked a small concealed door, bent down and went in through the opening. A light came on beyond the door and Tatarsky saw a large machine that looked like an open black book flanked by two vertical cylinders of frosted glass. The flat black surface facing Tatarsky bore the word ‘Compuware’ in white and some unfamiliar symbol, and standing in front of the machine was a seat rather like a dentist’s chair with straps and latches.

   ‘What’s that?’ Tatarsky asked.

   ‘A 3-D scanner.’

   ‘What’s it for?’

   ‘We’re going to scan in your image.’

   ‘Do I have to go through with it?’

   ‘Absolutely. According to the ritual, you only become the husband of the great goddess after you’ve been digitised - converted, as they say, into a sequence of visual images.’

   ‘And then I’ll be inserted into all the clips and broadcasts? Like Azadovsky?’

   ‘That’s your main sacramental function. The goddess really doesn’t have a body, but there is something that takes the place of her body. Her corporeal nature consists of the totality of all the images used in advertising; and since she manifests herself via a sequence of images, in order to become godlike, you have to be transformed. Then it will be possible for you to enter into mystical union. In effect, your 3-D model will be her husband, and you’ll be… a regent, I suppose. Come over here.’

   Tatarsky shifted his feet nervously and Farseikin laughed:

   ‘Don’t be afraid. It doesn’t hurt to be scanned. It’s like a photocopier, only they don’t close the lid… At least, not yet they don’t… OK, OK, I’m only joking. Let’s get on with it; they’re waiting for us upstairs. It’s a celebration - your coming-out party, so to speak. You can relax in a circle of close friends.’

   Tatarsky took a last look at the basalt slab with the dog and the goddess before plunging decisively through the doorway beyond which Farseikin was waiting for him. The walls and ceiling of the small room were painted white and it was almost empty - apart from the scanner it contained a desk with a control panel on it and several cardboard boxes that had once held electronic goods standing over by the wall.

   ‘Farsuk Karlovich, have you heard of the bird Semurg?’ Tatarsky asked as he sat in the armchair and set his forearms on the armrests.

   ‘No. What kind of a bird is it?’

   ‘There was an oriental poem,’ said Tatarsky; ‘I haven’t read it myself, only heard about it. About how thirty birds flew off to search for their king Semurg and then, after all kinds of different tests and trials, at the very end they learned that the word "Semurg" means "thirty birds".’

   ‘So?’ Farseikin asked, pushing a black plug into a socket.

   ‘Well,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I just thought, maybe the entire Generation "P", that is the one that chose Pepsi - you chose Pepsi when you were young as well, didn’t you?’

   ‘What other choice was there?’ Farseikin muttered, clicking switches on the control panel.

   ‘Yes, well… I had this rather frightening thought: that dog with five legs - maybe it’s all of us together? And now we’re all on the attack, sort of.’

   Farseikin was clearly too absorbed in his manipulations to take in what Tatarsky had said.

   ‘Right,’ he said, ‘now hold dead still and don’t blink. Ready?’

   Tatarsky gave a deep sigh.

   ‘Ready,’ he said.

   The machine began to hum and whirr and the frosted white lamps at each side of it lit up with a blinding brilliance. The structure that looked like an open book began slowly rotating around its axis, a ray of white light struck Tatarsky in the eyes and he was blinded for several seconds.’

   ‘I bow before the living god,’ Farseikin said solemnly.

   When Tatarsky opened his eyes, Farseikin was kneeling in front of the armchair with his head bowed, holding out to him a small black object. It was Azadovsky’s phone. Tatarsky took it gingerly and examined it: the phone looked like an ordinary small Phillips, except that it had only one button, in the form of a golden eye. Tatarsky wanted to ask if Alla knew what was happening, but he had no chance: Farseikin bowed, rose to his feet, walked backwards to the exit and tactfully closed the door behind him.

   Tatarsky was left alone. He got up from the chair, walked over to the door and listened. He couldn’t hear anything: Farseikin must already be in the changing room. Tatarsky moved across into the farthest comer of the room and cautiously pressed the button on the phone.

   ‘Hello,’ he said quietly into the handset. ‘Hello!’

   ‘I bow before the living god,’ Alla’s voice replied. ‘What are your instructions for today, boss?’

   ‘None yet,’ Tatarsky replied, amazed to sense that he could play his new part without the slightest effort. ‘Although, you know what. Alla, there will be a few after all. Firstly, have the carpet in the office taken up - I’m fed up with it. Secondly, make sure that from today on there’s nothing but Coca-Cola in the buffet, no Pepsi. Thirdly, Malyuta doesn’t work for us any more… because he’s about as much use to us as a fifth leg to a dog. All he does is spoil other people’s scenarios, and then the mazuma has to go back… And you. Alla my love, remember: if I say something, you don’t ask "why?", you just jot it down. You follow? That’s all right then.’

   When the conversation was over, Tatarsky tried to hook the phone on to his belt, but his Fukem-Al sheepskin skirt was too thick. He thought for a few moments about where he could stick it, and then recalled that he’d forgotten to say something, and pressed the golden eye again.

   ‘And one more thing,’ he said; ‘I completely forgot: take care of Rostropovich.’

   Babylen Tatarsky’s 3-D double appeared on screen times without number, but Tatarsky himself only liked to rewatch a few of the tapes. The first was a press conference given by officers of the State Security Forces who had been ordered to eliminate the well-known businessman and political figure Boris Berezovsky: Tatarsky, wearing a black mask covering his entire face, is sitting at the extreme left of a table crowded with microphones. The second tape was the funeral of the TV commentator Farsuk Seiful-Farseikin, who was strangled with a yellow skipping rope in strange circumstances in the entrance-way of his own house: Tatarsky, wearing dark glasses and a black armband, is seen kissing the inconsolable widow and tossing a green billiard ball on to the coffin half-covered in earth. The event shown in the next report is rather harder to understand: it’s live footage from a hidden camera of the unloading of an American Hercules C-130 military transport plane following a night landing on Red Square. The cargo being carried out of the plane consists of a large number of cardboard boxes bearing the inscription ‘electronic equipment’ and an unusual-looking logo - the casually traced outline of a human mammary gland of a size that can only be achieved by the installation of a silicone implant. Tatarsky, wearing the uniform of a crack commando, is standing there stock-still. His next appearance is one familiar to everybody, as Charles I in the monumental ad for the shampoo Head and Shoulders. Far less well known is another clip filmed on Red Square, an advert for Coca-Cola that was shown several times on St Petersburg TV, showing a congress of radical fundamentalists from all of the world’s major confessions. Dressed completely in black, Tatarsky plays an evangelist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stamping in fury on a can of Pepsi-Cola he raises his arm to point to the Kremlin wall and intones a verse from Psalm 14:

   There were they in great fear; for God is in the generation of the righteous.

   Many still remember his appearance in the clip for Adidas (slogan: "Three More White Lines’), but for some reason Tatarsky didn’t keep it in his collection. It didn’t even include the famous ad for the Moscow chain of Gap stores, in which Tatarsky appeared together with his deputy Morkovin, Morkovin wearing a denim jacket embroidered with gold in the shop window and Tatarsky wearing a padded army uniform hurling a brick at the reinforced glass and yelling:

   ‘ Afghanistan was heavier’ (slogan: ‘Enjoy the Gap’). But his very favourite video clip, the one - as his secretary Alla used to say in a whisper - that would bring tears to his eyes, was never shown on television even once.

   It is a commercial for Tuborg beer with the slogan: ‘Sta, viator!’ (and the variants: ‘Prepare Yourself and Think Final’ for the regional TV networks) in which the famous picture of the solitary wanderer is animated. There were rumours that a version of this clip was made in which there were thirty Tatarskys walking along the road one after the other, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to determine whether or not that’s true. The only thing we know for sure is that the existing clip is very short and simple.

   Tatarsky, wearing a white shirt open at the chest, is walking along a dusty track under a sun standing at its zenith. Suddenly he is struck by some kind of thought. He halts, leans against a wooden fence and wipes the sweat from his face with a handkerchief. A few seconds go by, and the hero seems to grow calmer. Turning his back to the camera, he stuffs the handkerchief into his pocket and slowly walks on towards the bright-blue horizon, where a few wispy clouds hang high in the sky.