Babylon (8 page)

   
‘But how do we - that is, Ed and me - know what to involve other people in?’
wrote Tatarsky in his notebook.

   
From one point of view, of course, it’s obvious: intuition. No need to inquire about what to do and how to do it - when you reach a certain degree of despair, you just start to intuit things for yourself. You sense the dominant tendency, so to speak, with your empty stomach. But where does the tendency come from? Who thinks it up, if - as I’m convinced - everyone in the world is simply trying to catch it and sell it, like Ed and me, or to guess what it is and print it, like the editors, of those glossy magazines?

   His thoughts on this theme were morose and they were reflected in his scenario for a clip for the washing powder Ariel, written soon after this event.

   
The scenario is based on motifs from Shakespeare. Loud music, solemn and menacing. The opening shot shows a cliff on the seashore. Night. Down below, menacing waves rear up in the dim moonlight. In the distance is an ancient castle, also illuminated by the moon. Standing on the top of the cliff is a girl of incredible beauty. She is Miranda. She is wearing a medieval dress of red velvet and a tall pointed cap with a trailing veil. She raises her arms towards the moon and utters a strange incantation three times. When she pronounces it for the third time there is a rumble of distant thunder. The music grows louder and more menacing. A wide beam of light emerges from the moon, which is visible in a break in the clouds, and extends until it reaches the rocks at Miranda’s feet. Her face expresses confusion - she is clearly afraid of what is about to happen, and yet she wants it. A shadow slides down the beam of light, coming closer, and as the melody reaches its climax, we see a proud spirit in all his evil beauty - his robes are flowing in the wind and his long hair is silvered by the moonlight. On his head is a slim wreath set with diamonds. He is Ariel. He flies close to Miranda, halts in mid-air and holds out his hand to her. After a moment’s struggle Miranda reaches out her own hand to his. Next frame: close-up of two hands approaching each other. Lower left - Miranda’s pale weak hand: upper right - the spirit’s hand, transparent and glowing. They touch each other, the spirit instantly transforms into a box of Ariel and everything is flooded in blinding light. Next frame: two boxes of washing powder. On one it says Ariel. On the other, in pale-grey letters, it says Ordinary Caliban. Miranda’s voice-over: ‘Ariel. Temptingly tempestuous’.

   Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black and white photograph that hung above Tatarsky’s desk. It was an advertisement for some boutique, showing a young man with long hair and carefully tended stubble in a luxurious wide-cut coat carelessly hung across his shoulders - the wind filled out the form of the coat so that it echoed the sail of a boat visible on the horizon. The waves breaking against the rocks and splashing up on to the shore fell just short of his shiny shoes. His face was set in a harsh, sullen grimace, and somehow he resembled the birds with outstretched wings (maybe eagles, maybe seagulls) soaring into the twilit sky from a supplement to the latest version of
Photoshop
(after taking a closer look at the photograph, Tatarsky decided that the boat on the horizon must have come sailing in from there too).

   After contemplating it for days Tatarsky finally understood: all the cliches to which the photograph was alluding had been born together with romanticism in the nineteenth century; their remains, together with those of the Count of Monte Cristo, had survived into the twentieth, but on the threshold of the twenty-first the count’s legacy had already been completely squandered. The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many times to be able to do any more business on it. Now, no matter how sincerely you wished to deceive yourself, it was virtually impossible to believe in any correspondence between the image that was being sold and its implied inner content. It was an empty form that had long ago ceased to mean what it should have meant. Everything was moth-eaten: the thoughts provoked by the sight of the conventional
Niebelung
in the studio photograph were not about the proud Gothic spirit implied by the frothing waves and sideburns, but about whether the photographer charged a lot, how much the model got paid and whether the model had to pay a fine when his personal lubricant stained the seat of the trousers from the company’s spring collection.

   Tatarsky’s deductions led him into a state of total and utter confusion. On the one hand, it seemed that he and Ed crafted a false panorama of life for others (like a battle scene in a museum, where the floor in front of the spectator is scattered with sand and worn-out boots and shells, but the tanks and the explosions are only drawn on the wall), guided solely by their intuition as to what the punters would swallow. On the other hand, his own life was a frustrating attempt to move a bit closer to the contents of this panorama. In essence it was an attempt to run into the picture drawn on the wall. Being a co-author of this picture made the attempt more than grotesque. Of course - or so it seemed to Tatarsky - a rich man could escape the bounds of false reality. He could move beyond the limits of the panorama that was compulsory for the poor. Tatarsky didn’t actually know much about what the world of the rich was like. There were only vague images circling around in his consciousness, cliches from advertising, which he himself had been rebroadcasting for such a long time he couldn’t possibly believe in them. What was clear to him was that you could only find out what prospects opened up to a man with a substantial bank account from the rich themselves, and on one occasion - by pure chance - Tatarsky managed to do just that.

   While he was drinking away a small fee in the Poor Folk bar, he eavesdropped on a conversation between two TV chat-show hosts - it was after midnight and they were continuing a drinking spree begun earlier somewhere else. Tatarsky was sitting just a couple of metres away from them, but they paid no more attention to him than if he’d been a stuffed model of a copywriter nailed to the counter in order to brighten up the decor.

   Although both of the showmen were thoroughly drunk, they’d lost none of that strange holographic gleam in every fold of their clothes, as though their physical bodies were not actually sitting at the next table but were simply being shown on a huge television standing next to Tatarsky. When he noticed this inexplicable but undoubtedly real effect, Tatarsky found himself thinking how long it would take them in limbo to scrape away all the human attention that had eaten into the pores of their souls. The showmen were talking shop, and Tatarsky gathered that one of them was having problems with his contract.

   ‘If they’d just extend it for next year.’ he said, clenching his fists.

   ‘Say they do,’ the other replied. ‘At the end of the year it’ll be the same thing all over again. And you’ll be living on tranquillizers again… And then what?’

   ‘Then what? Then I’ve got a serious plan.’ He slumped over the table and poured himself some vodka. ‘I’m just five hundred thousand short,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve got to make.’

   ‘What plan?’ ‘You won’t tell anyone? Listen…’

   He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, rummaged around for a long while and finally pulled out a sheet of glossy paper folded into four.

   ‘There.’ he said, ‘it says it on here… The kingdom of Bhutan. The only country in the world where television is forbidden. Unnerstand? Completely forbidden. It says here that not far from the capital they have an entire colony where big TV moguls live. If you spend all your life working in television, the very coolest thing you can do when you retire is move to Bhutan.’

   ‘Is that what you need the five hundred grand for?’

   ‘No, I need the five hundred grand so no one will come looking for me in Bhutan afterwards. Can you just imagine it? Forbidden. Not a single television set anywhere except in counter-espionage! And the embassies!’

   His companion took the sheet of paper from him, unfolded it and started reading.

   ‘You unnerstand?’ - the first showman carried on speaking regardless - ‘If anyone is keeping a television at home and the authorities find out about it, the police come round, unnerstand? And they cart the queer fucker off to prison. Or maybe they even shoot him.’

   He pronounced the word ‘queer’ with that sabre-whistle intake of breath you only ever hear from latent homosexuals who have deprived themselves of the joys of love in the name of a perverse misinterpretation of the social contract. His companion understood everything and didn’t take offence - he was looking through the article.

   ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘out of a magazine. It’s interesting all right… So who wrote it? Where is it now… Some guy called Edward Debirsian…’

   Tatarsky almost knocked over his table as he stood up to go to the toilet. He wasn’t surprised that TV personalities should feel that way about their work, although the degree of these people’s spiritual degradation did make it possible to allow that some of them might actually like their jobs. It was something else that had finally finished him off. Sasha Blo had a particular foible: any material that he liked, he would sign with his own real name. And what he liked more than anything else on earth was to pass off the products of his own untrammelled imagination as a narrative of real events - but it was a luxury he allowed himself only very rarely.

   Tatarsky laid down a line of cocaine on the cold white cheek of the toilet tank and, without even bothering to crush the lumps, snorted it through a rolled-up hundred-rouble bill (he was already out of dollars), then took out his notebook and wrote:

   
In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately, the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even that is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?

   He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: ‘Trapped? Masturbate!’

   Going back to the bar, he sat further away from the TV personalities and attempted to lean back and enjoy it. But it didn’t work for him - it never did. The repulsive Moscow cocaine, cut almost to nothing by the unwashed hands of a long chain of dealers, deposited an entire bouquet of medicinal smells in his nasopharynx - everything from streptocide to aspirin - and triggered an intense, stressful trembling in his body. They did say the powder they took a hundred and fifty dollars a gramme for in Moscow was not cocaine at all, but a mixture of Estonian speed with an assortment of Russian pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn’t enough, for some reason half of the dealers always wrapped the powder in a glossy advertisement for the Toyota Camry cut out of some magazine, and Tatarsky was tormented by the unbearable suspicion that they made a fat living not just at the expense of other people’s health, but by providing a PR service as well. Every time Tatarsky asked himself why he and others paid all that money in order to subject themselves once again to a humiliating and unhygienic procedure, the only explanation he could come up with went as follows: people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself. If cocaine was sold in chemists’ shops for twenty kopecks a gramme as a mouthwash for toothache, he thought, then nobody but punks would sniff it - the way it was, in fact, at the beginning of the century. But if some ether-based glue sniffed by juvenile junkies cost a thousand dollars a bottle, all the gilded youth of Moscow would be delighted to sniff it, and at presentations and buffet luncheons it would be
tres chic
to waft the volatile chemical vapours around yourself, complain about your brain neurons dying off and disappear for long periods into the toilet. Youth fashion magazines would devote revelatory cover stories (written, of course, by Sasha Blo) to the aesthetics of the plastic bag that was placed over the head for this procedure.

   ‘Oho!’ Tatarsky exclaimed, smacked himself on the forehead, took out his notebook, opened it at the letter ‘C’, and noted down:

   
Youth market colognes (all manufacturers). Link them with money and the Roman emperor Vespasian (tax on lavatories, the saying ‘Money doesn’t smell’). Example:

   
MONE Y DOES SMELL! "BENJAMIN" THE NEW COLOGNE FROM HUGO BOSS

   Putting away his notebook, he felt that the peak of the loathsome sensation had passed and he was quite strong enough to walk as far as the bar and get himself a drink. He wanted tequila, but when he reached the barman for some reason he ordered Smirnoff, which he normally couldn’t stand. He downed one shot right there at the bar, then took another and went back to his table. In the meantime he’d acquired a companion, a man of about forty with long, greasy hair and a wild beard, dressed in a crazy kind of embroidered jacket - in appearance he was a typical former hippy, one of those who had failed to find a place for themselves either in the past or in the present. Hanging round his neck was a large bronze cross.

   ‘Excuse me,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I was sitting here.’

   ‘So be my guest,’ said his new neighbour. ‘Don’t need the entire table, do you?’

   Tatarsky shrugged and sat facing him.

   ‘My name’s Grigory,’ his neighbour said affably.

   Tatarsky raised his weary eyes to look at him. ‘Vova.’ he said.

   Catching his glance, Grigory frowned and shook his head in sympathy.

   ‘You’ve got the shakes bad,’ he said. ‘Snorting?’

   ‘A bit,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Just now and again.’

   ‘Fool,’ said Grigory. ‘Just think about it: the mucous membrane of the nose - it’s as good as the exposed surface of the brain… And did you ever think about where that powder came from and who’s been sticking his body parts in it?’