Babylon (9 page)

   ‘Just this moment,’ Tatarsky confessed. ‘But what’s all this about body parts? What other body parts can you stick in it except your nose?’

   Grigory glanced around, pulled out a bottle of vodka from under the table and took a quick swallow from it.

   ‘Maybe you’ve heard of an American writer called Harold Robbins?’ he asked, hiding the bottle away.

   ‘No,’ answered Tatarsky.

   ‘A total arsehole. But all the English teachers read him. That’s why there are so many of his books in Moscow, and the children’s knowledge of the language is so bad. In one of his novels there was this black guy, a professional fucker who pulled rich white dames. So before the procedure this black dude sprinkled his…’

   ‘OK, I get it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’m going to be sick now.’

   ‘…his massive black dong with pure cocaine,’ Grigory concluded with satisfaction. ‘You might ask: what’s this black dude got to do with anything? I’ll tell you. I was re-reading Andreiev’s "Rosa Mundi" recently, the part about the soul of the nation. Andreiev says it’s a woman and she’s called Navna. Then afterwards I had this vision - she’s lying there like she’s sleeping on this white rock, and leaning over her there’s this vague black figure, with short little wings, you can’t see his face, and he’s just giving her it…’

   Grigory pulled an invisible control column in towards his stomach with his hands.

   ‘You want to know what it is you’re all using?’ he whispered, leaning his leering face close to Tatarsky. ‘Exactly. What he sprinkles on himself. And at the moment he sticks it in, you’re all shooting up and snorting. When he pulls it out, you all go running off trying to find more… And he just keeps on sticking it in and pulling it out, sticking it in and pulling it out…’

   Tatarsky leaned down into the gap between the table and the counter and puked. He glanced up cautiously at the barman: he was engaged in conversation with some customers and didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Looking around, Tatarsky noticed an advertising poster on the wall. It showed the nineteenth-century poet Tyutchev wearing a pince-nez, with a glass in his hand and a rug across his knees. His piercingly sad gaze was directed out of the window, and with his free hand he was stroking a dog sitting beside him. The strange thing was, though, that Tyutchev’s chair wasn’t standing on the floor, but on the ceiling. Tatarsky looked a little lower and read the slogan:

   
RUSSIA
- NO WAY IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND HER NO WAY HER SECRET SOUL TO RENDER SMIRNOFF

   Everything was calm. Tatarsky straightened up. He was feeling significantly better.

   Grigory leaned back in his chair and took another swig from his bottle. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he asserted. ‘Life should be lived cleanly.’

   ‘Oh, yes? And how’s that done?’ Tatarsky asked, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.

   ‘Nothing but LSD. Only via the gut and always with a prayer.’

   Tatarsky shook his head like a dog that has just clambered out of the water. ‘Where can you get it?’

   ‘What do you mean?’ Grigory was offended. ‘Just you come round here.’

   Tatarsky obediently got up, walked round the table and sat beside him.

   ‘I’ve been collecting for eight years,’ said Grigory, taking a stamp album out from under his jacket. ‘Take a look at that.’

   Tatarsky opened the album. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Look at all those different ones.’

   ‘That’s nothing,’ said Grigory. ‘What I’ve got here’s just for swapping and selling. I’ve got two shelves of these albums back at home.’

   ‘And you mean they all have different effects?’

   Grigory nodded.

   ‘But why?’

   ‘In the first place, because the formula’s different. I’ve not gone into it too deeply myself, but there’s always something added to the acid - phenamine maybe, maybe barbiturate or something else - and when it all works together, the effect’s cumulative. But apart from that, the most important thing is the drawing. There’s no getting away from the fact that you’re swallowing Mel Gibson or Mitsubishi, get it? Your mind remembers it; and when the acid reaches it, everything follows a set path. It’s hard to explain… have you ever tried it once at least?’

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Fly-agarics are more in my line.’

   Grigory shuddered and crossed himself.

   ‘Then what am I doing telling you about it?’ he said, glancing mistrustfully up at Tatarsky. ‘You should understand well enough.’

   ‘Yes, I understand, I understand,’ said Tatarsky casually. ‘And these here, with the skull and cross-bones - does anyone take those? Are there people who like those?’

   "They take all sorts. People come in all sorts, too, you know.’

   Tatarsky turned over the page. ‘Hey, those are pretty,’ he said. ‘Is that Alice in Wonderland?’

   ‘Aha. Only that’s a block. Twenty-five tabs. Expensive. This one here’s good, with the crucifixion. Only I don’t know how it’d go down on top of your fly-agarics. I wouldn’t recommend the one with Hitler. It’s euphoric for a couple of hours, but afterwards there’s bound to be a few seconds of eternal torment in hell.’

   ‘How can you have a few seconds of eternal torment? If it’s only a few seconds, how come they’re eternal?’

   ‘You just have to go through it. Yeah. And you might not make it through.’

   ‘I get you.’ said Tatarsky, turning the page. ‘And that glitch of yours about "Rosa Mundi" - which one was that from? Is it in here?’

   ‘Not a glitch, it was a vision,’ Grigory corrected him. ‘There’s none in here. It was a rare tab with a dragon defeating St George. From the German series: "John the Evangelist’s Bad Trip". I wouldn’t recommend that one either. They’re a bit longer and narrower than usual, and hard too. Less like a tab than a tablet with a label on it. A lot of stuff. You know what, I’d recommend you to try this one, with the blue Rajneesh. It’s kind and gentle. And it’ll sit well on top of the booze.’

   Tatarsky’s attention was caught by three identical lilac rectangles set between a tab with a picture of the
Titanic
and a tab with some laughing eastern deity.

   ‘These three here all the same, what are they?’ he asked. ‘Who’s this drawn on them? With the beard and the cap? I can’t tell whether it’s Lenin or Uncle Sam.’

   Grigory chuckled in approval.

   ‘There’s instinct for you,’ he said. ‘Who it is that’s drawn on them I don’t know. But it’s really wild stuff. The difference is the acid’s mixed with a metabolic. So it cuts in really sharp and sudden, in about twenty minutes. And the dose in them is enough for a whole platoon of soldiers. I wouldn’t give stuff like that to you, but if you’ve been eating fly-agarics…’

   Tatarsky noticed the security guard looking at them attentively.

   ‘I’ll take them,’ he said. ‘How much?’

   ‘Twenty-five dollars,’ said Grigory.

   ‘All I’ve got left is a hundred roubles.’

   Grigory thought for a second and nodded.

   Tatarsky held out the banknote rolled into a narrow tube, took a stamp out of the album and tucked it into his breast pocket.

   "There you go’ said Grigory, putting his album away. ‘And don’t you go snorting that garbage any more. Ifs never done anybody any good. Just makes you tired and ashamed about yesterday and makes your nose bleed.’

   ‘Do you know what comparative positioning is?’ Tatarsky asked.

   ‘No,’ said Grigory. ‘What is it?’

   ‘It’s an advertising technique you’re an absolute master of"

   Next morning Tatarsky was woken by the phone. His first reaction was annoyance - the phone had interrupted a very strange and beautiful dream, in which Tatarsky was taking an examination. The dream had started with him drawing three question tickets one after the other, and then setting off up a long spiral staircase like there used to be in one of the blocks of his first institute, where he studied electric furnaces. It was up to him to find the examiners himself, but every time he opened one of the doors, instead of an examination hall he found himself gazing into the sunset-lit field outside Moscow where he and Gireiev had gone walking on that memorable evening. This was very strange, because his search had already taken him up several floors above ground level.

   When he was fully awake he suddenly remembered Grigory and his stamp album. ‘I bought it,’ he thought in horror, ‘and I ate it…’ He leapt out of bed, went over to the desk, pulled out the top drawer and saw the stamp with the smiling lilac face looking up at him. ‘No,’ he thought, ‘thank God for that…’ Placing the stamp in the very farthest comer of the drawer, he covered it with a box of pencils.

   Meanwhile the phone was still ringing. ‘Pugin.’ Tatarsky thought to himself and picked up the receiver.

   ‘Hello,’ said an unfamiliar voice, ‘can I speak to Mr Tatarsky, please?’

   ‘Speaking.’

   ‘Good morning. This is Vladimir Khanin from the Privy Counsellor agency. I was left your number by Dima Pugin. Could we maybe get together some time today? Right away would be best.’

   ‘What’s happened?’ Tatarsky asked, realising immediately from the verb ‘left’ that something bad must have happened to Pugin.

   ‘Dima’s no longer with us. I know you worked with him, and he worked with me. So indirectly we’re acquainted. In any case, I have several of your works we were waiting for an answer on lying here on my desk.’

   ‘But how did it happen?’

   ‘When we meet,’ said his new acquaintance. ‘Write down the address.’

   An hour and a half later Tatarsky walked into the immense building of the Pravda complex, the building that had once housed the editorial offices of almost all the Soviet newspapers. A pass was ready and waiting for him at the duty desk. He went up to the eighth floor and found the room with the number he needed; there was a metal plate on the door bearing the words: ‘Ideological Department’ - apparently a leftover from Soviet times. ‘Or maybe not,’ thought Tatarsky.

   Khanin was alone in the room. He was a middle-aged man with a pleasant, bearded face, and he was sitting at a desk, hastily writing something down.

   ‘Come in and sit down,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

   Tatarsky took two steps into the room, saw the advertising poster sellotaped to the wall and almost choked on the spot. According to the text under the photograph, it was an advertisement for a new type of holiday involving the alternate use of jointly rented apartments - Tatarsky had already heard talk that it was just another big rip-off, like everything else. But that wasn’t the problem. The metre-wide photograph showed three palm trees on some paradise island, and those three palms were a point-for-point copy of the holographic image from the packet of Parliament cigarettes he’d found on the ziggurat. Even that was nothing compared with the slogan. Written in large black letters under the photograph were the words:

   ‘I told you to sit down! There’s a chair over here.’ Khanin’s voice roused Tatarsky from his trance. He sat down and awkwardly shook the hand that was extended towards him over the desk.

   ‘What’s the problem over there?’ Khanin asked, squinting across at the poster.

   ‘Oh, nothing.’ said Tatarsky. ‘Deja vu.’

   ‘Ah! I understand.’ said Khanin in a tone of voice that suggested he really had understood something. ‘Right, then. First of all about Pugin…’

   Gradually recovering his composure, Tatarsky began to listen.

   The robbery had obviously been an inside job and, taking everything into consideration, the thief must have known that Pugin had worked as a taxi-driver in New York. It was a horrible and rather improbable story: while Pugin was warming up the motor of his car, two guys had climbed into the back seat and given him an address: Second Avenue, corner of Twenty-Seventh Street. Under some kind of reflex hypnosis Pugin had driven off, then turned into a side street - and that was all he had managed to tell the police and the doctors. Seven bullet wounds had been found in his body - they’d fired straight through the back of his seat. Several thousand dollars Pugin was carrying with him were missing, as well as some file or other that he kept raving about until the moment of death.

   ‘Except that the file,’ Khanin said sadly, ‘isn’t missing. Here it is. He left it here, forgot it. Why don’t you take a look? I’ll just make a couple of calls in the meantime.’

   Tatarsky picked up the loose-leaf binder. He remembered Pugin’s mustachioed face, just as pasty and colourless as this cardboard, and his black-button eyes, like plastic studs. The folder evidently contained Pugin’s own works - how many times had he hinted that he was more than just a passive observer when it came to judging what other people produced? ‘He probably started back in New York,’ Tatarsky thought to himself. While Khanin was discussing some rates or other on the phone, Tatarsky came across two genuine masterpieces. The first was for Calvin Klein:

   
An elegant, rather effeminate Hamlet (general stylisation - unisex) in black tights and a light blue tunic worn next to the skin, wanders slowly around a graveyard. Beside one of the graves he halts, bends down and picks up a pink skull out of the grass. Close-up: Hamlet knitting his brows slightly as he gazes at the skull. View from the rear: close-up of taut buttocks with the letters ‘CK’. New camera angle: skull, hand, letters ‘CK’ on the blue tunic. Next frame: Hamlet tosses the skull into the air and kicks it. The skull soars upwards, then arcs back down and falls straight through the bronze wreath held by a bronze angel on one of the graves, just as though it were a basketball hoop. Slogan:

JUST BE. CALVIN
KLEJN

   The second slogan Tatarsky liked was intended for the Gap chain of shops in Moscow. The proposal was for a poster showing Anton Chekhov, first in a striped suit, and then in a striped jacket but with no trousers: the gap between his bare, skinny legs was emphasised in strong contrast, so that it resembled a Gothic hourglass. Then the outline of the gap between Chekhov’s legs was repeated, but without Chekhov; now it really had become an hourglass, with almost all the sand already fallen through into the bottom half. The text was: