Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

‘I didn’t understand what it meant: "Every brand has its bend".’

  ‘Bend. That’s the way we translate the expression "brand essence". That’s to say, the concentrated expression of a comprehensive image policy. For instance, the Marlboro bend or essence is a country of real men. The Parliament essence is jazz, and so on. You mean you didn’t know that?’

  ‘No, of course I knew that. What d’you take me for? It’s just a very odd kind of translation.’

  ‘What’s to be done about it?’ said Khanin. "This is Asia.’

  Tatarsky got up from the table. ‘Where’s your toilet,’ he asked.

  ‘First door after the kitchen.’

  When he stepped into the toilet, Tatarsky’s gaze was confronted by a photograph of a diamond necklace with the text:

  ‘De Beers. Diamonds are for ever’, hanging on the wall facing the door. This rather threw him off balance and for several seconds he couldn’t recall why he was there. When he remembered, he tore off a sheet of toilet paper and wrote on it:

  1) Brand essence (bend). Include in all concepts in place of ‘psychological crystallisation’.

  2) Parliament with tanks on the bridge. Instead of ‘the smoke of the Motherland’’ - ‘All that jazz’.

  Tucking the piece of paper into his breast pocket and flushing the toilet conspiratorially, he went back to the kitchen and walked right up to the Coca-Cola red banners.

  ‘It’s quite incredible,’ he said. ‘Looks like it said "Coke" on this flag from the very beginning.’

  ‘So what did you expect? What’s so surprising about that? D’you know what the Spanish for "advertising" is?’ Khanin hiccupped: ‘"Propaganda." So you and me are ideological workers, if you hadn’t realised it yet. Propagandists and agitators. I used to work in ideology, as it happens. At Komsomol Central Committee level. All my friends are bankers now; I’m the only one… I tell you, I didn’t have to reconstruct myself at all. It used to be: "The individual is nothing, the collective is everything.’’ and now it’s: "Image is nothing, thirst is everything." Agitprop’s immortal. It’s only the words that change.’

  Tatarsky felt an uneasy presentiment.

  ‘Listen.’ he said, ‘you didn’t happen to speak at party personnel meetings outside Moscow, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Khanin. ‘Why?’

  ‘In Firsanovka?’

  ‘Yes, in Firsanovka.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Tatarsky, gulping down his vodka. ‘All the time I had this feeling your face was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. Only you didn’t have a beard then.’

  ‘You mean you used to go to Firsanovka too?’ Khanin asked in delighted surprise.

  ‘Only once,’ Tatarsky answered. ‘You came out on the platform with such a hangover I thought you were going to puke the moment you opened your mouth…’

  ‘Hey, take it easy in front of the wife… Although you’re right: the main reason we went out there was to drink. Golden days!’

  ‘And so what happened? You came out with this great speech,’ Tatarsky continued. ‘I was studying at the Literary Institute at the time, and it really upset me. I felt jealous, because I realised I would never learn to manipulate words like that. No sense to it whatsoever, it just blew me away; all at once everything was absolutely clear. That’s to say, what the speaker - you - was trying to say wasn’t clear, because he didn’t really want to say anything, but everything in life was clear. I suppose that’s what those party personnel meetings were held for. I sat down to write a sonnet that evening, but I just got drunk instead.’

  ‘What was I speaking about, d’you remember?’ Khanin asked. He obviously found reminiscing pleasant.

  ‘Something or other to do with the twenty-seventh Party congress and its significance.’

  Khanin cleared his throat: ‘I think there is no need to explain to you Komsomol activists,’ he said in a loud, well-trained voice, ‘why the decision of our Party’s twenty-seventh congress are regarded as not merely significant, but epoch-making. Nonetheless, the methodological distinction between these two concepts occasions misunderstanding even among propagandists and agitators. After all, the propagandists and agitators are the builders of our tomorrow, and they should not be unclear in any way about the plan for the future that they have to build…’

  He hiccupped loudly and lost the thread of his speech.

  ‘That’s it, that’s it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I recognise you now all right. The most amazing thing is that you actually did spend an entire hour explaining the methodological difference between "significant" and "epoch-making", and I understood every single sentence perfectly. But if I tried to understand any two sentences together, it was like running my head against a brick wall… There was just no way. And there was no way I could repeat it in my own words. But then, on the other hand… What’s "Just do it" supposed to mean? And what’s the methodological difference between "Just do it" and "Just be"?’

  ‘Exactly what I’m getting at,’ said Khanin, pouring the vodka. "S exactly the same.’

  ‘What are you men doing drinking away like that?’ put in Liza, speaking for the first time. ‘You might at least propose a toast.’

  ‘OK, let’s have a toast,’ said Khanin, and he hiccupped again. ‘Only, you know, one that’s not only significant, but epoch-making as well. Komsomol member to party member, you follow?’

  Tatarsky held on to the table as he rose to his feet. He looked at the poster and thought for a second before raising his glass and speaking:

  ‘Comrades! Let us drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a flood of images!’

  CHAPTER 9. The Babylonian Stamp

  On arriving home, Tatarsky felt the kind of energy rush he hadn’t experienced in ages. Khanin’s metamorphosis had positioned the entire recent past in such a strange perspective it simply had to be followed by something miraculous. Pondering on what he might amuse himself with, Tatarsky strode restively around the flat several times until he remembered the acid tab he had bought in the Poor Folk bar. It was still lying in the drawer of the desk - in all that time he’d not had any reason to swallow it, and anyway he’d been afraid.

  He went over to the desk, took the lilac-coloured stamp out of the drawer and looked at it carefully. The face with the pointed beard smirked up at him; the stranger was wearing an odd kind of hat, something between a helmet and a dunce’s cap with a very narrow brim. ‘Wears a pointed cap,’ thought Tatarsky; ‘probably a jester, then. That means it’ll be fun.’ Without giving it any more thought, he tossed the tab into his mouth, ground it up between his teeth and swallowed down the small ball of soft fibres. Then he lay down on the divan and waited.

  He was soon bored just lying there. He got up, lit a cigarette and walked around the flat again. Reaching the closet, he remembered that since his adventure in the forest outside Moscow he hadn’t taken another look into the ‘Tikhamat-2’ folder. It was a classic case of displacement: not once had he recalled that he wanted to finish reading the materials in the file, although, on the other hand, he didn’t really seem to have forgotten it either. It had been exactly the same story with the acid tab, as though both of these items had been reserved for that special occasion which, in the course of normal life, never arrives. Tatarsky took down the folder from the top shelf and went back into the room. There were a lot of photographs inside, glued to the pages. One of them fell out as soon as he opened the folder, and he picked it up from the floor.

  The photo showed a fragment of a bas-relief - a section of sky with large stars carved into it. In the lower part of the photograph there were two upraised arms, cut off by the edge of the shot. These were genuine stars of heaven - ancient, immense and alive. Stars like that had long ago ceased to shine for the living and continued to exist only for stone heroes in antediluvian sculptures. But then, thought Tatarsky, the stars themselves can hardly have changed since then - it’s people who’ve cha
nged. Each star consisted of a central circle and pointed rays with bundles of sinuous parallel lines set between them.

  Tatarsky noticed there were almost invisible little red and green veins twinkling around the lines, as though he was watching a badly adjusted computer monitor. The shiny surface of the photograph took on a brilliant rainbow gleam and its glimmering began to occupy more of his attention than the actual image. ‘It’s started,’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Now that’s really quick…’

  Finding the page the photograph had come unstuck from, he ran his tongue across the dried-up spot of casein glue and set it back in its place. Then he carefully turned over the page and smoothed it down with the palm of his hand, so the photograph would stick properly. Glancing at the next photo, he almost dropped the folder on the floor.

  The photograph showed the same face as on the lilac tab-stamp. It was shown from a different angle, in profile, but there was absolutely no doubt about it.

  It was a complete photograph of the same bas-relief. Tatarsky recognised the fragment with the stars - they were small now and hard to pick out, and the arms uplifted towards them turned to belong to the tiny figure of a man standing on the roof of a house, frozen in a pose of absolute terror.

  The central figure in the bas-relief, whose face Tatarsky had recognised, was several times larger than the figure on the roof and all the other figures around it. It was a man wearing a pointed iron cap with a mysterious, half-drunk smile playing about his lips. His face seemed strangely, even absurdly out of place in the ancient image - it looked so natural Tatarsky could easily have believed the bas-relief had not been made three thousand years ago in Nineveh, but some time late last year in Yerevan or Calcutta. Instead of the spade-shaped beard with symmetrical curls an ancient Sumerian was supposed to wear, the man was wearing a sparse goatee, and he looked like a cross between Cardinal Richelieu and Lenin.

  Tatarsky hastily turned over the page and found the text relating to the photograph.

  Enkidu (Enki fecit) wasa fisherman-god, the servant of the god Enki (Lord of the Earth). He is the god of the Great Lottery and protector of ponds and canals; there are also examples of spells invoking Enkidu against various ailments of the digestive tract. He was made from clay, like Adam in the Old Testament story - the clay tablets with the questions for the Lottery were believed to be the flesh of Enkidu, and the ritual drink prepared in his temple was his blood…

  It was hard to read the text - the sense wasn’t getting through to him, and the letters were shimmering and blinking in all the colours of the rainbow. Tatarsky began studying the image of the deity in detail. Enkidu was draped in a mantle covered with oval plaques and in his hands he held bundles of strings that radiated out like fans towards the ground, so that he reminded Tatarsky of Gulliver with an army of Lilliputians trying to restrain him by cables attached to his arms. None of the pools and canals Enkidu was supposed to be concerned with were to be seen anywhere - he was walking through a burning city, where the houses came up to his waist. Under his feet lay prostrate figures with their arms extended in identical gestures - looking at them, Tatarsky noted the quite definite kinship between Sumerian art and socialist realism. The most interesting detail of the image were the strings radiating from Enkidu’s hands. Each string ended in a large wheel, in the centre of which was a triangle containing the crudely traced image of an eye. There were human bodies threaded on the strings - like the fish Tatarsky used to dry in his childhood, hanging them out in the yard on a length of fishing line.

  On the next page there was an enlarged fragment of the bas-relief showing the little human figures on one of the strings. Tatarsky was even slightly nauseated. With quite repulsive realism, the bas-relief showed the cable entering each human figure at the mouth and exiting from its backside. Some of the people’s arms were flung out to the sides, others were pressing their hands to their heads, and large-headed birds hung in the spaces between them. Tatarsky carried on reading:

  According to tradition Endu, wife of the god Enki (another account regards her as his female hypostasis, which seems unlikely; she can also be identified with the figure of Ishtar) was once sitting on the bank of a canal and telling the rosary of rainbow-coloured beads her husband had given her. The sun was shining very brightly and Endu was overcome by sleep. She dropped her rosary, which fell into the water, where the beads scattered and sank. After this the rainbow-coloured beads decided that they were people and settled throughout the pond. They built towns and had their own kings and gods. Then Enki took a lump of clay and moulded it into the form of a fisherman. He breathed life into it and called it Enkidu. He gave him a spindle of golden thread, and told him to go down into the water and gather up all the beads. Since the name ‘Enkidu’ contains Enki’s own name, it possesses special power and the beads are obliged to submit to the will of the god and string themselves on to the golden thread. Some researchers believe that Enkidu gathers up the souls of the deceased and transports them on his threads to the kingdom of the dead; numerous images have been preserved in which merchants and officials are shown appealing to Enkidu for help. These prayers contain a repeated plea to ‘raise the strong higher on the thread of gold’ and to ‘endow with the earthly enlility’ (see ‘Enlil’). There are also eschatological motifs to be found in the myth of Enkidu-as soon as Enkidu gathers everyone living on earth on to his thread life will cease, because they will once again become beads on the necklace of the great goddess. This event, due to happen at some point in the future, is identified with the end of the world.

  The ancient legend contains one motif for which it is difficult to provide an explanation: several versions describe in detail exactly how the bead-people crawl up along Enkidu’s threads. They don’t use their hands for this - their hands serve to cover their eyes and ears or to beat off the white birds that attempt to tear them from the threads. The bead-people ascend the string by first swallowing it and then grasping it alternately with their mouths and anuses. It is not clear how such Pantagruelesaue details come to be found in the myth of Enkidu - possibly they are echoes of another myth that has been lost.

  The wheels in which Enkidu’s threads end are also worth some consideration. They bear the likeness of an eye inscribed in a triangle. Here we have the intersection of the real with the mythical: the wheels of ancient Sumerian war chariots actually were secured by a triangular bronze plate attached to the wheel externally, and the form drawn on the plate, which is similar to the outline of an eye, symbolises the spindle on which the golden thread was wound. The wheel is a symbol of movement; thus we have the self-propelling spindle of the god Enki (cf. for instance Ariadne’s thread or the many-eyed wheels in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel). The power of the name ‘Enki’ is such that although originally there was only one such spindle, it might have come to seem to people that their numbers were beyond count.

  Tatarsky noticed a glimmering in the semi-darkness of the room. Thinking it must be the reflection of some light in the street, he stood up and looked out of the window, but there was nothing of any interest going on outside. He caught sight of his own orange divan reflected in the glass and was amazed to observe that, seen in mirror inversion, the tattered couch he had so often felt like throwing out on to the dump and burning was the finest part of an unfamiliar and quite amazingly beautiful interior. Returning to his seat, he glimpsed the glimmering light again out of the corner of his eye. He looked round, but the light shifted too, as though its source was a spot on his iris. ‘OK,’ Tatarsky thought happily, ‘so now we’re into the glitches.’ The focus of his attention shifted to the spot and rested there for only the briefest of moments, but that was enough for his mind to record an event that began gradually unfolding as it surfaced in his memory, like a photograph in a bath of developing fluid.

  It was summer, and he was standing on a city street lined with identical small houses. Towering up above the city was something between a conical factory chimney and a television tower -
it was hard to tell what it was, because mounted on the summit of the chimney-tower was a blinding white torch, blazing so brilliantly that the haze of hot air obscured the outline. He could see its lower section was like a stepped pyramid, but higher up, in the white radiance, it was impossible to make out any details. Tatarsky thought the construction was probably something like the gas flares they have at oil refineries, except that the flame was so bright. There were people standing motionless at the open windows of the houses and on the street - they were gazing upwards at the white fire. Tatarsky turned his eyes in the same direction, and immediately felt himself jerked upwards. He could feel the fire drawing him towards itself and he knew that if he didn’t turn his eyes away the flame would drag him upwards and consume him completely. Somehow he knew a lot about this fire. He knew many had already entered it ahead of him and were drawing him after them. He knew there were many who could only enter it after him, and they were pressing at his back. Tatarsky forced himself to close his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the tower had moved.

  Now he could see it wasn’t a tower - it was an immense human figure, towering up over the town. What he had taken for a pyramid now looked like the folds of a garment resembling a cloak or a mantle. The source of the light was the conical helmet on the figure’s head. Tatarsky could clearly see the face, with some kind of gleaming battering ram in the place of a beard. It was turned towards him, and he realised he could only see the face and the helmet instead of the flame, because the flame was looking at him, and in reality there was nothing human about it. The gaze directed towards Tatarsky expressed anticipation, but before he had time to think about what he actually wanted to say or ask, or whether he really wanted to say or ask anything at all, the figure gave him its answer and turned its gaze away. The same intolerably bright radiance appeared where the face had been and Tatarsky lowered his eyes.

  He noticed two people beside him, an elderly man in a shirt with an anchor embroidered on it and a boy in a black tee-shirt: they were holding hands and gazing upwards, and he had a feeling they had almost completely melted and merged with the bright fire, and their bodies, the street around them and the entire city were no more than shadows. Just a moment before the picture faded, Tatarsky guessed the bright fire he’d seen wasn’t burning high in the sky, but down below, as though he’d glimpsed a reflection of the sun in a puddle and forgotten he wasn’t looking at the actual position of the sun. Where the sun actually was, and what it was, he didn’t have time to find out, but he did manage to understand something else, something very strange: it wasn’t the sun that was reflected in the puddle, but the other way round; everything and everybody else - the street, the houses, the other people and he himself - were all reflected in the sun, which was entirely uninterested in the whole business, because it wasn’t even aware of it.