‘All right,’ said Tatarsky, pinching his leg again. ‘But surely someone has to control the economy, not just wind people up and come on heavy? The economy’s complicated. Doesn’t it take some kind of principles to regulate it?’
‘The principle’s very simple,’ said Morkovin. ‘Monetarism. To keep everything in the economy normal, all we have to do is to control the gross stock of money we have. And everything else automatically falls into place. So we mustn’t interfere in anything.’
‘And how do we control this gross stock?’
‘So as to make is as big as possible.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Of course. If the gross stock of money we have is as big as possible, that means everything’s hunky-dory.’
‘Yes,’ said Tatarsky, ‘that’s logical. But still someone has to run everything, surely?’
‘You want to understand everything far too quickly,’ Morkovin said with a frown. ‘I told you, just wait a while. That, my friend, is a great problem - trying to understand just who’s running things. For the time being let me just say the world isn’t run by a "who", it’s run by a "what". By certain factors and impulses it’s too soon for you to be learning about. Although in fact. Babe, there’s no way you could not know about them. That’s the paradox of it all…’
Morkovin fell silent and began thinking about something. Tatarsky lit a cigarette - he didn’t feel like talking any more. Meanwhile a new client had appeared in the canteen, one that Tatarsky recognised immediately: it was the well-known TV political analyst Farsuk Seiful-Farseikin. In real life he looked a bit older than he did on the screen. He was obviously just back from a broadcast: his face was covered with large beads of sweat, and the famous pince-nez was set crooked on his nose. Tatarsky expected Farseikin to dash over to the counter for vodka, but he came over to their table.
‘Mind if I turn on the sound?’ he asked, nodded towards the television. ‘My son made this clip. I haven’t seen it yet.’
Tatarsky looked up. Something strangely familiar was happening on the screen: there was a choir of rather dubious-looking sailors standing in a clearing in a birch forest (Tatarsky recognised Azadovsky right away - he was standing in the middle of the group, the only one with a medal gleaming on his chest). With their arms round each other’s shoulders, the sailors were swaying from side to side and gently singing in support of a yellow-haired soloist who looked like the poet Esenin raised to the power of three. At first Tatarsky thought the soloist must be standing on the stump of a gigantic birch tree, but from the ideally cylindrical form of the stump and the small yellow lemons drawn on it, he realised it was a soft drinks can magnified many times over and painted to resemble either a birch tree or a zebra. The slick image-sequencing testified that this was a very expensive clip.
‘Bom-bom-bom,’ the swaying sailors rumbled dully. The soloist stretched out his hands from his heart towards the camera and sang in a clear tenor:
My motherland gives me
For getting it right
My fill of her fizzy,
Her birch-bright Sprite!
Tatarsky crushed his cigarette into the ashtray with a sharp movement.
‘Motherfuckers.’ he said.
‘Who?’ asked Morkovin.
‘If only I knew… So tell me then, what area do they want to move me into?’
‘Senior creative in the kompromat department; and you’ll be on standby when we have a rush on. So now we’ll be standing, shoulder to shoulder, just like those sailors… Forgive me, brother, for dragging you into in all this. Life’s much simpler for the punters, who don’t know anything about it. They even think there are different TV channels and different TV companies… But then, that’s what makes them punters.’
CHAPTER 13. The Islamic Factor
It happens so often: you’re riding along in your white Mercedes and you go past a bus stop. You see the people who’ve been standing there, waiting in frustration for their bus for God knows how long, and suddenly you notice one of them gazing at you with a dull kind of expression that just might be envy. For a second you really start to believe that this machine stolen from some anonymous German burgher, that still hasn’t been fully cleared through the customs in fraternal Belorussia but already has a suspicious knocking in the engine, is the prize that witnesses to your full and total victory over life. A warm shiver runs up and down your spine, you proudly turn your face away from the people standing at the bus stop, and in your very heart of hearts you know that all your trials were not in vain: you’ve really made it.
Such is the action of the anal wow-factor in our hearts; but somehow Tatarsky failed to experience its sweet titillation. Perhaps the difficulty lay in some specific after-the-rain apathy of the punters standing at their bus stops, or perhaps Tatarsky was simply too nervous: there was a review of his work coming up, and Azadovsky himself was due to attend. Or perhaps the reason lay in the increasingly frequent breakdowns of the social radar locating unit in his mind.
‘If we regard events purely from the point of view of image animation,’ he thought, glancing round at his neighbours in the traffic jam, ‘then we have all our concepts inverted. For the celestial Silicon that renders this entire world, a battered old Lada is a much more complicated job than a new BMW that’s been blasted with gales for three years in aerodynamic tunnels. The whole thing comes down to creatives and scenario writers. But what bad bastard could have written this scenario? And who’s the viewer who sits and stuffs his face while he watches this screen? Most important of all, could it all really only be happening so that some heavenly agency can rake in something like money from something like advertising? Certainly looks like it. It’s a well-known fact that everything in the world is based on similitudes.’
The traffic jam finally began to ease. Tatarsky lowered the window. His mood was completely spoiled; he needed live human warmth. He pulled out of the stream of cars and braked at the bus stop. The broken glass panel in the side of the shelter had been patched over with a board carrying an advertisement for some TV channel showing an allegorical representation of the four mortal sins holding remote controls. An old woman was sitting motionless on the bench under the shelter with a basket on her knees, and sitting beside her was a curly-headed man of about forty, clutching a bottle of beer. He was dressed in a shabby, padded military coat. Noting that the man still seemed to possess a fair amount of vital energy, Tatarsky stuck out his elbow.
‘Excuse me, soldier,’ he said, ‘can you tell me where the Men’s Shirts shop is around here?’
The man looked up at him. He must have understood Tatarsky’s real motivation, because his eyes were immediately flooded with an ice-cold fury. The brief exchange of glances was most informative - Tatarsky realised that the man realised, and the man realised Tatarsky realised he’d been realised.
‘ Afghanistan was way heavier,’ said the man.
‘I beg your pardon, what did you say?’
‘What I said was’, the man replied, shifting his grip to the neck of the bottle, ‘that Afghanistan was way heavier. And don’t you even try to beg my pardon.’
Something told Tatarsky the man was not approaching his car in order to tell him the way to the shop, and he flattened the accelerator against the floor. His instinct had not deceived him - a second later something struck hard against the rear windsow and it shattered into a spider’s web of cracks, with white foam trickling down over them. Driven by his adrenalin rush, Tatarsky accelerated sharply. ‘What a fucker,’ he thought, glancing round. ‘And they want to build a market economy with people like that.’
After he parked in the yard of the Interbank Committee, a red Range-Rover pulled up beside him - the latest model, with a set of fantastical spotlights perched on its roof and its door decorated with a cheerful drawing of the sun rising over the prairie and the head of an Indian chief clad in a feather headdress. ‘I wonder who drives those?’ Tatarsky
thought, and lingered at the door of his car for a moment.
A fat, squat man wearing an emphatically bourgeois striped suit clambered out of the Range-Rover and turned round, and Tatarsky was amazed to recognise Sasha Blo - fatter than ever, even balder, but still with that same old grimace of tormented failure to understand what was really going on.
‘Sasha,’ said Tatarsky, ‘is that you?’
‘Ah, Babe,’ said Sasha Blo. ‘You’re here too? In the dirt department?’
‘How d’you know?’
‘Elementary, my dear Watson. That’s where everybody starts out. Till they get their hand in. There aren’t all that many creatives on the books. Everyone knows everyone else. So if I haven’t seen you before and now you’re parking at this entrance, it means you’re in kompromat. And you’ve only been there a couple of weeks at most.’
‘It’s been a month already,’ Tatarsky answered. ‘So what’re you doing now?’
‘Me? I’m head of the Russian Idea department. Drop in if you have any ideas.’
‘I’m not much good to you" Tatarsky answered. ‘I tried thinking about it, but it was a flop. You should try driving around the suburbs and asking the guys on the street.’
Sasha Blo frowned in dissatisfaction.
‘I tried that at the beginning,’ he said. ‘You pour the vodka, look into their eyes, and then it’s always the same answer:
"Bugger off and crash your fucking Mercedes." Can’t think of anything cooler than a Mercedes… And it’s all so destructive…’
‘That’s right,’ sighed Tatarsky and looked at the rear window of his car. Sasha Blo followed his glance.
‘Is it yours?’
‘Yes it is,’ Tatarsky said with pride.
‘I see’ said Sasha Blo, locking the door of his Range-Rover; ‘forty minutes of embarrassment gets you to work. Well, don’t let it get you down. Everything’s still ahead of you.’
He nodded and ran off jauntily towards the door, flapping a fat, greasy attache case as he went. Tatarsky gazed after him for a long moment, then looked at the rear window of his car again and took out his notebook. "The worst thing of all’, he wrote on the last page, ‘is that people base their intercourse with each other on senselessly distracting chatter, into which they cold-bloodedly, cunningly and inhumanly introduce their anal impulse in the hope that it will become someone else’s oral impulse. If this happens, the winner shudders or-giastically and for a few seconds experiences the so-called "pulse of life".’
Azadovsky and Morkovin had been sitting in the viewing hall since early morning. Outside the entrance several people were walking backwards and forwards, sarcastically discussing Yeltsin’s latest binge. Tatarsky decided they must be copywriters from the political department practising corporate non-action. They were called in one by one; on average they spent about ten minutes with the bosses. Tatarsky realised that the problems discussed were of state significance - he heard Yeltsin’s voice emanate from the hall at maximum volume several times. The first time he burbled:
‘What do we want so many pilots for? We only need one pilot, but ready for anything! The moment I saw my grandson playing with Play Station I knew straightaway what we need…’
The second time they were obviously playing back a section from an address to the nation, because Yeltsin’s voice was solemn and measured: ‘For the first time in many decades the population of Russia now has the chance to choose between the heart and the head. Vote with your heart!’
One project was wound up - that was obvious from the face of the tall man with a moustache and prematurely grey hair who emerged from the hall clutching a crimson loose-leaf folder with the inscription ‘Tsar’. Then music began playing in the hall - at first a balalaika jangled for a long time, then Tatarsky heard Azadovsky shouting: ‘Bugger it! We’ll take him off the air. Next.’
Tatarsky was the last in the queue. The dimly lit hall where Azadovsky was waiting looked luxurious but somewhat archaic, as though it had been decorated and furnished back in the forties. For some reason Tatarsky bent down when he entered. He trotted across to the first row and perched on the edge of the chair to the left of Azadovsky, who was ejecting streams of smoke into the beam of the video-projector. Azadovsky shook his hand without looking at him - he was obviously in a bad mood. Tatarsky knew what the problem was: Morkovin had explained it to him the day before.
‘They’ve dropped us to three hundred megahertz,’ he said gloomily. ‘For Kosovo. Remember how under the communists there were shortages of butter? Now it’s machine time. There’s something fatal about this country. Now Azadovsky’s watching all the drafts himself. Nothing’s allowed on the main render-server without written permission, so give it your best shot.’
It was the first time Tatarsky had seen what a draft - that is a rough sketch before it’s been rendered in full - actually looked like. If he hadn’t written the scenario himself, he would never have guessed that the green outline divided by lines of fine yellow dots was a table with a game of Monopoly set up on it. The playing pieces were identical small red arrows, and the dice were two blue blobs, but the game had been modelled honestly - in the lower section of the screen pairs of numbers from one to six flickered on and off, produced by the random number generator. The players themselves didn’t exist yet, though their moves corresponded to the points scored. Their places were occupied by skeletons of graduated lines with little circles as ball-joints. Tatarsky could only see their faces, constructed of coarse polygons - Salaman Raduev’s beard was like a rusty brick attached to the lower section of his face and a round bullet scar on his temple looked like a red button. Berezovsky was recognisable from the blue triangles of his shaved cheeks. As was only to be expected, Berezovsky was winning.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in Mother Russia, Monopoly’s a bit dicey. You buy a couple of streets, and then it turns out there are people living on them.’
Raduev laughed: ‘Not just in Russia. It’s like that everywhere. And I’ll tell you something else, Boris: not only do people live there; often they actually think the streets are theirs.’
Berezovsky tossed the dice. Once again he got two sixes.
"That’s not quite how it is.’ he said. ‘Nowadays people find out what they think from the television. So if you want to buy up a couple of streets and still sleep well, first you have to buy a TV tower.’
There was a squeak, and an animated insert appeared in the corner of the table: a military walkie-talkie with a long aerial. Raduev lifted it to his head-joint, said something curt in Chechen and put it back.
‘I’m selling off my TV announcer,’ he said, and flicked a playing piece into the centre of the table with his finger. ‘I don’t like television.’
‘I’m buying,’ Berezovsky responded quickly. ‘But why don’t you like it?
‘I don’t like it because piss comes into contact with skin too often when you watch it,’ said Raduev, shaking the dice in the green arrows of his fingers. ‘Every time I turn on the television, there’s piss coming into contact with skin and causing irritation.’
‘You must be talking about those commercials for Pampers, are you? But it’s not your skin, Salaman.’
‘Exactly,’ said Raduev irritably, ‘so why do they come into contact in my head? Haven’t they got anywhere else?’
The upper section of Berezovsky’s face was covered by a rectangle with a pair of eyes rendered in detail. They squinted in concern at Raduev and blinked a few times, then the rectangle disappeared.
‘Anyway, just whose piss is it?’ Raduev asked as if the idea had only just entered his head.
‘Drop it, Salaman,’ Berezovsky said in a reconciliatory tone. ‘Why don’t you take your move?’
‘Wait, Boris; I want to know whose piss and skin it is coming into contact in my head when I watch your television.’
‘Why is it my television?’
‘If a pipe runs across my squa
res, then I’m responsible for the pipe. You said that yourself. Right? So if all the TV anchormen are on your squares, you’re responsible for TV. So you tell me whose piss it is splashing about in my head when I watch it!’
Berezovsky scratched his chin. ‘It’s your piss, Salaman,’ he said decisively.
‘How come?’
‘Who else’s can it be? Think it out for yourself. In Chechnya they call you "the man with a bullet in his head" for your pluck. I don’t think anyone who decided to pour piss all over you while you’re watching TV would live very long.’ ‘You think right.’ ‘So, Salaman, that means it’s your piss.’ ‘So how does it get inside my head when I’m watching TV? Does it rise up from my bladder?’
Berezovsky reached out for the dice, but Raduev put his hand over them. ‘Explain,’ he demanded. "Then we’ll carry on playing.’
An animation rectangle appeared on Berezovsky’s forehead, containing a deep wrinkle. ‘All right,’ he said,’ I’ll try to explain.’
‘Go on.’
‘When Allah created this world.’ Berezovsky began, casting a quick glance upwards, ‘he first thought it; and then he created objects. All the holy books tell us that in the beginning was the word. What does that mean in legal terms? In legal terms it means that in the first place Allah created concepts. Coarse objects are the lot of human beings, but in stead of them Allah’ - he glanced upwards quickly once again - ‘has ideas. And so Salman, when you watch advertisements for Pampers on television, what you have in your head is not wet human piss, but the concept of piss. The idea of piss comes into contact with the concept of skin. You understand?’
‘More or less,’ said Raduev thoughtfully. ‘But I didn’t understand everything. The idea of piss and the concept of skin come into contact inside my head, right?’
Babylon Page 21
