Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  And she laughed. Her way of laughing was rather curious – loud, but short, as if the amusement was allowed to burst out from her for just a second before the valve closed again. It was like sneezing, except with laughter. And when she smiled elongated dimples appeared in her cheeks – two furrows really, more than dimples.

  ‘Actually,’ I confided, ‘I hardly ever write anything on my LJ page. It’s just that I don’t read newspapers and I don’t watch television. The LJ is where I keep up- to-date with the news. You can get a professional opinion on just about anything; all the experts have blogs nowadays.’

  ‘Reading experts’ blogs rather than newspapers,’ she said, ‘is like feeding on butchers’ excrement instead of eating meat.’

  The thought made me gag.

  ‘Interesting. Where did you get that from?’

  ‘I didn’t get it from anywhere. I thought of it myself.’

  ‘If you were to write a phrase like that in LiveJournal,’ I said, ‘you’d have to put a smiley after it.’

  ‘A smiley is a visual deodorant. It usually means that the user is afraid you might think he’s made a bad smell and wants you to know that really he smells like a rose.’

  I suddenly wanted to stop aside and check that I wasn’t exuding BO. We continued in silence to the end of the Boulevard. By that time I had worked up a pretty fair rage, but had been unable to come up with a suitable retort. Inspiration struck while I was looking up at the statue of Timiryazev.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re pretty good at Discourse. But as for Glamour – well, perhaps I’m out of date? Is that the latest fashion these days, to dress like Tom Sawyer?’

  ‘What does that mean, dressing like Tom Sawyer?’

  I looked her up and down, at her faded black t-shirt, at her dark trousers – they also, presumably, had at one time been black as well – and at her trainers.

  ‘Well, as if you’re just off to paint a fence.’

  This was, of course, below the belt; it was no way to talk to a girl. At least I hoped it was below the belt. It was meant to be.

  ‘You think I’m badly dressed?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, not badly exactly. Working-class clothes are fine. They even suit you, as a matter of fact. The only thing is, for a serious vampire it’s not really the style …’

  ‘Just a minute there,’ she said. ‘You really think I’m the one wearing working clothes? Not you?’

  True, there was a tear in my jacket and soot stains in a few places, but even so I felt confident that I was pretty impeccably dressed. I had bought the whole ensemble of jacket, trousers, shirt and shoes in LovemarX, taking it as a job lot from a display mannequin on the sales floor – all, that is, except the socks, which I bought separately. The advantage of the matching display was that it enabled me to cover up my problems with Glamour. As a tactic it was successful: Baldur personally approved my outfit, telling me that I looked like a Greenland queen on heat.

  ‘Let’s put it like this,’ I replied. ‘If I was going out to work on my vegetable patch I would wear different clothes. Clothes have after all a ritual significance, and rituals should be respected. They demonstrate status. Everyone ought to dress according to his or her position in society. That’s the nature of the social code. In my opinion the vampire has a very elevated status. Not just very elevated, the topmost status of all. And we should dress appropriately.’

  ‘And how exactly does dress reflect the social status?’

  This was my chance to show that I too was quite advanced in Discourse.

  ‘Generally speaking, in all epochs one sees the same simple principle at work,’ I expounded. ‘It is what is known as “industrial exemption”. The clothes a man wears signal his freedom from heavy physical labour. For instance, long sleeves extending beyond the fingers, as in “My Lady Greensleeves”. You know that song?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ I went on, ‘that a lady who wears clothes of this sort is not going to be scrubbing out saucepans or feeding the pigs. The same applies to lace cuffs round the wrists, elegant shoes with high heels and winkle-picker toes, various non-functional details of one’s attire such as baggy breeches, codpieces, all manner of frippery additions. But these days it’s, umm, any kind of expensive clothing, tastefully chosen. Anything to make it clear that the person is not going off to paint a fence.’

  ‘The theory is correct,’ said Hera, ‘but the way you are applying it in practice is way off beam. Your office uniform doesn’t remotely suggest that its wearer has freed himself from the degrading labour of painting fences. Quite the opposite. It sends a signal that at 10 a.m. you have to be at your desk in the office, where you must equip yourself with a virtual bucket of paint and busy yourself until 7 p.m. – excluding a short break for lunch – painting a virtual fence inside your head. Your senior manager must be happy with the progress of your work, which he will assess by reference to the optimistic expression on your face and the healthy glow of your cheeks.’

  ‘Why does it necessarily …’ I began.

  ‘How appalling!’ she interrupted. ‘And this is a vampire speaking? Rama, you look like a clerk waiting to go for a job interview with a Human Resources officer. Anyone would think you’ve got a short CV in your inside pocket, folded into four, which you don’t dare take out to check in case you make the letters run with your nervously sweating palms. And you have the nerve to criticise me, on a day when I have specially put on our national costume to celebrate a great event?’

  ‘What national costume?’ I asked, dumbfounded.

  ‘Black is vampire national dress. In the twenty-first century, “industrial exemption” style is when you couldn’t give a stuff what the captain of the galley in which you are chained to the oars thinks about your jacket. Everything else is working clothes. Even if you’re wearing a Rolex. Especially if you’re wearing a Rolex.’

  I did as it happened have a Rolex, not a particularly flash one but it was real. It suddenly felt unbearably heavy, and I drew my wrist back into my sleeve. I was beginning to feel as if I had been dropped over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  We crossed over New Arbat. Hera stopped in front of a shop window, carefully looked herself over and took out a tube of bright red lipstick, which she applied to her lips. It made her look exactly like a vampire girl out of a comic.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said ingratiatingly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She returned the lipstick to her pocket.

  ‘Tell me, do you really believe vampires bred human beings?’ I asked.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Why not? People bred pigs, didn’t they? And cows.’

  ‘But that’s completely different,’ I said. ‘People aren’t simple livestock. They have created wonderful cultures and civilisations. I find it very hard to believe that all this has been achieved purely to produce food for vampires. Just look around you …’

  Hera took me at my word. Standing still, with comic deliberation, she looked all round, at a stretch of the New Arbat, the Art Film Cinema, the Ministry of Defence and the Arbatskaya Metro Station, resembling a Mongol mausoleum in the middle of the steppe.

  ‘Why don’t you look around?’ she said, pointing to an advertisement hoarding just in front of us. The advert was for a lavatory pan bearing the legend ‘9,999 roubles’ in enormous letters, and a strapline that said: ‘Eldorado – no one beats our prices!’

  ‘I could suggest another strapline: “Freud’s Gold”,’ I said. ‘No, on second thoughts that would be better as a title for an action film.’

  The toilet began to move, breaking up into separate vertical strips. I realised that the hoarding itself consisted of a series of triangular columns. When they moved round one step, a new advertisement came into view, this one promoting telephone tariffs. It was executed in joyful yellow and dark blue colours, and announced: ‘$10 free!
Sign up for your ten dollars reward!’

  After another couple of seconds the columns turned once more, and the following image appeared in severe black lettering on a white background:

  I am the Lord thy God,

  thou shalt have none other Gods but Me.

  ‘Wonderful culture and civilisation,’ said Hera, echoing my words.

  ‘Well, what of it?’ I said. ‘All it is, some Protestants have rented this hoarding and are using it to advertise their account book – I mean, the Bible. I don’t deny that much that surrounds us is ludicrous. But even so I can’t believe that human languages and religions, merely to list which would fill an entire encyclopaedia, are simply the by-product of a vampire Food Supply Programme.’

  ‘What is it that bothers you about it?’

  ‘The disproportionate relationship between idea and result. It would be like building a huge metallurgical plant to produce … oh I don’t know … paper clips.’

  ‘Had it been vampires themselves who invented all these cultures and religions, then I agree it would have been overkill,’ she replied. ‘But human beings have done these things. It’s all, as you said yourself, a by-product.’

  ‘But if the only purpose of human beings is to provide food for vampires, then human civilisation must have a very low productivity coefficient.’

  ‘Well, what does it matter how high or low it is? It makes no difference to us. To whom are we obliged to account for it?’

  ‘That’s true, but … I still don’t believe it. There is nothing superfluous in nature. But here everything is superfluous.’

  Hera frowned. She looked angry when she did so, but I already knew that it was simply the expression her face assumed when she was concentrating her thoughts.

  ‘Do you know what termites are?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes. Blind white ants. They eat anything made of wood, from the inside. That writer, who was it, Mrakes, wrote something about them.’

  ‘Márquez?’

  ‘Could be. I haven’t read it, only heard about it in Discourse. I’ve never seen living termites either.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Hera. ‘But I saw a film about them. Termite communities have a king and a queen, who are protected by the ordinary termites. The king and queen stay in their cells, which they cannot leave. The worker termites constantly lick them clean and bring them food. Termites have their own style of architecture, a kind of Gothic vision on acid. They have a complex social hierarchy with a range of different professions: workers, soldiers, engineers. The thing I found most amazing was the way a new termite mound is created when a young king and queen fly away from the old one to build a new kingdom. As soon as they have arrived there, the first thing they do is gnaw off each other’s wings …’

  ‘Are you comparing human civilisation to a termite mound?’

  She nodded.

  ‘The very fact that you can do so,’ I said, ‘proves in itself how far termites and human beings are from one another.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’re ever going to find two termites discussing whether or not their mound is similar to a Gothite cathedral.’

  ‘In the first place,’ said Hera, ‘the word is Gothic, not Gothite. Secondly, nobody knows what termites talk about with one another. Thirdly, you didn’t let me finish. In the film I saw, we were shown how there are two species of soldier termites. There are ordinary rank-and-file soldiers, who have something like a pair of pincers on their heads. And there are others who have a long sort of needle on their heads. This needle exudes a chemical irritant in the form of a jelly, an extract from a special gland. When it was discovered that this extract from a termite’s pre-frontal gland is an effective cure for disease, people began to breed termites artificially so as to obtain more of the extract. Now, if you tried explaining to a horn-bearing termite from one of the artificially constructed mounds that the whole of his species’ huge and complex monarchical structure, all their unique architecture and harmonious social order, had been created merely because of the accidental usefulness to some apes of the extract produced by their pre-frontal gland, he would not believe you. And if you did manage to convince him, he would see it as a monstrous, insultingly disproportionate travesty.’

  ‘Junior manager’s pre-frontal gland extract,’ I repeated. ‘A delightful comparison …’

  ‘Straight from Enlil Maratovich. But let’s not trash the office proletariat. It’s vulgar to do that. Office-wallahs are not inferior to us, it’s just that we have had the luck and they have not.’

  ‘OK,’ I said peaceably. ‘Let’s make it middle management.’

  We were approaching the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Hera pointed to one of the benches nearby. On the back was an inscription in smudged yellow lettering:

  Christ is Yahweh for the poor.

  So mixed up has culture in Russia become over the past few years that it was impossible to work out whether this was meant to be abusive of Christ or, on the contrary, praise for him … For some reason there came into mind the torn-up dollar bill Enlil Maratovich had given me. I took it out of my pocket and read what was written around the pyramid with its single eye: ‘“Novus Ordo Seclorum” and “Annuit Coeptis”. What does that mean, when it’s translated?’

  ‘“New Order of the Ages”,’ said Hera, ‘aka “New World Order”. And something like “our efforts are looked on with favour by Providence”.’

  ‘What’s the point of it?’

  ‘Just some Masonic gibberish. You don’t need to go into it.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I agreed. ‘The main point was the gesture, wasn’t it? The fact that he tore the note in half? Maybe there is some special technology for destroying money, some annihilation in the process of which the vital energy it contains is distilled.’

  ‘How could that be done, for instance?’

  I reflected. ‘Well, let’s say the money is transferred to a special account, and then destroyed in a particular way. When the money itself has all gone the vital power remains and vampires drink it …’

  ‘Not very plausible,’ said Hera. ‘Where does this vital force come from? After all, the account can only exist in a computer system. You wouldn’t be able to say exactly where it is.’

  ‘Or perhaps the vampires gather round the laptop from which the transfer is to be made to somewhere in the Cayman Islands. And the laptop has some kind of special vampire gizmo in its USB port.’

  Hera laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m just thinking what a good time it is for the likes of us when the banks default.’

  ‘By the way, that’s a very good thought,’ I said. ‘Maybe everything is completely centralised. The sort of thing where they devalue something by ten per cent and then live happily off the proceeds for half a year.’

  Hera suddenly stopped and stood still.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I think …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I’ve just understood how it’s all done. Vampires don’t drink human red liquid but a special infusion called bablos. Most likely it’s made from old banknotes which are due for destruction. That’s why Enlil tore one up.’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered a conversation I happened to overhear. One vampire was asking Enlil when I happened to be there, if everything was ready for a bablos drinking session. Enlil replied that they were waiting for a consignment of old money from the Goznak mint, but it had not yet arrived. At that time I did not understand what they were talking about, but now it all falls into place.’

  ‘A delivery of old money from Goznak?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Think about it. People are constantly touching money, counting it out, putting it away in their wallets, scribbling on it, stashing it away. For them it is the most imp
ortant material object there is. The result is that banknotes become saturated with humans’ vital force. The longer a banknote remains in circulation, the more it gets impregnated. And when it is completely worn out and literally oozing human energy, it’s taken out of circulation, and the vampires prepare their drink from it.’

  I thought about it. It sounded bizarre, and not particularly appetising, but it might be more likely than my Cayman Islands theory.

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Who was the other vampire Enlil Maratovich was talking to?’

  ‘He’s called Mithra.’

  ‘Oh, so you know Mithra?’ I said, surprised. ‘Although, come to think of it, of course … It was he who gave me your letter.’

  ‘He was saying some quite amusing things about you,’ confided Hera. ‘He said that … oy …’

  She bit her tongue and put her hand over her mouth as if realising she had already said too much.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, forget it.’

  ‘No, you’d better say it since you’ve started.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ replied Hera. ‘Do you think we never talk about anything else but you? We have plenty of other topics, you know.’

  ‘What sort of other topics, if it’s not a secret?’

  Hera smiled.

  ‘He tries to chat me up.’

  ‘How? What sort of thing does he say?’

  ‘I’m not telling you. Why would I want to stifle your imagination by giving you examples? You might want to chat me up too.’

  ‘Do you want to be chatted up?’

  ‘Girls always like being paid compliments.’

  ‘But you’re not a girl. You’re a vampire. You wrote that in your letter.’