The Hall of the Singing Caryatids

by Victor Pelevin

  “In the blue billiard room,” Uncle Pete continued in a calmer tone of voice, “the billiard table stands on six legs that give blowjobs. Kind of like sphinxes with swan’s wings — its a pretty complicated makeup job. Ekaterina Simoniuk was one of these legs. Before the terrorist act she tried to shout out the Shahadah in Arabic, but thank God, a member of the security service responded immediately by shooting to kill. He has been recommended for a decoration. The potential victims of the terrorist attack did not even have time to realize what was going on, they thought the girl was just trying to attract attention. . . . We‘re checking her contacts now, following up the Chechen connection — we have information that the suicide bomber was from the Riyad-us-Saliheen Brigade, although she is not Chechen by nationality. As they say, Basayev is dead, but his cause lives on. . . . Girls, I understand that all this has nothing to do with you, but this incident will have serious consequences for all of us. An ideologist is going to start working with you. Don’t worry, not some Soviet-style old fart. A normal, modern young guy who’ll explain everything to you in human terms so you don’t develop any metastases in your brains. . . .”

  “We won’t get metastases there anyway,” said Vera. “Unless those injections trigger them, of course.”

  Uncle Pete didn’t dignify that remark with a reply.

  “And now about our work,” he said. “We’re doing a lousy job, girls. Oh, yes. In all this time there have only been three client-shows. And not a single one during your shift. If things carry on like this, we’ll have to say good-bye to the Malachite group. And we’ll schedule the hall for replanning. Make it the Mowgli room, or a little nook with a Tadjik girl for extreme snuff. Murmurings are already being heard among the shareholders. That’s just so you know.”

  “You’re saying we’ll get sacked?” asked Vera.

  Uncle Pete put on an offended expression.

  “Well what do you think, kiddo?” he replied. “Our top national priority is a competitive edge on the market. Lose your competitive edge, and you’re out. No one’s going to feed us for free.”

  “But how is that our fault?” asked Asya. “We do everything we’re supposed to. We’re prepared to be competitive. You’re the ones who have to bring in the punters. Maybe you could spread the word a bit wider, about this wonderful Malachite Hall . . .”

  “What does that mean, ‘spread the word?’ Information doesn’t get spread the way you think. Only by word of mouth. Someone looks in, likes it, and he tells someone else. Has anyone looked into your hall? They have. But they haven’t brought anyone else.”

  “Probably it’s the religious frescoes that put them off,” said Lena. “Maybe they feel ashamed in an interior like that. . . .”

  Uncle Pete gestured impatiently.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said. “The frescos develop the theme of the Malachite Hall in the Hermitage. . . . Although God only knows, I suppose you could be right — what do you think they ought to paint on the walls?”

  “Ask the artist Kulik to do it,” Lena said, surprising even herself. “Let him think of something.”

  Most of what she knew about Kulik was what she’d heard from the culturally sophisticated Kima, and she was afraid Uncle Pete might ask some trick question that would expose her ignorance. But he just jotted something down in his notebook.

  It’s not only the pictures that are to blame,” Asya put in. “Clients walk along the corridor without even glancing in, I’ve seen it. Maybe they simply don’t know that we’re alive? We stand there completely still. And we stay silent.”

  “Now, that’s more like it,” said Uncle Pete. “You stay

  silent. But what kind of Caryatids are you? Singing Caryatids. So why the silence? For your pay you can sing too.”

  The girls exchanged glances.

  “Are we going to sing all the time, then?” asked Lena.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Uncle Pete chuckled. “Songs, my little sweetheart. Music by composers.”

  •

  After careful thought they decided not to include songs in the continuous program. It required too much concentration from the performers, and also, in Uncle Pete’s opinion, the words of the songs could disrupt the clients’ leisure by engaging their attention and undermining their comfort. It was decided that initially the performance would be limited to a “polyphonic purr,” as Kima put it — and they would only move on to the song repertoire at the client’s request.

  They included two types of purr in the program. The first was the theme from Swan Lake — they got that down quite quickly. The second purr was based on the song “Mondo Bongo” from the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith. All they left of the lyrics, which referred inappropriately to the CIA, was a “la-la-la-la-la-la” that looped back on itself like a feather-light paper streamer, before collapsing altogether into a kind of shamelessly sweet delight. The resulting jingle could be purred in four voices, without stopping, for the whole forty-eight-hour shift — it was a beautiful and economical solution, in the sense of economy of effort.

  During the first musical shift, when they were fine-

  tuning “Mondo Bongo” (they sang two at a time, each pair for an hour), there were still no visitors. But this time there was a legitimate reason: the artist Kulik was at work in the Malachite Hall — Uncle Pete had commissioned a new mural from him after all.

  The most interesting thing was that they never saw Kulik himself — his assistants did the work, and it was done incredibly quickly: they finished the entire job in one day. First the young guys in yellow boilersuits covered the sky and the angels with an even layer of cream undercoating. Then they switched on a slide projector and traced the outline of the image projected onto the wall: the result was a rather crude human shadow with disproportionately long legs, framed by the words “woof!” “WOOF WOOF!!” and “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF!!!” written in all sorts of various fonts — from wacky comic to gloomy gothic. These various-caliber “woofs” covered the entire wall, overlapping each other, and the guys in the boilersuits filled them in with different colors, checking against charts laid out on the floor. It all turned out very beautiful and interesting, like some sort of bright Central Asian ornamental design — only in Lena’s view, it was all spoiled by that dark shadow wearing some kind of hat or cap. It wasn’t clear what all this was supposed to mean until the artists painted a verse epigraph in an upper corner of the wall and the name of the composition in a bottom corner. The epigraph was this:

  A breathless night. Dogs in the distance

  Cleave the stillness with motley barking.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .We enter — my shadow and I.

  Sebastopol, April 1919

  The composition was called “Nabokov in the Crimea.”

  Uncle Pete examined the mural with mild skepticism and inquired what Kulik’s own personal contribution was going to be, if the work was already finished. The senior assistant, a young man who looked like Hermes, with a beard woven into a braid, explained condescendingly that this was only the preparatory stage, the most important part was still to come: determining between which two walls a chain could be stretched, so that the master could be attached to it.

  Uncle Pete frowned when he heard that.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “He’s going to move along the chain on a special collar ring, with a dog skin thrown across his shoulders, and masturbate over a little plastic figure of a schoolgirl clutched in his hand. And once he’s sexually aroused, he’ll spontaneously fling himself on your clients. Like Caligula in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.”

  “What kind of skin?” asked Uncle Pete, staggered.

  “A dog skin,” the assistant repeated. “But if you want to camp it up, by all means, we can order a bearskin. Or even a nostalgic old black Labrador — if you can get it approved. We’ve already got a special grant for the black Lab — we’ll be doing that later in Frankfurt — but there’s no publicity for your installation, am I r
ight? So we can do it. It’ll be absolutely unforgettable. Just imagine it, eh? Your guests will live with that energy for the rest of their lives. . . .”

  Uncle Pete led the assistant out into the corridor.

  Since they didn’t put up the chain, Lena concluded that the artistic conception had been successfully simplified.

  While the artists were working and coming to an understanding with Uncle Pete, Lena underwent several new and very unusual experiences.

  Just like before, she felt that she was holding her hands folded in front of her chest. But now this feeling was joined by another phantom sensation — she felt that she had a second pair of legs supporting her long, long, very long body. Lena knew that this was a hallucination, since the second pair of legs would have had to be far behind the wall, and that wasn’t possible according to the laws of physics. But the feeling was far more real than any of those laws.

  During one of the breaks when the artists went out for a smoke, and Lena didn’t have to sing, the praying mantis briefly reappeared And just like the previous time, the exchange of information between them was wordless and virtually instantaneous.

  Lena explained that what she was doing with her mouth was music, useful work for which other people fed her, because of its beauty. The mantis informed her that mantises had a completely different kind of music — one note that had been sounding for millions of years without changing. Lena expressed curiosity as to how one note could be music, if it never changed. It doesn’t need to change, the mantis transmitted back. What makes it beautiful is that it will always be like that, no matter what happens. Lena wanted to hear that eternal note, but the mantis told her that she heard it anyway, she simply didn’t take any notice of it. Then Lena inquired if they could speak to each other in words, and the mantis answered something between “we’ll see” and “some other time.”

  This entire dialogue took no longer than a second.

  And then, as if he could sense what Lena really wanted, the mantis again revealed his incredible, clear, and eternally unchanging mind to her. After that there was no point in talking, and Lena gazed spellbound at the shimmering mother-of-pearl eternity until the end of her shift.

  After work Lena always felt shattered. The journey back into Moscow was especially hard for her — that was when the effects of the Mantis-B finally wore off. Every time Lena began to feel depressed — the human world to which she had to return seemed like such an uncomfortable place. Counterculture helped — she had gotten used to reading it on the return journey, curled up into a bundle of suffering by the window of the minibus. (Asya, who sat beside her, preferred the Orthodox Church glossy magazine Lust of the Eyes or the business weekly The Pride of Life, which the driver always bought.)

  As she read, Lena worked her way back into a reality that lashed at her errant consciousness with its trenchant, savage lines:

  The victory at Eurovision will not be the last! The country is learning to play by the world’s rules and making ever more serious investments in cultural expansion. According to information agencies, work is going on in Russia to create a fifth-generation queer by subjecting Boris Moiseev to fundamental modernization using nanotechnologies. Experts claim that this new Russian development will substantially surpass the closest western equivalent — Elton John. In this connection, observers remark that some fifth-generation technologies (for instance a total hair transplant) are still beyond the reach of Russian specialists, but believe that they can compensate for this backwardness by using augmented botox injections.

  The serious intellectual effort required to understand some of the information helped Lena to recover her equilibrium.

  In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein claimed to have discovered a general form for the description of all sentences in any language. In his opinion, this universal formula includes within itself every possible semiotic structure — just as the infinite space of the universe includes every possible cosmic object.

  “That there is a general form,” Wittgenstein writes, “is proved by the fact that there cannot be a proposition whose form could not have been foreseen (i.e. constructed). The general form of proposition is: ‘such and such is the case’ (‘Es verhält sich so und so’).”

  However the philologist Alexander Sirind, an associate professor at the Irkutsk Teacher Training College, successfully refuted the famous formula recently when he adduced the example of a proposition that transcends the Austrian philosopher’s all-embracing paradigm. It sounds like this: “Fuck off, Wittgenstein.”

  “The Austrian made the mistake of forgetting old man Schopenhauer,” says the academic, “but after all, the world is not just idea, it is also will!”

  Practically all the information that Lena came across was imbued with self-assured pride in the country’s success. Everything was permeated with it now — even the weather forecast and the blurbs on books — and that made the world outside her window a little more comfortable.

  In his autobiographical dilogy Black Earth and Downfall into Brooklyn, the Moscow correspondent of Time magazine, Andrew Shmaier, investigates the cultural and psychological shift taking place in the Russian consciousness, as a result of which a poorly paid western journalist (in former times the object of girls’ dreams and an almighty figure with the attributes of a deity) loses his attractiveness as a potential sexual partner and, in the eyes of the compradorist Moscow elite, is transformed into a banal cocktail reception parasite, who is dreary and depressing to talk to and absolutely good for nothing.

  However, she was finally brought down to Earth by an advertisement aimed, as always, at recognition of the image it had already created:

  “Free Space.” I’ll get a wash and go to the mountains! ™

  Even this relatively smooth reentry mechanism did not provide complete protection. A few journeys like this were enough to make Lena to realize that human reality does not consist of time and space, but of various whisperings, mutterings, outcries, and other voices. She didn’t know who they belonged to. Some resembled her parents’ voices, some were like her friends’, but the words spoken by them were wreathed in oppressive meanings that were vague but absolutely inescapable — for instance, a voice sounding like Kima’s repeated a strange phrase over and over again: “the glossy analysis of romantic stubble with which the countercultural heroes tickle the Fabergé Egg system.” Lena wanted to ask Kima what it was the heroes tickled with — the romantic stubble or the glossy analysis — but she realized the question would sound strange.

  When the praying mantis went away, these voices started chattering hysterically in her mind, clamoring for her attention and tossing it to each other by turns, until soon they became so frequent and dense that they overlapped each other, forming something like a basin that someone had put over her head.

  After that, she didn’t see the world as it really is (that was where the praying mantis lived), but only the interior of this basin — the human dimension. She knew the same thing was happening to her friends. It was obvious from their faces.

  At home, Lena locked herself in her room and waited for four human days to pass by until she could ride out of Moscow again to spend a little time with the praying mantis. For that she was willing to sing the purr from “Mondo Bongo” and the mix from Tchaikovsky and the anthem of the USSR in English (that was Uncle Pete’s latest commission) — basically she would do anything at all.

  The world of mantises was a good place to be. There was no gloom in it — that is, if you didn’t count the need to return to the Profsoyuznaya metro station in a minibus with a placard that said “semiotic signs.” But in the world of people everything was . . . not exactly totally unbearable. It was just that . . . Lena had trouble finding the right words, until one day Asya offered her thoughts on the subject.

  “It’s kind of like guided dreaming with Nadezhda Pravdina,” said Lena. “We learn to dream about shit, because that means money’s on the way.”

  “If we recall that life is a
dream,” Kima replied from her seat by the window of the minibus, “then we get the formula of modern civilization and culture.”

  Such indeed was the case.

  •

  Uncle Pete arranged the promised meeting with the ideologist as a picnic with campfires and shish kebabs on the bank of a canal. A lot of people came to the lecture — three busloads of guys and girls. Most of the faces were unfamiliar. Lena recognized the young Atlantes she had seen in the cafeteria, the Caryatid Varya from the third shift, one Mermaid, and the hirsute man with the silicone breasts, dressed in a shapeless smock instead of a purple bedspread. He was conspicuously drunk and kept sipping from a flat flask that he took out of his pocket.

  Lena had a short conversation with Varya, whom she had only met once before at the introductory session in the Slavyanskaya Hotel. Varya had a big bruise under her eye, thickly smeared with pancake makeup. Apparently there had been a combined corporate function and birthday party in the Malachite Hall two days earlier. The entire company was celebrating — some kind of “special service venture yids” as Varya described them vaguely and incorrectly. They had brought several crates of French champagne with them, and ten of their own broads.

  “Would you believe it?” she complained. “These guys fired the champagne corks at us! And not just them, they set their little whores on us too, and they laughed and kept aiming for our faces, from just six feet away. You try singing ‘Happy Birthday’ with that going on. They broke Tanya’s nose and almost put my eye out. If I could get my hands on those bitches, I’d kill them on the spot. . . .”

  “Did you finish the song?” Lena asked sympathetically.

  “Yes,” Varya replied, casting a meaningful glance at the man with the silicone breasts who was listening to their conversation. “What else could we do? Why’s that man with tits eavesdropping on us?”

  Lena wanted to talk a bit more, but Varya said she had to finish reading the book she’d brought with her — the other girls in her shift were all waiting to read it. The book was in English and it was called Singing in Awkward Positions: The All-Inclusive Manual by Eros Blandini. Eros Blandini, Vera explained, was a castrated dwarf who worked as the sound effects for the magical fairground attraction “The Singing Head.” He had spent his long life singing out of lockers, crates, and dark corners while lying, sitting, and even standing on his head.