Babylon (16 page)

   For those changed times this was an absolutely fantastic haul.

   But a couple of months later Tatarsky accidentally discovered an incredibly insulting little detail: it turned out Finlandia’s future distributor hadn’t paid up because he’d decided to use his text in his advertising, but because he was afraid Tatarsky might sell it to Absolut or Smirnoff dealers. Tatarsky even started to write a sonnet dedicated to this event, but after a couple of minutes discarded it as non-functional. In general, it was hard to believe that not so very long ago he had been wont to spend so much time searching for meaningless rhymes that had long since been abandoned by the poetry of the market democracies. It seemed simply inconceivable that only a few short years ago life had been so gentle and undemanding that he could waste entire kilowatts of mental energy in dead-end circuits of his brain that never paid back the investment.

   Tatarsky suspected that black PR was a more widespread and significant phenomenon than just a means of survival for certain protein-based life-forms in the era of the mass media; but he couldn’t connect up his heterogeneous suspicions concerning the true nature of the phenomenon to form a clear and unified understanding. There was something missing.

   ‘Public relations are people’s relations with each other,’ he jotted down in confused fashion in his notebook.

   
People want to earn money in order to gain freedom, or at least a breathing space from their interminable suffering. And we copywriters manipulate reality in front of people’s eyes so that freedom comes to be symbolised by an iron, or a sanitary towel with wings, or lemonade. That’s what they pay us for. We pawn this stuff off on them from the screen, and then they pawn it off on each other, and on us who write the stuff, and it’s like radioactive contamination, when it makes no difference any longer who exploded the bomb. Everyone tries to show everyone else that they’ve already achieved freedom, and as a result, while we pretend to socialise and be friendly, all we really do is keep pawning each other off with all sorts of jackets, mobile phones and cars. It’s a closed circle. And this closed circle is called black PR.

   Tatarsky became so absorbed in his thoughts on the nature of this phenomenon that he wasn’t in the least surprised when one day Khanin stopped him in the corridor, grabbed hold of one of his buttons and said: ‘I see you know all there is to know about black PR.’

   ‘Almost,’ Tatarsky answered automatically, because he’d just been thinking about the topic. "There’s just some central element that’s still missing.’

   ‘I’ll tell you what it is. What’s missing is the understanding that black public relations only exist in theory. What happens in real life is grey PR.’

   ‘That’s interesting,’ said Tatarsky enthusiastically, ‘very interesting! Quite astounding! But what does it mean in practical terms?’

   ‘In practical terms it means you have to shell out.’

   Tatarsky started. The fog of thoughts clouding his mind was dispersed in an instant to be replaced by a terrifying clarity.

   ‘How d’you mean?’ he asked feebly.

   Khanin took him by the arm and led him along the corridor.

   ‘Did you take delivery of two grand from Finlandia?’ he asked.

   ‘Yes,’ Tatarsky replied uncertainly.

   Khanin bent the middle and fourth fingers of his hand over slightly - far enough to suggest that he was about to shift to the hand-gestures characteristic of New Russian thugs, but not too far, so the situation still seemed to be peaceful.

   ‘Now remember this,’ he said quietly. ‘As long as you work here, you work to me. There’s no other way to figure it and make sense. So the figures say one grand of greenbacks is mine. Or were you thinking of setting up on your own?’

   ‘I, I… I’d be delighted…’ Tatarsky stammered in a state of shock. ‘That is, of course I don’t want to… That is, I do. I wanted to split it; I just didn’t know how to bring up the subject.’

   ‘No need to be shy about it. Someone might get the wrong idea. You know what? Why don’t you come round to my place this evening. We can have a drink and a talk. And you can drop in the mazuma while you’re at it.’

   Khanin lived in a large, newly refurbished flat, in which Tatarsky was astonished by the patterned oak doors with gold locks - what astonished him about them was the fact that the wood had already cracked and the gaps in the panels had been filled in a slapdash fashion with mastic. Khanin was already drunk when he greeted his guest. He was in an excellent mood - when Tatarsky held out the envelope to him from the doorway, Khanin knitted his brows and waved it aside, as though offended at such a brusque businesslike entrance, but at the extreme extent of the gesture he lifted the envelope out of Tatarsky’s fingers and immediately tucked it away somewhere.

   ‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘Liza’s cooked something.’

   Liza proved to be a tall woman with a face red from some kind of cosmetic scrubbing. She fed Tatarsky stuffed cabbage leaves, which he had hated ever since he was a small child. In order to overcome his revulsion he drank a lot of vodka, and by the time the dessert arrived he had almost reached Khanin’s state of intoxication, which meant socialising went a lot smoother.

   ‘What’s that you have up there?’ Tatarsky asked, nodding in the direction of the wall.

   There was a reproduction of a Stalinist poster hanging at the spot he indicated: ponderous red banners with yellow tassels and the blue-looking Moscow university building visible in the gaps between them. The poster was obviously twenty years or thereabouts older than Tatarsky, but the print was absolutely fresh.

   ‘That? A young guy who used to work for us before you did that on the computer,’ answered Khanin. ‘You see, there used to be a hammer and sickle there, and a star, but he took them out and put in Coca-Cola and Coke instead.’

   ‘Yes, I see,’ Tatarsky said, amazed. ‘But you can’t see it at first - they’re exactly the same yellow colour.’

   ‘If you look closely you’ll see it. I used to have the poster over my desk, but the other guys started getting awkward about it. Malyuta took offence for the flag and Seryozha took offence for Coca-Cola. In the end I had to bring it home.’

   ‘Malyuta took offence?’ Tatarsky asked in surprise ‘Have you seen what he put up over his own desk yesterday?’

   ‘Not yet.’

   ‘"Every pogrom has its programme, every brand has its bend".’

   ‘So what?’

   Tatarsky suddenly realised that Khanin really didn’t see anything strange in such sentiments. And what was more, he suddenly stopped seeing anything strange in them himself.

   ‘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!’

   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.