Babylon (19 page)

   ‘Oh no, Gireiev, this mantra of yours isn’t doing the business,’ Tatarsky whispered, and went into the kitchen.

   After drinking more vodka (he had to force it down), he went back into the room and turned on the television. The room was filled with solemn music; the blue spot on the screen expanded and transformed itself into an image. They were broadcasting some concert or other.

   ‘Lord, hear Thou my plea,’ sang a man with a powdered face, wearing a bow tie and a shot silk waistcoat under black tails. As he sang he rolled his goggling eyes and sawed at the air with his open hand in a strange manner, as though he was being borne away on a current of celestial ether.

   Tatarsky clicked on the remote and the man in the bow tie disappeared. ‘Maybe I should pray?’ he thought. ‘It might do some good…’ He remembered the man from the bas-relief with his arms upraised to the starry sky.

   He went out into the centre of the room and knelt down with some difficulty, then crossed his arms on his chest and raised his eyes to the ceiling.

   ‘Lord, hear Thou my plea,’ he said quietly. ‘I have sinned greatly against Thee. I live a bad life, a wrong one. But in my soul there are no abominable desires, cross my heart. I’ll never eat any of that junk again. I… I only want to be happy, and I just can’t manage it. Perhaps it’s what I deserve. I can’t do anything else except write bad slogans. But for Thee, oh Lord, I’ll write a good one - honest I will. You know, they do position Thee quite wrongly. They haven’t got a clue. Take that latest clip, where they’re collecting money for that church. There’s this old woman standing there with a box, and first someone driving an old jalopy puts in a rouble and then someone driving a Mercedes drops in a hundred bucks. The idea’s clear enough, but in terms of positioning it’s way off beam. The guy in the Mercedes wouldn’t wait in the queue of jalopies. A blind horse could see it. And the target group we need is all those guys in their Mercedes, because in terms of yield one Mercedes is worth a thousand jalopies. That’s not the way to do it. Here…’

   Managing somehow to scramble upright, Tatarsky struggled over to the desk, picked up a pen and began writing in a jerky, spiderish scrawl:

   
Poster (theme for a clip). A room in a very expensive hotel. Carrara marble table. A laptop computer flashes out a message: ‘Transaction confirmed’. Near the computer we see a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill and a hotel-room Bible in three languages. Slogan:

   
THE SHINING WORD FOR YOUR SHINING WORLD!

   
Variant: another setting - a private jet airplane, a stock exchange, a Manhattan penthouse, a Cote d’Azur estate, etc. Instead of the Bible we see the Saviour Himself approaching the camera in the rays of His glory. Slogan:

   
A FIRST-CLASS LORD FOR YOUR HAPPY LOT.

   Tatarsky dropped the pen and raised his red, tear-stained eyes to the ceiling. ‘Dost Thou like it. Lord?’ he asked quietly.

   God’s love for man is manifest in a great principle that defies adequate expression in words: ‘and yet it can be done’. The phrase ‘and yet it can be done’ means an immense number of things, including, for instance, that the principle itself, despite being absolutely impossible to express, can yet be expressed and manifested. Even more than that, it can be expressed an infinite number of times, and each time in a completely new way - which is why poetry exists. Such is the love of God. And what is man’s response to it?

   Tatarsky woke in a cold sweat, unable to understand what the pitiless onslaught of the daylight was punishing him for. He could vaguely recall shouting out in his sleep and apparently trying to justify himself to someone - in other words he’d had an alcoholic nightmare. Now his hangover was so fundamental and profound that there was no point in seeking salvation by simply pouring a shot of vodka down his throat. He couldn’t even think about it, because the very thought of alcohol triggered spasms of retching; but to his great good fortune, that irrational and mystical manifestation of the divine love that spreads its trembling wings over Russia had already embraced his suffering soul.

   He could yet take a hair of the dog that bit him. There was a special method for it, known as a ‘locomotive’. It had been perfected over generations of alcoholics and handed down to Tatarsky by a certain individual from the esoteric circles of St Petersburg the morning after a monstrous drinking session. ‘In essence the method is Gurdjieffian,’ the man had explained. ‘It belongs to what he called "the path of the cunning man". You have to regard yourself as a machine. This machine has receptors, nerve endings and a central control centre that is declaring quite unambiguously that any attempt to consume alcohol will instantly result in vomiting. What does the cunning man do? He deceives the machine’s receptors. From a practical point of view it goes like this: you fill your mouth with lemonade. Then you pour a glass of vodka and raise it to your mouth. Then you swallow the lemonade, and while the receptors are reporting to the supreme control centre that you’re drinking lemonade, you quickly swallow the vodka. Your body simply doesn’t have time to react, because its mind’s fairly sluggish. But there is one subtle point involved. If you swallow Coca-Cola before the vodka instead of lemonade, there’s a fifty per cent chance you’ll puke anyway; and if you swallow Pepsi-Cola, you’re absolutely certain to puke.’

   ‘What a concept that would make,’ Tatarsky pondered dourly as he entered the kitchen. There was still a little vodka in one of the bottles. He poured it into a glass and then turned towards the fridge. He was frightened by the thought that there might not be anything in it except Pepsi-Cola, which he usually bought out of faithfulness to the ideals of his own generation, but fortunately, standing there on the bottom shelf was a can of Seven-Up some visitor or other had brought together with the vodka.

   ‘Seven-Up,’ Tatarsky whispered, licking his desiccated lips. "The Uncola…’

   The operation was a success. He went back into the room and over to the desk, where he discovered several sheets of paper covered in crooked lettering. Apparently the previous evening’s flood-tide of religious feeling had cast up some debris on the paper shoreline.

   The first text was printed in very neat and tidy capital letters:

   ‘ETERNAL LIFE’ COCKTAIL MAN, DESIRE NOUGHT FOR THYSELF. WHEN PEOPLE WHO SUFFER COME TO YOU IN MULTITUDES GIVE OF THYSELF WITHOUT REMAINDER

   YOU SAY YOU’RE NOT READY? TOMORROW WE BELIEVE YOU WILL BE! BUT IN THE MEANTIME -
BOMBAY
SAPPHIRE
GIN WITH TONIC, JUICE OR YOUR FAVOURITE MIXER

   The second text must have been delivered from the great advertising agency in the sky when Tatarsky had already reached an extreme stage of drunkenness - it took him several minutes just to decipher his own scrawl. The slogan had evidently been written when his prayerful ecstasy had passed its peak and his consciousness had finally reverted to a mode of pragmatic rationalism:

   The phone rang. ‘Khanin.’ Tatarsky thought in fright as he picked up the receiver. But it was Gireiev.

   ‘Babe? How’re you doing?’

   ‘So-so, ‘Tatarsky replied.

   ‘Sorry about yesterday. You phoned so late, and my wife went on the warpath. Did you get by OK?’

   ‘More or less.’

   ‘Know what I wanted to tell you? You might find it interesting from a professional point of view. This lama’s arrived in town - Urgan Djambon Tulku the Seventh, from the Gelugpa sect - and he gave an entire lecture about advertising. I’ve got it on cassette; you can have a listen to it. There was loads of all sorts of stuff, but the central idea was very interesting. From the Buddhist point of view the meaning of advertising is extremely simple. It attempts to convince us that consuming the product advertised will result in a high and auspicious reincarnation - and not even after death, but immediately following the act of consumption. Like, chew Orbit sugar-free and straightaway you’re an
asura.
Chew Dirol, and you’re a god with snow-white teeth.’

   ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ said Tatarsky, wincing at his gradually dissipating spasms of nausea.

   ‘Well, to keep it simple, what he was trying to say was that the main purpose of advertising is to show people other people who’ve managed to find happiness in the possession of material objects. But in reality people suffering from that delusion don’t exist anywhere except in the ads.’

   ‘Why?’ asked Tatarsky, struggling to keep up with the ebbs and flows of his friend’s thought.

   ‘Because it’s never the things that are advertised, it’s human happiness. The people they show are always equally happy, only the happiness comes from buying different things in different cases. So people don’t go to a shop to buy things, they go there looking for this happiness; but the shops don’t sell it. Then the lama criticised the theory of someone called Che Guevara. He said Che Guevara wasn’t a proper Buddhist and therefore wasn’t a proper authority for a Buddhist; and he hadn’t actually given the world anything except a burst of machine-gun fire and his famous trademark. But then, the world hadn’t give him anything else either…’

   ‘Listen,’ said Tatarsky, ‘finish up, will you? I can’t take anything in anyway - my head hurts. Why don’t you just tell me what that mantra was you gave me?’

   ‘It’s not a mantra,’ replied Gireev. ‘It’s a sentence in Hebrew from a textbook. My wife’s studying it.’

   ‘Your wife?’ Tatarsky echoed in surprise, wiping the beads of cold sweat from his forehead. ‘But of course. If you have a son, then you have a wife. What’s she studying Hebrew for?’

   ‘She wants to get out of here. Not long ago she had this terrible vision. No glitches, mind, just while she was meditating. Anyway, there’s this rock and this naked girl lying on it and the girl is Russia. So stooping over her there’s this… You can’t make out the face, but he seems to be wearing an army coat with epaulettes, or some kind of cloak. And he’s giving her…’

   ‘Don’t pile it on,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’ll be sick. I’ll call you back later, OK?’

   ‘OK,’ agreed Gireiev.

   ‘Hang on. Why’d you give me that sentence and not a mantra?’

   ‘What’s the difference? In that state it doesn’t matter what you recite. The main thing is to keep your mind occupied and drink as much vodka as possible. Who’s going to give you a mantra without conferring it properly anyway?’

   ‘So what does the phrase mean?’

   ‘Let me have a look. Where is it now… Aha, here it is. ‘Od melafefon bva kha sha.’ It means "Please give me another cucumber". What a gas, eh? A natural born mantra. Of course, it starts with "od", not "om", I changed that. And if you put "hum" at the end as well…’

   ‘OK, OK" said Tatarsky. ‘Cheers. I’m going out for some beer.’

   It was a clear, fresh morning; its cool purity seemed to conceal some incomprehensible reproach. Tatarsky emerged from the entrance-way of his house and stopped, absorbed in thought. It would take him ten minutes to walk as far as the round-the-clock shop he normally went to for hangover remedies (the local winos called it ‘the round-the-bend place’) and the same amount of time to get back. Close by, just a couple of minutes away, were the kiosks in one of which he had formerly worked. Since then he hadn’t gone anywhere near them, but he had no time right now to worry about any vague, ill-defined fears. Struggling against his own reluctance to carry on living, Tatarsky set off towards the kiosks.

   Several of them were already open, and there was a newspaper stand beside them. Tatarsky bought three cans of Tuborg and an analytical tabloid - it was one he used to look through for the sake of the advertising spreads, which aroused his professional interest even in a severely hung-over state. He drank the first can while he leafed through the tabloid. His attention was caught by an advertisement for Aeroflot showing a married couple climbing up a gangway set against a palm tree laden with paradisaical fruit. ‘What idiots,’ Tatarsky thought. ‘Who advertises themselves like that? Someone needs to fly to Novosibirsk, and they promise him he’ll end up in heaven. But maybe he’s not due in heaven just yet; maybe he’s got business in Novosibirsk… Might as well invent an "Icarus" airbus…’ The next page was taken up by a colourful advertisement for an American restaurant on Uprising Square - a photograph of the entrance with a jolly neon sign blazing above it:

   Tatarsky folded up the newspaper, laid it flat on a dirty crate standing between the kiosks, sat down on it and opened up the second can.

   He felt better almost immediately, in order not to look at the world around him, Tatarsky fixed his gaze on the can. There was a large picture on it under the yellow word ‘Tuborg’: a fat man in braces wiping the sweat from his forehead with a white handkerchief. Above the man’s head was a searing expanse of blue, and he was standing on a narrow track that led away beyond the horizon; in short, the picture was so heavily loaded with symbolism that Tatarsky couldn’t understand how the thin aluminium of the can could support it. He automatically began composing a slogan.

   ‘Something like this,’ he thought: ‘Life is a solitary journey beneath a scorching sun. The road we walk along leads to nowhere; and no one knows where death lies in wait. Remembering this, everything in the world seems empty and meaningless. And then - enlightenment. Tuborg. Prepare yourself. Variant: Think final.’

   Part of the slogan could be written in Latin - Tatarsky still had the taste for that going back to his first job. For instance, ‘Halt, wayfarer’ - something-something
viator.
Tatarsky couldn’t remember precisely; he’d have to look it up in his
Inspired Latin Sayings.
He rummaged in his pockets to find a pen to note down his creation. There wasn’t one. Tatarsky decided to ask a passer-by for one and he looked up. Standing there right in front of him was Hussein.

   Hussein was smiling with the corners of his mouth, his hands were thrust into the pockets of his broad velvet trousers, and his gleaming oily eyes were quite expressionless - he was just surfacing from a recent fix. He’d hardly changed at all, except for maybe putting on a little weight. There was a short astrakhan hat on his head.