Babylon (21 page)

   ‘But why do they treat us like that?’ Khanin interrupted. ‘What d’you think?’

   ‘The way I reckon it,’ said Wee Vova, ‘it’s all because we’re living on their handouts. We watch their films, ride their wheels, even eat their fodder. And we don’t produce nothing, if you think about it, ‘cept for mazuma… Which is still only their dollars, whichever way you look at it, which makes it a mystery how come we can be producing ‘em. But then somehow we must be producing ‘em - no one’d give us ‘em for free. I ain’t no economist, but I got a gut feeling something’s rotten here, somehow something somewhere don’t add up.’

   Wee Vova fell silent and started thinking hard. Khanin was about to make some remark, but Wee Vova suddenly erupted: ‘But they think we’re some kind of cultural scumbags. Like some kind of nig-nogs out in Africa, get it? Like we was animals with money. Pigs, maybe, or bulls. But what we are, is Russia! Makes you frightened to think of it! A great country!’

   ‘That’s right,’ said Khanin.

   ‘It’s just that we’ve lost our roots for the time being ‘cause of all this crap that’s going down. You know yourself what life’s like now. No time for a fart. But that don’t mean we’ve forgot where we come from, like some half-baked golly-wogs…’

   ‘Let’s try to keep feelings out of it,’ said Khanin. ‘Just explain to the boy here what you want him to do. Keep it simple, without the trimmings.’

   ‘OK, listen up and I’ll lay it out for you just like counting on my fingers,’ said Wee Vova. ‘Our national business is expanding into the international market. Out there there’s all kinds of mazuma doing the rounds - Chechen, American, Columbian - you get the picture. And if you look at them like mazuma, then they’re all the same; but in actual fact behind every kind of mazuma there’s a national idea. We used to have Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. Then came this communism stuff. Now that’s all over, and there’s no idea left at all ‘cept for mazuma. But there’s no way you can have nothing but mazuma behind mazuma, right? ‘Cause then there’s just no way to understand why some mazuma’s up front and some’s in behind, right?’

   ‘Spot on,’ said Khanin. ‘Listen and learn, Babe.’

   ‘And when our Russian dollars are doing the rounds somewhere down in the Caribbean,’ Wee Vova continued, ‘you can’t even really figure why they’re Russian dollars and not anyone else’s. We don’t have no national i-den-ti-ty…’

   Wee Vova articulated the final word syllable by syllable.

   ‘You dig it? The Chechens have one, but we don’t. That’s why they look at us like we’re shit. There’s got to be some nice, simple Russian idea, so’s we can lay it out clear and simple for any bastard from any of their Harvards: one-two, tickety-boo, and screw all that staring. And we’ve got to know for ourselves where we come from.’

   ‘You tell him what the job is" said Khanin, and he winked at Tatarsky in the driving mirror. ‘He’s my senior creative. A minute of his time costs more than the two of us earn in a week.’

   ‘The job’s simple.’ said Wee Vova. ‘Write me a Russian idea about five pages long. And a short version one page long. And lay it out like real life, without any fancy gibberish, so’s I can splat any of those imported arseholes with it - bankers, whores, whoever. So’s they won’t think all we’ve done in Russia is heist the money and put up a steel door. So’s they can feel the same kind of spirit like in ‘45 at Stalingrad, you get me?’

   ‘But where would I get?…’ Tatarsky began, but Khanin interrupted him:

   ‘That’s your business, sweetheart. You’ve got one day, it’s a rush job. After that I’ll be needing you for other work. And just bear in mind we’ve given this commission to another guy as well as you. So try your best.’

   ‘Who, if it’s not a secret?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘Sasha Blo. Ever heard of him?’

   Tatarsky said nothing. Khanin made a sign to Wee Vova and the car stopped. Handing Tatarsky a hundred-rouble bill, Khanin said: ‘That’s for your taxi. Go home and work. And no more drinking today.’

   Out on the pavement Tatarsky waited for the car to leave before taking out the business card from the prisoner of the Caucasus. It looked strange - in the centre there was a picture of a sequoia, covered with leaf-like dollar bills, and all the rest of the space was taken up by stars, stripes and eagles. All of this Roman magnificence was crowned by the following text in curly gold lettering:

   • OPEN JOINT STOCK COMPANY SOFT DRINKS AND JUICES Shares Placement Manager:

   
Mikhail Nepoiman

   ‘Aha,’ muttered Tatarsky. ‘I see we’re old acquaintances.’

   He tucked the card in his pocket, turned towards the stream of cars and raised his hand. A taxi stopped almost immediately.

   The taxi-driver was a fat-faced bumpkin with an expression of intense resentment on his face. The thought flashed through Tatarsky’s mind that he was like a condom filled so full of water you barely needed to touch it with something sharp for it to soak anyone nearby in a one-off disposable waterfall.

   ‘Tell me,’ Tatarsky asked on a sudden impulse, ‘you wouldn’t happen to know what the Russian idea is, would you?’

   ‘Ha,’ said the driver, as if he been expecting this very question. ‘I’ll tell you about that. I’m half Mordvinian. So when I was serving in the army, the first year, on training, there was this sergeant there called Harley. Used to say, "I hate Mords and nig-nogs," and he’d send me off to scrub the shit-house with a toothbrush. Two months the bastard took the piss out of me. Then all of a sudden these three Mordvin brothers arrived for their training, and all of them weightlifters, can you imagine that? "So who is it round here doesn’t like Mordvinians?" they said.’

   The driver laughed happily and the car swerved across the road, almost skipping out into the opposite lane.

   ‘What’s that got to do with the Russian idea?’ Tatarsky asked, hunched down in his seat in fear.

   ‘I’ll tell you what. That Harley got such a belting he spent two weeks on his back with a medical battalion. That’s what. They worked him over another five times until he was fit for nothing but demobbing. But they didn’t just work him over…’

   ‘Can you stop there, please,’ Tatarsky said, not wanting to hear any more.

   ‘I can’t stop here,’ said the driver, ‘I’ve got to find a place to turn. I tell you, if only they’d just beaten him… But, oh no!’

   Tatarsky gave in, and as the car took him home the driver shared the fate of the chauvinist sergeant in a degree of detail that destroyed even the slightest possibility of sympathy - after all, sympathy is always based on a brief instant of identification, and in this case that was impossible - neither heart nor mind would dare risk it. In fact, it was just a typical army story.

   When Tatarsky got out of the car, the driver said to him: ‘As for that idea of yours, I’ll tell you straight: fuck only knows. All I want is the chance to earn enough to keep me in petrol and booze. Yeltsin-Schmeltsin - what do I care, so long as they don’t go smashing my face against a table?’

   Perhaps it was these words that made Tatarsky remember the handcuffed manager who’d dialled the telephone number in the empty air. Inside the entrance-way of his house, he stopped. He’d only just realised what the case really required. He took the card out of his pocket and wrote on its reverse:

   THERE’S ALWAYS SOMEBODY WHO CARES! PUT YOUR TRUST IN
TAMPOKO
SHARES!

   ‘So it’s a conifer, is it?’ he thought.

   It happens so often: you step outside on a summer’s morning and come face to face with this immense, beautiful world hastening on its way to some unknown destination and filled with mysterious promise, and the blue sky is awash with happiness, and suddenly your heart is pierced by a feeling, compressed into a single split second, that there life is in front of you and you can follow it on down the road without a backwards glance, gamble on yourself and win, go coursing across life’s seas on a white speedboat and hurtling along her roads in a white Mercedes; and your fists tighten and clench of their own accord, and the muscles on your temples stand out in knots, and you promise yourself that you will rip mountains of money out of this hostile void with your bare teeth and you’ll brush aside anybody you have to, and nobody will ever dare to use that American word ‘loser’ about you.

   That is how the oral wow-factor manifests itself in our hearts. But as Tatarsky wandered towards the underground with a folder under his arm, he was indifferent to its insistent demands. He felt exactly like a ‘loser’ - that is, not only a complete idiot, but a war criminal as well, not to mention a failed link in the biological evolution of humanity.

   Yesterday’s attempt to compose the Russian idea had ended in the first total and absolute failure of Tatarsky’s career. At first the task hadn’t seemed very complicated, but once he’d sat down to it he’d been horrified to realise there wasn’t a single idea in his head, not a thing. Not even the ouija board was any help when he turned to it in his despair after the hands of the clock had crept past midnight. Che Guevara did respond, but in reply to a question about the Russian idea he produced a rather strange passage:

   
Fellow compatriots! It would be more correct to talk of the oral-anal wow-effect, since these influences fuse into a single impulse and it is precisely this complex of emotions, this conglomerate of the two, that is regarded as defining the socially valuable aspects of human existence. Note that advertising occasionally prefers a quasi-Jungian approach to a quasi-Freudian one: it sometimes happens that the acquisition of a material object is not the expression of a naked act of monetarist copulation, but of the search for a magical quality capable of relegating oral-anal stimulation to the background. For instance, a blue-green toothbrush somehow guarantees the safety of an attempt to clamber from an upper balcony to a lower one, a refrigerator protects you from being crushed to death amidst the fragments of a grand piano that has fallen off the roof, and a jar of kiwi fruit in syrup saves you from an aeroplane crash - but this is an approach that most of the professionals regard as outmoded. Amen.

   The only thing in all this that reminded Tatarsky of the Russian idea was the use of Yeltsin’s favourite phrase: ‘Fellow compatriots’, which had always seemed to Tatarsky akin to the address ‘Fellow prisoners’ with which the institutionalised mobsters used to begin their written missives to the labour camps, their so-called ‘daubs’. But despite this similarity, Wee Vova would hardly have been satisfied by the brief extract produced. Tatarsky’s attempts to establish contact with some other spirit more competent in the question concerned came to nothing. True, an appeal to the spirit of Dostoievsky, in whom Tatarsky had placed especially high hopes, did evoke certain interesting side-effects, with the ouija board trembling and leaping into the air, as though it was being pulled in all directions at once by several equally strong presences, but the crooked scribbles left on the paper were useless to Tatarsky, although, of course, he could console himself with the thought that the idea he was seeking was so transcendent that this was the only way it could be expressed on paper. However that might be, Tatarsky hadn’t got the job done.

   There was no way in the world he could show Khanin the sheet of paper in his folder with the fragment about the tooth-brush and kiwi fruit, but he had to show him something, and Tatarsky’s mind retreated into self-flagellation, rewriting all the brand names with the word ‘laser’ in them and savouring them as he applied them to himself; ‘Loser-Jet’ and ‘Loser-Max’ lashed sweetly at his very soul, allowing him just for a moment to forget his impending disgrace.

   As he drew closer to the metro, however, Tatarsky was distracted from his thoughts somewhat. Something strange was going on there. A cordon of about twenty military police with automatic rifles were talking to each other on their walkie-talkies, pulling heroic and mysterious faces. In the centre of the cordoned-off area a small crane was loading the burnt-out remains of a limousine on to the platform of a truck. Several men in civilian clothes were walking round the skeleton of the car, carefully examining the asphalt, gathering up bits of something from it and putting them into plastic bags like rubbish bags. Tatarsky had a good view of all this from higher up the street, but once he came down to the same level as the station, the impenetrable crowd concealed what was happening from view. Tatarsky jostled briefly at the sweaty backs of his fellow citizens, then sighed and went on his way.

   Khanin was out of sorts. With his forehead propped in the palm of his hand, he was tracing some kind of cabbalistic symbols in the ashtray with a cigarette-butt. Tatarsky sat on the edge of the chair at the other side of the desk, pressing the folder to his chest and stuttering his rambling excuses.

   ‘I’ve written it, of course. As best I could, that is. But I think I’ve made a balls of it, and it’s not something you should give to Wee Vova. The problem is, the theme is so… It turns out it’s not such a simple theme at all… Maybe I can think up a slogan, or add something to the brand essence of the Russian idea, or expand somehow on what Sasha Blo writes, but I’m still not ready to write a concept. I’m not just being modest, I’m just being objective. In general…’

   ‘Forget it,’ Khanin interrupted.

   ‘Why, what’s happened?’

   ‘Wee Vova’s been taken out.’

   ‘How?’ Tatarsky slumped back on his chair.

   ‘Dead easy,’ said Khanin. ‘Yesterday he had a shoot-out with the Chechens. Right beside your house it was, as it happens. He arrived on two sets of wheels with his fighters, everything fair and up front. He thought it would all be done right. But those bastards dug a trench on the hill opposite during the night, and as soon as he turned up they blasted him with a pair of "bumble-bee" flame-throwers. They’re fearsome fucking things: produce a volumetric explosion with a temperature of two thousand degrees. Wee’s car was armour-plated, but armour’s only good against normal people, not these abortions…’