Empire V (7 page)

Baldur explained the meaning of the word ‘metrosexual' as follows:

‘A metrosexual is a person who dresses like a queer, but in fact is not one. That is to say, he may in fact be queer, but it's not necessary.'

This was rather confusing, and I appealed to Jehovah for elucidation.

‘Metrosexuality,' said Jehovah, ‘is just another packaging of “conspicuous consumption”.'

‘What?' I asked, and at once remembered information gleaned from a recently swallowed preparation. ‘Oh, I know. Consumption for show. A term introduced by Thorstein Veblen at the beginning of the last century.'

I waited until the next Glamour lesson to repeat this to Baldur.

‘Why does Jehovah feel he has to mess with your head like that?' muttered Baldur crossly. ‘“Conspicuous consumption”, indeed! Why use an English expression? Everything should be called by its proper Russian name. I've already told you what a metrosexual is.'

‘Well then, what is a vamposexual?'

‘A vamposexual is what you must become,' replied Baldur. ‘There is no precise definition; everything depends on your own intuition. It is what you have to become in order to catch the pulse of the times.'

‘And what is that?'

‘Exactly what the pulse of the times is,' said Baldur, ‘no one knows, because time possesses no such attribute. All there is, really, is a collection of op-ed columns on the pulse of the times. But when enough of the op-ed pieces agree the pulse of the times to be such and such, then everyone starts to repeat it because they want to stay in step with time. But that is absolutely impossible because time has no legs.'

‘Surely normal people don't believe what editorials and op-ed pieces say?'

‘When did you last meet a normal person? In our country there are not more than a hundred of them left, and they are all under close FSB surveillance. Things are not that simple. On the one hand there is in reality no pulse of the times, nor anything to be in step with. But on the other hand, everyone tries to get a handle on the pulse of the times and to be in step with it, because the corporate model of the world is undergoing continual modification. That's why people have to grow cool beards and wear silk ties to prove their loyalty. Vampires must conform in order to blend in with their surroundings.'

‘I still don't understand what a vamposexual is,' I confessed.

Baldur picked up from the table a test tube which had been left there after the Discourse lesson. Its stopper was labelled ‘
German Classical Philosophy Dept. Phil. Mos. State Univ
.' Baldur shook on to his tongue the remaining drops of clear liquid, chewed his lip, frowned and asked:

‘Do you remember the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach?'

‘Who wrote it?'

‘Who wrote it? Why, Karl Marx of course.'

I strained my memory. ‘Oh yes. Just a moment. “Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”'

‘Exactly. Your task, Rama, is not to interpret a vamposexual. Your task is to become one.'

Baldur was, of course, right. Theory in this context counted for little. But the Glamour course was not confined to theory. I was handed ‘expenses': a weighty block of thousand-rouble banknotes shrink-wrapped in plastic and a Visa card with what struck me as an insanely high credit limit of a hundred thousand dollars. No accounting was required.

‘Time for practical work,' said Baldur. ‘When you've got through that lot, let me know.'

This was the moment when I came to realise that being a vampire was a serious and responsible matter.

There were two places a vampire was expected to buy clothes and other necessities: LovemarX, on Uprising Square and Archetypique Boutique, on Pozharsky Passage.

I had, as it happens, long been struck by a particular sign of the times expressed in the vulgar grafting of fashionable foreign names on to shops, restaurants and even novels written in Russian. They proclaimed: ‘We're special, not like you, we're trendy, off-shore, refurbished
à l'européenne
.' Usually the only effect it had on me was to make me want to throw up, but I had passed LovemarX and Archetypique Boutique so often that instead of merely irritating me their names began to demand analysis.

From the theoretical part of the Glamour course I knew that the word ‘lovemarks' refers to brand names which people lust after with all their hearts, seeing in them not merely the outward appearance of the object in question but the framework of their own personality. Presumably the final ‘X' was a nod to the new Internet orthography – or perhaps to the marble bust of Marx in the sales hall.

Archetypique Boutique proved to be an entire shopping mall of boutiques in which it was easy to lose oneself. The choice of goods on offer was wider than in LovemarX but it was not a place I could warm to. Rumour had it that it had formerly been the headquarters of the Gulag Inspectorate – either the geodetic survey or the permanent administration staff. Discovering this, I could see why Baldur and Jehovah referred to the place as the ‘Glamour Archipelago' or simply the ‘Archipelago'.

The pictures on the walls of the Archetypique Boutique were mostly photographs of expensive sports cars with silly, jokey titles such as ‘Wheelbarrow No. 51', ‘Wheelbarrow No. 89', and so on. One such number would appear on your sales receipt and if you were able to identify correctly the make of the corresponding car you could claim a ten per cent discount.

I understood, naturally, that this was a standard marketing device: the customer is supposed to circumambulate through the Archipelago in search of the right
wheelbarrow
and catch en route sight of new items which could eventually end up in the shopping cart. Even so, the mutual magnetism of the words struck me as distasteful.

There was one other emporium where one was supposed to buy knickknacks such as expensive watches, pipes and the like. This shop was called ‘Height Reason – Boutique for the Thinking Elite'. In the marketing brochure the Russian name had been collapsed into a single, rather strange word: ‘
HIGHTREASON
'.

Not being a smoker I had no interest at all in pipes. As for expensive watches, I had always been frightened off by the Patek Philippe advertisement in the same brochure: ‘
You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation
.'

I remembered, from seeing Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction
, a special technique whereby a costly chronometer could be passed to the next generation: in the paternal rectum while doing – and, I suppose, measuring – time in a Japanese prison camp. The situation of the businessman Khodorkovsky has made the subject very topical. Incidentally since then the innumerable photographs of Khodorkovsky behind bars has begun to look like a Patek Philippe ad campaign, the naked wrist of the imprisoned entrepreneur making the message unmistakeable. For my taste, the Patek Philippe chronometer was too big. On its own, perhaps, it might have been able to slip through, but never that bulky great metal bracelet …

The upshot was that I failed to enter the world of the Thinking Elite. Like all losers I naturally consoled myself by reflecting that I had never really wanted to.

JEHOVAH

If the answer Baldur gave to any query was so specific as to make it almost impossible not to grasp, Jehovah's explanatory powers had another distinction. He could outline an entire intellectual field in a few words, or follow a thread of key concepts through the most labyrinthine web of ideas. Often he would resort to surprising analogies.

‘If you want to understand what human culture is,' he said one day, ‘consider the inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands. There are tribes there who deify the technology of the white man. A particular object of worship is the aeroplane, which flies through the sky bringing all manner of beautiful and delicious objects. The Polynesian belief system is known as “cargo cult”. The aboriginal people there have constructed ritual aerodromes to await, so to speak, Coca-Cola from heaven …'

I had the usual reaction in my head, along the lines of ‘I remember everything that happened not to me …'

‘No,' I said, ‘that's nonsense. The reason the aborigines told that story to American anthropologists was simply in order to get rid of them quicker. Anyhow, it would have been impossible to persuade the anthropologists that the aborigines were actually after something entirely different. The truth is that the spiritual core of cargo cult lies elsewhere, and deeper. In Melanesia, where it all began, the inhabitants were so impressed by the feats of Japanese kamikaze pilots that they built ritual aerodromes for them to invite their souls to be reborn in the archipelago, should it be found there was not enough room for them in the Yasakuni Shrine.'

‘I had not heard that,' said Jehovah. ‘Interesting. But it does not alter anything. The indigenous people do more than build fake airstrips. They also make dummy aeroplanes out of mud, sand and straw – no doubt to provide the souls of the kamikaze with somewhere to live. These planes are inspirational artefacts. They sometimes have up to ten engines, fashioned out of old buckets and barrels. Seen as
objets d'art
they could be considered
chefs-d'œuvre
. But aeroplanes made out of mud do not fly. The same applies to human Discourse. No vampire should ever treat it seriously.'

I reported this conversation to Baldur.

‘Does this mean,' I asked, ‘that I too am learning how to make bogus aeroplanes out of sand and straw?'

Baldur looked me up and down with an expression of exasperation.

‘Not just that,' he replied. ‘That is indeed what you're being taught, but there's another side to it as well. You're also learning how to tart yourself up like a poof so that everyone will think you have access to a pipeline that spews out dosh – and hate you for it even more strongly. Have you forgotten who you are, Rama? You're a vampire!'

I spent a few days mulling over what Jehovah had said, looking up on the Internet examples of my countrymen's discourse, among them my old man's dicta on ‘plebs' and ‘responsible elites'. I could now understand practically all of them, including references to other texts, innuendoes and cultural allusions, some of them suave, witty and well written. Jehovah was right, all the same: these aircraft were not designed to fly. I found a good many wise words in them, but they rang empty and hollow, like a cannibal's beads made from stray European coins.

I wrote in my notebook:

The cargo-discourse of Moscow differs from the Polynesian model in that, instead of playing with fragments of alien aviation technology it plays with fragments of borrowed jargon. The linguistic camouflage with which the ‘pundit' lards his article fulfils the same function as the bright orange life-jacket adopted by an African headhunter: it's more than a mask – it's warpaint. The aesthetic face of cargo-discourse is cargo-glamour, it is what makes the struggling office boy skimp on his food so that he can buy himself an expensive power suit
.

When I proudly showed this observation to Jehovah, he twiddled his finger meaningfully round his temple.

‘Rama,' he said, ‘you're missing the point. You seem to think Moscow cargo-discourse is subordinate to New York or Paris cargo-discourse and that is the whole problem. It is not the case at all.
All
human cultures are cargo cultures. In no way can the artificial aircraft created by one tribe be superior to the artificial aircraft created by another.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because flightless aircraft are not susceptible to comparative analysis. They do not fly, and they lack any technological specifics that can be measured against any others. They only have one function, and that is a magical one which does not depend on how many buckets they put under the wings for imitation engines, nor on what colour they are.'

‘But,' I objected, ‘if we are surrounded by ersatz aeroplanes, they must have some basis in things people have copied, must they not? After all, for the cargo cult to have developed in the first place, there was presumably at least one real plane flying through the sky.'

‘The plane in question was not flying through the sky,' Jehovah answered. ‘It was flying through the human mind. It was the Mighty Bat.'

‘You mean vampires?'

‘Yes,' said Jehovah. ‘But there is no point in discussing it now. You lack the requisite knowledge base.'

‘Just one question,' I said. ‘You say that all human culture amounts to no more than a cargo cult. What do people build instead of mud aeroplanes then?'

‘Cities.'

‘Cities?'

‘Yes,' answered Jehovah, ‘and everything else as well.'

I tried raising the subject with Baldur, but he also declined to discuss it.

‘Too soon,' he said. ‘Don't run before you can walk. You've got to absorb what you need to know in the correct order. Your studies today must be the foundation for what you will learn tomorrow. When you build a house you don't start with the attic.'

There seemed no room left for disagreement.

There was one more societal practice I was required to master. It was the art of ‘vampospirituality', sometimes called by Jehovah ‘metrospirituality', from which I concluded they were more or less the same thing. Jehovah defined it as: ‘conspicuous consumption in the domain of spirit'. What vampospirituality meant in practice was proof of access to, and familiarity with, the least accessible forms of ancient spiritual practices: it might include photo opportunities with the Dalai Lama, documentary evidence of acquaintance with Sufi sheikhs and Latin-American shamans, nocturnal visits by helicopter to Mount Athos, and so on.

‘And this goes on here as well?' I asked bitterly. I could not see exactly what he was driving at.

‘Yes, it is just the same here, and everywhere else as well,' said Jehovah. ‘And for all time. Observe what happens when people converse with one another. Why does a man open his mouth?'

I shrugged.

‘The key message a human being tries to convey to others is that he enjoys a much more prestigious level of consumption than might at first appear. At the same time he tries to instil in those around him the idea that their own level of consumption confers significantly less prestige than they had naïvely imagined. All social manoeuvres are subordinated to this aim. More importantly, it is the only issue that inspires unvarying emotions.'

‘Well, I seem to have come across rather different kinds of people in my life,' I said in an attempt at light-hearted irony.

Jehovah looked at me mildly.

‘Rama,' he said, ‘you have just presented me with a prime example of what I was trying to get across. You wish to let me understand that you are accustomed to a mode of consumption that is superior to mine. Mine, you suggest, sucks. The only difference is that we are talking about consumption in the sphere of human relationships. This is the very movement of a human soul I have in mind. However hard you look, you will never find anything else there … The only thing that changes is the particular mode of consumption. It may relate to objects, impressions, cultural manifestations, books, conceptions, states of mind and so on.'

‘That is revolting,' I said, quite sincerely.

Jehovah raised a finger.

‘But on no account should you hold people in contempt because of it,' he said. ‘Always keep in mind that for a vampire to do so is as shameful as it is for a human being to laugh at a cow because she has a greasy, fat, ugly udder dangling between her legs. It was we, Rama, who bred people and reared them. For that reason we must accept them as they are. No one else will ever feel compassion for them.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘So what am I supposed to do when someone fishes out his picture taken with the Dalai Lama?'

‘You produce one of your own, a photograph of yourself standing beside Christ, the Buddha and Muhammad … No, better not have Muhammad actually there with you. You can just have arrows pointing to the edge of the picture: “Muhammad was here” …'

The word ‘spirituality' often came up in our discussions, and eventually I became interested to know exactly what was meant by the term. Researching the subject by means of random degustations, I summarised the results of my observations in the following note:

Russian ‘spirituality' means that people here devote their best efforts not to material production of any kind, but to putting on airs. By the same token, a person who lacks ‘spirituality' reveals it by his inability to do so in the appropriate manner. Expertise in this field can only be gained through experience and money, hence there is no creature less spiritual than a junior manager
.

The range covered in the Glamour course was extensive, but almost none of it could be memorised on the conscious level. It included a great many tastings – I had to sample an unbelievable number of absurd preparations, each one of which swelled the load of life experiences now weighing on my shoulders. To this day I do not know how I could have swallowed such as the following:

‘Little bastard $%'
‘Blow
ayu-yu.
'
‘Cavalli No.3.'
‘
O
ф
te
н
!
'
‘Bloody
masha ts
.'
‘
Chichiki
.'

But my forays into the turbid smog of other souls were not in vain. I gained ever more acute understanding of what was going on in the world around me. Now, when I read coverage of a private concert by an A-list popstar in a Rublevka estate or some deferential article about the second Moscow Region Yachting Festival in Nice, I no longer felt crushed by another proof of my own inadequacy, but recognised that I had simply stumbled into the firing line of the new breed of Party machine-gunners who were replacing the Political Commissariat and National Folk Dance Ensembles.

The same was true of Discourse. I began to see that a spat between two intellectuals, one a lapdog of the regime, the other a fearless Valiant-for-truth fearlessly attacking it from all possible standpoints, bore no resemblance to a genuine conflict of ideologies, but was a duet for mouth organ and concertina. It was nothing but noise, whose only purpose was to act as background for the real ideology being trumpeted out loud.

‘If Glamour is the ideology of the regime,' said Jehovah, ‘the most important of all arts for us are PR, GR, BR and FR. In a word – advertising.'

GR, apparently, stood for Government Relations. I did not know what BR and FR were, and was too idle to ask.

We had two lessons devoted to advertising, not to its dubious theory as developed by human beings (Jehovah called it simply ‘charlatanry'), but to its core techniques as applied to commerce, politics and information. Jehovah's definition was as follows: ‘Without ever resorting to outright untruth, to construct from fragments of the truth a picture whose connection to reality is limited to whatever is good for sales.' It was an apparently simple formulation, but in fact it embraced a vitally important elaboration: if the link to reality proved not to increase sales (and very often it could not) then the solution was to connect it to something else. This was precisely the eye of the needle through which the multitude of caravans passed.

Among the examples adduced to illustrate this concept was this linguistic-geometric construct:

         No one speaks of it.
         No one forgets it.
         This is the root of all.
The source from which we all came, you and I,
And all those whom for now you regard as ‘other',
Is not far off in the Himalayas, but inside yourself.
         It's real and tangible.
         Certain and serious.
         This is for real.

The explanation was as follows:

Rule 3. Non-traditional positioning of anal–phallic penetration with addition of contexts orthogonally related to the subj.

‘Why the shape of the cross?' I asked Jehovah.

Jehovah shook a drop of clear liquid from the test tube on to his finger, licked it, and for a few moments stared unseeing into the far distance.

‘You didn't read it all the way through,' he said. ‘“Why the cross?” is the campaign slogan.'

A template example of spin being deployed for political purposes was the campaign by the Loyalist Youth Movement ‘True Batch of Hope' (
Surkoff_Fedayeen/built305
). This campaign was aimed at generating positive interest in the English-speaking mass media, basing itself on a quotation from late Nabokov translating early Okudzhava:

Nadezhda I shall then be back
When the true batch outboys the riot …

I did not need to ask: ‘Why true batch?' The homonyms with the Russian phrase for a trumpeter sounding the retreat were obvious. The brief digression into advertising was thereupon abandoned, and we continued with the general theory of Glamour.

I now find it quite amusing to think back to the importance I attached at the time to the insights I neatly inscribed in my notebook: