Empire V (8 page)

The need for Scientific Communism arises when belief fades in the feasibility of Communism actually being built, while the need for Glamour arises at the disappearance of natural sexual attraction
.

Be that as it may, after I had experienced the effects of preparations labelled ‘Catwalk Meat 05 – 07'and ‘Suicide-Bimbombers of Beelzebub' (categories of fashion models so designated by some particularly misogynistic vampire) my original conception underwent an important clarification:

It is not as simple as that. What precisely is natural sexual attraction? When you look close up at a girl who is considered the epitome of beauty, you see the pores in her skin, the pimples, the chapped lips and so on. Beauty or ugliness can be sensed only at a distance, when the lineaments of the face can be reduced to a schematic diagram which may be compared with the manga-style templates stored in the unconscious mind. Where these templates come from is anyone's guess – but one suspects that in our day they have less to do with the genetic code than with the Glamour industry. In the world of automation, coercive governance of this type is known as ‘override'.

There were a few entertaining moments. One sample turned up twice in my programme, under different headings. The preparation was classified as: ‘Art Projects Curator Rh4'.

The red liquid had come from a middle-aged lady who really did look as if she could be an Islamist suicide-bomber. Both Baldur and Jehovah had included her in their lists because in their eyes a curator was seen to be someone pursuing an occupation midway between Glamour and Discourse and thus representing an invaluable source of information. I thought otherwise. The purpose of the degustation was to study the inner world of the contemporary artist, but this curator had not even mastered the jargon of her profession – she was merely Googling her way round it. There was, nevertheless, one touching detail: she had experienced orgasm only once in her life, when a drunken lover had called her a pubic louse feeding on financial capitalism.

I expressed my perplexity at this outcome to Jehovah and was informed that this experience was, in fact, the point of the lesson inasmuch as it revealed the subject in its entirety. I said I did not believe it, whereupon he made me sample three artists and another art gallery curator. Afterwards I made the following entry in my notebook:

On average, the contemporary artist is an anal prostitute with a mouth stitched shut and an arse painted on the wall. And the so-called curator is a person who sets himself up as the artist's spiritual pimp despite the complete absence of any spiritual dimension in the proceedings
.

Writers (whom we also covered in the Glamour course) were slightly better. After familiarising myself with their category I wrote in my notebook:

What is the most important thing for a writer? It is to possess a malicious, morbid, jealous and envious ego. If this is present, all else will follow.

Assorted varieties of critics, experts, press and Internet culturologists (it was around this time that I finally worked out what the word meant) found their way into the Discourse curriculum. A half-hour excursion into their universe allowed me to formulate the following rule:

The interim height of a crab louse equals the height of the object onto which it craps, plus 0.2 millimetres
.

The last note I made on the Glamour course was as follows:

The most fruitful technique for promoting glamour in modern Russia will be anti-glamour. ‘Deconstructing' glamour will allow it to infiltrate even those dark places where glamour itself would not dream of trespassing.

Not all the tastings had an epistemological purpose. Baldur often had me pry into another person purely in order that I should familiarise myself with a particular brand of Spanish crocodile-skin footwear or line of men's eau de cologne. A highborn English economist found his way into the Glamour list because he was a specialist in expensive clarets, and he was followed in my investigations by a Japanese designer whose silk neckties were the best in the world (it emerged that he was the son of a man who had been sentenced by court martial to be hanged). Needless to say, such researches appeared to me a complete waste of my time and energy.

Before long, however, I grew to understand that the object of these excursions was not just to absorb yet more information, but to remodel my entire mode of thinking. The truth is that there is a vital difference between the mental processes of a vampire and those of a human being. When thinking, the vampire employs the same cerebral constructions as the man, but the path taken to get from one premise to another is as different from predictive human thought as is the exquisite trajectory of a bat flying through the dusk from a pigeon circling over an urban rubbish dump.

‘The best human beings are capable of thought almost on a level with vampires,' said Baldur. ‘They have a name for it in their world – genius.'

Jehovah's take was more restrained.

‘About genius I'm not so sure,' he said. ‘Genius resists analysis and explanation, it's a bit of a grey area. With us, everything is straightforward and clear. Thinking becomes vampiric when sufficient degustations have been imbibed to generate new parameters of associative connections.'

Technically speaking, my brain was already equipped to function in a new way. But the inertia of human nature still imposed its innate conditions. Many things which to my mentors were crystal clear I failed to grasp. What they saw as a logical bridge all too often presented itself to me as a conceptual chasm.

‘There are two main aspects to Glamour,' declared Jehovah at one of our lessons. ‘On the one hand, it is the searingly painful shame and humiliation brought about by one's poverty and physical ugliness. On the other, it is a malignant glee at the sight of the depravity and imperfections which others have not succeeded in concealing …'

‘How can this be so?' I marvelled. ‘You told me Glamour was sex expressed as money. Surely there must be something attractive about it. Where is that in what you have just said?'

‘You're thinking like a human being,' said Jehovah. ‘Why don't
you
tell me where it is?'

I thought. But nothing came into my head. ‘I don't know,' I said finally.

‘Nothing that exists is imperfect or hideous in or of itself. Everything depends on correlation. For a girl to realise that she is a fat, poor, ugly freak, all she has to do is open a glamour magazine, where she will be confronted with a slim super-rich beauty queen. Then she has someone against whom to compare herself.'

‘But why should the girl want to do this?'

‘Well, come on, you can answer that,' said Jehovah.

I thought some more.

‘She has to …' and suddenly vampire logic laid out the answer clearly before me. ‘She has to, so that she and all those other people the glossy mags have turned into humiliated freaks will carry on financing the Glamour industry out of their wretched earnings.'

‘Quite right, well done. But even
that
is still not the ultimate objective. You rightly talk of Glamour needing to be financed, but what is its aim?'

‘Glamour drives the economy forward because its victims start stealing money?' I hazarded at random.

‘Far too much like human logic. You're not an economist, Rama, you're a vampire. Concentrate.'

I was silent, because nothing entered my head. Jehovah paused for a minute, then said:

‘The aim of Glamour is to ensure that the life of mankind passes in a miasma of ignominy and self-contempt, a condition known as “original sin”. It is the direct result of consuming images of beauty, success and intellectual brilliance. Glamour and Discourse submerge their consumers in mediocrity, idiocy and destitution – qualities which are, of course, relative, but cause real suffering. All human life is dominated by this sense of disgrace and poverty.'

‘Why is original sin necessary?'

‘It is necessary because human thought must be confined within strict limits, and because mankind must remain in ignorance of its true place in the symphony of men and vampires.'

I guessed that in this context the word ‘symphony' meant something like ‘symbiosis'. But I could not get out of my head an image of some gigantic orchestra, before which stood Jehovah on the conductor's podium in a black tailcoat, his mouth smeared in blood …

After a pause for thought, I said:

‘All right. I can understand why Glamour is a mask. But why do we say the same of Discourse?'

Jehovah closed his eyes and assumed a look of Yoda, the mentor of the Jedi.

‘In the Middle Ages no one knew that America existed,' he said, ‘therefore it was not necessary to conceal it. It never entered anyone's head to look for it. That is the best disguise of all. If our aim is to hide something from people, all we need do is make sure no one thinks of it. For this to be the case, human thought must be under permanent supervision, that is to say Discourse has to be controlled. To control Discourse, all we need is the power to establish its borders. Once they are set, an entire universe can be hidden beyond them. You know this from your own situation. You must admit, the world of vampires is pretty well camouflaged.'

I nodded.

‘Not only that,' continued Jehovah, ‘discourse is another, and magical, form of masking. I'll give you an example. No human being will disagree with the proposition that there is a great deal of evil in the world, is that not so?'

‘It is.'

‘But what is the source of this evil? Not a day goes without newspapers filling acres of space arguing about it. It is one of the most astounding aspects of the world we live in, given that people are capable of recognising the nature of evil instinctively, with no need to have it analysed and explained. To have succeeded in rendering it such a shrouded mystery is a serious magical act.'

‘Yes,' I agreed sadly, ‘that seems to be very near the truth.'

‘Discourse acts in a manner not unlike an electric barbed-wire fence where the current touches not the human body but the human mind. It defines territory that cannot be penetrated from territory from which it is impossible to escape.'

‘What is the territory that cannot be escaped?'

‘I can't believe you're asking that. Glamour, of course! Open any glossy magazine and look. There in the middle you find Glamour, and round the edges Discourse. Or the other way round – Discourse in the middle and Glamour round the edges. Glamour is always surrounded either by Discourse or by empty space. There is nowhere for the human being to escape to. Empty space holds nothing for him, yet he cannot pass through the Discourse barrier. The only thing left to him is to sleepwalk through the pastures of Glamour.'

‘But why do vampires need it?'

‘Glamour has one other function which we have not yet mentioned,' replied Jehovah. ‘And for vampires it is the most important one. But it is too early to speak of it yet. You will find out about it after the Great Fall.'

‘And when will that be?'

To this Jehovah made no reply.

And so it was, taste by taste, swallow by swallow, step by step, that I was transformed into a culturally advanced metrosexual, ready to plunge into the very heart of darkness.

THE FILING CABINET

From what I have written it may appear that my transformation into a vampire was accomplished without inner struggle. This was far from the case.

During the first few days I felt as though I had undergone a major operation on my brain. At night I had nightmares. I was drowning in a bottomless black swamp enclosed by a ring of stone blocks, or else I was being roasted in the mouth of some horrible brick monster, which for some reason contained a stove. But the worst nightmare of all was when I woke up and became conscious of the new centre of my being, a nucleus of steel that had taken the place of my heart, had nothing to do with me, yet was at the same time the core of my person. This was how I experienced the Tongue as it gradually entered into a symbiotic relationship with my brain.

Once my missing canine teeth had grown back in (apart from being slightly whiter they were identical to my old ones) the nightmares ceased. Or more accurately, I stopped reacting to them as nightmares and came to terms with such visions in my dreams. I had had to make a similar adjustment when I first went to school. Now my soul gradually recovered itself, much as an occupied city comes back to life or the fingers of a benumbed hand begin again to stir. But all the time, day and night, I felt as though I was under surveillance by an invisible television camera installed inside me, through which one part of me observed the other part.

One day I went home to collect my things. The room in which I had spent my childhood seemed small and dark, the Sphinx in the hallway no more than a kitschy caricature. Seeing me, my mother for some reason lost her cool, then shrugged her shoulders and went into her room. I felt no link whatsoever with the place in which I had spent so many years; everything about it was alien. I quickly gathered up the things I needed, threw my laptop into my bag, and returned to my new apartment.

After lessons with Baldur and Jehovah I had time to take a closer look at my surroundings. I had been curious from the very beginning about the somewhat skimpy library of test tubes in Brahma's study, and guessed that somewhere there must be a catalogue. Before long I found it in one of the drawers of the escritoire: a handwritten album bound in a rather unusual snakeskin or something of the sort. Each drawer of the filing cabinet corresponded with a pair of pages in the catalogue, in which were notes and brief commentaries on the numbered test tubes.

The catalogue itself was divided into sections, amusingly reminiscent of the bays in a video store. The largest section was erotica, itself divided into eras, countries and genres. The cast list was impressive: in the French bloc were Gilles de Rais, Madame de Montespan, the Bourbon King Henry IV and Jean Marais. I could not conceive how it had been possible to obtain the red liquid from all these people, even in microscopic doses.

The military section included, besides Napoleon, one of the last shoguns of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Marshal Zhukov and various celebrities from the Second World War, among them the air aces Pokryshkin, Adolf Galland and Hans Ulrich Rudel.

These sections of the catalogue – the military and the erotic – aroused my keenest interest, followed, as is invariably the case in life, by the keenest disappointment. The relevant contents in the filing cabinet itself must have been moved somewhere else. Only in three sections were there any test tubes containing liquid preparations: ‘Master Mask-Makers', ‘Prenatal Experiences' and ‘Literature'.

I had no desire to learn anything more about the people who had made the masks the late Brahma had collected (they were displayed on the walls). Likewise the literature section: it contained many names familiar from the school curriculum and I still remembered the nausea they provoked during lessons. ‘Prenatal Experiences' was the one that sparked my greatest interest.

I assumed this must concern the experience of the foetus in the womb. I could not even imagine what it could be like. No doubt, I thought, some vague glimmers of light, muffled sounds from the surrounding environment, rumblings from the maternal bowels, pressures on the body – in short ineffable feelings like soaring weightlessly through the air or swooping up and down on a roller coaster.

Bracing myself and selecting a test tube labelled ‘Italy-(' I drew a few drops into the dropper, placed them in my mouth and sat down on the sofa.

What I then experienced, in its incoherence and illogicality, was like a dream sequence. I seemed to be returning from Italy, where I had evidently failed to complete the task I had been assigned – something to do with stone-carving. I felt sad, because of having left there many things I loved. I could see their shadows: summer-houses among the vines, tiny carriages (these were children's toys, memories of which were preserved with especial clarity), a rope swing in a garden …

But before I knew it I was somewhere else, apparently a Moscow railway station. I had disembarked from the train and gone through an inconspicuous door into an obviously specialised building, which seemed to house a scientific institute of some kind. The building was in the process of being renovated: furniture was being moved out, the old parquet taken up from the floor. I decided I had to get out to the street, and found myself walking down a long corridor. At first it snaked along in one direction, then through a circular room to head off in another …

After some time wandering about in the corridor I noticed a window in one wall, but when I looked through it I realised that I was nowhere near a street exit; in fact I was even further away than when I had started, for now I was several storeys above ground level. I thought I had better ask someone to tell me the way out, but annoyingly no one was within sight. I did not want to go back along the winding corridor, so began opening one door after another looking for someone to ask.

Behind one of the doors was a cinema. It was in the process of being cleaned, the floor scrubbed. I asked the cleaning women how I could get to the street.

‘Down here,' said an old biddy in a blue overall, ‘down the chute. That's how we go.'

She pointed to an opening in the floor and I saw a green plastic shaft like you find in an aquapark. It struck me as a modern and progressive method of transport but I held back, afraid that my jacket might snag in the tube, which seemed rather too narrow. On the other hand, the old woman who had advised me to take this route was herself pretty wide in the beam.

‘Is this really the way you go down?' I asked.

‘Course it is,' said the woman, leaning over it and emptying dirty water with some kind of feathers in it from the bucket she held in her hands. I did not find this at all surprising, merely thinking that now I would have to wait until the tube dried out …

At this point the experience came to an end.

By now I had already absorbed enough from my Discourse studies to recognise the symbolism of dream visions. I could even make a guess at interpreting the labels on the test tubes. Presumably, if the one designated ‘Italy-(' ended, so to say, in midair, and its neighbour was ‘France-)', logically the first would conclude with the lyrical hero's leap into the shaft. But I did not test this supposition; the prenatal experience continued to occupy a disagreeable position in my emotional spectrum, reminding me of the feverish hallucinations induced by influenza.

The episode brought to mind a well-known analogy of the body inside the mother's womb as a car awaiting the soul which will come to drive it away on its journey. But what is the precise moment when the soul makes its entrance? When the construction of the car commences, or when it is completed and ready to depart? I discovered that it is possible to express this question, which currently divides adherents and opponents of abortion into two implacably opposed camps, in less adversarial formulations. Several examples of Discourse I had absorbed contained more interesting views.

Among them was, for example, this one: there is no vehicle for the soul to enter; the life of the body resembles the trajectory of a radio-controlled drone. A more radical interpretation still was that there is not even a trajectory of the drone, but a three-dimensional film of such a journey projected in some way onto a static mirror, which is the soul … Strangely enough, this perspective appeared the most plausible to me, probably because at this time my own mirror was reflecting a great number of other people's films while not itself moving anywhere, suggesting that it was indeed stationary. But what is this mirror? Where is it located? At this point I realised that yet again I was falling into the trap of conceptualising the soul, and my mood accordingly soured.

A couple of days later I found in one of the drawers a stray test tube containing less liquid than the others. Its index number did not correspond to the index number of the drawer. I checked it in the catalogue and saw that the preparation was designated ‘Rudel ZOO'. The notes confirmed that it concerned the German airman Hans Ulrich Rudel. The classification, however, was in the erotic, not the military section.

Degustation followed promptly.

I saw nothing connected with military activities – unless one could include in that category some blurry memories of a Christmas flight over Stalingrad. There were no world-famous villains either. The material was all relentlessly everyday: Hans Ulrich Rudel was featured on his last visit to Berlin. Dressed in a black leather overcoat, with some implausible medal round his neck, he was superciliously, and with virtually no attempt at concealment, copulating in broad daylight with a high-school girl near the Berlin Zoo U-Bahn station. The girl was pale with ecstasy. In addition to the erotic element the preparation included memories of an enormous concrete ziggurat with platforms for anti-aircraft artillery. The whole structure had such a contrived air about it that I began to have doubts about the veracity of the whole proceedings. As for the rest, it resembled a somewhat style-conscious pornographic film.

I confess that I watched it several times, certainly more than twice. Rudel's face was that of an intelligent sheet-metalworker; the schoolgirl looked as if she had stepped out of a margarine advertisement. As I understood, intimate encounters in the vicinity of the Zoo station between people previously unacquainted with one another had become something of a tradition as the fall of the city became imminent. Eleventh-hour Aryan coupling appeared a somewhat melancholy pursuit, attributable perhaps to vitamin deficiency. I was particularly struck to learn that Rudel passed the time between aerial combat sorties by throwing the discus around the aerodrome, like a Greek athlete. Somehow I had a completely different conception of these times.

A few days later I did after all experiment with a preparation from the literary section. The late Brahma had been a great admirer of Nabokov, as was confirmed by the portraits of him on the wall. His library contained no less than thirty preparations, all in one way or another connected with the author. Among them were such strangely labelled test tubes as, for instance, ‘Pasternak+½ Nabokov'. I could not work out what this could possibly mean. Either it concerned an unknown chapter in the personal lives of the titans, or it was an attempt to blend their talents in an alchemic retort according to specified proportions.

I wanted to try this preparation. But disappointment awaited me: the degustation did not result in any revelations. At first I thought the tube must contain nothing but water, but after a few minutes the skin of my fingers began to itch and I felt a strong desire to write some verse. I seized pen and paper. Ambition, however, failed to lead to my developing a poetic gift: the lines inched forward one by one but declined to shape themselves into anything consummate or harmonious. After filling up half a notepad, I found I had given birth to the following:

For your Kant, for your cut, for your rusty
kalinka
,
For your underhand tender so tenderly rigged …

Having reached this point, inspiration found itself blocked by an impenetrable barrier. The beginning seemed to predicate a response such as ‘I would give you …' but herein lay precisely the difficulty.
What
, I thought, trying to see the situation objectively through the eyes of a third party,
could I conceivably be offering you for your cut of the rigged deal?
Several plausible answers couched in highly unsuitable language did occur to me, but none of them could be said to enhance the poetic context.

I came to the conclusion that my experiment with poetry had run into the sand, and got up from the divan. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by such a surge of joy welling up in my breast that nothing could prevent it from erupting and drenching all mankind with glittering foam. I took a deep breath and allowed the wave to gush tumultuously out. Then my hand wrote, in English:

My sister, do you still recall
The blue Khasan and Khalkhin-Gol?

And that was all.

It may be that the abridged result of the experiment was due to lack of emotional material in my soul. The greatest architect needs bricks, after all. As far as Nabokov was concerned, the deficiencies of my English vocabulary may also have had something to do with it.

Nevertheless, the experiment cannot be counted a complete failure. From it I learnt that there must exist ways of ring-fencing the amount of information contained in the preparations: this one had no revelations at all about the poets' private life.

I decided to ask Baldur about this.

‘You mean you've been poking about in the library?' he asked, clearly displeased.

‘Well, yes.'

‘You shouldn't touch anything. Don't you have enough material to work on? I can ask Jehovah to give you a lot more …'

‘All right,' I said, ‘I won't do it again. But please explain how can there be only one property in a preparation? For instance, in this case, versification techniques. Without any personal images?'

‘It's a distillation. There is a particular technology which is operated by a vampire-purifier. The red liquid passes through a cylindrical spiral in his helmet. He goes into a special trance and concentrates on the particular aspect of the life-experience he desires to preserve. In the process all other components of the experience are discarded in favour of the content selected by the purifier. This isolates the required spectrum of information and eliminates everything else. Human experience is harmful and destructive, and in large doses can be fatal. Why do you think people die like flies? It's because of their life experiences.'