Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  ‘That’s where we come to the most important part. When there’s still about half the Smirnoff or Absolut left, the jeep’s still on the road and death seems a distant and abstract prospect, a highly specific chemical reaction occurs inside the head of the guy who created the whole mess. He develops this totally boundless megalomania and orders himself an advertising clip. He insists his clip has to blow away all the other cretins’ clips. The psychology of it’s easy enough to understand. The guy’s opened up some little company called Everest and he’s so desperate to see his logo on Channel One, somewhere between BMW and Coca-Cola, that he could top himself. So just as soon as this reaction takes place in the client’s head, we pop out of the bushes.’

  Tatarsky liked the sound of that ‘we’ very much.

  ‘The situation’s like this.’ Morkovin went on. ‘There are only a few studios that make the videos, and they’re desperate for writers with nous, because these days everything depends on the writer. The job itself works like this: the people from the studio find a client who wants to get himself on TV. You take a look at him. He tells you something. You listen to what he wants to say. Then you write the scenario. It’s usually about a page long, because the clips are short. It might only take you a couple of minutes, but you don’t go back to him for at least a week - he has to think you’ve spent all that time dashing backwards and forwards across your room, tearing your hair out and thinking, thinking, thinking. He reads what you’ve written and, depending on whether he likes the scenario or not, he orders a video from your people or gets in touch with someone else. That’s why, as far as the studio you work for is concerned, you’re the top man. The order depends on you. And if you can hypnotise the client, you take ten per cent of the total price of the video.’

  ‘And how much does a video cost?’

  ‘Usually from fifteen to thirty grand. Say twenty on average.’

  ‘What?’ Tatarsky asked in disbelief.

  ‘O God, not roubles. Dollars.’

  In a split second Tatarsky had calculated what ten per cent of twenty thousand would be. He swallowed hard and stared at Morkovin with dog-like eyes.

  ‘Of course, it’s not going to last,’ said Morkovin. ‘In a year or two, everything’s going to look entirely different. Instead of all these pot-bellied nobodies taking loans for their petty little businesses, there’ll be guys borrowing millions of bucks at a time. Instead of jeeps for crashing into lamp-posts there’ll be castles in France and islands in the Pacific. Instead of five hundred grammes the former party secretaries will be demanding five hundred grand. But basically what’s going on in this country of ours won’t be any different, which means that the basic principle of our work will never change.’

  ‘My God,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Money like that… It’s kind of frightening.’

  ‘Ifs Dostoievsky’s old eternal question.’ Morkovin said, laughing. ‘Am I a timid cowering creature or have I got moral rights?’

  ‘Seems to me you’ve already answered that question.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morkovin, ‘I reckon I have.’

  ‘And what is your answer?’

  ‘It’s very simple. I’m a timid cowering creature with inalienable rights.’ The next day Morkovin took Tatarsky to a strange place called Draft Podium (after several minutes of intense mental effort Tatarsky abandoned the attempt to guess what that meant). It was located in the basement of an old brick-built house not far from the centre of town. Entry was via a heavy steel door, which led into a small office space crammed with equipment. Several young men were waiting there for Tatarsky. Their leader was a stubble-cheeked guy by the name of Sergei, who looked like Dracula in his younger days. He explained to Tatarsky that the small cube of blue plastic standing on an empty cardboard box was a Silicon Graphics computer that cost one hell of a lot of money, and the Soft Image program that was installed on it cost twice as much. The Silicon was the most important treasure in this subterranean cave. The room also contained a few more simple computers, scanners and some kind of VCR with lots of dials and lights. One detail that made a great impression on Tatarsky was that the VCR had a wheel on it with a handle, like the wheel on a sewing machine, and you could use it to wind on the frames on the tape by hand.

  Draft Podium had a certain very promising client in its sights. ‘The mark’s about fifty,’ said Sergei, dragging on a menthol cigarette. ‘Used to work as a teacher of physics. Just when things started coming apart he set up a co-operative baking bird’s milk’ cakes and in two years made so much money that now he rents an entire confectionery plant in Lefortovo. Recently he took out a big loan. The day before yesterday he went on the sauce, and he usually stays on it about two weeks.’

  ‘Where do you get that kind of information?’ Tatarsky asked.

  ‘His secretary.’ said Sergei. ‘So anyway, we have to get to him with the scenario now, before he has time to sober up. When he sobers up, he gets greedy. We’re meeting tomorrow at one in his office.’

  The next day Morkovin arrived at Tatarsky’s place early. He brought with him a large, bright-yellow plastic bag containing a maroon jacket made of material that looked like the fabric they use for Russian army greatcoats. The intricate crest gleaming on the breast pocket was reminiscent of the emblem on a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. Morkovin said it was a ‘club jacket’. Tatarsky didn’t understand what he meant, but he did as he was told and put it on. Then Morkovin took a foppish notebook in a leather cover out of the bag, together with an incredibly thick ballpoint pen with the word ‘Zoom’ on it and a pager - at that time they’d only just appeared in Moscow.

  ‘You have to hang this thing on your belt,’ he said. ‘You’re meeting the client at one, and at twenty past one I’ll give you a call on the pager. When it beeps, take it off your belt and look at it like it’s something important. All the time the client’s talking, keep making notes in the notebook.’

  ‘What’s it all for?’ Tatarsky asked.

  ‘It’s obvious enough, isn’t it? The client’s paying big money for a sheet of paper and a few drops of black ink out of a printer. He has to be absolutely certain plenty of others have paid money for the same thing before him.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Tatarsky, ‘all these jackets and pagers are just the thing to raise doubts in his mind.’

  ‘Don’t go complicating things,’ said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Life’s simpler and stupider than that. And then there’s this…’

  He took a slim case out of his pocket, opened it and held it out to Tatarsky. It contained a heavy watch that was almost beautiful in a repulsive kind of way, made of gold and steel.

  ‘It’s a Rolex Oyster. Careful, you’ll chip off the gold plate; it’s a fake. I only take it out on business. When you’re talking with the client, flash it around a bit, you know. It helps.’

  Tatarsky felt inspired by all this support. At half past twelve he emerged from the metro. The guys from Draft Podium were waiting for him not far from the entrance. They’d arrived in a long black Mercedes. Tatarsky had already learned enough about business to know the car had been hired for about two hours. Sergei was unshaven as ever, but now there was something sullenly stylish about his stubble - probably due to the dark jacket with the incredibly narrow lapels and the bow tie. Sitting beside him was Lena, who looked after contracts and kept the books. She was wearing a simple black dress (no jewellery and no make-up) and in her hand she was holding an attache case with a golden lock. When Tatarsky climbed into the car, the three of them exchanged glances and Sergei spoke to the chauffeur.

  ‘Drive on.’

  Lena was nervous. All the way there she kept giggling as she told them about some guy called Azadovsky - apparently her friend’s lover. This Azadovsky inspired her with an admiration that bordered on rapture: he’d arrived in Moscow from Ukraine and moved in with her friend, got himself registered in her flat, then invited his sister and her two children up
from Dnepropetrovsk. He’d registered them in the flat and immediately, without the slightest pause, swapped the flat for a different one through the courts and dispatched Lena’s sister to a room in a shared apartment.

  ‘He’s a man who’ll really go far!’ Lena kept repeating.

  She was especially impressed by the fact that, once the operation had been completed, the sister and her children were immediately banished back to Dnepropetrovsk; there was so much detail in the way the tale was told that by the end of the journey Tatarsky began to feel as though he’d lived half his life in the flat with Azadovsky and his nearest and dearest; but then, Tatarsky was just as nervous as Lena.

  The client (Tatarsky never did find out what his name was) looked remarkably like the image that had taken shape in Tatarsky’s mind following the previous day’s conversation. He was a short, thickset little man with a cunning face, from which the grimace of a hangover was only just beginning to fade - evidently he’d taken his first drink of the day not long before the meeting.

  Following a brief exchange of pleasantries (Lena did most of the talking; Sergei sat in the corner with his legs crossed, smoking) Tatarsky was introduced as the writer. He sat down facing the client, clanging the Rolex against the edge of the desk as he did so, and opened up his notebook. It immediately became clear that the client had nothing in particular to say. Without the assistance of a powerful hallucinogen it was hard to feel inspired by the details of his business - he droned on most of the time about some kind of oven-trays with a special non-stick coating. Tatarsky listened with his face half-turned away, nodding and doodling meaningless flourishes in his notebook. He surveyed the room out of the corner of his eye - there was nothing interesting to be seen there, either, if you didn’t count the misty-blue reindeer-fur hat, obviously very expensive, that was lying on the upper shelf in an empty cupboard with glass doors.

  As promised, after a few minutes the pager on his belt rang. Tatarsky unhooked the little black plastic box from his belt. The message on the display said: ‘Welcome to route 666.’

  ‘Some joker, eh?’ thought Tatarsky.

  ‘Is it from Video International?’ Sergei asked from the comer.

  ‘No,’ Tatarsky replied, following his lead. ‘Those blockheads don’t bother me any more, thank God. It’s Slava Zaitsev’s design studio. It’s all off for today.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Sergei asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘Surely he doesn’t think we’re that desperate for his business…’

  ‘Let’s talk about that later,’ said Tatarsky.

  Meanwhile the client was scowling thoughtfully at his reindeer-fur hat in the glass-fronted cupboard. Tatarsky looked at his hands. They were locked together, and his thumbs were circling around each other as though he was winding in some invisible thread. This was the moment of truth.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid that it could all just come to a full stop?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘You know what kind of times these are. What if everything suddenly collapses?’

  The client frowned and looked in puzzlement, first at Tatarsky and then at his companions. His thumbs stopped circling each other.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he answered, looking up. ‘Who isn’t? You ask some odd questions.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

  Five minutes later the conversation was over. Sergei took a sheet of the client’s headed notepaper with his logo - it was a stylised bun framed in an oval above the letters ‘LCC’. They agreed to meet again in a week’s time; Sergei promised the scenario for the video would be ready by then.

  ‘Have you totally lost your marbles, or what?’ Sergei asked Tatarsky, when they came out on to the street. ‘Nobody asks questions like that.’

  The Mercedes took all three of them to the nearest metro station.

  When he got home, Tatarsky wrote the scenario in a few hours. It was a long time since he’d felt so inspired. The scenario didn’t have any specific storyline. It consisted of a sequence of historical reminiscences and metaphors. The Tower of Babel rose and fell, the Nile flooded, Rome burned, ferocious Huns galloped in no particular direction across the steppes - and in the background the hands of an immense, transparent clock spun round.

  ‘One generation passeth away and another generation cometh,’ said a dull and demonic voice-over (Tatarsky actually wrote that in the scenario), ‘but the Earth abideth for ever.’ But eventually even the earth with its ruins of empires and civilisations sank from sight into a lead-coloured ocean; only a single rock remained projecting above its raging surface, its form somehow echoing the form of the Tower of Babel that the scenario began with. The camera zoomed in on the cliff, and there carved in stone was a bun and the letters ‘LCC’, and beneath them a motto that Tatarsky had found in a book called Inspired Latin Sayings:

  MEDIIS TEMPESTATIBUS PLACIDUS CALM IN THE MIDST OF STORMS LEFORTOVO CONFECTIONERY COMBINE

  In Draft Podium they reacted to Tatarsky’s scenario with horror.

  ‘Technically it’s not complicated,’ said Sergei. ‘Rip off the image-sequence from a few old films, touch it up a bit, stretch it out. But it’s totally off the wall. Even funny in a way.’

  ‘So it’s off the wall.’ Tatarsky agreed. ‘And funny. But you tell me what it is you want. A prize at Cannes or the order?’

  A couple of days later Lena took the client several versions of a scenario written by somebody else. They involved a black Mercedes, a suitcase stuffed full of dollars and other archetypes of the collective unconscious. The client turned them all down without explaining why. In despair Lena showed him the scenario written by Tatarsky.

  She came back to the studio with a contract for thirty-five thousand, with twenty to be paid in advance. It was a record. She said that when he read the scenario the client started behaving like a rat from Hamlin who’d heard an entire wind orchestra.

  ‘I could have taken him for forty grand.’ she said. ‘I was just too slow on the uptake.’

  The money arrived in their account five days later, and Tatarsky received his honestly earned two thousand. Sergei and his team were already planning to go to Yalta to film a suitable cliff, on which the bun carved in granite was supposed to appear in the final frames, when the client was found dead in his office. Someone had strangled him with a telephone cord. The traditional electric-iron marks were discovered on the body, and some merciless hand had stopped the victim’s mouth with a Nocturne cake (sponge soaked in liqueur, bitter chocolate in a distinctly minor key, lightly sprinkled with a tragic hoar-frosting of coconut).

  ‘One generation passeth away and another generation cometh.’ Tatarsky thought philosophically, ‘but thou lookest out always for number one.’

  And so Tatarsky became a copywriter. He didn’t bother to explain himself to any of his old bosses; he simply left the keys of the kiosk on the porch of the trailer where Hussein hung out: there were rumours that the Chechens demanded serious compensation when anyone left one of their businesses.

  It didn’t take him long to acquire new acquaintances and he started working for several studios at the same time. Big breaks like the one with Lefortovo’s calm-amid-storms Confectionery Combine didn’t come very often, unfortunately.

  Tatarsky soon realised that if one in ten projects worked out well, that was already serious success. He didn’t earn a really large amount of money, but even so it was more than he’d made in the retail trade. He would recall his first advertising job with dissatisfaction, discerning in it a certain hasty, shamefaced willingness to sell cheap everything that was most exalted in his soul. When the orders began coming in one after another, he realised that in this particular business it’s always a mistake to be in a hurry, because that way you bring the price way down, and that’s stupid: everything that is most sacred and exalted should only be sold for the highest price possible, because afterwards there’ll be nothing left to trade in. Tatarsky realised, however, that t
his rule did not apply to everyone. The true virtuosos of the genre, whom he saw on TV, somehow managed to sell off all that was most exalted every day of the week, but in a way that provided no formal grounds for claiming they’d sold anything, so the next day they could start all over again with nothing to worry about. Tatarsky couldn’t even begin to imagine how they managed that.

  Gradually a very unpleasant tendency began to emerge: a client would be presented with a project conceived and developed by Tatarsky, politely explain that it was not exactly what was required, and then a month or two later Tatarsky would come across a clip that was quite clearly based on his idea. Trying to discover the truth in such cases was a waste of time.

  After listening to his new acquaintances’ advice, Tatarsky attempted to jump up a rung in the advertising hierarchy and began developing advertising concepts. The work was much the same as he had been doing before. There was a certain magic book, and once you’d read it there was no more need to feel shy of anyone at all or to have any kind of doubts. It was called Positioning: A Battle for your Mind, and it was written by two highly advanced American shamans. Its essential message was entirely inapplicable to Russia - as far as Tatarsky could judge, there was no battle being waged by trademarks for niches in befuddled Russian brains; the situation was more reminiscent of a smoking landscape after a nuclear explosion - but even so the book was useful. If was full of stylish expressions like ‘line extension’ that could be stuck into concepts and dropped into spiels for clients. Tatarsky realised what the difference was between the era of decaying imperialism and the era of primitive capital accumulation. In the West both the client who ordered advertising and the copywriter tried to brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter’s job was to screw with the client’s brains. Tatarsky realised in addition that Morkovin was right and this situation was never going to change. One day, after smoking some especially good grass, he uncovered by pure chance the basic economic law of post-socialist society: initial accumulation of capital is also final.