Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  The explanation was not a very pleasant one: it was a relict of the Soviet era, the slave mentality he still hadn’t completely squeezed out of himself. Tatarsky thought for a while and came to the conclusion that the slave in the soul of Soviet man was not concentrated in any particular sector, but rather tinged everything that happened in its twilit expanses in a shade of chronic psychological peritonitis, which meant there was no way to squeeze this slave out drop by drop without damaging precious spiritual qualities. This thought seemed important to Tatarsky in the light of his forthcoming collaboration with Pugin, and he rummaged in his pockets for a long time to find a pen to note it down, but couldn’t find one.

  Another passer-by appeared, coming towards him; this time it was definitely no hallucination. That much became clear after Tatarsky’s attempt to borrow a pen - the passer-by took to his heels, running with genuine speed and not looking back.

  Tatarsky simply couldn’t figure out what it was in his behaviour that had such a terrifying effect on the people he met. Perhaps they were frightened by the strange disorder of his speech, the way the words he tried to pronounce fell apart into syllables that then re-attached themselves to each other in a random order. Even so, there was something rather flattering in such an extreme reaction.

  Tatarsky was suddenly struck so forcibly by a certain thought that he stopped dead and slapped his palm against his forehead. ‘Why, of course, it’s the Tower of Babel!’ he thought. ‘They probably drank that mushroom tea and the words began to break apart in their mouths, just like mine. Later they began to call it a confusion of tongues. It would be better to call it a confusion of language…’

  Tatarsky could sense that his thoughts were filled with such power that each one was a stratum of reality, just as important in every respect as the forest he was walking through this evening. The difference was that the forest was a thought he couldn’t stop thinking, no matter how much he wanted to. On the other hand, there was almost no will whatsoever involved in what was going on in his mind. As soon as he had the thought about the confusion of tongues, it became clear to him that the memory of Babylon was the only possible Babylon: by thinking about it, he had summoned it to life; and the thoughts in his head were like trucks loaded with building materials, rushing towards Babylon, making it more and more substantial.

  ‘They called the confusion of tongues the Tower of Babel.’ he thought. ‘But just what is the Tower of Babel?’

  He swayed on his feet, feeling the earth swing round smoothly beneath him. He only stayed upright because the axis of the earth’s rotation ran precisely through the top of his head.

  The confusion of tongues coincides in time with the creation of the tower. When there is a confusion of tongues, then the Tower of Babel starts to rise. Or maybe it doesn’t rise; maybe it’s just that the entrance to the ziggurat opens up. Yes, of course. There’s the entrance right there.

  A pair of large gates decorated with three-dimensional red stars had appeared in the barbed-wire fence along which Tatarsky was walking. Above them blazed a powerful lamp surmounted by a cowl, and the bright-blue light illuminated the numerous graffiti covering the green sheet-metal of the gates. Tatarsky stopped.

  For a minute or two he studied the traditional mid-Russian attempts to write the names of the surrounding villages in Latin script, various names surmounted by crude crowns, symbolic representations of a penis and a vulva, the English verbs ‘to fuck’ and ‘to suck’ in the third person singular of the present tense, but all peppered with incomprehensible apostrophes and abundant logos from the music business. Then his gaze fell on something strange.

  It was a large inscription - significantly larger than all the rest, stretching right across the gates - written in fluorescent orange paint (it gleamed brightly in the rays of the electric lamp): THIS GAME HAS NO NAME.

  The moment Tatarsky read it, all the other ethnographic material ceased to register in his awareness; his consciousness held nothing but these glittering words. He seemed to understand their meaning at a very deep level, and although he could hardly have explained it to anyone else, that meaning undoubtedly required him to climb over the gates. It proved not to be difficult.

  Behind the gates was an abandoned building site, a wide area of waste ground with only sparse indications of any human presence. At the centre of the site stood an unfinished building - either the foundations of some intergalactic radio telescope or a strangely designed multi-storey parking lot: the construction work had been broken off at a stage when only the load-bearing structures and walls were in place. The structure looked like a stepped cylinder made up of several concrete boxes standing one on top of another. Round them wound a spiral roadway on reinforced concrete supports, which ended at the top box, surmounted by a small cubic tower with a red signal lamp.

  Tatarsky thought it must be one of those military construction projects begun in the seventies that had failed to save the empire, but had shaped the aesthetic of ‘Star Wars’. He recalled Darth Vader and his asthmatic wheezing and marvelled at what a wonderful metaphor he was for the career communist: probably somewhere on his starship he had a dialysis machine and two teams of cardiologists, and Tatarsky recalled vaguely that there had been hints at something of the kind in the film. But in his present state thinking about Darth Vader was dangerous.

  The unfinished building was illuminated by three or four floodlights that plucked patches of it out of the gloom - sections of the concrete wall, the spiral road and the upper tower with its winking signal light. If not for that red beacon, the building’s incompleteness could have been taken in the darkness for the dilapidation of age, and it might have been a thousand or even a full ten thousand years old. But then, thought Tatarsky, the beacon could be powered by some unimaginable ancient electricity transmitted under the ground from Egypt or Babylon.

  Recent traces of man were only visible by the gates, where he was standing. There was something like the branch office of a military unit here - several living trailers, a boom, a board with a fire bucket and a crowbar, and a stand with a poster showing identical soldiers with a strange self-absorption imprinted on their faces demonstrating various training formations. Tatarsky was not in the least bit surprised when he saw an immense mushroom with a tin-sheet cap and a telephone hanging on its stalk-post - he realised it must be the sentry post. At first he was sure there was no sentry on duty, but then he saw that the mushroom’s conical cap was painted red and decorated with symmetrical white spots.

  ‘Nothing’s quite as simple as it seems,’ he whispered.

  That very moment a quiet, mocking voice spoke somewhere close beside him: ‘This game has no name. It will never be the same.’

  Tatarsky swung round. There was no one anywhere near him, and he realised it was an auditory hallucination. He felt a bit scared, but despite everything, what was taking place held a strangely delightful promise.

  ‘Onwards,’ he whispered, leaning forward and slipping quickly through the murk towards the road that led to the ziggurat. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘it’s just a multi-storey carpark.’

  ‘With hanging gardens,’ the voice in his head added quietly.

  The fact that the voice spoke in Russian convinced Tatarsky it was a hallucination, but it reminded him once again of the confusion of tongues. As though in response to his thought the voice pronounced a long phrase in a strange language with a large number of sibilants. Tatarsky decided to ignore it, especially since he had already set foot on the spiral ascent.

  From the distance he had failed to appreciate the true dimensions of the building. The road was wide enough for two trucks to pass each other (‘Or chariots,’ the voice added gleefully, ‘chariots with four-in-hand! Now those were chariots!’).

  It was constructed of concrete slabs, with the joints between them left unsealed. Tall plants protruded from the joints - Tatarsky didn’t know what they were called, but he had known since he was a child that h
e could use their tough stems in his shoes instead of shoe laces. From time to time wide gaps appeared in the wall to his right, leading into the body of the ziggurat. Inside there were wide open spaces littered with building waste. The road constantly disappeared round the comer ahead, seeming to break off in mid-air, and Tatarsky walked carefully, clinging to the wall with one hand. On one side the tower was illuminated by the floodlights from the building site, and on the other by the moon, suspended in a gap in a high cloud. He could hear an open door banging in the wind somewhere up above, and the same wind brought the distant sound of dogs barking. Tatarsky slackened his pace until he was walking really slowly.

  Something crunched under his foot. It was an empty cigarette pack. When he picked it up and moved into a patch of light, he saw it was a pack of Parliament Menthol. But there was something else much more surprising about it: on the front of the pack there was an advertising hologram showing three palm trees.

  ‘It all fits,’ he whispered and carried on, keeping a careful eye on the ground beneath his feet.

  The next discovery was waiting one tier higher - he spotted the coin gleaming in the moonlight from a distance. He’d never seen one like it before: a Republic of Cuba three-peso piece with a portrait of Che Guevara. Tatarsky was not at all surprised that a Cuban coin should be lying on a military construction site - he remembered the final sequence of the film Golden Eye, with that immense Soviet-made antenna rising up out of the water somewhere on the Isle of Freedom. This was obviously the payment received for its construction. He replaced the coin in the empty Parliament pack and put it in his pocket, completely confident that there was something else waiting for him.

  He wasn’t mistaken. The road was approaching its end at the very top box, in front of which lay a heap of building waste and broken crates. Tatarsky noticed a strange little cube lying in among the waste and picked it up. It was a pencil sharpener in the shape of a television, and someone had drawn a large eye on its plastic screen with a ballpoint pen. The sharpener was old - they used to make them like that in the seventies -and it was remarkable that it was so well preserved.

  Cleaning off the mud clinging to the sharpener, Tatarsky slipped it into his inside pocket and looked round, wondering what to do next. He was afraid to go into the box: it was dark in there and he could easily break his neck if he fell into some hole or other. Somewhere up above, a door banged once again in the wind, and Tatarsky remembered there was a small tower on the summit of the building, with a red beacon lamp. He couldn’t see the tower from where he was standing, but there was a short fire-ladder leading upwards.

  The small tower turned out to be the housing where the lift motors should have been. The door was open. On the wall right inside the door there was a light-switch. When Tatarsky turned on the light he saw the lingering traces of a soldier’s harsh life: a wooden table, two stools and and empty beer bottles in the corner. It was obvious that these were the traces of a soldier’s life, and not any other, from the magazine photographs of women stuck to the walls. Tatarsky studied them for a while. He thought that one of them, running across the sand of a tropical beach entirely naked and with a golden suntan, looked very beautiful. It wasn’t even so much her face and figure, but the incredible, indefinable freedom of her movement, which the photographer had managed to capture. The sand, the sea and the leaves of the palm trees on the photograph were all so vivid that Tatarsky heaved a heavy sigh - the meagre Moscow summer was already over. He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he fancied he could hear the distant murmur of the sea.

  He sat down at the table, laid out his trophies on it and looked them over once again. The palms on the empty Parliament pack and on the photograph were very similar, and he thought they must grow in the same place, in a part of the world he would never get to see - not even in the Russian style, from inside a tank - and if he ever did, it would only be when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:

  The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October ‘93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament (digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:

  Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland

  Parliament slogan:

  THE MOTHERLAND’S#1 SMOKE!

  "Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.

  Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the sand as a souvenir, but he decided against it. He turned out the light, went out on to the roof and stopped to allow his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

  ‘What now?’ he thought. To the station.’

  CHAPTER 5. Poor Folk

  The adventure in the forest outside Moscow proved positively stimulating to Tatarsky’s professional abilities. Scenarios and concepts now came to him far more easily, and Pugin even paid him a small advance for his slogan for Parliament: he said Tatarsky had hit the bull’s-eye, because until ‘ 93 a pack of Parliament had cost the same as a pack of Mariboro, but after those famous events Parliament had rapidly become the most popular cigarette in Moscow, and now they cost twice as much. Subsequently, however, ‘the smoke of the Motherland’ was dispersed without a trace into the thick gloom of a winter that arrived unexpectedly early. The only dubious echo of the slogan left in the snowbound advertising space of Moscow was the phrase: ‘From ship to ball’, another borrowing - by an unknown colleague of Tatarsky’s - from the poet Griboedov. It was to be glimpsed at one time on large hoarding advertisements for menthol cigarettes - a yacht, blue sea and sky, a peaked cap with a sunburst and a pair of long legs. Tatarsky felt a pang of jealousy at this, but not a very powerful one - the girl in the menthol advert had been chosen to suit the taste of such a wide target group that the text seemed spontaneously to read as: ‘From ship to balls’.

  For some reason the wave of fly-agaric energy that had swept through his nervous system found its finest outlet in texts for cigarettes - probably for the same reason that the first truly successful experience of love or narcotics determines your preferences for the rest of your life. His next great success (not only in his own opinion, but in the opinion of Pugin, who surprised him once again by paying him) was a text written for Davidoff cigarettes, which was symbolic, because his career had started with them. The text was based on an advertisement for Davidoff Classic that was on all the hoardings in the city centre: dark tones, a close-up of a wasting face with the burden of unbearable knowledge glinting in the eyes, and the inscription:

  THE MORE YOU KNOW: DAVIDOFF CLASSIC

  At the first sight of the wise, wrinkled face, Tatarsky immediately began wondering just what it was that this foreign smoker knew. The first explanation to come to mind was rather sombre: a visit to the cancer clinic, an X-ray and a dreadful diagnosis.

  Tatarsky’s project was in total contrast: a light background, a youthful face expressive of ignorant happiness, a white pack with slim gold letters and the text:

  ‘FOR IN MUCH WISDOM IS MUCH SORROW AND HE WHO INCREASES KNOWLEDGE INCREASES GRIEF.’ DAVIDOFF LIGHTS

  Pugin said Davidoff’s agent would be unlikely to be interested, but some other cigarette market leader might very well take it. ‘I’ll have a word with Azadovsky.’ he said casually. ‘He’s got an exclusive on sixteen brands.’ It seemed to Tatarsky he’d heard that name before. He jotted the phrase down in
his notebook and casually dropped it into several conversations with clients, but his natural shyness found expression in the fact that he usually halved the number of brands.

  At the beginning of winter Tatarsky had his one-room flat redecorated after a fashion (against the background of cornflower-blue Soviet-era tiles that were coming away from the wall, the expensive Italian mixer-tap looked like a gold tooth in the mouth of a leper, but he had no money for major renovations). He also bought a new computer, although he had no particular need for it - he’d simply begun to have difficulties getting texts printed out that he’d typed in his favourite word-processing program: one more muffled groan under the iron boot of Microsoft. Tatarsky didn’t feel seriously aggrieved, although he did note the profoundly symbolic nature of the event: his interface program - a medium by its very nature - was becoming the most important message, taking over an incredible amount of computer memory space and resources, and that reminded him very much of a brazen new Russian running the funds for teachers’ salaries through the accounts in his bank.

  The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business, the more questions he had to which he couldn’t find the answer, neither in Al Rice’s Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky that all the themes that Al Rice hadn’t touched on were analysed in Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a second in George Orwell’s 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and become a world-famous advertising guru filled Tatarsky with a mystical, rapturous admiration for his own profession.