Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  I entered, carefully closing the door behind me.

  This altar room was the same size as its predecessor, but seemed bigger because of its modern look. The walls were painted white and the floor had been paved with large sand-coloured tiles. Altogether it suggested a moderately prosperous Moscow apartment, except that the designer furniture looked more expensive than that. But there was not much of it: a red sofa and two blue armchairs. On the wall opposite the altar (so far I had not summoned up courage to look in the other direction) hung a plasma TV. Beside it was a bamboo screen with a representation à la Van Gogh of a French night sky, in the illimitable vastness of which burned what looked like hundreds of upturned smart cars. Evidently this was the screen behind which the girls had been told to hide themselves.

  ‘Greetings,’ said a caressingly tender voice. ‘Why don’t you turn round? Look at me; don’t be afraid. You think I’m some sort of Medusa, and just one glance from me is enough to get you stoned? No, no, my boy. We’re too low here to get high, ha ha. Only joking – just my little joke. Couldn’t you raise your eyes and look at me?’

  I raised my eyes.

  The altar niche also bore traces of having been recently refurbished. They were even to be seen on skin of the bat’s neck – where it touched the wall it was stained with white emulsion paint.

  A woman’s face was smiling at me from the middle of the recess – still, as the saying goes, with traces of her former beauty. From all appearances the head was about fifty years old, but in fact was probably more than that because even my untutored eye could see traces of numerous cosmetic procedures and rejuvenating injections. Only the mouth was smiling while the eyes, encircled by immobile skin, looked out full of doubt and alarm.

  The head was crowned by an amazingly elaborate coiffure – a combination of Rastafarian ‘let’s-share-a-joint’ dreadlocks and the cool glamour of a Snow Queen. Below it tumbled a shock of piebald dreads into which were woven beads and bangles of various sizes, while above it the hair had been teased up into a fan of four peacock feathers linked by a shell of golden chains and threads. The tracery of this glittering polygon made one think of a crown. As a hairdo it was certainly impressive: I thought how good it would have looked in the Alien vs. Predator film – on the head of some sharp-toothed cosmic sow. Atop this tired and puffy female face, however, it did look rather absurd.

  ‘Well then, come to me. Come to Mummy,’ cooed the head. ‘Let me feast my eyes on you.’

  I came close up to her, and we kissed one another three times in the Russian fashion, delicately passing the lips to brush the cheek near the mouth.

  I was amazed by the head’s manoeuvrability. First she seemed to fly at me from one side, then instantly appear at the other, and finally back to the starting point. During the kiss I just had time to turn my eyes, no more.

  ‘Ishtar Borisovna,’ said the head. ‘Ishtar to you. Don’t imagine I address everyone like that, only boys as pretty as you, ha ha …’

  ‘Rama the Second,’ I introduced myself.

  ‘I know. Sit down. No, wait a moment. How about a little cognac to celebrate our meeting?’

  ‘Ishtar Borisovna, you’re not to have any more today,’ protested a severe young female voice from behind the screen.

  ‘Oh, it’s only to toast our acquaintance,’ said the head. ‘Five grams apiece, that’s all. Don’t worry, the young man will help me.’

  She nodded towards the altar table.

  Here total disorder reigned. The marble slab was piled high with glossy magazines, all muddled up with cosmetic jars and bottles of expensive liquor. Right in the middle of the chaos bulked a massive, heavy laptop computer, the kind one could use as a replacement for a desktop. I noticed that the printed matter on the table was not confined to unadulterated glamour: among the magazines were titles such as Your Property and Refurbishment in Moscow.

  ‘There’s the cognac,’ said Ishtar. ‘And wee glasses too. Don’t worry, they’re clean …’

  From the table I took the bottle of Hennessy XO, whose shape reminded me of the stone females from the early altar rooms I had seen, and poured some cognac into the large cut-crystal goblets the head had referred to as ‘wee glasses’. To me they looked more like vases than glasses – they took just about the whole bottle. No objection was raised to this.

  ‘Good,’ said Ishtar. ‘You do the clinking yourself … and then help Mummy.’

  I tinkled one glass against the other and held one out, not knowing what I should do next.

  ‘Tip it up, don’t be afraid …’

  I inclined the glass and the head deftly dived down below it to catch the yellow-brown stream. Not a single drop reached the floor. It made me think of midair refuelling. Instead of a neck, Ishtar had a furry, sinewy stem more than a metre long, which made her look like an animated tree-growing mushroom.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating the blue armchair placed beside the altar. I sat on the edge of it, sipped a little cognac and put the glass on the table.

  The head smacked its lips once or twice and closed its eyes in contemplation. I had enough experience of vampires to know what this meant. I passed my hand over my neck and looked at my fingers – and there, sure enough, was a tiny red spot. Obviously she had managed to bite me as we kissed. Opening her eyes, she fixed them on me.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I said, ‘when someone …’

  ‘Well, I do like it,’ interrupted the head, ‘especially when I have a drink. I’m allowed … Well, you know … Hello Rama. Roma as was. You had a difficult childhood, you poor, poor boy.’

  ‘Why difficult?’ I replied, embarrassed. ‘It was a childhood like any other.’

  ‘You’re right, a childhood like any other. That’s why it was difficult. Everyone in our country has a difficult childhood. It’s so as to prepare a person for life as a grown-up. Which is going to be so difficult it will totally screw you up.’

  Ishtar sighed and again smacked her lips. I could not work out whether she was savouring my red liquid, or the cognac, or both at the same time.

  ‘You don’t like being a vampire, do you, Rama?’ she concluded.

  ‘Why do you say that? It’s pretty good, really.’

  ‘When people like it, they don’t live as you do. They want to spend every day as if it was a jolly Halloween holiday. Like your friend Mithra. But you … You were thinking about your soul again two nights ago, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was,’ I conceded.

  ‘What do you think a soul is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Our people have already asked me that.’

  ‘So how can you think about it when you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘Well, you can see that for yourself.’

  ‘Certainly … Listen, do you think about the meaning of life as well?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I replied, embarrassed.

  ‘About how the world came into being? And about God?’

  ‘That too. Yes, I have done.’

  Ishtar frowned, as if trying to decide what was to be done with me. A tiny wrinkle appeared on the smooth surface of her forehead. Then it disappeared and all was smooth again.

  ‘I do understand you,’ she said. ‘And I do a lot of thinking too. Especially just recently … But I have reasons to. Concrete reasons. You though? You’re so young, you ought to be living and enjoying yourself. Not like us pensioners!’

  It occurred to me that this was how older women often talked, women who had been born under Stalin and who had preserved within themselves a cache of state-sponsored optimism which their schooldays had drummed into their frightened souls. There had been a time when I too had accepted the blister raised by such a burn as the stigmata of the sacred flame. But my course of degustations had cured me of this misapprehension.

  Ishtar glanced at my glass and then at me, pulled a sour face, t
hen winked and stretched her mouth into a smile. The whole pantomime took less than a second – her grimaces were so quick they were more like a nervous tic.

  I understand what was required. Getting up, I took my glass from the table and we repeated the aerial refuelling procedure. Ishtar made no sound by which anyone sitting behind the screen could interpret what was going on. I took my seat again. Ishtar knitted her brow with an air of martyrdom and expelled a deep sigh.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is how matters stand. I am a Goddess all right, but that does not mean I shall be able to give you any intelligent answers to your questions. You see, the realm in which I am a Goddess is a very constricted one. What you should do is this. You should seek out a vampire by the name of Osiris. He is the guardian of traditional lore. Tell him I sent you. He will explain everything to you.’

  ‘How will I find him?’

  ‘Ask someone. Only don’t mention it to Enlil. They are brothers, and have been in a quarrel for many years. I’ve also fallen out with Osiris, you might say.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It wasn’t really about anything specific. It’s just that he lost contact with me. He’s a Tolstoyan.’

  ‘A Tolstoyan?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes. Do you know anything about them?’

  ‘No. Never heard of them.’

  ‘Tolstoyan vampires appeared at the beginning of the last century,’ said Ishtar. ‘The ideas of Count Tolstoy were very fashionable then. The simple life. The sufferings of the people, return to basic truths, all that sort of thing. Some of our people were also attracted to it and were tempted to follow the simple life. But how is a vampire going to simplify his life? They decided not to suck bablos any more and go back to pure red liquid. But without killing anybody, because after all they were Tolstoyans. So there aren’t many left now, but Osiris is one of them.’

  ‘How did he get into it?’

  ‘Drugs – that’s what I think, if I’m honest. Narcotics and all sorts of stupid books. You’ll have your fill of talk if you speak with him. He can fuck your brains as well as Enlil can, only from the other direction …’

  She laughed. I got the impression that the brandy she had drunk was already having its effect.

  ‘What is bablos?’ I asked

  ‘Didn’t Enlil tell you anything about it?’

  ‘He started to. About the life-force a man radiates into space whenever he thinks about money. Aggregate “M-5”. But he said I would learn the rest … here. If I am considered worthy.’

  ‘Oy, give me a break,’ groaned Ishtar. ‘Considered worthy, my foot. Double checking, triple checking. I have no secrets from anybody. If you want to know something, just ask me.’

  ‘Bablos – does the word come from bablo, the Russian slang for money?’

  Ishtar tittered, and I heard the girls behind the screen laughing as well.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bablos is a really ancient word. It may be the very oldest which has come down to us. It has the same root as “Babylon”, and that in turn comes from the Akkadian word “bab-ilu” which means “the gates of God”. Bablos is a sacred drink that turns vampires into gods.’

  ‘Is that why we have names like we do?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes bablos is called “red liquid”. But Enlil goes all scientific when he speaks of it: Aggregate “M-5”, the ultimate condition of money. It’s condensed human life-force.’

  ‘Does one drink bablos?’

  ‘One drinks cognac. One sucks bablos. There’s not much of it.’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘I think there’s a bit of confusion here. Enlil Maratovich told me that “red liquid” is the correct term for human …’

  ‘Blood,’ broke in Ishtar. ‘With me you can call it that.’

  But by now I was finding it difficult to say the word.

  ‘He was saying that vampires stopped drinking red liquid when they developed human beings to the point where they could produce money.’

  ‘Quite correct,’ said Ishtar. ‘But we are still vampires, so we cannot entirely do without blood. Otherwise we would lose our identity and our roots. What is money? It is the symbolic blood of the world. Everything depends on it, both for humans and for us. But the manner in which we depend on it is different, because we live in the real world whereas human beings live in the world of illusions.’

  ‘Why do they? Surely they cannot all be so stupid?’

  ‘They are not stupid. It’s simply the way life is arranged. People are born into the world in order to create bablos out of Glamour concentrate. It has different names in different eras, but the formula of human destiny has not changed for many centuries.’

  ‘What is that formula?’

  ‘“Illusion – money – illusion”. Do you know what is the principal characteristic of mankind as a biological species? People are constantly chasing after visions that arise within their heads. But for some reason they do not capture them there inside their heads, where they appear, but pursue them in the real physical world, on which the visions are merely superimposed. And then, when the visions dissipate, the man stops and says to himself: oh Mama, what was that? Where am I, and why am I, and what am I supposed to do now? This syndrome applies not just to individuals, but to entire civilisations. To live amidst illusions is the natural habitat for people just as it is for a grasshopper to sit in the grass. Because it is precisely human illusions that produce bablos …’

  They’re obsessed with that bloody grasshopper, I thought. All the same, there was something very dispiriting about these older vampires always trying to talk to me in language they thought I would understand.

  ‘What does it mean, to live in the real world?’ I asked.

  ‘It was very well put by Count Dracula. He said, “The image is nothing, the thirst is everything.”’

  ‘Is there a formula for vampires’ destiny?’

  ‘Yes. “Red liquid – money – red liquid”. If we forget about political correctness, “blood – money – bablos”. The red liquid in the formula is human, but not the bablos.’

  ‘But how can “red liquid” be the name for both bablos and human … er, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Because,’ answered Ishtar, ‘they are the same thing on different levels of the dialectical spiral. Not only in their colour but also in their essential quality. Like, for instance, beer and cognac …’

  Pronouncing the word ‘cognac’ she glanced at the table, then at me, and winked. Trying not to make any noise, I poured out the remainder of the Hennessy XO into my glass and thence into the mouth of the head. Again with great agility she dived under the glass, and not a drop fell to the floor.

  I could not work out where the cognac could be going to, once she had drunk it. Presumably there was some sort of craw in her neck. At all events, the full effect of the alcohol was now visible. Her face was flushed, and I could see what I had not noticed before, lines of scars from plastic surgery just below the ears.

  I heard a meaningful cough behind the screen, from the unseen girl. I decided Ishtar would not get any more spirits from me.

  ‘But the difference consists in the degree of concentration of the essence,’ went on Ishtar. ‘There are five litres of red liquid in a man. But in the whole of his life no more than a gram of bablos can be extracted from him. Do you see?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You can get a whole gram from a WASP in America. Our Russkies are far stingier … I wish I had some to offer you. Hey, girls, have we any bablos?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl’s voice behind the screen.

  ‘So you see,’ said Ishtar. ‘The cobbler has no shoes. I’m the one who makes the stuff, and I don’t have any.’

  ‘How do you make it?’

  ‘Would you like to know the complete technological process? Want to creep under my skirts? Bablos is my milk …’<
br />
  Obviously I had once again failed wholly to mask my feelings, because Ishtar burst out laughing. I bit my lip, pasting on to my face a serious and respectful expression. She found this even more amusing.

  ‘Enlil gave you the drawing from a dollar bill, didn’t he?’ she asked. ‘The one with the pyramid and the eye? That shows how the production is achieved technologically, and it is also at the same time my allegorical portrait. Well, not precisely mine, but any Ishtar in any country …’

  ‘You’re much prettier,’ I put in.

  ‘Thank you. The pyramid is the body of the goddess in which the bablos is condensed. The significance of the eye in the triangle is that it represents a disposable head which allows the goddess to see humans and restore contact with them after any catastrophe or major shift in their world. The eye is separate from the pyramid, therefore it makes no difference to vampires what people might believe in, or what kind of paper currency might be circulating among them in a hundred years’ time – dollars or dinars. We are like deepwater fish – we are not disturbed by any hurricane which may arise on the surface; it does not touch us.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘And about me being prettier – well, you’re not very good at pretending. You’re very amusing, all the same … By the way, thanks for your thoughts about my hairdo. I’ll bear them in mind.’

  I had said nothing to her about her coiffure, but realised that my initial impression must have had time to embed itself in my red liquid.

  ‘Please forgive me,’ I said, shamefacedly.

  ‘No offence, I’m not a fool. You’re quite right. The only thing is, I too get bored and lonely. After all, I have to watch television, and read glossy magazines, and now there’s the Internet. And they’re all so full of advertisements! They keep on at you: “Buy it! Because you’re worth it,” ha ha …’

  Ishtar cackled with laughter again, and I realised she was now completely drunk.

  ‘I do believe it,’ she continued. ‘I know I’m worth it, because I’m the one who keeps the whole schmear on the road. But I can’t go off and buy a Learjet, can I? Or a yacht … well I could, as a matter of fact, but what would I do with it? I tell you what, forget the damn yacht … I saw an ad just a while ago. In a magazine – there it is, have a look …’