“Why are you reading it?” asked Lena.
“Oh, come on!” said Varya. “It’s got all the technical moves in it. There’s this rule — if you want to stay in business, even just stay where you already are, you have to keep growing all the time, because other people are trying to grow too and sideline you.”
Lena felt a strange pang — not exactly envy, not exactly jealousy, not exactly fear. She didn’t say anything, just wrote down the title of the book so she could tell Kima about it, because she knew English.
The ideologist arrived very late.
He got there after dark, when the shish kebabs had already been eaten and the campfires had burned out (they had to be lit again). He was a man about forty years old with pleasant, regular features, like the faces they used to draw on Soviet posters. Everyone was surprised to see him dressed in a full Second World War uniform, including a helmet and waterproof cloak, but the ideologist explained that he’d come from a rehearsal for another function and hadn’t had any time to change. He got straight down to business without any delay.
“You had an explosion,” he said, taking off his helmet. “Well, you almost did, it’s the same thing. The most important thing now is to feel our way into the psychology of this failed terrorist and understand why Ekaterina Simoniuk wanted to inflict such a tragedy upon you. She doesn’t appear to have had any reasons for hatred. In her job she earned more in a month than both her parents do in a year. Why did she try to commit this act? Let’s think about this question for a minute or two.”
While everyone was thinking, the ideologist took off his groundsheet cloak, exposing a soldier’s tunic worn outside his trousers.
“Now let me tell you what I think about this. As everyone knows, before she died, Ekaterina Simoniuk tried to shout the Shahadah, and the security forces are working on the Riyad-us-Saliheen Brigade theory at the moment. But the Chechen terrorist connection here is only secondary. I’ll explain why. . . .”
The ideologist ruffled up his hair several times, as if he was trying to electrify his head. It seemed to work — he frowned and started talking quickly.
“The Shahadah is an Arabic oath pronounced in order to declare a person’s acceptance of Islam. To understand why a Moscow girl born in Ukraine accepted this religion, we must ask ourselves the question: What is modern Islam? According to its leading political theorists, it is a religion of the oppressed. Yes indeed, my friends, of the oppressed. So why, then, did Ekaterina Simoniuk, with her astronomical salary, feel like an oppressed victim in our city? After all, she could indulge herself far more freely than her friends or her parents from Kharkov, let alone her parents’ parents. So why did this girl join the ranks of the Black Widows? That’s the real crux of the matter. Does anyone understand why?”
The man with the breasts muttered something and everyone stared at him. But he didn’t say anything else.
“Then I’ll try to answer this question. You are all familiar, boys and girls, with the doctrine of the Invisible Hand of the Market, which sets everything in its right place by redirecting people and resources to where there is an effective demand. Our life today seems to be arranged like that. But the doctrine of the Invisible Hand proceeds on the assumption that a human being is a rational creature who always makes decisions based on an understanding of his own advantage. The pioneers of the nineties who laid the foundations of our present prosperity — admittedly, with mistakes and excesses — held precisely this view of human nature. But it has all turned out to be far more complicated. The human being is not arranged in the way the economists thought. He or she is motivated by irrational as well as rational factors. Have any of you heard of the so-called ultimatum game?”
There wasn’t anybody on the grass who had.
“It’s a well-known economic experiment to study the motives of human choice. The essential point is simple. You and the person you are playing with are given a certain sum of money. The other person decides at his own discretion how to divide the money between the two of you, and you can accept his decision or reject it. If you accept it, each of you gets the amount that your partner decided on. If you don’t accept it, no one gets anything at all. Got that?”
“Yes,” said voices from out of a darkness with orange sparks flying over it.
“Now this is where the most interesting part starts. The ideal homo economicus, as the theory describes him, should accept any decision made by his partner in the game. After all, even if he is only given one percent, he’s getting money for nothing. And if he rejects his partner’s decision, he misses out completely. But research indicates that most people prefer to end up with nothing if they are offered less than thirty percent of the total sum. It’s irrational. But that’s the way the human brain works.”
“I’d take fifteen percent,” a voice called out.
“And I’d take whatever I was given,” said another voice, “and then I’d come back at night and kill them all.”
“Thank you for those opinions,” the ideologist replied. “But please let me finish. In actual fact it’s much more complicated than that. One secret economics institute in Moscow conducted special research on the ultimatum game, in which an important amendment was made to the standard form of the experiment. The player who had to accept or reject the decision about dividing up the money was shown a photograph, instead of another live player, and then told how that person had apportioned the money. So, they showed the players photographs . . . ”
The ideologist frowned as if he had suddenly recalled something unpleasant.
“We won’t name any names,” he continued, “you already know the top rankings on the Forbes list. Well then, in this case there was a significant deviation from the standard threshold of 70/30. For some reason with these people our fellow citizens would only agree to equal shares.
“Like Sharikov in Heart of a Dog,” an ingratiating voice said out of the darkness. “Divide everything up.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good example,” the ideologist responded. “Let’s not discuss why we have this slide toward a 50/50 threshold. There are many reasons, and they must be sought in our complicated history and culture, in our communal psychology and national character. What is important is to remember that these attitudes exist in our minds, and our enemies are learning to exploit them. That’s why they brainwash us by constantly rotating photographs of various Russian oligarchs like Abramovich and Prokhorov in the mass media and describing their freakish whims and revels. What they’re counting on here is very simple — to provoke in the common man the same feeling that makes the player in the economic ultimatum game give way to a furious desire to restore justice and lose everything in the process. But while in a laboratory experiment, this decision remains no more than a statistic, in real life its results can be tragic.”
The ideologist stopped speaking, as if to give everyone a chance to appreciate the full weight of what he had said. Silence descended on the canal bank.
“Is it hard to take part in the ultimatum game and maintain a rational outlook? Of course it is. But that, boys and girls, is precisely why we must regard ourselves as warriors — oh yes indeed, warriors on the psychological front. Only very recently, one of your sisters-in-arms, Ekaterina Simoniuk, played her own version of the ultimatum game with destiny. And she lost everything, including her own young life. I’m certain that if she was sitting at this campfire with us now, she would be struck, as we all are, by the thought of how important it is to maintain a cool, sober state of mind. All of us — I say ‘us’ because this is my problem too — need to learn to move beyond the irrational, unconscious impulse that destroyed Ekaterina Simoniuk. Do not be envious. Today’s Bentley driver is tomorrow’s cop on the beat, heh-heh. . . .”
“It’s the other way around,” a cheerful young voice shouted from the fire, “today’s cop on the beat is tomorrow’s Bentley driver!”
“That happens too,” the ideologist agreed amicably. “But so what? That’s the way life is. T
o see all this and hold firm — that, if you like, is our own Orthodox jihad. In the genuine, spiritual sense of the word . . .”
He coughed to clear his throat as if embarrassed at such exalted and inspired words, and continued in an ordinary, everyday tone of voice.
“Basically, we have to keep in mind the most important thing, boys and girls. In the modern world there are powerful forces that aspire to exploit our natural human irrationality for their own purposes. And they are often successful. I’m sure that this is what happened in the case of Ekaterina Simoniuk. This tragedy shows just how much impact the media bombardment from London and New York actually has on our minds. Don’t think that you are too smart or above all this. Don’t think that the brainwashing doesn’t work on you, that it’s some kind of foam plastic seventeen point two. The brainwashing even works on me. The only thing we can do is learn to keep our emotions under control. Just remember this: in the age of political technologies, sooner or later our most natural and spontaneous feelings are mobilized in the mercenary interests of others — there are entire teams of professional scoundrels working on that. There is an undeclared war going on, and every time we feel in our hearts a pang of apparently just resentment at the excesses of our wealthy Russian knuckleheads, the oligarchs of London rub their sweaty hands together and laugh. . . .”
“That’s really clever,” Lena thought respectfully, “twisting everything around like that, just like a Möbius strip. I’d never have thought of anything like that. Very smart.”
For some reason the lecture had a counterproductive effect on the silicone-breasted man who was sitting beside Lena. In him, the flame that was supposed to expire flared up instead. He finished off the indeterminate liquid in his flask and started muttering, gradually raising his voice:
“Fancy fucking thinkers . . . One’s worked on the documents, another’s worked out the numbers. And they’ve all got firm handshakes, the bastards. But we’ll still be sucking dick underground, the same as ever. . . .”
“You mean you have clients?” asked Lena.
The man raised his eyes to look at her.
“Sure,” he replied. “Why, don’t you?”
Lena didn’t say anything.
“Where are you from?” the man asked.
“The Malachite Hall,” Lena replied proudly.
“What do you do there?”
“We sing there. Colored to match.”
“The Malachite Hall. . . .” the man muttered. He already seemed out of his mind. “They’ll drink their champagne, and we’ll sing for them, colored to match. And not only sing, we’ll actually fight for the right to sing to them. Compete against each other . . . fucking architects. And how did it all begin, eh? A lack of social justice, that’s how. The fucking Politburo built itself a great big dacha. . . .”
The ideologist listened tensely to this voice of the people and attempted to ride the storm. “That’s right!” he said, raising one finger. “And now, for fuck’s sake, there’s not enough freedom for them. It’s the same thing happening again, not a micron’s difference. They’re pushing the same program. And they want to screw us according to the same schedule.”
“Get lost, you jerk,” the breasted man whined. “Fuck off, you scumbag. . . .”
The ideologist took offense.
“Then perhaps you’ll continue the lecture?” he said. “Since the two of us seem to be giving it together.”
But the breasted man had already lost interest in external reality — he started hiccupping violently, so they dragged him further away from the fire just to be on the safe side.
After the lecture Lena wanted to approach the ideologist, but there were too many people around the fire where he was standing. Primeval red shadows played across the ideologist’s face, and that made his answers seem especially weighty.
“Just think for yourselves, boys and girls — this Kasparov, who needs him? It’s like us sending some Yakut to New York in a t-shirt that says, ‘Brooklyn, Wake Up!’ ”
“But he’s the champion of the world,” someone said uncertainly in the darkness.
“And exactly what is a chess champion?” asked the ideologist, turning toward the voice. “He’s not a prisoner of conscience or some kind of social thinker. He’s something like a man with a very big dick. Only Kasparov hasn’t got it up for years, if you check the tournament tables. Maybe Eduard Limonov is interested in this business for old times’ sake, but what’s it to us? No, boys and girls, the age of political pygmies working for Pindostan is gone forever. Finished. They can sing a final song of farewell, if they like. . . .”
Lena realized that the spiel about Kasparov’s big dick, which brought a flash of enthusiasm from the gathering, was not part of the prepared lecture but an association that had occurred spontaneously to the speaker. As he finished his talk and said good-bye, the ideologist got dressed in something extremely strange. Instead of his tunic, he pulled on a tight-fitting sleeveless rubber garment that ended in a hood with a nipple. A small opening had been cut in the hood for his face, and the garment itself was colored like the Russian flag.
A black Lexus was already waiting for the ideologist. Squeezing himself into the back seat with an inelegant but energetic jerk of his entire body, he shouted a final “So long!” through the window and drove off into the night, dropping long sparks out of the window from the cigarette that the driver had put in his mouth.
“They’ve given him a job at the ministry,” Varya explained. “A nice, cozy spot. But the rest of the mob’s getting the push. They’re preparing for their farewell event, a youth protest called ‘No to Spiritual AIDS.’ Fifty thousand dickheads on Lenin Prospect.”
Then Varya whispered in her ear that Ekaterina Simoniuk hadn’t died the way their bosses had said. She wasn’t planning to blow anyone up, she just gave too much lip to some big-time Caucasian types who were playing in the blue billiard room.
“She just lambasted them from under the table. ‘We don’t want all you wild animals here,’ she said. ‘Go on back to your mountain village, the white mule can give you a blowjob.’ Well, that got them really riled — who likes to hear things like that, when they’ve paid good money, and they’re high on cocaine? They prodded her with a cue and it got her in the eye. It happened by accident, no one meant to kill her. The PR people invented all that stuff about plastic explosives and the Shahadah. There are heaps of them on the staff, but there’s no work — this is a classified project. So they’re trying real hard. But at least the lecture was interesting, wasn’t it?”
•
The visitors entered the Hall of the Singing Caryatids at the tail end of the final spread, when Lena and her girlfriends were wearily purring their way toward the end of the theme from Swan Lake.
There were four of them — a short, fat man in a shaggy robe, two guards in expensive double-breasted suits, and Uncle Pete in a t-shirt that said:
D&G
discourse and glamour
From the abject way Uncle Pete fussed over the fat man, Lena realized he must be someone very important. And then she recognized exactly who it was.
This was incredible. . . .
It was Mikhail Botvinik standing down there, looking exactly like in the photograph that she had spoken to in the minibus — with the same bright blush covering his entire face and the same part in his sparse black hair.
Lena almost fell off her pedestal. So Kima had been telling the truth! Of course, in theory Botvinik could have just dropped in of his own accord — but no power on earth would ever convince Lena of that.
Botvinik jerked his chin upwards in a distinctive gesture that she had seen before on television.
“What are they singing?” he asked.
“Tchaikovsky,” Uncle Pete replied. “Incredibly beautiful music — we took a long time choosing it. Sounds like it’s about some primeval mystery, doesn’t it?”
“Ha,” said Botvinik. “You know which mystery that is? That Tchaikovsky lived with his own co
achman. The coachman was the husband, and Tchaikovsky was the wife. He even took that coachman to Italy with him. There’s your primeval mystery for you, six hundred and eighteen, trunks, my precious trunks.”
“You think that’s what the music’s about?” asked Uncle Pete, startled.
“Of course,” Botvinik replied. “being determines consciousness. Ta-ti-ta-ti ta-ta. . . . That’s the sweet, melting feeling he got when his coachman stuck it up him. . . .”
Lena saw Kima, who was standing opposite her, take her hand off the marble slab and show her two fingers. That was a secret sign. Lena repeated the same gesture for Asya, because she couldn’t see Kima. A few seconds later all four of them started purring “Mondo Bongo” in perfect synchronization.
“Whoa,” said Botvinik, impressed. “How do they do that?”
“They took note of your criticism,” Uncle Pete said with a smile. “And switched to a different composition. You can dance to it with any of the girls, if you like.”
“I’m not some kind of queer, to go shaking my ass about,” Botvinik said and nodded at Lena. “Is she jabbing those two fingers at me?”
“No,” answered Uncle Pete. “They’re coordinating the change of music.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Okay now, Lena,” Uncle Pete said with a wink, “go back to Tchaikovsky. . . .”
Lean gave the sign to Kima, and she passed it on to Vera, who couldn’t see Lena, and the girls switched back smoothly to Swan Lake.
“Not bad,” Botvinik laughed. “I’ll have to bring the guys around.”
He pulled in his stomach, tightened the belt of his robe, and winked at Lena.
The Hall of the Singing Caryatids Page 6