Babylon

CHAPTER 8. Safe Haven

The lift that was elevating Tatarsky towards his new job contained only a single solitary graffito, but even that was enough to make it clear at a glance that the heart of the advertising business beat somewhere close at hand. The graffito was a variation on a classic theme, the advertisement for Jim Beam whisky in which a simple basic hamburger evolved into a complex, multi-tiered sandwich, then the sandwich became an even more intricate baguette, and finally the baguette turned back into the basic hamburger, which all went to show that everything returns to its origins. Traced out on the wall in gigantic three-dimensional letters casting a long drawn shadow were the words: FUCK YOU.

Written below it in small letters was the original Jim Beam slogan: ‘You always get back to the basics.’

Tatarsky was simply delighted at the way the entire evolutionary sequence implied in the inscriptions had simply been omitted - he could sense the laconic hand of a master at work. What was more, despite the risque nature of the subject, there wasn’t even the slightest trace of Freudianism in the text.

It was quite possible that the unknown master was one of his two colleagues who also worked for Khanin. They were called Seryozha and Malyuta, and they were almost complete opposites. Seryozha, a short man with light hair, wore gold-rimmed spectacles and strove with all his might to resemble a Western copywriter, but since he didn’t know what a Western copywriter actually looked like and relied on nothing but his own strange ideas about the matter, the impression he actually produced was of something touchingly Russian and very nearly extinct.

Malyuta, a robust slob in a dirty denim suit, was Tatarsky’s comrade in misfortune - he had also suffered from his romantically-minded parents’ love for exotic names - in this case the name borne by Ivan the Terrible’s most infamous lieutenant - but that didn’t make them close. When he began talking to Tatarsky about his favourite theme, geopolitics, Tatarsky said that in his opinion it consisted mostly of an irresolvable conflict between the right hemisphere and the left that certain people suffer with from birth. After that Malyuta began behaving towards him in an unfriendly fashion.

Malyuta was a frightening individual in general. He was a rabid anti-Semite, not because he had any reason to dislike Jews, but because he tried as hard as he could to maintain the image of a patriot, logically assuming there was nothing else a man called Malyuta could do with his life. All the descriptions of the world Malyuta encountered in the analytical tabloids were in agreement that anti-Semitism was an indispensable element of the patriotic image. The result was that, following long efforts to mould his own image, Malyuta had come to resemble most of all a villain from Bin Laden’s gang in a stupid low-budget action movie, which started Tatarsky wondering whether these low-budget action movies were quite so stupid after all, if they were capable of transforming reality after their own image.

When they were introduced, Tatarsky and Khanin’s other two employees exchanged folders of their work; it was a bit like the mutual positioning of dogs sniffing each other’s ass the first time they meet. Leafing through the works in Malyuta’s folder, Tatarsky several times found himself shuddering in horror. The very same future he had playfully described in his concept for Sprite (the folk-costume image of the pseudo-Slavonic aesthetic, visible ever more clearly through the dark, swirling smoke of a military coup) was present in full-blown form in these sheets typed with carbon paper. Tatarsky was particularly badly shaken by the scenario for a Harley-Davidson clip:

A street in a small Russian town. In the foreground a rather blurred, out-of-focus motorcycle, looming over the viewer. In the distance is a church; the bell is ringing. The service has only just finished and people are walking down along the street. Among the passers-by are two young men wearing red Russian shirts outside their trousers - they could be cadets from military college on holiday. Close-up: each of them is carrying a sunflower in his hands. Close-up: a mouth spitting out a husk. Close-up: foreground - the handlebars and petrol tank of the motorcycle, behind it - our heroes, gazing obsessively at the motorcycle. Close-up: fingers breaking seeds out of a sunflower. Close-up: the two heroes exchange glances, one says to the other:

‘Sergeant in our platoon was called Harley. A real bull of a man. But he took to the drink.’

‘Why’d he do that?’

‘You know. No one gives a Russian a chance these days.’

Next frame - a Hassidic Jew of massive proportions comes out of the door of a house wearing a black leather jacket and a black wide-brimmed hat. Beside him our two heroes appear skinny and puny - they involuntarily take a step backwards. The Jew gets on to the motorcycle, starts it up with a roar, and a few seconds later has disappeared from view - all that’s left is a blue haze of petrol smoke. Our two heroes exchange glances again. The one who recalled the sergeant spits out a husk and says with a sigh:

‘Just how long can the Davidsons keep riding the Harleys? Russia, awake!’

(Or: ‘World history. Harley-Davidson’. A possible softer version of the slogan: ‘The Harley motorcycle. Not to say Davidson’s.’)

At first Tatarsky decided it must be a parody, and only after reading Malyuta’s other texts did he realise that for Malyuta sunflowers and sunflower-seed husks were positive aesthetic characteristics. Having been convinced by the analytical tabloids that sunflower seeds were inseparably fused with the image of a patriot, Malyuta had cultivated his love of them as dedicatedly and resolutely as he cultivated his anti-Semitism.

The second copywriter, Seryozha, would leaf for hours at a time through Western magazines, translating advertising slogans with a dictionary, on the assumption that what worked for a vacuum cleaner in one hemisphere might well do the job for a wall-clock ticking away in the other. In his good English he would spend hours interrogating his cocaine dealer, a Pakistani by the name of Ali, about the cultural codes and passwords to which Western advertising made reference. Ali had lived for a long time in Los Angeles and even if he couldn’t provide explanations for the most obscure elements of obscurity, he could at least lie convincingly about what he didn’t understand. Perhaps it was Seryozha’s intimate familiarity with advertising theory and Western culture in general that made him think so highly of the first job Tatarsky based on the secret wow-technology imparted by commendante Che during the seance. It was an advert for a tourist firm organising tours to Acapulco. The slogan was: