Babylon

WOW! ACAPULYPSE NOW!

‘Right on!’ Seryozha said curtly, and shook Tatarsky by the hand.

Tatarsky in turn was quite genuinely delighted by one of Seryozha’s early works, which the author himself regarded as a failure:

No, you’re not a sailor any more… Your friends will reproach you for your indifference. But you will only smile in reply - you never really were a sailor anyway. All your life you’ve simply been heading for this safe haven.

Malyuta never touched Western magazines - he only ever read the tabloids, or The Twilight of the Gods, always with a bookmark in one and the same place. But soon Tatarsky was astonished to notice that for all their serious differences in intellectual orientation and personal qualities, Seryozha and Malyuta were both sunk equally deeply in the bottomless pit of moutharsing. It was evident in numerous details and traits of behaviour. For instance, when they spoke to Tatarsky about a certain common acquaintance of theirs, both of them in turn described him as follows:

‘You know,’ said Seryozha, ‘in psychological terms he’s something like a novice broker who earns six hundred dollars a month, but is counting on reaching fifteen hundred by the end of the year…’

‘And then,’ added Malyuta, raising a finger, ‘when he takes his dame out to Pizza Hut and spends forty dollars on the two of them he thinks it’s a big deal.’

Immediately following this phrase Malyuta was overwhelmed by the influence of the anal wow-factor: he took out his expensive mobile phone, twirled it between his fingers and made an entirely unnecessary call.

Apart from all that, Seryozha and Malyuta actually turned out a remarkably similar product - Tatarsky realised this when he discovered two works devoted to the same item in their folders.

Two or three weeks before Tatarsky joined the staff, Khanin’s office had submitted a big order to a client. Some shady customers, who urgently needed to sell a large lot of fake runners, had ordered an advert from Khanin for Nike - that was the brand their canvas slippers were disguised to look like. The intention was to off-load the goods at the markets around Moscow, but the lot was so large that the shady characters, having mumbled a few incantations over their calculators, had decided to shell out for a television advert in order to accelerate their turnover. And the kind of ad they wanted had to be heavy stuff - ‘the kind,’ as one of them said, ‘that’ll do their heads in straight off. Khanin submitted two versions, Seryozha’s and Malyuta’s. Seryozha, who read at least ten textbooks on advertising written in English while he was working on the job, produced the following text:

The project employs an American cultural reference familiar to the Russian consumer from the mass media - that is, the mass suicide of members of the occult group Heaven’s Gate from San Diego, which was intended to allow them to make the transition to their subtle bodies so that they could travel to a comet. All those who killed themselves were lying on simple two-level bunk-beds; the video sequence was shot strictly in black and white. The faces of the deceased were covered with simple black cloth, and on their feet they were wearing black Nike runners with a white symbol, the so-called ‘swoosh’. In aesthetic terms the proposed video is based on an Internet clip devoted to the event - the picture on the television screen duplicates the screen of a computer monitor, in the centre of which well-known frames from a CNN report are repeated in sequence. At the end, when the motionless soles of the runners with the inscription ‘Nike’ have been displayed for long enough, the shot shifts to the end-board of a bed with a sheet of Whatman paper glued to it, on which a ‘swoosh’ looking like a comet has been drawn with a black felt-tip pen:

The camera moves lower, and vse see the slogan, written in the same felt-tip pen:

While Malyuta was working on his scenario he didn’t read anything at all except the gutter tabloids and so-called patriotic newspapers with their scatologically eschatalogical positioning of events; but he obviously must have watched a lot of films. His version went like this:

A street in a small Vietnamese village lost deep in the jungle. In the foreground a typical third-world country Nike workshop - we recognise it from the sign: NIKE sweatshop No. 1567903. All around there are tall tropical trees, a section of railway line suspended on the village fence rings like a bell. Standing in the doorway of the workshop is a Vietnamese with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, wearing khaki trousers and a black shirt, which automatically bring to mind the film The Deer Hunter. Close-up: hands on an automatic rifle. The camera enters the door and we see two rows of work-tables with workers who are chained in place sitting at them. The scene brings to mind the galley scene from the film Ben Hur. All of the workers are wearing incredibly old, torn and tattered American military uniforms. They are the last American prisoners of war. On the table in front of them there are Nike runners in various stages of completion. All of the prisoners of war have curly black beards and hooked noses. (This last phrase was written in between the lines in pencil - evidently the inspiration had struck Malyuta after the text had been printed.) The prisoners of war are dissatisfied with something - at first they murmur quietly, then they start banging on the tables with the half-glued runners. There are shouts of: ‘We demand a meeting with the American consul!’ and, ‘We demand a visit from a UN commissioner!’ Suddenly a burst of automatic rounds is fired into the ceiling, and the noise instantly ceases. The Vietnamese in the black shirt is standing in the doorway, with a smoking automatic in his hands. The eyes of everyone in the room are fixed on him. The Vietnamese strokes his automatic rifle, then jabs his finger in the direction of the nearest table with half-finished runners and says in broken English: ‘Just do it!’

Voice-over: ‘Nike. Good:2, Evil:0.’

Once when he caught Khanin alone in his office, Tatarsky asked: ‘Tell me, this work Malyuta produces - does it ever get accepted?’

‘It does.’ said Khanin, putting aside the book he was reading. ‘Of course it does. The runners may be American, but they have to be sold to the Russian mentality. So it all suits very well. We edit it a bit, of course, so as not to fall foul of the law.’

‘And you say the advertisers like it?’

‘The advertisers we have here have to have it explained to them what they like and what they don’t. And anyway, why does any advertiser give us an ad?’

Tatarsky shrugged.

‘No, go on, tell me.’

‘To sell product.’

"That’s in America - to sell product.’

"Then so he can feel like a big-shot.’

"That was three years ago,’ Khanin said in a didactic tone. ‘Things are different now. Nowadays the client wants to show the big guys who keep a careful eye on what’s happening on screen and in real life that he can simply flush a million dollars down the tubes; and for that, the worse his advert is, the better. The viewer is left with the feeling that the client and the producers are absolute idiots, but then’ - Khanin raised one finger and his eyes twinkled wisely - ‘the signal indicating how much money it costs reaches the viewer’s brain. The final conclusion about the client is as follows - he may be a total cretin, but his business is doing so well he can afford to put out any old crap over and over again. And that’s the best kind of advertising there can possibly be. A man like that will get credit anywhere, no sweat.’

‘Complicated,’ said Tatarsky.

‘Sure it is. There’s more to it than reading your Al Rice.’

‘And where can you gather such profound insight into life?’ asked Tatarsky.

‘From life itself,’ Khanin said with feeling.

Tatarsky looked at the book lying on the desk in front of him. It looked exactly like a Soviet-era secret edition of Dale Carnegie for Central Committee members - there was a three-digit copy number on the cover and below that a typed title:

Virtual Business and Communications. There were several bookmarks set in the book: on one of them Tatarsky read the words: ‘Suggest, schizo-blocks’.

‘Is that something to do with computers?’ he asked.

Khanin picked up the book and hid it away in the drawer of his desk.

‘No,’ he replied unwillingly. ‘It actually is about virtual business.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘To cut it short,’ said Khanin, ‘it’s business in which the basic goods traded are space and time.’

‘How’s that?’

‘It’s just like things are here in Russia. Look around: the country hasn’t produced anything for ages. Have you done a single advertising project for a product produced here?’

‘I can’t recall one,’ Tatarsky replied. ‘Hang on, though, there was one - for Kalashnikov. But you could call that an image ad.’

‘There, you see,’ said Khanin. ‘What’s the most important feature of the Russian economic miracle? Its most important feature is that the economy just keeps on sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, while business keeps on growing stronger and expanding into the international arena. Now try this: what do the people you see all around you trade in?’

‘What?’

"Things that are absolutely non-material. Air time and advertising space - in the newspapers or out on the street. But time in itself can’t be air time, just as space in itself can’t be advertising space. The first person who managed to unite time and space via the fourth dimension was the physicist Einstein. He had this theory of relativity - maybe you’ve heard of it. Soviet power did it as well, only via a paradox - you know that. They lined up the guys in the camps, gave them shovels and told them to dig a trench from the fence as far as lunchtime. But now it’s very easily done - one minute of prime air time costs the same as a two-column colour ad in a major magazine.’

‘Then that means the fourth dimension is money?’ asked Tatarsky.

Khanin nodded.

‘Not only that.’ he said, ‘from the point of view of monetarist phenomenology, it is the substance from which the world is constructed. There was an American philosopher called Robert Pirsig who believed that the world consists of moral values; but that was just the way things could seem in the sixties - you know, the Beatles, LSD, all that stuff. A lot more has become clear since then. Have you heard about the cosmonauts’ strike?’

‘I think I heard something,’ Tatarsky answered, vaguely recalling some newspaper article.

‘Our cosmonauts get twenty to thirty thousand dollars a flight. The Americans get two hundred or three hundred thousand. So our guys said: "We’re not going to fly at thirty grand; we want to fly at three hundred grand too." What does that mean? It means they’re not really flying towards the twinkling points of light of those unknown stars, but towards absolutely specific sums of hard currency. Such is the nature of the cosmos. And the non-linear nature of time and space is expressed in the fact that we and the Americans burn equal amounts of fuel and fly equal numbers of kilometres in order to arrive at absolutely different amounts of money. That is one of the fundamental secrets of the Universe…’

Khanin suddenly broke off and began to light a cigarette, clearly winding up the conversation. ‘Now go and get some work done,’ he said.

‘Can I read the book some time?’ Tatarsky asked, nodding towards the desk where Khanin had hidden his secret text. ‘For my general development?’

‘All in good time,’ said Khanin, giving him a sweet smile.

Even without any secret handbooks Tatarsky was already beginning to find his bearings in the commercial relations of the age of virtual business. As he was quick to realise from observing the behaviour of his colleagues at work, the basis of these relations was so-called ‘black PR’, or as Khanin pronounced it in full: ‘black public relations’. The first time Tatarsky heard the words the bard of the Literary Institute was resurrected briefly in his soul, intoning in sombre tones:

‘Black public relations, uniting all nations…’ But there wasn’t actually any real romantic feeling behind this abbreviation, and it was entirely devoid of the baggage of negative connotations ascribed to it by those who use the phrase ‘black PR’ to mean an attack mounted via the mass media.

It was actually quite the opposite - advertising, like other forms of human activity in the vast, cold expanses of Russia, was inextricably intertwined with the ‘black cash flow’, which in practical terms meant two things. Firstly, journalists were quite willing to deceive their newspapers and magazines by extracting black cash from anyone who more or less naturally fell within their field of attention - and it wasn’t just restaurant-owners who wanted to be compared with Maxim’s who had to pay, but writers who wanted to be compared with Marquez, which meant that the boundary between literary and restaurant criticism grew ever finer and more arbitrary. Secondly, copywriters took pleasure in deceiving their agencies by finding a client through them and then concluding an unwritten deal with him behind their bosses’ backs. After he’d taken a good look around, Tatarsky took a cautious first step on to this fruitful ground, where he met with immediate success: he managed to sell his slightly modified project for Finlandia vodka (the new slogan was: ‘Reincarnation Now!’).

Usually he dealt with lowly cogs in the PR machinery, but this time he was summoned to the owner of the firm that intended to take on the dealership for Finlandia, who was a dour and serious-minded youth. Having read several times through the two pages Tatarsky had brought, he chuckled, thought for a moment, rang his secretary and asked her to prepare the paperwork. Half an hour later a stunned Tatarsky emerged on to the street, carrying in his inside pocket an envelope containing two and a half thousand dollars and a contract for the full and unconditional transfer of all rights to the young man’s company.

For those changed times this was an absolutely fantastic haul.

But a couple of months later Tatarsky accidentally discovered an incredibly insulting little detail: it turned out Finlandia’s future distributor hadn’t paid up because he’d decided to use his text in his advertising, but because he was afraid Tatarsky might sell it to Absolut or Smirnoff dealers. Tatarsky even started to write a sonnet dedicated to this event, but after a couple of minutes discarded it as non-functional. In general, it was hard to believe that not so very long ago he had been wont to spend so much time searching for meaningless rhymes that had long since been abandoned by the poetry of the market democracies. It seemed simply inconceivable that only a few short years ago life had been so gentle and undemanding that he could waste entire kilowatts of mental energy in dead-end circuits of his brain that never paid back the investment.

Tatarsky suspected that black PR was a more widespread and significant phenomenon than just a means of survival for certain protein-based life-forms in the era of the mass media; but he couldn’t connect up his heterogeneous suspicions concerning the true nature of the phenomenon to form a clear and unified understanding. There was something missing.

‘Public relations are people’s relations with each other,’ he jotted down in confused fashion in his notebook.

People want to earn money in order to gain freedom, or at least a breathing space from their interminable suffering. And we copywriters manipulate reality in front of people’s eyes so that freedom comes to be symbolised by an iron, or a sanitary towel with wings, or lemonade. That’s what they pay us for. We pawn this stuff off on them from the screen, and then they pawn it off on each other, and on us who write the stuff, and it’s like radioactive contamination, when it makes no difference any longer who exploded the bomb. Everyone tries to show everyone else that they’ve already achieved freedom, and as a result, while we pretend to socialise and be friendly, all we really do is keep pawning each other off with all sorts of jackets, mobile phones and cars. It’s a closed circle. And this closed circle is called black PR.

Tatarsky became so absorbed in his thoughts on the nature of this phenomenon that he wasn’t in the least surprised when one day Khanin stopped him in the corridor, grabbed hold of one of his buttons and said: ‘I see you know all there is to know about black PR.’

‘Almost,’ Tatarsky answered automatically, because he’d just been thinking about the topic. "There’s just some central element that’s still missing.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is. What’s missing is the understanding that black public relations only exist in theory. What happens in real life is grey PR.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Tatarsky enthusiastically, ‘very interesting! Quite astounding! But what does it mean in practical terms?’

‘In practical terms it means you have to shell out.’

Tatarsky started. The fog of thoughts clouding his mind was dispersed in an instant to be replaced by a terrifying clarity.

‘How d’you mean?’ he asked feebly.

Khanin took him by the arm and led him along the corridor.

‘Did you take delivery of two grand from Finlandia?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Tatarsky replied uncertainly.

Khanin bent the middle and fourth fingers of his hand over slightly - far enough to suggest that he was about to shift to the hand-gestures characteristic of New Russian thugs, but not too far, so the situation still seemed to be peaceful.

‘Now remember this,’ he said quietly. ‘As long as you work here, you work to me. There’s no other way to figure it and make sense. So the figures say one grand of greenbacks is mine. Or were you thinking of setting up on your own?’

‘I, I… I’d be delighted…’ Tatarsky stammered in a state of shock. ‘That is, of course I don’t want to… That is, I do. I wanted to split it; I just didn’t know how to bring up the subject.’

‘No need to be shy about it. Someone might get the wrong idea. You know what? Why don’t you come round to my place this evening. We can have a drink and a talk. And you can drop in the mazuma while you’re at it.’

Khanin lived in a large, newly refurbished flat, in which Tatarsky was astonished by the patterned oak doors with gold locks - what astonished him about them was the fact that the wood had already cracked and the gaps in the panels had been filled in a slapdash fashion with mastic. Khanin was already drunk when he greeted his guest. He was in an excellent mood - when Tatarsky held out the envelope to him from the doorway, Khanin knitted his brows and waved it aside, as though offended at such a brusque businesslike entrance, but at the extreme extent of the gesture he lifted the envelope out of Tatarsky’s fingers and immediately tucked it away somewhere.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘Liza’s cooked something.’

Liza proved to be a tall woman with a face red from some kind of cosmetic scrubbing. She fed Tatarsky stuffed cabbage leaves, which he had hated ever since he was a small child. In order to overcome his revulsion he drank a lot of vodka, and by the time the dessert arrived he had almost reached Khanin’s state of intoxication, which meant socialising went a lot smoother.

‘What’s that you have up there?’ Tatarsky asked, nodding in the direction of the wall.

There was a reproduction of a Stalinist poster hanging at the spot he indicated: ponderous red banners with yellow tassels and the blue-looking Moscow university building visible in the gaps between them. The poster was obviously twenty years or thereabouts older than Tatarsky, but the print was absolutely fresh.

‘That? A young guy who used to work for us before you did that on the computer,’ answered Khanin. ‘You see, there used to be a hammer and sickle there, and a star, but he took them out and put in Coca-Cola and Coke instead.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Tatarsky said, amazed. ‘But you can’t see it at first - they’re exactly the same yellow colour.’

‘If you look closely you’ll see it. I used to have the poster over my desk, but the other guys started getting awkward about it. Malyuta took offence for the flag and Seryozha took offence for Coca-Cola. In the end I had to bring it home.’

‘Malyuta took offence?’ Tatarsky asked in surprise ‘Have you seen what he put up over his own desk yesterday?’

‘Not yet.’

‘"Every pogrom has its programme, every brand has its bend".’

‘So what?’

Tatarsky suddenly realised that Khanin really didn’t see anything strange in such sentiments. And what was more, he suddenly stopped seeing anything strange in them himself.

‘I didn’t understand what it meant: "Every brand has its bend".’

‘Bend. That’s the way we translate the expression "brand essence". That’s to say, the concentrated expression of a comprehensive image policy. For instance, the Marlboro bend or essence is a country of real men. The Parliament essence is jazz, and so on. You mean you didn’t know that?’

‘No, of course I knew that. What d’you take me for? It’s just a very odd kind of translation.’

‘What’s to be done about it?’ said Khanin. "This is Asia.’

Tatarsky got up from the table. ‘Where’s your toilet,’ he asked.

‘First door after the kitchen.’

When he stepped into the toilet, Tatarsky’s gaze was confronted by a photograph of a diamond necklace with the text:

‘De Beers. Diamonds are for ever’, hanging on the wall facing the door. This rather threw him off balance and for several seconds he couldn’t recall why he was there. When he remembered, he tore off a sheet of toilet paper and wrote on it:

1) Brand essence (bend). Include in all concepts in place of ‘psychological crystallisation’.

2) Parliament with tanks on the bridge. Instead of ‘the smoke of the Motherland’’ - ‘All that jazz’.

Tucking the piece of paper into his breast pocket and flushing the toilet conspiratorially, he went back to the kitchen and walked right up to the Coca-Cola red banners.

‘It’s quite incredible,’ he said. ‘Looks like it said "Coke" on this flag from the very beginning.’

‘So what did you expect? What’s so surprising about that? D’you know what the Spanish for "advertising" is?’ Khanin hiccupped: ‘"Propaganda." So you and me are ideological workers, if you hadn’t realised it yet. Propagandists and agitators. I used to work in ideology, as it happens. At Komsomol Central Committee level. All my friends are bankers now; I’m the only one… I tell you, I didn’t have to reconstruct myself at all. It used to be: "The individual is nothing, the collective is everything.’’ and now it’s: "Image is nothing, thirst is everything." Agitprop’s immortal. It’s only the words that change.’

Tatarsky felt an uneasy presentiment.

‘Listen.’ he said, ‘you didn’t happen to speak at party personnel meetings outside Moscow, did you?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Khanin. ‘Why?’

‘In Firsanovka?’

‘Yes, in Firsanovka.’

‘So that’s it,’ said Tatarsky, gulping down his vodka. ‘All the time I had this feeling your face was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. Only you didn’t have a beard then.’

‘You mean you used to go to Firsanovka too?’ Khanin asked in delighted surprise.

‘Only once,’ Tatarsky answered. ‘You came out on the platform with such a hangover I thought you were going to puke the moment you opened your mouth…’

‘Hey, take it easy in front of the wife… Although you’re right: the main reason we went out there was to drink. Golden days!’

‘And so what happened? You came out with this great speech,’ Tatarsky continued. ‘I was studying at the Literary Institute at the time, and it really upset me. I felt jealous, because I realised I would never learn to manipulate words like that. No sense to it whatsoever, it just blew me away; all at once everything was absolutely clear. That’s to say, what the speaker - you - was trying to say wasn’t clear, because he didn’t really want to say anything, but everything in life was clear. I suppose that’s what those party personnel meetings were held for. I sat down to write a sonnet that evening, but I just got drunk instead.’

‘What was I speaking about, d’you remember?’ Khanin asked. He obviously found reminiscing pleasant.

‘Something or other to do with the twenty-seventh Party congress and its significance.’

Khanin cleared his throat: ‘I think there is no need to explain to you Komsomol activists,’ he said in a loud, well-trained voice, ‘why the decision of our Party’s twenty-seventh congress are regarded as not merely significant, but epoch-making. Nonetheless, the methodological distinction between these two concepts occasions misunderstanding even among propagandists and agitators. After all, the propagandists and agitators are the builders of our tomorrow, and they should not be unclear in any way about the plan for the future that they have to build…’

He hiccupped loudly and lost the thread of his speech.

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I recognise you now all right. The most amazing thing is that you actually did spend an entire hour explaining the methodological difference between "significant" and "epoch-making", and I understood every single sentence perfectly. But if I tried to understand any two sentences together, it was like running my head against a brick wall… There was just no way. And there was no way I could repeat it in my own words. But then, on the other hand… What’s "Just do it" supposed to mean? And what’s the methodological difference between "Just do it" and "Just be"?’

‘Exactly what I’m getting at,’ said Khanin, pouring the vodka. "S exactly the same.’

‘What are you men doing drinking away like that?’ put in Liza, speaking for the first time. ‘You might at least propose a toast.’

‘OK, let’s have a toast,’ said Khanin, and he hiccupped again. ‘Only, you know, one that’s not only significant, but epoch-making as well. Komsomol member to party member, you follow?’

Tatarsky held on to the table as he rose to his feet. He looked at the poster and thought for a second before raising his glass and speaking:

‘Comrades! Let us drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a flood of images!’