Babylon

CHAPTER 9. The Babylonian Stamp

On arriving home, Tatarsky felt the kind of energy rush he hadn’t experienced in ages. Khanin’s metamorphosis had positioned the entire recent past in such a strange perspective it simply had to be followed by something miraculous. Pondering on what he might amuse himself with, Tatarsky strode restively around the flat several times until he remembered the acid tab he had bought in the Poor Folk bar. It was still lying in the drawer of the desk - in all that time he’d not had any reason to swallow it, and anyway he’d been afraid.

He went over to the desk, took the lilac-coloured stamp out of the drawer and looked at it carefully. The face with the pointed beard smirked up at him; the stranger was wearing an odd kind of hat, something between a helmet and a dunce’s cap with a very narrow brim. ‘Wears a pointed cap,’ thought Tatarsky; ‘probably a jester, then. That means it’ll be fun.’ Without giving it any more thought, he tossed the tab into his mouth, ground it up between his teeth and swallowed down the small ball of soft fibres. Then he lay down on the divan and waited.

He was soon bored just lying there. He got up, lit a cigarette and walked around the flat again. Reaching the closet, he remembered that since his adventure in the forest outside Moscow he hadn’t taken another look into the ‘Tikhamat-2’ folder. It was a classic case of displacement: not once had he recalled that he wanted to finish reading the materials in the file, although, on the other hand, he didn’t really seem to have forgotten it either. It had been exactly the same story with the acid tab, as though both of these items had been reserved for that special occasion which, in the course of normal life, never arrives. Tatarsky took down the folder from the top shelf and went back into the room. There were a lot of photographs inside, glued to the pages. One of them fell out as soon as he opened the folder, and he picked it up from the floor.

The photo showed a fragment of a bas-relief - a section of sky with large stars carved into it. In the lower part of the photograph there were two upraised arms, cut off by the edge of the shot. These were genuine stars of heaven - ancient, immense and alive. Stars like that had long ago ceased to shine for the living and continued to exist only for stone heroes in antediluvian sculptures. But then, thought Tatarsky, the stars themselves can hardly have changed since then - it’s people who’ve changed. Each star consisted of a central circle and pointed rays with bundles of sinuous parallel lines set between them.

Tatarsky noticed there were almost invisible little red and green veins twinkling around the lines, as though he was watching a badly adjusted computer monitor. The shiny surface of the photograph took on a brilliant rainbow gleam and its glimmering began to occupy more of his attention than the actual image. ‘It’s started,’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Now that’s really quick…’

Finding the page the photograph had come unstuck from, he ran his tongue across the dried-up spot of casein glue and set it back in its place. Then he carefully turned over the page and smoothed it down with the palm of his hand, so the photograph would stick properly. Glancing at the next photo, he almost dropped the folder on the floor.

The photograph showed the same face as on the lilac tab-stamp. It was shown from a different angle, in profile, but there was absolutely no doubt about it.

It was a complete photograph of the same bas-relief. Tatarsky recognised the fragment with the stars - they were small now and hard to pick out, and the arms uplifted towards them turned to belong to the tiny figure of a man standing on the roof of a house, frozen in a pose of absolute terror.

The central figure in the bas-relief, whose face Tatarsky had recognised, was several times larger than the figure on the roof and all the other figures around it. It was a man wearing a pointed iron cap with a mysterious, half-drunk smile playing about his lips. His face seemed strangely, even absurdly out of place in the ancient image - it looked so natural Tatarsky could easily have believed the bas-relief had not been made three thousand years ago in Nineveh, but some time late last year in Yerevan or Calcutta. Instead of the spade-shaped beard with symmetrical curls an ancient Sumerian was supposed to wear, the man was wearing a sparse goatee, and he looked like a cross between Cardinal Richelieu and Lenin.

Tatarsky hastily turned over the page and found the text relating to the photograph.

Enkidu (Enki fecit) wasa fisherman-god, the servant of the god Enki (Lord of the Earth). He is the god of the Great Lottery and protector of ponds and canals; there are also examples of spells invoking Enkidu against various ailments of the digestive tract. He was made from clay, like Adam in the Old Testament story - the clay tablets with the questions for the Lottery were believed to be the flesh of Enkidu, and the ritual drink prepared in his temple was his blood…

It was hard to read the text - the sense wasn’t getting through to him, and the letters were shimmering and blinking in all the colours of the rainbow. Tatarsky began studying the image of the deity in detail. Enkidu was draped in a mantle covered with oval plaques and in his hands he held bundles of strings that radiated out like fans towards the ground, so that he reminded Tatarsky of Gulliver with an army of Lilliputians trying to restrain him by cables attached to his arms. None of the pools and canals Enkidu was supposed to be concerned with were to be seen anywhere - he was walking through a burning city, where the houses came up to his waist. Under his feet lay prostrate figures with their arms extended in identical gestures - looking at them, Tatarsky noted the quite definite kinship between Sumerian art and socialist realism. The most interesting detail of the image were the strings radiating from Enkidu’s hands. Each string ended in a large wheel, in the centre of which was a triangle containing the crudely traced image of an eye. There were human bodies threaded on the strings - like the fish Tatarsky used to dry in his childhood, hanging them out in the yard on a length of fishing line.

On the next page there was an enlarged fragment of the bas-relief showing the little human figures on one of the strings. Tatarsky was even slightly nauseated. With quite repulsive realism, the bas-relief showed the cable entering each human figure at the mouth and exiting from its backside. Some of the people’s arms were flung out to the sides, others were pressing their hands to their heads, and large-headed birds hung in the spaces between them. Tatarsky carried on reading:

According to tradition Endu, wife of the god Enki (another account regards her as his female hypostasis, which seems unlikely; she can also be identified with the figure of Ishtar) was once sitting on the bank of a canal and telling the rosary of rainbow-coloured beads her husband had given her. The sun was shining very brightly and Endu was overcome by sleep. She dropped her rosary, which fell into the water, where the beads scattered and sank. After this the rainbow-coloured beads decided that they were people and settled throughout the pond. They built towns and had their own kings and gods. Then Enki took a lump of clay and moulded it into the form of a fisherman. He breathed life into it and called it Enkidu. He gave him a spindle of golden thread, and told him to go down into the water and gather up all the beads. Since the name ‘Enkidu’ contains Enki’s own name, it possesses special power and the beads are obliged to submit to the will of the god and string themselves on to the golden thread. Some researchers believe that Enkidu gathers up the souls of the deceased and transports them on his threads to the kingdom of the dead; numerous images have been preserved in which merchants and officials are shown appealing to Enkidu for help. These prayers contain a repeated plea to ‘raise the strong higher on the thread of gold’ and to ‘endow with the earthly enlility’ (see ‘Enlil’). There are also eschatological motifs to be found in the myth of Enkidu-as soon as Enkidu gathers everyone living on earth on to his thread life will cease, because they will once again become beads on the necklace of the great goddess. This event, due to happen at some point in the future, is identified with the end of the world.

The ancient legend contains one motif for which it is difficult to provide an explanation: several versions describe in detail exactly how the bead-people crawl up along Enkidu’s threads. They don’t use their hands for this - their hands serve to cover their eyes and ears or to beat off the white birds that attempt to tear them from the threads. The bead-people ascend the string by first swallowing it and then grasping it alternately with their mouths and anuses. It is not clear how such Pantagruelesaue details come to be found in the myth of Enkidu - possibly they are echoes of another myth that has been lost.

The wheels in which Enkidu’s threads end are also worth some consideration. They bear the likeness of an eye inscribed in a triangle. Here we have the intersection of the real with the mythical: the wheels of ancient Sumerian war chariots actually were secured by a triangular bronze plate attached to the wheel externally, and the form drawn on the plate, which is similar to the outline of an eye, symbolises the spindle on which the golden thread was wound. The wheel is a symbol of movement; thus we have the self-propelling spindle of the god Enki (cf. for instance Ariadne’s thread or the many-eyed wheels in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel). The power of the name ‘Enki’ is such that although originally there was only one such spindle, it might have come to seem to people that their numbers were beyond count.

Tatarsky noticed a glimmering in the semi-darkness of the room. Thinking it must be the reflection of some light in the street, he stood up and looked out of the window, but there was nothing of any interest going on outside. He caught sight of his own orange divan reflected in the glass and was amazed to observe that, seen in mirror inversion, the tattered couch he had so often felt like throwing out on to the dump and burning was the finest part of an unfamiliar and quite amazingly beautiful interior. Returning to his seat, he glimpsed the glimmering light again out of the corner of his eye. He looked round, but the light shifted too, as though its source was a spot on his iris. ‘OK,’ Tatarsky thought happily, ‘so now we’re into the glitches.’ The focus of his attention shifted to the spot and rested there for only the briefest of moments, but that was enough for his mind to record an event that began gradually unfolding as it surfaced in his memory, like a photograph in a bath of developing fluid.

It was summer, and he was standing on a city street lined with identical small houses. Towering up above the city was something between a conical factory chimney and a television tower - it was hard to tell what it was, because mounted on the summit of the chimney-tower was a blinding white torch, blazing so brilliantly that the haze of hot air obscured the outline. He could see its lower section was like a stepped pyramid, but higher up, in the white radiance, it was impossible to make out any details. Tatarsky thought the construction was probably something like the gas flares they have at oil refineries, except that the flame was so bright. There were people standing motionless at the open windows of the houses and on the street - they were gazing upwards at the white fire. Tatarsky turned his eyes in the same direction, and immediately felt himself jerked upwards. He could feel the fire drawing him towards itself and he knew that if he didn’t turn his eyes away the flame would drag him upwards and consume him completely. Somehow he knew a lot about this fire. He knew many had already entered it ahead of him and were drawing him after them. He knew there were many who could only enter it after him, and they were pressing at his back. Tatarsky forced himself to close his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the tower had moved.

Now he could see it wasn’t a tower - it was an immense human figure, towering up over the town. What he had taken for a pyramid now looked like the folds of a garment resembling a cloak or a mantle. The source of the light was the conical helmet on the figure’s head. Tatarsky could clearly see the face, with some kind of gleaming battering ram in the place of a beard. It was turned towards him, and he realised he could only see the face and the helmet instead of the flame, because the flame was looking at him, and in reality there was nothing human about it. The gaze directed towards Tatarsky expressed anticipation, but before he had time to think about what he actually wanted to say or ask, or whether he really wanted to say or ask anything at all, the figure gave him its answer and turned its gaze away. The same intolerably bright radiance appeared where the face had been and Tatarsky lowered his eyes.

He noticed two people beside him, an elderly man in a shirt with an anchor embroidered on it and a boy in a black tee-shirt: they were holding hands and gazing upwards, and he had a feeling they had almost completely melted and merged with the bright fire, and their bodies, the street around them and the entire city were no more than shadows. Just a moment before the picture faded, Tatarsky guessed the bright fire he’d seen wasn’t burning high in the sky, but down below, as though he’d glimpsed a reflection of the sun in a puddle and forgotten he wasn’t looking at the actual position of the sun. Where the sun actually was, and what it was, he didn’t have time to find out, but he did manage to understand something else, something very strange: it wasn’t the sun that was reflected in the puddle, but the other way round; everything and everybody else - the street, the houses, the other people and he himself - were all reflected in the sun, which was entirely uninterested in the whole business, because it wasn’t even aware of it.

This idea about the sun and the puddle filled Tatarsky with such a feeling of happiness that he laughed out loud in his joy and gratitude. All the problems of life, all those things that had seemed so unsolvable and terrifying, simply ceased to exist - for an instant the world was transformed in the same way as his divan had been transformed when it was reflected in the window pane.

When Tatarsky came round he was sitting on the divan, holding between his fingers the page that he still hadn’t turned. There was an incomprehensible word pulsating in his ears, something like ‘sirrukh’ or ‘sirruf. It was the answer the figure had given him.

‘Sirrukh, sirruf,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t understand.’

The happiness he had been feeling only a moment before was replaced by fright. He suddenly felt it must be unlawful to learn anything like that, because he couldn’t see how you could live with the knowledge. ‘And I’m the only one who knows it,’ he thought nervously; ‘how can I be allowed to know it and still stay here and keep on walking around in this world? What if I tell someone? But then, who is there to permit it or forbid it, if I’m the only one who knows? Just a second, though - what can I actually tell anyone anyway?’

Tatarsky started thinking about it: there really was nothing in particular he could tell anyone. What was the point of telling a drunken Khanin it was the puddle that was reflected in the sun, and not the sun that was reflected in the puddle? Of course, he could tell him, but then… Tatarsky scratched the back of his head. He remembered this was the second revelation of this kind in his life: after gorging himself on fly-agarics with Gireiev, he’d understood something of equal importance. But then he’d completely forgotten it. All that remained in his memory were the words that were supposed to convey the truth: ‘There is no death, because the threads disappear but the sphere remains.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ he muttered, ‘how difficult it is to bring anything at all back here…’

‘That’s exactly right,’ said a quiet voice. ‘Any insight of true breadth and profundity will inevitably be reduced to words. And the words will inevitably be reduced to themselves.’

Tatarsky thought the voice sounded familiar. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, looking round the room.

‘Sirruf has arrived,’ the voice replied.

‘What’s that, a name?’

"This game has no name,’ the voice replied. ‘It’s more of an official position.’

Tatarsky remembered where it was he’d heard the voice - on the military building site in the woods outside Moscow. This time he could see the speaker, or rather, he was able to imagine him instantly and without the slightest effort. At first he thought it was the likeness of a dog sitting there in front of him - something like a greyhound, but with powerful paws with claws and a long vertical neck. The beast had an elongated head with conical ears and a very pleasant-looking, if slightly cunning, little face crowned by a coquettish mane of fur. There seemed to be a pair of wings pressed against its sides. After a short while Tatarsky realised the beast was so large and so strange that the word ‘dragon’ would suit him best, especially since he was covered in shimmering rainbow scales (but then, just at that moment almost every object in the room was shimmering with every hue of the rainbow). Despite its distinctly reptilian features, the being radiated goodwill so powerfully that Tatarsky wasn’t at all frightened.

‘Yes, everything is reduced to words.’ repeated the Sirruf. ‘As far as I am aware, the most profound revelation ever to visit a human being under the influence of drugs was occasioned by a critical dose of ether. The recipient summoned up the strength to write it down, even though it cost a supreme effort. What he wrote was: "The universe is permeated by a smell of oil.’ You’ve got a long way to go before you reach depths like that. Well, anyway, that’s all beside the point. Why don’t you tell me where you got the stamp from?’

Tatarsky remembered the collector from the Poor Folk bar and his album. He was about to reply, but the Sirruf interrupted him:

‘Grisha the stamp-collector. I thought as much. How many of them did he have?’

Tatarsky remembered the page of the album and the three lilac-coloured rectangles in the plastic pocket.

‘I see,’ said the Sirruf. ‘So there are two more.’

After that he disappeared, and Tatarsky returned to his normal state. He understood now what happens to a person who has the delirium tremens he’d read so much about in the classics of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He had no control at all over his hallucinations, and he simply couldn’t tell which way he would be tossed by the next thought. He began to feel afraid. He got up and walked quickly into the bathroom, put his head under a stream of water and held it there until the cold became painful. He dried his hair on a towel, went back into the room and took another look at its reflection in the window pane. The familiar interior appeared to him now like a Gothic stage set for some menacing event due to occur at any moment, and the divan appeared like some sacrificial altar for large animals.

‘Why on earth did I have to go and swallow that garbage?’ he thought in anguish.

‘Absolutely no reason whatsoever,’ said the Sirruf, resurfacing in some obscure dimension of his consciousness. ‘It really isn’t good for man to go taking drugs. Especially psychedelics.’

‘Yes, I know that myself.’ Tatarsky replied quietly. ‘Now I do.’

‘Man has a world in which he lives.’ the Sirruf said didactically. ‘Man is man because he can see nothing except that world. But when you take an overdose of LSD or dine on panther fly-agarics, you’re stepping way out of line - and you’re taking a grave risk. If you only realised how many invisible eyes are watching you at that moment you would never do it; and if you were to see even just a few of those who are watching you, you’d die of fright. By this act you declare that being human is not enough for you and you want to become someone else. But in the first place, in order to cease being human, you have to die. Do you want to die?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, earnestly pressing his hand to his heart.

‘And who is it you want to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky said, crushed.

‘You see what I mean? Just one more tab from happy Holland might not have meant too much, but what you swallowed was something quite different. It’s a numbered issue, an official service document, by eating which you shift across into a different realm where there are absolutely no idle pleasures or amusements. And which you’re not supposed to go wandering about in without an official commission. And you don’t have any commission. Do you?’

‘No,’ agreed Tatarsky.

‘We’ve settled things with Grisha. He’s a sick man, a collector; and he came by the pass by accident… But what did you eat it for?’

‘I wanted to feel the pulse of life,’ Tatarsky said with a sob.

‘The pulse of life? Very well, feel it,’ said the Sirruf.

When Tatarsky came to his senses, the only thing in the world he wanted was that the experience he’d just been through and had no words to describe, merely a feeling of black horror, should never happen to him again. For that he was prepared to give absolutely anything.

‘Again, perhaps?’ asked the Sirruf.

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘please, don’t. I’ll never, never eat that garbage again. I promise.’

‘You can promise the local policeman. If you live till morning, that is.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Just what I say. Do you at least realise that was a pass for five people? And you’re here alone. Or are there really five of you?’

When Tatarsky recovered his senses again he felt he really didn’t have much chance of surviving the night. There had just been five of him, and every one of them had felt so bad that Tatarsky had instantly realised what a blessing it was to exist in the singular.’ and he was astonished how people could be so blind as not to appreciate their good fortune.

‘Please.’ he said, ‘please, don’t do that to me again.’

‘I’m not doing anything to you,’ replied the Sirruf. ‘You’re doing it all yourself.’

‘Can I explain?’ Tatarsky asked piteously. ‘I realise I’ve made a mistake. I realise it’s not right to look at the Tower of Babel. But I didn’t…’

‘What has the Tower of Babel got to do with it?’ the Sirruf interrupted.

‘I’ve just seen it.’

‘You can’t see the Tower of Babel, you can only ascend it.’ replied the Sirruf. ‘I tell you that as its guardian. And what you saw was the complete opposite. One could call it the Carthaginian Pit. The so-called tofet.’

‘What’s a tofet?’

‘It’s a place of sacrificial cremation. There were pits of the kind in Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and so forth, and they really did burn people in them. That, by the way, is why Carthage was destroyed. These pits were also known as Gehenna - after a certain ancient valley where the whole business started. I might add that the Bible calls it the "abomination of the Ammonites" - but you haven’t read the Bible anyway, you only search through it for new slogans.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Very well. You can regard the tofet as an ordinary television.’

‘I still don’t understand. Do you mean I was inside a television?’

‘In a certain sense. You saw the technological space in which your world is being consumed by fire. Something like a garbage incinerator.’

Once again Tatarsky glimpsed the figure holding the glittering strings on the periphery of his field of vision. The vision lasted for only a fraction of a second.

‘But isn’t he the god Enkidu?’ he asked. ‘I was just reading about him. I even know what those strings are he has in his hands. When the beads from the great goddess’s necklace decided they were people and they settled right across the reservoir…’

‘In the first place, he isn’t a god, quite the opposite. Enkidu is one of his less common names, but he is better known as Baal. Or Baloo. In Carthage they tried to sacrifice to him by burning their children, but there was no point, because he makes no allowances and simply cremates everyone in turn. In the second place, the beads didn’t decide they were people, it was people who decided they were beads. That’s why the entity you call Enkidu gathers up those beads and cremates them, so that some day people will realise they aren’t beads at all. Do you follow?’

‘No. What are the beads, then?’

The Sirruf said nothing for a moment.

‘How can I explain it to you? The beads are what that Che Guevara of yours calls "identity".’

‘But where did these beads come from?’

‘They didn’t come from anywhere. They don’t actually exist.’

‘What is it that burns then?’ Tatarsky asked doubtfully.

‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t understand. If there’s fire, then there must be something burning. Some kind of substance.’

‘Have you ever read Dostoievsky?’

‘I can’t stand him, to be honest.’

‘A pity. In one of his novels there was an old man called Zosima who was horrified by intimations of the material fire. It’s not clear quite why he was so afraid. The material fire is your world. The fire in which you burn has to be maintained. And you are one of the service personnel.’

‘Service personnel?’

‘You are a copywriter, aren’t you? That means you are one of those who force people to gaze into the consuming fire.’

‘The consuming fire? But what is it that’s consumed?’

‘Not what, but who. Man believes that he is the consumer, but in reality the fire of consumption consumes him. What he receives in return are certain modest joys. It’s like the safe sex that you all indulge in ceaselessly, even when you are alone. Environmentally friendly garbage incineration. But you won’t understand it anyway.’

‘But who’s the garbage, who is it?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘Is it man?’

‘Man by nature is almost as great and beautiful as Sirruf.’ the Sirruf replied. ‘But he is not aware of it. The garbage is this unawareness. It is the identity that has no existence in reality. In this life man attends at the incineration of the garbage of his identity…’

‘Why should man gaze into this fire if his life is burning in it?’

‘You have no idea of what to do with these lives anyway; and whichever way you might turn your eyes, you are still gazing into the flames in which your life is consumed. There is mercy in the fact that in place of crematoria you have televisions and supermarkets; but the truth is that their function is the same. And in any case, the fire is merely a metaphor. You saw it because you ate a pass to the garbage incineration plant. All most people see in front of them is a television screen…’

And with that he disappeared.

‘Hey there,’ Tatarsky called.

There was no reply. Tatarsky waited for another minute before he realised he’d been left alone with his own mind, ready to wander off in any direction at all. He had to occupy it with something quickly.

‘Phone,’ he whispered. ‘Who? Gireiev! He knows what to do.’

For a long time no one answered. Eventually, on the fifteenth or twentieth ring, Gireiev’s morose voice responded.

‘Hello.’

‘Andrey? Hello. This is Tatarsky.’

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘Listen,’ Tatarsky said hastily, ‘I’m in trouble. I’ve done too much acid. Someone in the know tells me it was five doses. Anyway, to cut it short, I’m coming apart at all the seams. What can I do?’

‘What can you do? I don’t know what you can do. In cases like that I recite a mantra.’

‘Can you give me one?’

‘How can I give you one? It has to be conferred.’

‘Aren’t there any you can just give me without any conferring?’

Gireiev thought. ‘Right, just hang on a minute,’ he said, and put the receiver down on the table.

For several minutes Tatarsky tried to make sense of the distant sounds borne to him along the wires on an electric wind. At first he could hear fragments of conversation; then an irritated woman’s voice broke in for a long time; then everything was drowned out by the abrupt and demanding sound of a child crying.

‘Write this down,’ Gireiev said at last. ‘ Om melafefon bva kha sha. I’ll give you it letter by letter: o, em…’

‘I’ve got it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘What does it mean?’

‘That’s not important. Just concentrate on the sound, OK? Have you got any vodka?’

‘I think I had two bottles.’

‘You can drink them both. It goes well with this mantra. In an hour it’ll be all over. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Thanks. Listen, who’s that crying there?’

‘My son,’ Gireiev answered.

‘You have a son? I didn’t know. What’s his name?’

‘Namhai,’ Gireiev replied in a disgruntled voice. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

Tatarsky put down the receiver and dashed into the kitchen, rapidly whispering to himself the incantation he’d just been given. He took out a bottle of Absolut and drank it all in three glassfuls, followed it up with some cold tea and then went into the bathroom - he was afraid to go back into the room. He sat on the edge of the bath, fixed his eyes on the door and began to whisper:

‘ Om melafefon bva kha sha, om melafefon bva kha sha…’

The phrase was so difficult to pronounce, his mind simply couldn’t cope with any other thoughts. Several minutes went by and a warm wave of drunkenness spread throughout his body. Tatarsky had almost relaxed when suddenly he noticed the familiar glimmering on the periphery of his field of vision. He clenched his fists and began whispering the mantra more quickly, but it was already too late to halt the new glitch.

Something like a firework display erupted at the spot where the bathroom door had just been, and when the red and yellow blaze died down a little, he saw a burning bush in front of him. Its branches were enveloped in bright flame, as though it had been doused in blazing petrol, but the broad dark-green leaves were not consumed in the fire. No sooner had Tatarsky studied the bush in detail than a clenched fist was extended towards him from out of its heart. Tatarsky swayed and almost fell backwards into the bath. The fist unclenched and on the palm extended in front of his face Tatarsky saw a small, wet, pickled cucumber covered in green pimples.

When the bush disappeared, Tatarsky could no longer recall whether he had taken the cucumber or not, but there was a distinctly salty taste in his mouth. Perhaps it was blood from a bitten lip.

‘Oh no, Gireiev, this mantra of yours isn’t doing the business,’ Tatarsky whispered, and went into the kitchen.

After drinking more vodka (he had to force it down), he went back into the room and turned on the television. The room was filled with solemn music; the blue spot on the screen expanded and transformed itself into an image. They were broadcasting some concert or other.

‘Lord, hear Thou my plea,’ sang a man with a powdered face, wearing a bow tie and a shot silk waistcoat under black tails. As he sang he rolled his goggling eyes and sawed at the air with his open hand in a strange manner, as though he was being borne away on a current of celestial ether.

Tatarsky clicked on the remote and the man in the bow tie disappeared. ‘Maybe I should pray?’ he thought. ‘It might do some good…’ He remembered the man from the bas-relief with his arms upraised to the starry sky.

He went out into the centre of the room and knelt down with some difficulty, then crossed his arms on his chest and raised his eyes to the ceiling.

‘Lord, hear Thou my plea,’ he said quietly. ‘I have sinned greatly against Thee. I live a bad life, a wrong one. But in my soul there are no abominable desires, cross my heart. I’ll never eat any of that junk again. I… I only want to be happy, and I just can’t manage it. Perhaps it’s what I deserve. I can’t do anything else except write bad slogans. But for Thee, oh Lord, I’ll write a good one - honest I will. You know, they do position Thee quite wrongly. They haven’t got a clue. Take that latest clip, where they’re collecting money for that church. There’s this old woman standing there with a box, and first someone driving an old jalopy puts in a rouble and then someone driving a Mercedes drops in a hundred bucks. The idea’s clear enough, but in terms of positioning it’s way off beam. The guy in the Mercedes wouldn’t wait in the queue of jalopies. A blind horse could see it. And the target group we need is all those guys in their Mercedes, because in terms of yield one Mercedes is worth a thousand jalopies. That’s not the way to do it. Here…’

Managing somehow to scramble upright, Tatarsky struggled over to the desk, picked up a pen and began writing in a jerky, spiderish scrawl:

Poster (theme for a clip). A room in a very expensive hotel. Carrara marble table. A laptop computer flashes out a message: ‘Transaction confirmed’. Near the computer we see a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill and a hotel-room Bible in three languages. Slogan:

THE SHINING WORD FOR YOUR SHINING WORLD!

Variant: another setting - a private jet airplane, a stock exchange, a Manhattan penthouse, a Cote d’Azur estate, etc. Instead of the Bible we see the Saviour Himself approaching the camera in the rays of His glory. Slogan:

A FIRST-CLASS LORD FOR YOUR HAPPY LOT.

Tatarsky dropped the pen and raised his red, tear-stained eyes to the ceiling. ‘Dost Thou like it. Lord?’ he asked quietly.