Babylon

ABSOLUT HENNESSY

Offer to Absolut and Hennessy distributors first, and if they don’t take it, to Finlandia, Smirnoff and Johnny Walker.

"There you go.’ said Gireiev, holding out the bundle and the bottle to Tatarsky. ‘Only let’s agree between ourselves that when you eat them, you don’t come back here. I still haven’t forgotten that time in autumn.’

‘I promise.’ said Tatarsky. ‘By the way, where’s that unfinished radar tower around here? I saw it from the car when we were driving here.’

‘It’s quite near. You go across the field and then the road through the forest starts. When you see a wire fence, just follow it. It’s about three kilometres. Why, do you want to go wandering around it?’

Tatarsky nodded.’I’m not so sure about that,’ said Gireiev. ‘It’s not so bad when you’re clean, but if you’re on the mushrooms… The old men say it’s a bad place; but then, where can you find a good place around Moscow?’

In the doorway Tatarsky turned back and hugged Gireiev round the shoulders. ‘You know, Andriusha.’ he said, ‘I don’t want this to sound sentimental, but thank you very, very much!’

‘What for?’ asked Gireiev.

‘For sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life. Without that the real one would be so disgusting!’

‘Thank you,’ Gireiev replied, ‘thank you.’ He was obviously touched.

‘Good luck in business.’ Tatarsky said, and left.

The fly-agarics kicked in when he’d already been walking along the wire-netting fence for half an hour. First came the familiar symptoms: the pleasant trembling and itching in the fingers. Then looming up out of the bushes came the pillar with the notice: ‘Campfires forbidden!’ that he’d once taken for Hussein. As was only to expected, in the daylight there was no noticeable resemblance. Even so, Tatarsky felt a certain nostalgia as he recalled the story of Semurg the king of the birds.

‘Semurg, Sirruf.’ said a familiar voice in his head: ‘what difference does it make? Just different dialects. So you’ve been guzzling garbage again?’

‘Now it’s started,’ thought Tatarsky; ‘the beastie’s here.’

But the Sirruf gave no further indication of its presence all the way to the tower. The gates that Tatarsky had climbed over were open. There was no one to be seen on the construction site; the trailers were locked and the telephone that used to hang on the sentry’s mushroom shelter had disappeared.

Tatarsky climbed to the summit of the structure without any adventures. In the lift-tower everything was still the same as it had been: empty bottles and a table in the centre of the room.

‘Well,’ he asked out loud, ‘where’s the goddess here?’

There was no reply, nothing but the sound of the autumn forest rustling in the wind somewhere below. Tatarsky leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and began to listen. For some reason he decided it was willows that were whispering in the wind, and he recalled a line from a play he’d heard on the radio: ‘It’s the sisters of sorrow, who live in the willows.’ And immediately he could hear snatches of women’s voices in the quiet murmuring of the trees, sounding like a dim echo of words spoken to him long, long ago that had lost their way among the cul-de-sacs of memory.

‘But do they know,’ the quiet voices whispered, ‘that this famous world of theirs consists of nothing but the condensation of darkness - neither breathing in, nor breathing out; neither right, nor left; neither fifth, nor tenth? Do they know that their extensive fame is known to no one?’

‘Everything is the precise opposite of what they think,’ the quiet voices whispered; ‘there is no truth or falsehood; there is one infinitely clear, pure and simple thought in which the spirit of man swirls like a drop of ink that has fallen into a glass of water. When man ceases to swirl in this simple purity, absolutely nothing happens and life turns out to be merely the rustling of curtains in the window of a long-ruined tower, and every thread in those curtains thinks that the great goddess is with it. And the goddess truly is with it.’

‘Once, my love, all of us were free - why did you have to create this terrible, ugly world?’

‘Was it I who created it?’ whispered Tatarsky.

No one replied. Tatarsky opened his eyes and looked out through the doorway. Above the horizontal of the forest hung a cloud shaped like a heavenly mountain - it was so large that the infinite height of the sky, forgotten already in childhood, was suddenly visible again. On one of the slopes of the cloud there was a narrow conical projection, like a tower seen through mist. Something trembled inside Tatarsky - he recalled that once the ephemeral celestial substance of which these white mountains and this tower consisted had also been within him. And then - long, long ago, probably even before he was born - it had cost no effort at all for him to become such a cloud and float up to the very summit of the tower. But life had squeezed this strange substance out of his soul and there was only just enough of it left to allow him to recall it for a second and instantly lose the recollection.

Tatarsky noticed that the floor under the table was covered with a panel made from boards nailed together. Peering through a gap between them, he saw the blackness of a dark multi-storey abyss. ‘Of course,’ he recalled, ‘it’s the lift-shaft; and this is the engine room, just like the room with that render-server. Only there aren’t any automatic rifles.’ He sat at the table and gingerly placed his feet on the boards. At first he felt a bit afraid that the boards under his feet would break and that he and they would go tumbling down together into the deep shaft with the stratified garbage of the years lying at its bottom. But the boards were thick and secure.

The chamber had obviously been visited by someone, most likely the local tramps. There were freshly trampled cigarette butts on the floor, and on the table there was a fragment of newspaper with the television programmes for the week. Tatarsky read the title of the final programme before the jagged line of the torn edge: 0:00 - The Golden Room

‘What kind of programme’s that?’ he thought. ‘Must be something new.’ He rested his chin on his folded hands and gazed at the photograph of the woman running along the sand, which was still hanging in the same place. The daylight exposed the blisters and blots the damp had produced on the paper. One of the blots lay directly over the face of the goddess, and in the daylight it appeared warped, pock-marked and old.

Tatarsky drank the remainder of the vodka and closed his eyes.

The brief dream he saw was very strange. He was walking along a sandy beach towards a golden statue gleaming in the sun - it was still a long way off, but he could see it was a female torso without a head or hands. Slowly trudging along beside Tatarsky was the Sirruf, with Gireiev sitting on its back. The Sirruf was sad and looked like an ass exhausted by heavy work, and the wings folded on its back looked like an old felt saddle.

‘You write slogans,’ Gireiev said, ‘but do you know the most important slogan of all? The base slogan, you could call it?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, screwing up his eyes against the golden radiance.

‘I’ll tell you it. You’ve heard the expression "Day of Judgement"?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, there’s nothing really frightening about that judgement. Except that it’s already begun, and what happens to all of us is no more than a phase in a court experiment, a re-enactment of the crime. Think about it: surely it’s no problem for God to create this entire world out of nothing, with its eternity and infinity, for just a few seconds in order to test a single soul standing before him?’

‘Andrei.’ Tatarsky answered, squinting at the darned slippers in the string stirrups, ‘just leave it out, will you? I get enough shit at work. At least you could lay off.’