Babylon

CHAPTER 4. The Three Riddles of Ishtar

The following day Tatarsky, still absorbed in his thoughts about the cigarette concept, ran into his old classmate Andrei Gireiev at the beginning of Tverskaya Street. Tatarsky hadn’t had any news of him for several years, and he was astounded at the style of the clothes he was wearing - a light-blue cassock with a Nepalese waistcoat covered in embroidery worn over the top of it. In his hands he had something that looked like a large coffee-mill, covered all over with Tibetan symbols and decorated with coloured ribbons. He was turning its handle. Despite the extreme exoticism of every element of his get-up, in combination they appeared so natural that they somehow neutralised each other. None of the passers-by paid any attention to Gireiev. Just like a fire hydrant or an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, he failed to register in their field of perception because he conveyed absolutely no new visual information.

Tatarsky first recognised Gireiev’s face and only afterwards began to pay attention to the rich details of his appearance. Looking attentively into Gireiev’s eyes, he realised he was not quite himself, although he didn’t seem to be drunk. In fact he was calm and in control, and he inspired confidence.

He said he was living just outside Moscow in the village of Rastorguevo and invited Tatarsky to visit him. Tatarsky agreed, and they went down into the metro, then changed to the suburban train. They travelled in silence; Tatarsky occasionally turned away from the view through the window to look at Gireiev. In his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost universe - not the Soviet universe, because that didn’t contain any wandering Tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in parallel with the Soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe, which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity, and just as imperceptibly. Gireiev lived in a crooked black house with the garden in front of it run wild, all overgrown with umbrellas of giant dill half as tall again as a man. In terms of amenities his house was somewhere between village and town: looking down through the hole in the hut of the outside lavatory he could see wet and slimy sewage pipes that ran across the top of the cesspit, but where they ran from or to wasn’t clear. On the other hand, the house had a gas cooker and a telephone.

Gireiev seated Tatarsky at the table on the verandah and tipped a coarsely ground powder into the teapot from a red tin box with something Estonian written on it in white letters.

‘What’s that?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘Fly-agarics,’ answered Gireiev, and began pouring boiling water into the teapot. The smell of mushroom soup wafted round the room.

‘What, are you going to drink that?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Gireiev, ‘there aren’t any brown ones.’

He said it as though it was the answer to every conceivable objection, and Tatarsky couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. He hesitated for a moment, until he recalled that only yesterday he’d been reading about fly-agarics, and he overcame his misgivings. The mushroom tea actually tasted quite pleasant.

‘And what will it do for me?’

‘You’ll see soon enough,’ replied Gireiev. ‘You’ll be drying them for winter yourself.’

‘Then what do I do now?’

‘Whatever you like.’

‘Is it OK to talk?’

‘Try it.’

Half an hour passed in rather inconsequential conversation about people they both knew. As was only to be expected, nothing very interesting had happened to any of them in the meantime. Only one of them, Lyosha Chikunov, had distinguished himself - by drinking several bottles of Finlandia vodka and then freezing to death one starry January night in the toy house on a children’s playground.

‘Gone to Valhalla,’ was Gireiev’s terse comment.

‘Why are you so sure?’ Tatarsky asked; then he suddenly remembered the running deer and the crimson sun on the vodka label and assented internally. He reached for his notebook and wrote: ‘An ad for Finlandia. Based on their slogan:

"In my previous life I was clear, crystal spring water". Variant.’complement: a snowdrift with a frozen puddle of puke on top. Text: "In my previous life I was Finlandia vodka".’

Meanwhile a scarcely perceptible sensation of happy relaxation had developed in his body. A pleasant quivering rose in his chest, ran in waves through his trunk and his arms and faded away without quite reaching his fingers. And for some reason Tatarsky very much wanted the quivering to reach his fingers. He realised he hadn’t drunk enough; but the teapot was already empty.

‘Is there any more?’ he asked.

‘There, you see,’ said Gireiev, ‘what did I tell you?’

He stood up, left the room and came back with an open newspaper scattered with dry pieces of sliced fly-agaric mushrooms. Some of them still had scraps of red skin with little white blots, while others had shreds of newspaper with the mirror-images of letters clinging to them.

Tatarsky tossed a few pieces into his mouth, chewed them and swallowed. The taste of the dried fly-agarics reminded him a little of potato flakes, except that it was nicer - it occurred to him that they could be sold in packets like potato chips, and this must be one of the secret routes to a bank loan, Grand Cherokee jeep, advertisement clip and violent death. He started pondering what the clip might be like, tossed another portion into his mouth and looked around him. It was only at this stage that he actually noticed several of the objects decorating the room. For instance, that sheet of paper hanging in the obvious place on the wall - there was a letter written on it, maybe Sanskrit, maybe Tibetan, resembling a dragon with a curved tail.

‘What’s that?’ he asked Gireiev.

Gireiev glanced up at the wall. ‘Hum.’ he said.

‘What d’you need it for?’

‘That’s how I travel.’

‘Where to?’ asked Tatarsky.

Gireiev shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ he said. ‘Hum. When you don’t think, lots of things become clear.’

But Tatarsky had already forgotten his own question. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude to Gireiev for inviting him here. ‘You know.’ he said.’ I’m going through a difficult period right now. Most of the time I associate with bankers and other scum who want advertising. The stress is just incredible. But out here with you… I feel just as though I’ve come back home.’

Gireiev seemed to understand what he was feeling. ‘It’s nothing.’ he said, ‘Don’t even think about it. A couple of those bankers came to see me last winter. Wanted to expand their consciousness. Afterwards they ran off barefoot across the snow. Why don’t we go for a walk?’

Tatarsky was happy to agree. Once outside the garden gate, they set off across a field criss-crossed by freshly dug ditches. The path led them to a forest and began winding between the trees. The itching and trembling in Tatarsky’s hands was getting stronger, but it still wasn’t reaching his fingers. Noticing there were lots of fly-agarics growing on the ground among the trees, he dropped behind Gireiev and picked several of them. They weren’t red, but dark brown and very beautiful. He ate them quickly and then caught up with Gireiev, who hadn’t noticed anything.

Soon the forest came to an end and they came out into a large open space, a collective farm field bounded on its far side by the river. Tatarsky looked upwards to where motionless clouds towered up into the sky above the field in the last orange rays of one of those inexpressibly sad sunsets that autumn sometimes produces outside Moscow. They walked on for a while down the track along the edge of the field and sat down on a fallen tree.

Tatarsky suddenly thought of a potential advertising concept for fly-agarics. It was based on the startling realisation that the supreme form of self-realisation for fly-agarics is an atomic explosion - something like the glowing non-material body that certain advanced mystics acquire. Human beings were simply a subsidiary form of life that the fly-agarics exploited in order to achieve their supreme goal, in the same way as human beings exploited mould for making cheese. Tatarsky raised his eyes towards the orange rays of the sunset and the flow of his thoughts was abruptly broken off.

‘Listen,’ Gireiev said after a few more minutes’ silence, ‘I just thought about Lyosha Chikunov again. Sad about him, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it is,’ Tatarsky replied.

‘Weird, that - he’s dead, and we’re alive… Only I suspect that every time we lie down and sleep, we die just the same way. And the sun disappears for ever, and all history comes to an end. And then non-existence just gets sick of itself and we wake up. And the world comes into existence all over again.’

‘How can non-existence get sick of itself?’

‘Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don’t even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and our world are the same thing.’

Tatarsky tried to understand what this meant. He noticed that thinking had became difficult and even dangerous, because his thoughts had acquired such freedom and power that he could no longer control them. The answer appeared to him immediately in the form of a three-dimensional geometrical figure. Tatarsky saw his own mind: it was a white sphere, like a sun but absolutely calm and motionless. Dark, twisted fibrous threads extended from the centre of the sphere to its periphery. Tatarsky realised that they were his five senses. The fibres that were a little thicker were sight, the ones a bit thinner than those were hearing, and the others were almost invisible. Dancing and meandering around these motionless fibres was a winding spiral, like the filament of an electric-light bulb. Sometimes it would align itself for a moment with one of them; sometimes it would curl up around itself to form a glowing circle of light like the one left by the lighted tip of a cigarette swirled rapidly in the dark. This was the thought with which his mind was occupied.

‘That means there is no death.’ Tatarsky thought happily. ‘Why? Because the threads disappear, but the sphere remains!’

He was filled with happiness at having managed to formulate the answer to a question that had tormented humanity for the last several thousand years in terms so simple anyone could understand them. He wanted to share his discovery with Gireiev, and taking him by the shoulder he tried to pronounce this final phrase out loud. But his mouth spoke something else, something meaningless - all the syllables that made up the words were still there, but they were jumbled up chaotically. Tatarsky thought he needed a drink of water, and so he said to Gireiev, who was staring at him in fright:

‘Li’d winker drike I watof!’

Gireiev obviously didn’t understand what was going on; but it was clear that whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

‘Li’d dratinker wike of wit!’ Tatarsky repeated meekly and tried to smile.

He really wanted Gireiev to smile back at him; but Gireiev did something strange - he got to his feet and backed away from Tatarsky, who understood for the first time what was meant by the phrase ‘a mask of horror’. His friend’s face was distorted into the most distinct possible mask of precisely that kind. Gireiev took several faltering steps backwards, then turned and ran. Tatarsky was offended to the depths of his soul.

Meanwhile the evening twilight had begun to thicken. As it flitted through the blue haze between the trees, Gireiev’s Nepalese waistcoat looked like a large butterfly. Tatarsky found the idea of pursuit exciting. He launched himself after Gireiev, bounding high in the air in order not to stumble over some root or hummock. It was soon clear that he was running a lot faster that Gireiev, quite incomparably faster, in fact. He overtook him and turned back several times before he realised that he wasn’t running around Gireiev, but around the remnant of a dry tree-trunk the same height as a man. That sobered him up a little, and he set off down the path in what he thought was the direction of the railway station.

Along the way he ate several more fly-agarics that attracted his attention among the trees, and soon he found himself on a wide dirt road with a fence of barbed wire running along one edge of it.

Someone appeared ahead of him, walking along. Tatarsky went up to him and asked politely: ‘Stan gou thecation totet yell he mow? There trun rewains?’

Glancing sharply at Tatarsky, the stranger took a quick step backwards, then took to his heels. Everybody seemed to be reacting to him in the same way today. Tatarsky remembered his Chechen employer and thought cheerfully to himself:

‘What if I met Hussein now, I wonder if he’d be scared?’

When Hussein promptly appeared at the edge of the road, it was Tatarsky who was scared. Hussein was standing there silently in the grass and not reacting in any way to Tatarsky’s approach. But Tatarsky slowed his pace, walked across to Hussein with meek, childish steps and stood there paralysed with guilt.

‘What did you want?’ Hussein asked.

Tatarsky said something extremely inappropriate: ‘I just need a second. I wanted to ask you, as a representative of the target group: what associations does the word "parliament" have for you?’ In his fright he didn’t even notice whether he was speaking normally or not.

Hussein wasn’t surprised at all. He thought for a moment and answered: ‘Al-Ghazavi had this poem called "The Parliament of Birds". It’s about how thirty birds flew off in search of the bird that is called Semurg - the king of all birds and a great master.’

‘But why did they fly off in search of a king, if they had a parliament?’

‘You ask them that. And then, Semurg was not just a king, he was a fount of great knowledge. That’s more than you can say for a parliament.’

‘How did it all end?’ asked Tatarsky.

‘When they had endureded thirty trials, they learned that the word "Semurg" means "thirty birds".’

‘Who from?’

‘The voice of God told them.’

Tatarsky sneezed. Hussein immediately fell silent and turned away his glowering face. Tatarsky waited for a continuation for quite a long time before he realised that Hussein was actually a post with a sign nailed to it saying: ‘Campfires forbidden!’ that he could scarcely make out in the semi-darkness. That upset him - so Gireiev and Hussein were in league now! He’d liked Hussein’s story, but now it was clear that he’d never learn all the details, and in the form he’d heard it, it wasn’t even fit for a cigarette concept. Tatarsky walked on, wondering what it was that had made him stop in such a cowardly fashion by a Hussein-post that hadn’t even asked him to.

The explanation was not a very pleasant one: it was a relict of the Soviet era, the slave mentality he still hadn’t completely squeezed out of himself. Tatarsky thought for a while and came to the conclusion that the slave in the soul of Soviet man was not concentrated in any particular sector, but rather tinged everything that happened in its twilit expanses in a shade of chronic psychological peritonitis, which meant there was no way to squeeze this slave out drop by drop without damaging precious spiritual qualities. This thought seemed important to Tatarsky in the light of his forthcoming collaboration with Pugin, and he rummaged in his pockets for a long time to find a pen to note it down, but couldn’t find one.

Another passer-by appeared, coming towards him; this time it was definitely no hallucination. That much became clear after Tatarsky’s attempt to borrow a pen - the passer-by took to his heels, running with genuine speed and not looking back.

Tatarsky simply couldn’t figure out what it was in his behaviour that had such a terrifying effect on the people he met. Perhaps they were frightened by the strange disorder of his speech, the way the words he tried to pronounce fell apart into syllables that then re-attached themselves to each other in a random order. Even so, there was something rather flattering in such an extreme reaction.

Tatarsky was suddenly struck so forcibly by a certain thought that he stopped dead and slapped his palm against his forehead. ‘Why, of course, it’s the Tower of Babel!’ he thought. ‘They probably drank that mushroom tea and the words began to break apart in their mouths, just like mine. Later they began to call it a confusion of tongues. It would be better to call it a confusion of language…’

Tatarsky could sense that his thoughts were filled with such power that each one was a stratum of reality, just as important in every respect as the forest he was walking through this evening. The difference was that the forest was a thought he couldn’t stop thinking, no matter how much he wanted to. On the other hand, there was almost no will whatsoever involved in what was going on in his mind. As soon as he had the thought about the confusion of tongues, it became clear to him that the memory of Babylon was the only possible Babylon: by thinking about it, he had summoned it to life; and the thoughts in his head were like trucks loaded with building materials, rushing towards Babylon, making it more and more substantial.

‘They called the confusion of tongues the Tower of Babel.’ he thought. ‘But just what is the Tower of Babel?’

He swayed on his feet, feeling the earth swing round smoothly beneath him. He only stayed upright because the axis of the earth’s rotation ran precisely through the top of his head.

The confusion of tongues coincides in time with the creation of the tower. When there is a confusion of tongues, then the Tower of Babel starts to rise. Or maybe it doesn’t rise; maybe it’s just that the entrance to the ziggurat opens up. Yes, of course. There’s the entrance right there.

A pair of large gates decorated with three-dimensional red stars had appeared in the barbed-wire fence along which Tatarsky was walking. Above them blazed a powerful lamp surmounted by a cowl, and the bright-blue light illuminated the numerous graffiti covering the green sheet-metal of the gates. Tatarsky stopped.

For a minute or two he studied the traditional mid-Russian attempts to write the names of the surrounding villages in Latin script, various names surmounted by crude crowns, symbolic representations of a penis and a vulva, the English verbs ‘to fuck’ and ‘to suck’ in the third person singular of the present tense, but all peppered with incomprehensible apostrophes and abundant logos from the music business. Then his gaze fell on something strange.

It was a large inscription - significantly larger than all the rest, stretching right across the gates - written in fluorescent orange paint (it gleamed brightly in the rays of the electric lamp): THIS GAME HAS NO NAME.

The moment Tatarsky read it, all the other ethnographic material ceased to register in his awareness; his consciousness held nothing but these glittering words. He seemed to understand their meaning at a very deep level, and although he could hardly have explained it to anyone else, that meaning undoubtedly required him to climb over the gates. It proved not to be difficult.

Behind the gates was an abandoned building site, a wide area of waste ground with only sparse indications of any human presence. At the centre of the site stood an unfinished building - either the foundations of some intergalactic radio telescope or a strangely designed multi-storey parking lot: the construction work had been broken off at a stage when only the load-bearing structures and walls were in place. The structure looked like a stepped cylinder made up of several concrete boxes standing one on top of another. Round them wound a spiral roadway on reinforced concrete supports, which ended at the top box, surmounted by a small cubic tower with a red signal lamp.

Tatarsky thought it must be one of those military construction projects begun in the seventies that had failed to save the empire, but had shaped the aesthetic of ‘Star Wars’. He recalled Darth Vader and his asthmatic wheezing and marvelled at what a wonderful metaphor he was for the career communist: probably somewhere on his starship he had a dialysis machine and two teams of cardiologists, and Tatarsky recalled vaguely that there had been hints at something of the kind in the film. But in his present state thinking about Darth Vader was dangerous.

The unfinished building was illuminated by three or four floodlights that plucked patches of it out of the gloom - sections of the concrete wall, the spiral road and the upper tower with its winking signal light. If not for that red beacon, the building’s incompleteness could have been taken in the darkness for the dilapidation of age, and it might have been a thousand or even a full ten thousand years old. But then, thought Tatarsky, the beacon could be powered by some unimaginable ancient electricity transmitted under the ground from Egypt or Babylon.

Recent traces of man were only visible by the gates, where he was standing. There was something like the branch office of a military unit here - several living trailers, a boom, a board with a fire bucket and a crowbar, and a stand with a poster showing identical soldiers with a strange self-absorption imprinted on their faces demonstrating various training formations. Tatarsky was not in the least bit surprised when he saw an immense mushroom with a tin-sheet cap and a telephone hanging on its stalk-post - he realised it must be the sentry post. At first he was sure there was no sentry on duty, but then he saw that the mushroom’s conical cap was painted red and decorated with symmetrical white spots.

‘Nothing’s quite as simple as it seems,’ he whispered.

That very moment a quiet, mocking voice spoke somewhere close beside him: ‘This game has no name. It will never be the same.’

Tatarsky swung round. There was no one anywhere near him, and he realised it was an auditory hallucination. He felt a bit scared, but despite everything, what was taking place held a strangely delightful promise.

‘Onwards,’ he whispered, leaning forward and slipping quickly through the murk towards the road that led to the ziggurat. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘it’s just a multi-storey carpark.’

‘With hanging gardens,’ the voice in his head added quietly.

The fact that the voice spoke in Russian convinced Tatarsky it was a hallucination, but it reminded him once again of the confusion of tongues. As though in response to his thought the voice pronounced a long phrase in a strange language with a large number of sibilants. Tatarsky decided to ignore it, especially since he had already set foot on the spiral ascent.

From the distance he had failed to appreciate the true dimensions of the building. The road was wide enough for two trucks to pass each other (‘Or chariots,’ the voice added gleefully, ‘chariots with four-in-hand! Now those were chariots!’).

It was constructed of concrete slabs, with the joints between them left unsealed. Tall plants protruded from the joints - Tatarsky didn’t know what they were called, but he had known since he was a child that he could use their tough stems in his shoes instead of shoe laces. From time to time wide gaps appeared in the wall to his right, leading into the body of the ziggurat. Inside there were wide open spaces littered with building waste. The road constantly disappeared round the comer ahead, seeming to break off in mid-air, and Tatarsky walked carefully, clinging to the wall with one hand. On one side the tower was illuminated by the floodlights from the building site, and on the other by the moon, suspended in a gap in a high cloud. He could hear an open door banging in the wind somewhere up above, and the same wind brought the distant sound of dogs barking. Tatarsky slackened his pace until he was walking really slowly.

Something crunched under his foot. It was an empty cigarette pack. When he picked it up and moved into a patch of light, he saw it was a pack of Parliament Menthol. But there was something else much more surprising about it: on the front of the pack there was an advertising hologram showing three palm trees.

‘It all fits,’ he whispered and carried on, keeping a careful eye on the ground beneath his feet.

The next discovery was waiting one tier higher - he spotted the coin gleaming in the moonlight from a distance. He’d never seen one like it before: a Republic of Cuba three-peso piece with a portrait of Che Guevara. Tatarsky was not at all surprised that a Cuban coin should be lying on a military construction site - he remembered the final sequence of the film Golden Eye, with that immense Soviet-made antenna rising up out of the water somewhere on the Isle of Freedom. This was obviously the payment received for its construction. He replaced the coin in the empty Parliament pack and put it in his pocket, completely confident that there was something else waiting for him.

He wasn’t mistaken. The road was approaching its end at the very top box, in front of which lay a heap of building waste and broken crates. Tatarsky noticed a strange little cube lying in among the waste and picked it up. It was a pencil sharpener in the shape of a television, and someone had drawn a large eye on its plastic screen with a ballpoint pen. The sharpener was old - they used to make them like that in the seventies -and it was remarkable that it was so well preserved.

Cleaning off the mud clinging to the sharpener, Tatarsky slipped it into his inside pocket and looked round, wondering what to do next. He was afraid to go into the box: it was dark in there and he could easily break his neck if he fell into some hole or other. Somewhere up above, a door banged once again in the wind, and Tatarsky remembered there was a small tower on the summit of the building, with a red beacon lamp. He couldn’t see the tower from where he was standing, but there was a short fire-ladder leading upwards.

The small tower turned out to be the housing where the lift motors should have been. The door was open. On the wall right inside the door there was a light-switch. When Tatarsky turned on the light he saw the lingering traces of a soldier’s harsh life: a wooden table, two stools and and empty beer bottles in the corner. It was obvious that these were the traces of a soldier’s life, and not any other, from the magazine photographs of women stuck to the walls. Tatarsky studied them for a while. He thought that one of them, running across the sand of a tropical beach entirely naked and with a golden suntan, looked very beautiful. It wasn’t even so much her face and figure, but the incredible, indefinable freedom of her movement, which the photographer had managed to capture. The sand, the sea and the leaves of the palm trees on the photograph were all so vivid that Tatarsky heaved a heavy sigh - the meagre Moscow summer was already over. He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he fancied he could hear the distant murmur of the sea.

He sat down at the table, laid out his trophies on it and looked them over once again. The palms on the empty Parliament pack and on the photograph were very similar, and he thought they must grow in the same place, in a part of the world he would never get to see - not even in the Russian style, from inside a tank - and if he ever did, it would only be when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:

The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October ‘93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament (digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:

Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland

Parliament slogan:

THE MOTHERLAND’S#1 SMOKE!

"Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.

Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the sand as a souvenir, but he decided against it. He turned out the light, went out on to the roof and stopped to allow his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

‘What now?’ he thought. To the station.’