Babylon

CHAPTER 5. Poor Folk

The adventure in the forest outside Moscow proved positively stimulating to Tatarsky’s professional abilities. Scenarios and concepts now came to him far more easily, and Pugin even paid him a small advance for his slogan for Parliament: he said Tatarsky had hit the bull’s-eye, because until ‘ 93 a pack of Parliament had cost the same as a pack of Mariboro, but after those famous events Parliament had rapidly become the most popular cigarette in Moscow, and now they cost twice as much. Subsequently, however, ‘the smoke of the Motherland’ was dispersed without a trace into the thick gloom of a winter that arrived unexpectedly early. The only dubious echo of the slogan left in the snowbound advertising space of Moscow was the phrase: ‘From ship to ball’, another borrowing - by an unknown colleague of Tatarsky’s - from the poet Griboedov. It was to be glimpsed at one time on large hoarding advertisements for menthol cigarettes - a yacht, blue sea and sky, a peaked cap with a sunburst and a pair of long legs. Tatarsky felt a pang of jealousy at this, but not a very powerful one - the girl in the menthol advert had been chosen to suit the taste of such a wide target group that the text seemed spontaneously to read as: ‘From ship to balls’.

For some reason the wave of fly-agaric energy that had swept through his nervous system found its finest outlet in texts for cigarettes - probably for the same reason that the first truly successful experience of love or narcotics determines your preferences for the rest of your life. His next great success (not only in his own opinion, but in the opinion of Pugin, who surprised him once again by paying him) was a text written for Davidoff cigarettes, which was symbolic, because his career had started with them. The text was based on an advertisement for Davidoff Classic that was on all the hoardings in the city centre: dark tones, a close-up of a wasting face with the burden of unbearable knowledge glinting in the eyes, and the inscription: