Babylon

CHAPTER 6. The Path to Your Self

Next morning Tatarsky was woken by the phone. His first reaction was annoyance - the phone had interrupted a very strange and beautiful dream, in which Tatarsky was taking an examination. The dream had started with him drawing three question tickets one after the other, and then setting off up a long spiral staircase like there used to be in one of the blocks of his first institute, where he studied electric furnaces. It was up to him to find the examiners himself, but every time he opened one of the doors, instead of an examination hall he found himself gazing into the sunset-lit field outside Moscow where he and Gireiev had gone walking on that memorable evening. This was very strange, because his search had already taken him up several floors above ground level.

When he was fully awake he suddenly remembered Grigory and his stamp album. ‘I bought it,’ he thought in horror, ‘and I ate it…’ He leapt out of bed, went over to the desk, pulled out the top drawer and saw the stamp with the smiling lilac face looking up at him. ‘No,’ he thought, ‘thank God for that…’ Placing the stamp in the very farthest comer of the drawer, he covered it with a box of pencils.

Meanwhile the phone was still ringing. ‘Pugin.’ Tatarsky thought to himself and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello,’ said an unfamiliar voice, ‘can I speak to Mr Tatarsky, please?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Good morning. This is Vladimir Khanin from the Privy Counsellor agency. I was left your number by Dima Pugin. Could we maybe get together some time today? Right away would be best.’

‘What’s happened?’ Tatarsky asked, realising immediately from the verb ‘left’ that something bad must have happened to Pugin.

‘Dima’s no longer with us. I know you worked with him, and he worked with me. So indirectly we’re acquainted. In any case, I have several of your works we were waiting for an answer on lying here on my desk.’

‘But how did it happen?’

‘When we meet,’ said his new acquaintance. ‘Write down the address.’

An hour and a half later Tatarsky walked into the immense building of the Pravda complex, the building that had once housed the editorial offices of almost all the Soviet newspapers. A pass was ready and waiting for him at the duty desk. He went up to the eighth floor and found the room with the number he needed; there was a metal plate on the door bearing the words: ‘Ideological Department’ - apparently a leftover from Soviet times. ‘Or maybe not,’ thought Tatarsky.

Khanin was alone in the room. He was a middle-aged man with a pleasant, bearded face, and he was sitting at a desk, hastily writing something down.

‘Come in and sit down,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

Tatarsky took two steps into the room, saw the advertising poster sellotaped to the wall and almost choked on the spot. According to the text under the photograph, it was an advertisement for a new type of holiday involving the alternate use of jointly rented apartments - Tatarsky had already heard talk that it was just another big rip-off, like everything else. But that wasn’t the problem. The metre-wide photograph showed three palm trees on some paradise island, and those three palms were a point-for-point copy of the holographic image from the packet of Parliament cigarettes he’d found on the ziggurat. Even that was nothing compared with the slogan. Written in large black letters under the photograph were the words: