Babylon (23 page)

   ‘You like it?’ he asked.

   ‘Of course,’ said Tatarsky. ‘A Piaget Possession, if I’m not mistaken? I think it costs seventy thousand?’

   ‘Piaget Possession?’ The young man glanced at the dial. ‘Yes, so it is. I don’t know how much it cost.’

   Morkovin gave Tatarsky a sideways glance.

   ‘There’s nothing that identifies someone as belonging to the lower classes of society so clearly as knowing all about expensive watches and cars. Babe,’ he said.

   Tatarsky blushed and lowered his eyes.

   The section of carpet immediately in front of his face was covered in a pattern depicting fantastic flowers with long petals of various colours. Tatarsky noticed that the nap of the carpet was thickly covered with minute white pellets like pollen, as though with frost. He glanced across at Morkovin. Morkovin stuck his small tube into one nostril, closed the other nostril with one finger and ran the free end of the tube across the petal of a fantastical violet daisy. Tatarsky finally got the idea.

   For several minutes the silence in the room was broken only by the sound of intense snorting. Eventually the owner of the office raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Well?’ he asked, looking at Tatarsky.

   Tatarsky tore himself away from the pale-purple rose that he was absorbed in processing. His resentment had completely evaporated.

   ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Simply excellent!’

   He found talking easy and pleasurable; he might have felt a certain constraint when he entered this huge office, but now it had disappeared without trace. The cocaine was the real thing, and hardly cut at all - except perhaps for the very slightest aftertaste of aspirin.

   ‘One thing I don’t understand, though,’ Tatarsky continued, ‘is why all this fancy technology? It’s all very elegant, but isn’t it a bit unusual!’

   Morkovin and the owner of the office exchanged glances.

   ‘Didn’t you see the sign on our premises?’ the owner asked:

   ‘The Institute of Apiculture?’

   ‘Yes,’ said Tatarsky.

   ‘Well then. Here we are, making like bees.’

   All three of them laughed, and they laughed for a long tune, even when the reason for laughing had been forgotten.

   Finally the fit of merriment passed. The owner of the office looked around as though trying to recall what he was there for, and evidently remembered. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s get down to business. Morky, you wait with Alla. I’ll have a word with the man.’

   Morkovin hurriedly sniffed a couple of paradisaical cornflowers, stood up and left the room. The owner of the office got to his feet, stretched, walked round the desk and sat down in the armchair.

   ‘Have a seat,’ he said.

   Tatarsky sat in the armchair facing the desk. It was very soft, and so low that he fell into it like falling into a snowdrift. When he looked up, Tatarsky was struck dumb. The table towered over him like a tank over a trench, and the resemblance was quite clearly not accidental. The twin supports decorated with plates of embossed nickel looked exactly like broad caterpillar tracks, and the picture in the round frame hanging on the wall was now exactly behind the head of the office’s owner, so it looked like a trapdoor from which he had just emerged - the resemblance was further reinforced by the fact that only his head and shoulders could be seen above the desk. He savoured the effect for a few seconds, then he rose, leaned out across the desk and offered Tatarsky his hand:

   ‘Leonid Azadovsky.’

   ‘Vladimir Tatarsky,’ said Tatarsky, rising slightly as he squeezed the plump, limp hand.

   ‘You’re no Vladimir; you’re called Babylen,’ said Azadovsky. ‘I know all about it. And I’m not Leonid. My old man was a wanker too. Know what he called me? Legion. He probably didn’t even know what the word means. It used to make me miserable too, at first. Then I found out there was something about me in the Bible, so I felt better about it. OK then…’

   Azadovsky rustled the papers scattered around on his desk.

   ‘Now what have we here… Aha. I’ve had a look at your work, and I liked it. Good stuff. We need people like you. Only in a few places… I don’t completely believe it. Here, for instance; you write about the "collective unconscious". Do you actually know what that is?’

   Tatarsky shuffled his fingers as he tried to find the words.

   ‘At the unconscious collective level,’ he answered.

   ‘Aren’t you afraid someone might turn up who knows exactly what it is?’

   Tatarsky twitched his nose. ‘No, Mr Azadovsky,’ he said, ‘I’m not afraid of that; and the reason I’m not is that for a long time now everyone who knows what the "collective unconscious" is has been selling cigarettes outside the metro. One way or another, I mean. I used to sell cigarettes outside the metro myself. I went into advertising because I was sick of it.’

   Azadovsky said nothing for a few seconds while he thought over what he’d just heard. Then he chuckled.

   ‘Is there anything at all you believe in?’ he asked.

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky.

   ‘Well, that’s good,’ said Azadovsky, taking another look into the papers, this time at some form with columns and sections. ‘OK… Political views - what’s this we have here? It says "upper left" in English. I don’t get it. What a fucking pain - soon every form and document we have’ll be written in English. So what are your political views?’

   ‘Left of right centrists,’ Tatarsky replied.

   ‘And more specifically?’

   ‘More specifically… Let’s just say I like it when life has big tits, but I’m not in the slightest bit excited by the so-called Kantian tit-in-itself, no matter how much milk there might be splashing about in it. That’s what makes me different from selfless idealists like Gaidar…’

   The phone rang and Azadovksy held up his hand to stop the conversation. He picked up the receiver and listened for a few minutes, his face gradually hardening into a grimace of loathing.

   ‘So keep looking.’ he barked, dropped the receiver on to its cradle and turned towards Tatarsky. ‘What was that about Gaidar? Only keep it short, they’ll be ringing again any minute.’

   ‘To cut it short,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I couldn’t give a toss for any Kantian tit-in-itself with all its categorical imperatives. On the tit market the only tit that gives me a buzz is the Feuerbachian tit-for-us. That’s the way I see the situation.’

   "That’s what I think too.’Azadovksy said in all seriousness. ‘Even if it’s not so big, so long as it’s Feuerbachian…’

   The phone rang again. Azadovsky picked up the receiver and listened for a while, and his face blossomed into a broad smile.

   ‘Now that’s what I wanted to hear! And the control shot? Great! Good going!’

   The news was obviously very good: Azadovsky stood up, rubbed his hands together, walked jauntily over to a cupboard set in the wall, took out a large cage in which something started dashing about furiously, and carried it over to the desk. The cage was old, with traces of rust, and it looked like the skeleton of a lampshade.

   ‘What’s that?’ asked Tatarsky.

   ‘Rostropovich.’ replied Azadovsky.

   He opened the little door, and a small white hamster emerged from the cage on to the desk. Casting a glance at Tatarsky from its little red eyes, it buried its face in its paws and began rubbing its nose. Azadovsky sighed sweetly, took something like a toolbag out of the desk, opened it and set out a bottle of Japanese glue, a pair of tweezers and a small tin on the desktop.

   ‘Hold him,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t be afraid, he won’t bite.’

   ‘How should I hold him?’ Tatarsky asked, rising from his armchair.

   Take hold of his paws and pull them apart. Like a little Jesus. Aha, that’s right.’

   Tatarsky noticed there were several small discs of metal with toothed edges on the hamster’s chest, looking like watch cog-wheels. When he looked closer he saw they were tiny medals made with remarkable skill - he even thought he could see tiny precious stones gleaming in them, accentuating the similarity to parts of a watch. He didn’t recognise a single one of the medals - they clearly belonged to a different era, and they reminded him of the dress uniform regalia of a general from the times of Catherine the Great.

   ‘Who gave him those?’ he asked.

   ‘Who could give them to him, if not me?’ Azadovsky chanted, extracting a short little ribbon of blue watered silk from the tin. ‘Hold him tighter.’

   He squeezed a drop of glue out on to a sheet of paper and deftly ran the ribbon across it before applying it to the hamster’s belly.

   ‘Oh,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I think he’s…’

   ‘He’s shit himself,’ Azadovsky confirmed, dipping a diamond snowflake clasped in the pincers into the glue. ‘He’s so happy. Hup…’

   Tossing the tweezers down on the desk, he leaned down over the hamster and blew hard several times on his chest.

   ‘Dries instantly,’ he announced. ‘You can let him go.’

   The hamster began running fussily around the table - he would run up to the edge, lower his nose over it as though he was trying to make out the floor far below, twitch it rapidly and then set off for the opposite edge, where the same procedure was repeated.

   ‘What did he get the medal for?’ Tatarsky asked.

   ‘I’m in a good mood. Why, are you jealous?’

   Azadovsky caught the hamster, tossed it back into the cage, locked the door and carried it back to the cupboard.

   ‘Why does he have such a strange name?’

   ‘You know what, Babylen,’ said Azadovsky, sitting back down in his chair, ‘Rostropovich could ask you the same thing.’

   Tatarsky remembered he’d been advised not to say too much or ask too many questions. Azadovsky put the medals and accessories away in the desk, crumpled up the sheet of paper stained with glue and tossed it into the waste bin.

   ‘To cut it short, we’re taking you on for a trial period of three months.’’ he said. ‘We have our own advertising department now, but we don’t produce so much ourselves; we’re more into coordinating the work of several of the major agencies. Sort of like we don’t play, but we keep score. So for the time being you’ll be in the internal reviews department on the third floor from the next entrance. We’ll keep an eye on you and think things over, and if you suit, we’ll move you on to something with more responsibility. Have you seen how many floors we have here?’

   ‘Yes, I have,’ said Tatarsky.

   ‘All right then. The potential for growth is unlimited. Any questions?’

   Tatarsky decided to ask the question that had been tormenting him since the moment they met.

   ‘Tell me, Mr Azadovsky, yesterday I saw this clip about these pills - wasn’t it you playing the doctor?’

   ‘Yes, it was,’ Azadovsky said drily. ‘Is there some law against that?’

   He looked away from Tatarsky, picked up the phone and opened his notebook. Tatarsky realised that the audience was over. Shifting uncertainly from one foot to the other, he glanced at the carpet.

   ‘D’you think I could…’

   He didn’t need to finish. Azadovsky smiled, pulled a straw out of the vase and tossed it on to the desk.

   ‘Shit-stupid question,’ he said, and began dialling a number.

   The pivotal element of the office environment was the piercing voice of the western Ukrainian cook that emanated from the small canteen almost all day long. All the other elements of aural reality were strung on it like beads on a thread: telephones ringing, voices, the fax squeaking and the printer humming. The material objects and people occupying the room all condensed around this primary reality - or at least that was the way things had seemed to Tatarsky for quite a few months now.

   ‘So there I am yesterday driving down Pokrovka,’ a cigarette critic who’d just dashed in was telling the secretary in a high, thin tenor, ‘and I brake at the crossroads there for this queue. Beside me there’s this Chaika, and out of it gets this real heavy-looking Chechen, and he looks around like he’s just shit on everyone from a great height. He stands there, you know, like really getting into it; then suddenly up pulls this real gen-u-ine Cadillac, and out gets this girl in tattered jeans and runners and dashes over to a kiosk to get some Pepsi-Cola. You can just imagine what’s going on with the Chechen! Imagine having to swallow that!’

   ‘Wow!’ replied the secretary, without looking up from her computer keyboard.

   There were talking behind Tatarsky too, and very loudly. One of his subordinates, a late-middle-aged editor and old Communist Party publication type, was hauling someone over the coals on the speaker-phone in a rumbling bass voice. Tatarsky could tell the editor’s deafening volume and implacable heartiness were intended for his ears. This only irritated him, and his sympathy was captured by the thin, sad voice replying from the speaker-phone.

   ‘I corrected one but not the other,’ the voice said quietly. "That’s how it happened.’

   ‘Well, well" growled the editor. ‘So what on earth do you think about when you’re working? You’re handling two pieces - one called "Prisoner of Conscience" and the other called "Eunuchs of the Harem", right?’

   ‘Right.’

   ‘You put headings on the clipboard to change the font, and then on page thirty-five you find "Prisoner of the Harem", right?’

   ‘Right.’

   ‘Then shouldn’t it be obvious enough that on page seventy-four you’re going to have "Eunuchs of Conscience"? Or are you just a total tosser?’

   ‘I’m a total tosser,’ agreed the sad voice.

   ‘You’re both fucking tossers,’ thought Tatarsky. He’d been feeling depressed since the morning - probably because of the constant rain. He’d been sitting by the window and staring at the roofs of the cars as they ploughed through the streams of murky water. Old Ladas and Moskviches built back in Soviet times stood rusting along the edge of the pavement like garbage the river of time had tossed up on to its muddy shore. The river of time itself consisted for the most part of bright-coloured foreign cars with water spurting up in fountains from under their tyres.

   Lying on the desk in front of Tatarsky was a pack of Gold Yava cigarettes, the new version of the old Soviet favourite, set in a cardboard display frame, and a heap of papers.