Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘What’s the problem over there?’ Khanin asked, squinting across at the poster.

‘Oh, nothing.’ said Tatarsky. ‘Deja vu.’

‘Ah! I understand.’ said Khanin in a tone of voice that suggested he really had understood something. ‘Right, then. First of all about Pugin…’

Gradually recovering his composure, Tatarsky began to listen.

The robbery had obviously been an inside job and, taking everything into consideration, the thief must have known that Pugin had worked as a taxi-driver in New York. It was a horrible and rather improbable story: while Pugin was warming up the motor of his car, two guys had climbed into the back seat and given him an address: Second Avenue, corner of Twenty-Seventh Street. Under some kind of reflex hypnosis Pugin had driven off, then turned into a side street - and that was all he had managed to tell the police and the doctors. Seven bullet wounds had been found in his body - they’d fired straight through the back of his seat. Several thousand dollars Pugin was carrying with him were missing, as well as some file or other that he kept raving about until the moment of death.

‘Except that the file,’ Khanin said sadly, ‘isn’t missing. Here it is. He left it here, forgot it. Why don’t you take a look? I’ll just make a couple of calls in the meantime.’

Tatarsky picked up the loose-leaf binder. He remembered Pugin’s mustachioed face, just as pasty and colourless as this cardboard, and his black-button eyes, like plastic studs. The folder evidently contained Pugin’s own works - how many times had he hinted that he was more than just a passive observer when it came to judging what other people produced? ‘He probably started back in New York,’ Tatarsky thought to himself. While Khanin was discussing some rates or other on the phone, Tatarsky came across two genuine masterpieces. The first was for Calvin Klein:

An elegant, rather effeminate Hamlet (general stylisation - unisex) in black tights and a light blue tunic worn next to the skin, wanders slowly around a graveyard. Beside one of the graves he halts, bends down and picks up a pink skull out of the grass. Close-up: Hamlet knitting his brows slightly as he gazes at the skull. View from the rear: close-up of taut buttocks with the letters ‘CK’. New camera angle: skull, hand, letters ‘CK’ on the blue tunic. Next frame: Hamlet tosses the skull into the air and kicks it. The skull soars upwards, then arcs back down and falls straight through the bronze wreath held by a bronze angel on one of the graves, just as though it were a basketball hoop. Slogan:

The second slogan Tatarsky liked was intended for the Gap chain of shops in Moscow. The proposal was for a poster showing Anton Chekhov, first in a striped suit, and then in a striped jacket but with no trousers: the gap between his bare, skinny legs was emphasised in strong contrast, so that it resembled a Gothic hourglass. Then the outline of the gap between Chekhov’s legs was repeated, but without Chekhov; now it really had become an hourglass, with almost all the sand already fallen through into the bottom half. The text was:

RUSSIA WAS ALWAYS NOTORIOUS FOR THE GAP BETWEEN CULTURE AND CIVILISATION. NOW THERE IS NO MORE CULTURE. NO MORE CIVILISATION. THE ONLY THING THAT REMAINS IS THE GAP. THE WAY THEY SEE YOU.

A few pages further on, Tatarsky came across his own text for Parliament. Suddenly it was clear to him that Pugin hadn’t invented any of the other pieces either. By this stage his imagination had already built up the image of a masked giant of advertising thought, capable of punning fluently on Shakespeare or Russian history at will. But like some heavy metal from the bottom of the periodic table, this virtual Pugin existed in Tatarsky’s consciousness for no more than a few seconds before he disintegrated.

Khanin said goodbye and hung up the phone. Tatarsky looked up and was amazed to see a bottle of tequila, two glasses and a saucer of lemon slices standing on the desk - Khanin had deftly set everything up while he was talking.

‘One for the departed?’ he suggested.

Tatarsky nodded. They clinked glasses and drank. Tatarsky squeezed a slice of lemon between his gums and began nervously composing a phrase to suit the occasion, but the telephone rang again.

‘What’s that? What’s that?’ Khanin said into the receiver. ‘I don’t know. This is a very serious matter. You go straight round to the Institute of Apiculture… Yes, yes, to the tower.’

He hung up and looked intently at Tatarsky.

‘And now,’ he said, removing the tequila from the table, ‘let’s get to grips with your latest works, if you have no objection. I presume you’ve understood that Dima was bringing them to me?’

Tatarsky nodded.

‘Right, then. As far as Parliament is concerned I must admit, it’s good. But once you’ve latched on to a theme like that, why do you hold back? Relax! Let yourself go all the way! Put a Yeltsin on all four tanks with a glass in his hand.’

‘That’s an idea,’ Tatarsky agreed, inspired, sensing he was sitting opposite a man of real understanding. ‘But then we’d have to take out the parliament building, give each Yeltsin a rose and make it an advertisement for that whisky… What’s it called - the one with the roses on the label…’

‘Four Roses bourbon?’ Khanin said, and chuckled. ‘Why not? We could. Make a note of it somewhere for yourself.’

He pulled several sheets of paper held together by a paper-clip towards himself, and Tatarsky immediately recognised the project that had cost him so much effort for Tampako, a company that produced juices but for some reason intended to sell shares - he’d given it to Pugin two weeks before. It wasn’t a scenario but a concept, that is, a product of a somewhat paradoxical genre in which the author explains, as it were, to very rich people how they should earn their living and asks them to give him a little bit of money for doing it. The pages of the familiar text were covered with dense red scribblings.

‘Aha,’ said Khanin, glancing over the markings, ‘here I see you’ve got problems. In the first place, they took serious offence at one of your pieces of advice.’

‘Which one?’

‘I’ll read it to you,’ said Khanin, leafing through the pages, ‘where is it now… it was underlined in red… but almost all of this part is underlined… aha, here it is - triple underlining. Listen:

And so there exist two methods for advertising shares: the approach that shapes the investor s image of the issuing firm, and the approach that shapes the investor’s image of the investor. In the language of the professional these approaches are called ‘where to invest’ and ‘who to invest with’…

‘No, they actually liked that bit… aha, here it is:

In our opinion, before the campaign begins it would make good sense to think about changing the name of the firm. The reason for this is that Russian TV carries a lot of advertising for Tampax sanitary products. This concept is so firmly positioned in the consumers’ consciousness that displacing and replacing it would involve immense expenditure. The associative link Tampako-Tampax is exceptionally inappropriate for a firm that produces soft drinks. In our opinion, it is enough to change the penultimate vowel in the firm’s name: ‘Tampuko’ or ‘Tampeko’. This completely eliminates the negative association…’

Khanin looked up. ‘You’ve learned a lot of good words, can’t fault you there,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you understand you just don’t go making suggestions like that? Here they’ve poured their life’s blood into this Tampako of theirs. For them it means… To keep it short, these people have totally identified themselves with their product, and you start telling them things like this. You might as well tell a mother: your son’s a real freak, of course, but we’ll give his face a couple of licks of paint and everything’ll be just fine.’