Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Perhaps I misheard,’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Perhaps it’s just his pronunciation… But then I asked how he knew my name was Babe, and he said he knew from Pugin. No, I should never get drunk like that, never.’

After about forty minutes of slow, pensive walking he found himself beside the statue of Mayakovsky. He stopped and studied it closely for a little while. The bronze jacket in which Soviet power had invariably dressed the poet was back in fashion now - Tatarsky remembered that only recently he’d seen exactly the same style in a Kenzo advertisement.

After walking round the statue and admiring the firm, reliable backside of the Party’s loudmouth, Tatarsky finally realised that depression had invaded his soul. There were two ways he could get rid of it - down a hundred grammes of vodka, or spend about a hundred dollars on buying something immediately (some time ago Tatarsky had realised with astonishment that the two actions evoked a similar state of light euphoria lasting for an hour to an hour and a half).

He didn’t fancy the vodka in view of the newly surfaced memories of his drinking bouts with Pugin. Tatarsky glanced around. There were plenty of shops, but they were all very specialised. He had no real use for blinds, for instance. He began peering at the signboards on the far side of Tverskaya Street and suddenly started in amazement. This was too much: at an acute angle to him on the wall of a building on the Garden Ring he could make out a white signboard bearing the clearly distinguishable word ‘ISHTAR’.

A couple of minutes later, slightly out of breath, he was already approaching the entrance. It was a tiny fly-by-night shop, newly converted from a sandwich bar, but already bearing the imprint of decline and imminent extinction: a poster in the window promised a fifty-per-cent sale.

Inside, in the cramped space doubled by the mirrors on the walls, there were several long rails with various types of jeans and a long shelf of shoes, mostly trainers. Tatarsky cast a weary glance over the splendour of leather and rubber. Ten years ago a new pair of trainers brought in from abroad by a distant relative used to mark the starting point of a new period in your life - the design on the sole was a simulacrum of the pattern on the palm of your hand, from which you could forecast the future for a year ahead. The happiness that could be extracted from such an acquisition was boundless. Nowadays, to earn the right to the same amount you had to buy at least a jeep, maybe even a house. Tatarsky didn’t have that kind of money, and he didn’t expect to have it at any time in the foreseeable future. True, he could buy a whole truckload of trainers, but they didn’t gladden his heart in the same way any more. Tatarsky wrinkled up his forehead as he struggled to remember what this phenomenon was called in the professional jargon; and when he remembered, he took out his notebook and opened it at the letter ‘R’. "The inflation of happiness,’ he jotted down hastily: ‘having to pay more money for the same amount. Use in advertising real estate: Ladies and gentlemen! These walls offer you sure-fire protection against cognitive dissonance’. You need never even know what it is.’

‘What are you looking for?’ the salesgirl asked. She definitely did not like the idea of this customer writing things down in a notebook - that sort of thing ended in unannounced visits from inspectors of one kind or another.

‘I’d like some shoes,’ Tatarsky replied with a polite smile. ‘Something light, for summer.’

‘Ordinary shoes? Trainers? Gym shoes?’

‘Gym shoes’ said Tatarsky. ‘It’s years since I’ve seen any gym shoes.’

The girl led him over to the shelf. "There you are.’ she said. ‘Platform soles.’

Tatarsky picked up a thick-soled white gym shoe.

‘What make is it?’ he asked.

‘No name,’ said the girl. ‘From England.’

‘What d’you mean?’ he asked in astonishment.

The girl turned the back of the gym shoe to face him, and there on the heel he saw a rubber badge with the words: ‘NO NAME’.

‘Do you have a forty-three?’ Tatarsky asked.

He left the shop wearing his new gym shoes, his old shoes in a plastic bag. He was absolutely sure now that there was some meaning to the route he was following today and he was afraid of making a mistake by taking a wrong turning. He hesitated for a moment and then set off down Sadovaya Street.

About fifty metres further on he came across a tobacco kiosk, but when he stepped up to buy some cigarettes, Tatarsky was amazed to see a wide range of condoms looking more like the display in a chemist’s shop. Standing out clearly among the Malaysian Kama-Sutra condoms with their bob-bled shafts was a strange semi-transparent device of blue rubber covered with a multitude of thick knobs, looking very much like the head of the main demon from the film Hell-raiser. The label underneath it said ‘re-usable’.

But Tatarsky’s attention was caught by a neat black, yellow and red rectangle with a German eagle in a double black circle that looked like an official seal and the inscription ‘Sico’. It looked so much like a small banner that Tatarsky bought two packs on the spot. On the back of the pack it said: ‘In buying Sico condoms, you put your trust in traditional German quality control.’

‘Clever.’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Very clever.’

He pondered the theme for several seconds, trying to invent a slogan. Eventually the phrase he was looking for lit up in his head.

‘Sico. A Porsche in the world of condoms.’ he whispered, and wrote down his invention. Then he put his notebook away and looked around. He was standing on the comer of Sadovo-Triumfalnaya Street and some other street that branched off to the right. There on the wall in front of his face was a poster with the words: "The Path to Your Self” and a yellow arrow pointing round the corner. Tatarsky’s heart skipped a beat, and then the vague realisation dawned that The Path to Your Self was a shop.

‘Of course, what else?’ Tatarsky muttered to himself.

He only found the shop after weaving his way for ages through nearby yards and passages - near the end of his journey he remembered that Gireiev had mentioned this shop to him, but he’d used the abbreviated form of its name, PYS. There were no large signboards anywhere to be seen, nothing but a small board with the handwritten word ‘Open’ in the doorway of an ordinary-looking two-storey building. Tatarsky realised, of course, that things hadn’t been arranged like this through lack of foresight, but in order to induce a feeling of esoteric anticipation. Nonetheless, the method worked on him as well - as he climbed the stairs leading into the shop, he was aware of a sensation of subtle reverence.

Once inside the door he knew that instinct had led him to the right place. Hanging above the counter was a black tee shirt with a portrait of Che Guevara and the inscription: ‘Rage Against the Machine’. On the piece of cardboard under the tee shirt it said: ‘Bestseller of the month!’ There was nothing surprising about that - Tatarsky knew very well (he had even written about it in one of his concepts) that in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

‘What sizes do you have?’ he asked the sales assistant, a very pretty girl in a vaguely Babylonian-Assyrian style.

"There’s only one left,’ she answered. ‘Just your size.’

He paid, put the tee shirt in his shoulder-bag and then froze in indecision at the counter.

‘We’ve got a new lot of crystal balls, better buy one before they all go,’ purred the girl, and she began sorting out a pile of children’s bibs with inscriptions in runic characters.