Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Tell me,’ Tatarsky asked on a sudden impulse, ‘you wouldn’t happen to know what the Russian idea is, would you?’

‘Ha,’ said the driver, as if he been expecting this very question. ‘I’ll tell you about that. I’m half Mordvinian. So when I was serving in the army, the first year, on training, there was this sergeant there called Harley. Used to say, "I hate Mords and nig-nogs," and he’d send me off to scrub the shit-house with a toothbrush. Two months the bastard took the piss out of me. Then all of a sudden these three Mordvin brothers arrived for their training, and all of them weightlifters, can you imagine that? "So who is it round here doesn’t like Mordvinians?" they said.’

The driver laughed happily and the car swerved across the road, almost skipping out into the opposite lane.

‘What’s that got to do with the Russian idea?’ Tatarsky asked, hunched down in his seat in fear.

‘I’ll tell you what. That Harley got such a belting he spent two weeks on his back with a medical battalion. That’s what. They worked him over another five times until he was fit for nothing but demobbing. But they didn’t just work him over…’

‘Can you stop there, please,’ Tatarsky said, not wanting to hear any more.

‘I can’t stop here,’ said the driver, ‘I’ve got to find a place to turn. I tell you, if only they’d just beaten him… But, oh no!’

Tatarsky gave in, and as the car took him home the driver shared the fate of the chauvinist sergeant in a degree of detail that destroyed even the slightest possibility of sympathy - after all, sympathy is always based on a brief instant of identification, and in this case that was impossible - neither heart nor mind would dare risk it. In fact, it was just a typical army story.

When Tatarsky got out of the car, the driver said to him: ‘As for that idea of yours, I’ll tell you straight: fuck only knows. All I want is the chance to earn enough to keep me in petrol and booze. Yeltsin-Schmeltsin - what do I care, so long as they don’t go smashing my face against a table?’

Perhaps it was these words that made Tatarsky remember the handcuffed manager who’d dialled the telephone number in the empty air. Inside the entrance-way of his house, he stopped. He’d only just realised what the case really required. He took the card out of his pocket and wrote on its reverse:

THERE’S ALWAYS SOMEBODY WHO CARES! PUT YOUR TRUST IN TAMPOKO SHARES!

‘So it’s a conifer, is it?’ he thought.

It happens so often: you step outside on a summer’s morning and come face to face with this immense, beautiful world hastening on its way to some unknown destination and filled with mysterious promise, and the blue sky is awash with happiness, and suddenly your heart is pierced by a feeling, compressed into a single split second, that there life is in front of you and you can follow it on down the road without a backwards glance, gamble on yourself and win, go coursing across life’s seas on a white speedboat and hurtling along her roads in a white Mercedes; and your fists tighten and clench of their own accord, and the muscles on your temples stand out in knots, and you promise yourself that you will rip mountains of money out of this hostile void with your bare teeth and you’ll brush aside anybody you have to, and nobody will ever dare to use that American word ‘loser’ about you.

That is how the oral wow-factor manifests itself in our hearts. But as Tatarsky wandered towards the underground with a folder under his arm, he was indifferent to its insistent demands. He felt exactly like a ‘loser’ - that is, not only a complete idiot, but a war criminal as well, not to mention a failed link in the biological evolution of humanity.

Yesterday’s attempt to compose the Russian idea had ended in the first total and absolute failure of Tatarsky’s career. At first the task hadn’t seemed very complicated, but once he’d sat down to it he’d been horrified to realise there wasn’t a single idea in his head, not a thing. Not even the ouija board was any help when he turned to it in his despair after the hands of the clock had crept past midnight. Che Guevara did respond, but in reply to a question about the Russian idea he produced a rather strange passage:

Fellow compatriots! It would be more correct to talk of the oral-anal wow-effect, since these influences fuse into a single impulse and it is precisely this complex of emotions, this conglomerate of the two, that is regarded as defining the socially valuable aspects of human existence. Note that advertising occasionally prefers a quasi-Jungian approach to a quasi-Freudian one: it sometimes happens that the acquisition of a material object is not the expression of a naked act of monetarist copulation, but of the search for a magical quality capable of relegating oral-anal stimulation to the background. For instance, a blue-green toothbrush somehow guarantees the safety of an attempt to clamber from an upper balcony to a lower one, a refrigerator protects you from being crushed to death amidst the fragments of a grand piano that has fallen off the roof, and a jar of kiwi fruit in syrup saves you from an aeroplane crash - but this is an approach that most of the professionals regard as outmoded. Amen.

The only thing in all this that reminded Tatarsky of the Russian idea was the use of Yeltsin’s favourite phrase: ‘Fellow compatriots’, which had always seemed to Tatarsky akin to the address ‘Fellow prisoners’ with which the institutionalised mobsters used to begin their written missives to the labour camps, their so-called ‘daubs’. But despite this similarity, Wee Vova would hardly have been satisfied by the brief extract produced. Tatarsky’s attempts to establish contact with some other spirit more competent in the question concerned came to nothing. True, an appeal to the spirit of Dostoievsky, in whom Tatarsky had placed especially high hopes, did evoke certain interesting side-effects, with the ouija board trembling and leaping into the air, as though it was being pulled in all directions at once by several equally strong presences, but the crooked scribbles left on the paper were useless to Tatarsky, although, of course, he could console himself with the thought that the idea he was seeking was so transcendent that this was the only way it could be expressed on paper. However that might be, Tatarsky hadn’t got the job done.

There was no way in the world he could show Khanin the sheet of paper in his folder with the fragment about the tooth-brush and kiwi fruit, but he had to show him something, and Tatarsky’s mind retreated into self-flagellation, rewriting all the brand names with the word ‘laser’ in them and savouring them as he applied them to himself; ‘Loser-Jet’ and ‘Loser-Max’ lashed sweetly at his very soul, allowing him just for a moment to forget his impending disgrace.

As he drew closer to the metro, however, Tatarsky was distracted from his thoughts somewhat. Something strange was going on there. A cordon of about twenty military police with automatic rifles were talking to each other on their walkie-talkies, pulling heroic and mysterious faces. In the centre of the cordoned-off area a small crane was loading the burnt-out remains of a limousine on to the platform of a truck. Several men in civilian clothes were walking round the skeleton of the car, carefully examining the asphalt, gathering up bits of something from it and putting them into plastic bags like rubbish bags. Tatarsky had a good view of all this from higher up the street, but once he came down to the same level as the station, the impenetrable crowd concealed what was happening from view. Tatarsky jostled briefly at the sweaty backs of his fellow citizens, then sighed and went on his way.