Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

When he emerged from the toilet he stopped, astounded at the view that suddenly confronted him. There must have been a double door in the corridor before, but it had been broken out and its frame, daubed with black paint, was protruding from the walls and ceiling. With its slightly rounded outline the opening looked like the frame around a television screen - so much like it, in fact, that for a moment Tatarsky thought he was watching the country’s biggest TV set. Azadovsky and his company were outside his field of view, but he could see the two bandits by the nearest table and the new customer who had appeared beside them. He was a tall, thin old man wearing a brown raincoat, a beret and powerful spectacles with earpieces that were too short. Through the lenses his eyes appeared disproportionately large and childishly honest. Tatarsky could have sworn he’d seen him somewhere before. The old man had already gathered around himself a few listeners, who looked like homeless tramps.

‘You guys,’ he was saying in a thin voice full of astonishment, ‘you’ll never believe it! There I was picking up half a litre in the vegetable shop at the Kursk station, you know. I’m queuing up to pay, and guess who comes into the shop? Chubais! Fuck me… He was wearing this shabby grey coat and a red mohair cap, and not a bodyguard in sight. There was just a bit of a bulge in his right pocket, as though he had his rod in there. He went into the pickles section and took a big three-litre jar of Bulgarian tomatoes - you know, the green ones, with some green stuff in the jar? And he stuck it in his string bag. I’m standing there gawping at him with my mouth wide open, and he noticed, gave me a wink and hopped out the door. I went across to the window, and there was this car with a light on the roof, winking at me just like he did. He hops in and drives off. Bugger me, eh, the things that happen…’

Tatarsky cleared his throat and the old man looked in his direction.

"The People’s Will,’ Tatarsky said and winked, unable to restrain himself.

He pronounced the words very quietly, but the old man heard. He tugged on one of the bandits’ sleeves and nodded in the direction of the gap in the wall. The bandits put down their half-finished bottles of beer on the table in synchronised motion and advanced on Tatarsky, smiling slightly. One of them put his hand in his pocket, and Tatarsky realised they were quite possibly going to kill him.

The adrenalin that flooded through his body lent his movements incredible lightness. He turned, shot out of the beer-hall and set off across the yard at a run. When he reached the very middle of it he heard several loud cracks behind him and something hummed by him very close. Tatarsky doubled his speed. He only allowed himself to glance around close to the comer of a tall log-built house that he could hide behind - the bandits had stopped shooting, because Azadovsky’s security guards had come running up with automatics in their hands.

Tatarsky slumped against the wall, took out his cigarettes with fingers that refused to bend and lit up. "That’s the way it happens,’ he thought, ‘just like that. Simple, out of the blue.’

By the next time he screwed up the nerve to glance round the comer his cigarette had almost burnt away. Azadovsky and his company were getting into their cars; both the bandits, their faces beaten to pulp, were sitting on the back seat of a jeep with the bodyguards, and the old man in the brown raincoat was heatedly arguing his case to an indifferent bodyguard. At last Tatarsky remembered where he’d seen the old man before - he was the philosophy lecturer from the Literary Institute. He didn’t really recognise his face - the man had aged a lot - so much as the intonation of astonishment with which he once used to read his lectures. ‘The object’s got a pretty strong character,’ he used to say, throwing back his head to look up at the ceiling of the auditorium; ‘it demands disclosure of the subject: that’s the way it is! And then, if it’s lucky, merging may take place…’

Tatarsky realised that merging had finally taken place. "That happens too,’ he thought and, taking out his notebook, jotted down the slogan he’d invented in the beer-hall:

DIAMONDS ARE NOT FOR EVER! THE BROTHERS DEBIRSIAN FUNERAL PARLOUR

‘They’ll probably fire me,’ he thought, when the cavalcade of cars disappeared round a bend. ‘Where now? God only knows where. To Gireiev. He lives somewhere just around here.’

Gireiev’s house proved surprisingly easy to find - Tatarsky recognised it from the garden with its forest of unbelievably tall dill umbrellas, looking more like small trees than large weeds. Tatarsky knocked several times on the gate and Gireiev appeared on the verandah. He was wearing trousers of an indefinite colour, baggy at the knees, and a tee shirt with a large letter ‘A’ in the centre of a rainbow-coloured circle.

‘Come on in,’ he said, ‘the gate’s open.’

Gireiev had been drinking for a few days, drinking away a fairly large sum of money, which was now coming to an end. This was the deduction that could be drawn from the fact that there were empty bottles from expensive brands of whisky and brandy standing along the wall, while the bottles standing closer to the centre of the room were from various kinds of vodka bootlegged from the Caucasus, the kinds that had romantic and passionate names and were sold around the railway stations. In the time that had elapsed since Tatarsky’s last visit the kitchen had hardly changed at all, except for becoming even dirtier, and images of rather frightening Tibetan deities had appeared on the walls. There was one other innovation: a small television glimmering in the comer.

When he sat down at the table, Tatarsky noticed the television was standing upside down. The screen was showing the animated titles from some programme - a fly was buzzing around an eye with long lashes thickly larded with mascara. The name of the programme appeared - Tomorrow - at which very moment the fly landed on the pupil and stuck fast, and the lashes began to wrap themselves around it like a Venus fly-trap. The anchor man appeared, dressed in the uniform of a jail guard - Tatarsky guessed that must be the insulted response of a copywriter from the seventh floor to the recent declaration by a copywriter from the eighth floor that television in Russia is one of the state power structures. Because the anchor man was inverted, he looked very much like a bat hanging from an invisible perch. Tatarsky was not particularly surprised to recognise him as Azadovsky. His hair was dyed jet-black and he had a narrow shoelace moustache under his nose. He grinned like a halfwit and spoke:

‘Very soon now in the city of Murmansk the nuclear jet-powered cruiser The Idiot will slide down the slipway. Its keel was laid to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoievsky. It is not clear as yet whether the government will be able to find the money needed to lay the keel of another ship of the same kind, the Crime and Punishment. Book news!’ - Azadovsky produced a book with a cover depicting the holy trinity of a grenade-thrower, a chain-saw and a naked woman - ‘Good needs hard fists. That’s something we’ve known for a long time, but there was still something missing! Now here is the book we’ve been waiting for all these years - good with hard fists and a big dick: The Adventures of Svyatoslav the Roughneck. Economic news: in the State Duma today the make-up was announced of the new minimum annual consumer goods basket. It includes twenty kilogrammes of pasta, a centner of potatoes, six kilogrammes of pork, a padded coat, a pair of shoes, a fur cap with earflaps and a Sony Black Trinitron television. Reports from Chechnya…’