Виктор Пелевин: Babylon

Tatarsky was left alone. He got up from the chair, walked over to the door and listened. He couldn’t hear anything: Farseikin must already be in the changing room. Tatarsky moved across into the farthest comer of the room and cautiously pressed the button on the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said quietly into the handset. ‘Hello!’

‘I bow before the living god,’ Alla’s voice replied. ‘What are your instructions for today, boss?’

‘None yet,’ Tatarsky replied, amazed to sense that he could play his new part without the slightest effort. ‘Although, you know what. Alla, there will be a few after all. Firstly, have the carpet in the office taken up - I’m fed up with it. Secondly, make sure that from today on there’s nothing but Coca-Cola in the buffet, no Pepsi. Thirdly, Malyuta doesn’t work for us any more… because he’s about as much use to us as a fifth leg to a dog. All he does is spoil other people’s scenarios, and then the mazuma has to go back… And you. Alla my love, remember: if I say something, you don’t ask "why?", you just jot it down. You follow? That’s all right then.’

When the conversation was over, Tatarsky tried to hook the phone on to his belt, but his Fukem-Al sheepskin skirt was too thick. He thought for a few moments about where he could stick it, and then recalled that he’d forgotten to say something, and pressed the golden eye again.

‘And one more thing,’ he said; ‘I completely forgot: take care of Rostropovich.’

Babylen Tatarsky’s 3-D double appeared on screen times without number, but Tatarsky himself only liked to rewatch a few of the tapes. The first was a press conference given by officers of the State Security Forces who had been ordered to eliminate the well-known businessman and political figure Boris Berezovsky: Tatarsky, wearing a black mask covering his entire face, is sitting at the extreme left of a table crowded with microphones. The second tape was the funeral of the TV commentator Farsuk Seiful-Farseikin, who was strangled with a yellow skipping rope in strange circumstances in the entrance-way of his own house: Tatarsky, wearing dark glasses and a black armband, is seen kissing the inconsolable widow and tossing a green billiard ball on to the coffin half-covered in earth. The event shown in the next report is rather harder to understand: it’s live footage from a hidden camera of the unloading of an American Hercules C-130 military transport plane following a night landing on Red Square. The cargo being carried out of the plane consists of a large number of cardboard boxes bearing the inscription ‘electronic equipment’ and an unusual-looking logo - the casually traced outline of a human mammary gland of a size that can only be achieved by the installation of a silicone implant. Tatarsky, wearing the uniform of a crack commando, is standing there stock-still. His next appearance is one familiar to everybody, as Charles I in the monumental ad for the shampoo Head and Shoulders. Far less well known is another clip filmed on Red Square, an advert for Coca-Cola that was shown several times on St Petersburg TV, showing a congress of radical fundamentalists from all of the world’s major confessions. Dressed completely in black, Tatarsky plays an evangelist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stamping in fury on a can of Pepsi-Cola he raises his arm to point to the Kremlin wall and intones a verse from Psalm 14:

There were they in great fear; for God is in the generation of the righteous.

Many still remember his appearance in the clip for Adidas (slogan: "Three More White Lines’), but for some reason Tatarsky didn’t keep it in his collection. It didn’t even include the famous ad for the Moscow chain of Gap stores, in which Tatarsky appeared together with his deputy Morkovin, Morkovin wearing a denim jacket embroidered with gold in the shop window and Tatarsky wearing a padded army uniform hurling a brick at the reinforced glass and yelling:

‘ Afghanistan was heavier’ (slogan: ‘Enjoy the Gap’). But his very favourite video clip, the one - as his secretary Alla used to say in a whisper - that would bring tears to his eyes, was never shown on television even once.

It is a commercial for Tuborg beer with the slogan: ‘Sta, viator!’ (and the variants: ‘Prepare Yourself and Think Final’ for the regional TV networks) in which the famous picture of the solitary wanderer is animated. There were rumours that a version of this clip was made in which there were thirty Tatarskys walking along the road one after the other, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to determine whether or not that’s true. The only thing we know for sure is that the existing clip is very short and simple.

Tatarsky, wearing a white shirt open at the chest, is walking along a dusty track under a sun standing at its zenith. Suddenly he is struck by some kind of thought. He halts, leans against a wooden fence and wipes the sweat from his face with a handkerchief. A few seconds go by, and the hero seems to grow calmer. Turning his back to the camera, he stuffs the handkerchief into his pocket and slowly walks on towards the bright-blue horizon, where a few wispy clouds hang high in the sky.