I was gliding down into the darkness for so long I had time not only to conquer my panic but to become bored and extremely cold. Virgil’s phrase about Lake Avernus came to mind: ‘smooth is the descent, and easy is the way.’ The Romans considered that people could accomplish the descent into Hades without difficulty. That’s how much they knew, I thought. The circles I was describing blended into a monotonously wearying passage – not unlike walking down the staircase of a high-rise building during a power cut. The most sinister aspect of it was that I had no sense of nearing the bottom.
To occupy my mind with something, I tried conjuring up everything I knew about the expression ‘the tree of life’. First of all, it was the name of the tree on which the Scandinavian god Odin hung himself in his attempt to be initiated into the secret of the runes. You have to imagine him hanging upside down … Secondly, in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, which figured in one of the degustations on the theme of ‘local cults’, there had been an excerpt on the subject.
‘For their delight is deception,’ I repeated over to myself what I could remember. ‘And their fruit is an incurable poison and their promise is death. And in the midst of paradise, they planted the tree of their life … But I, I will teach you what the mystery of their life is … the root of the tree is bitter and its branches are death, and its shade is hate … Deception dwells in its leaves, and it blossoms from the darkness …’
The tree that grows into darkness – a beautiful, and morbid, image. Its fruits, apparently, were also death, but I could not remember exactly. The agglomeration of so many such horrors in this description was not, however, especially frightening – after all, many things that made ancient man tremble with fear have long since become a normal part of our daily existence.
The chasm widened out. I wondered what could possibly have caused this strange geological formation. Enlil Maratovich’s house was built on a hill, so it was possible that at one time it had been the mouth of an ancient volcano. Although, heaven knows, there aren’t too many volcanoes on the outskirts of Moscow … Or it might be a tunnel resulting from a meteorite strike. Of course, there was also the possibility that it was a man-made shaft.
I began to sense the bottom. It was closer than I thought – the confined walls of the well shaft were giving back too many reflections of the sound waves from my echo-locator, thus providing a misleading impression of the space. Below me was water, a small circular lake. The water was warm and steam was rising from it, which I felt as extra-dense air. I was afraid I might get a soaking or even drown. But as I descended even lower I became aware of a triangular opening in the stone face. It was the entrance to a cave just above the surface of the water, and there I could alight.
My first attempt was unsuccessful. My wings struck the water and I nearly fell in. I had to gain height again and repeat the manoeuvre. This time I furled my wings too high above the stone shelf and made a rather painful landing.
As on the previous occasion, the striking of my fists against the cold stone was the signal to shake me free of my dream and simultaneously of my bat body. I stood upright on my feet.
The surrounding gloom was damp, warm and slightly sultry. What air there was had a whiff of sulphur, and a peculiar kind of mineral smell reminiscent of spas in the Caucasus I had been taken to in early childhood. The floor of the cave was uneven, with large boulders lying about on it, so that I had to tread carefully and pick out a place for each step. A light burned in the depths of the cave, but I could not see where it was coming from.
What I saw when I turned a corner and entered the lit area was hard to believe.
Before me was an enormous, empty cavern, an underground hall pierced by spotlights which, however, did not illuminate the space so much as mask it, so blinding were they to anyone entering. The roof of the cavern was so far above I could hardly see it.
In the centre of the hall towered a gigantic structure to which led a long scaffold bridge made of metal. At first I thought the structure was a huge plant, some sort of shaggy cactus as big as a large house, surrounded by yet more scaffolding to which it was tightly bound by strips of dark material. It could also have been a barrel-shaped cargo rocket on its launch platform, an impression reinforced by the number of pipes and cables extending from it into the darkness. Above the structure were two huge metal rings set into the ceiling.
I worked my way forward, the ringing of my heels on the metal giving warning of my approach. No one, however, come out to meet me. On the contrary, I noticed several obscure figures scurrying away at my appearance. I had the impression they were women swathed in full-body covering, as in the East. I did not hail them, assuming that they would do so themselves if they wished to make contact with me. The ritual, I thought, might stipulate solitude.
After another ten metres, I stopped.
I noticed that this colossal tun, surrounded by scaffolding and pipes, seemed to be breathing. It was alive. And at this moment my faculties experienced one of those small miracles that occur when the mind suddenly assembles a coherent picture from a myriad of formerly random lines and zigzags.
I was looking at a giant bat trussed with belts and held up by an array of props and braces and buttresses. Her paws, like the upturned base of a giant crane, were forced into the two cyclopean copper rings in the stone ceiling, and her wings were bound to her body with ropes and trusses. I could not see her head – judging by the proportions of her body it was in a pit extending far below the level of the floor. Her breathing reminded me of a huge pump working.
She was old. So old that the odour that came off was more geological than biological – this must have been what I had taken for the sulphurous smell of mineral water. She looked unreal, like a whale enwrapped in its own flippers suspended above the ground in a corset. It was the sort of image a surrealist artist of the last century might have painted under the influence of hashish …
It was not possible to get close to the bat because she was surrounded by a fence. The scaffolding on which I was walking ended at a tunnel cut into the rock and led downwards. Cautiously I descended the slippery steps and found myself in a passage lit by halogen lamps. It was something like a gallery reinforced by steel framing, such as one sees in a mine on television, and black cables ran along its floor. A light breeze fanned my face: there was a ventilation system.
I proceeded along the passage. It soon brought me into a circular room carved out of the thickness of the rock. The room was extremely old; the roof was covered in soot, which had eaten so deeply into the stone that it no longer soiled the touch. On the walls were ochre drawings – rune-like zigzags and silhouettes of animals. To the right of the entrance was a darker patch on the wall like a window, except that it was not a window but a recess cut deeper into the rock. Before it stood a primitive altar – a stone slab with various artefacts lying on it. They included terracotta discs, crude beakers and a number of statuettes all resembling one another: figurines of a fat woman with a tiny head, enormous breasts and an equally enormous bottom. Some had been fashioned from bone, others from fired clay.
I turned one of the lamps round so that its beam fell on the recess above the altar. The opening was covered by a stretched-out piece of animal skin, in the middle of which was a wrinkled human head with long grey hair. It was shrivelled, but there was no sign of decomposition.
The effect was ghoulish and repellent. I hastily continued along the passage. After a few metres I came to another similar room with a niche in it also containing a mummified head sewn into a piece of animal hide. On the altar before it lay shards of crystal, unrecognisable fossilised organic matter of some description, and some bronze arrowheads. The walls were decorated with rich ornamentation.
Further on was another such room, then another, and another.
There were very many of them, and the combined effect was of a history museum exhibition: ‘From Early Man to Our Own Times’. Bronze axes and knives, rust stains where iron implements had disintegrated, scattered coins, drawings on the walls – I would certainly have spent longer looking at it all had it not been for those heads hanging there like monstrous dried cherries. They hypnotised me. I could not even be sure they were dead.
‘I am a vampire, I am a vampire,’ I whispered quietly to myself, trying to dispel the terror gripping me. ‘I am the most terrible thing here – nothing can be more terrible than I …’
But even I did not find this very convincing.
Gradually furniture began to appear in some of the rooms – benches and chests. Jewellery glittered on some of the heads above the altars, growing progressively more elaborate: earrings, beads, gold combs. One head was adorned with a necklace of small coins. This one I stopped to take a closer look at. And suddenly the money-bedizened head inclined towards me, as if giving me a nod.
This was not the first time I thought I might have detected some movement, but I had put it down to tricks of light and shade. But now I could hear the tinkling of the coins, and realised that light and shade had nothing to do with it.
Struggling with my fear, I stepped up closer to the niche. Again, the head twitched, and I saw that it was not the head moving but the animal skin on which it was hanging. And then I finally understood what it was.
It was the neck of the colossal bat, visible through the apertures in the rock wall.
I remembered that the Gnostic texts made mention of a certain high-ranking demonic creature, a serpent with the head of a lion – ‘The Lord of This World’. Here everything was the other way round. The giant bat had the neck of a snake which, rhizome-like, wound its way deep into the thickness of the stone. Perhaps there were several such necks, and I was following the path of one of them along a gallery cut into the rock. Altar rooms were set up at those places where the neck could be seen.
In the rooms I saw much that was wonderful and much that was strange. The chronological sequence, however, was often disrupted, for instance when following a collection of valuable harnesses and weapons that seemed to belong to the era of the Golden Horde, I next came across a room with obviously Egyptian relics, as if I had stumbled into the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid (the gods seemed to be distinctly second-hand: their faces had been maimed by a multitude of knocks). I remember one room lined with sheets of gold inscribed in Church Slavonic: as I passed through it I felt as though I were inside a safe of treasures belonging to an Old Believers’ sect. In another room, my eye was caught by a gold peacock with emerald-green eyes and a rotting tail. I knew that at one time the throne of the emperors of Byzantium was flanked by two such birds – this might have been one of them.
It eventually dawned on me why there appeared to be such chronological dislocations. In many of the rooms there were two or three ways out. Behind these too were enfilades of more altar rooms, but they were unlit and the very thought of going along such passages filled me with terror. Clearly the garland of lamps was intended to guide the traveller along the shortest route to the goal.
The altar rooms also differed in mood. Some of them were monastic in their severity; others, on the other hand, reminded me of an aristocratic boudoir. The coiffures of the mummified heads gradually increased in complexity. Wigs began to appear, and layers of cosmetics on the shrivelled faces. I noticed that in all this time I did not see a single male face.
The deeper I descended into the stone gallery, the stronger grew the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that the end of the journey was approaching. This was clear from the changes in the way the rooms were decorated. I already knew what must await me at the conclusion of the exhibition. There could be no doubt that it would be another head, and this time a live one – that very ‘antenna of a dimension proportionate to the wavelength’ of which Enlil Maratovich had spoken.
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century altar rooms were like galleries in a small museum. They were full of pictures, escritoires stood against the walls, and on the altars themselves lay bulky folios with raised gold lettering printed on them.
One room, which I dated to the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed the most elegant to me, being furnished simply and in good taste. On the walls were two large paintings simulating windows into a garden in which cherry trees were in blossom. The pictures were so skilfully integrated into the space that the illusion was complete, especially viewed from the altar where the head was. The head in this room struck me as relatively unimpressive: it was adorned with no more than a single string of pearls, and the coiffure was extremely plain. On the altar before it was a white enamelled telephone which had been damaged by bullets. Beside it was a long cigarette-holder of coral. Looking more closely I noticed bullet-holes in the furniture and the pictures. There was also a peculiar mark on the temple of the shrivelled head – but this could have been an extended birthmark.
In the earliest room of the Soviet era the function of the altar was performed by a door resting on two stools. There was a telephone on this one as well: it was black and had a horn-shaped cradle for the handset, with something like the handle of an old car magneto on the side. The room was almost empty: the only decoration was provided by flags standing in the corners and crossed sabres on the walls. The altar niche contained not one but two heads, one hanging in the middle and the other huddled away forlornly on its own in the corner. Near the altar was a mourning wreath with a red ribbon woven into it, as withered as the head above it.
The altar in the next room was a huge office desk with a pile of cardboard folders with papers on it. Here was another telephone: a massive piece of equipment in black ebony, redolent of calm dependability. Bookcases, with rows of books in identical brown bindings, lined the walls. There were no heads at all in the altar recess; all that could be seen were some tubes bound up with insulating tape protruding from the skin.
The last room, by contrast, was a true museum of late Soviet life with a great number of different objects preserved in it. Garish cut-crystal vases and wine glasses on a sideboard, carpets on the walls, mink coats on hangers, an enormous Bohemian glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling … In the corner stood a colour television set as big as a trunk and covered in dust. In the centre of the altar table, among old newspapers and photograph albums, was yet another telephone – this time a white plastic one, with the USSR coat of arms in gold on the disc. There was a head in the altar niche: an ordinary, unremarkable shrivelled head with a hennaed chignon piled up in a bun at the back, and big ruby earrings.
The passage did not go any further. The Hall of Mature Socialism, as I privately dubbed this altar room, ended in a steel door. On it hung a nameplate, green with age, on which was written in queerly printed old script:
Ye Greate Batte
On the wall I noticed a bell. Shifting nervously from foot to foot, I pressed it.
Half a minute passed. The lock clicked open and the door opened a few millimetres, but no further. After waiting a little more, I put my ear to the crack which had opened.
‘Girls, girls,’ came a hoarse female voice, ‘conceal yourselves, now. How many times do I have to tell you: get behind the screen!’
I rang once more.
‘OK, OK,’ answered the voice. ‘Come on in!’
I entered, carefully closing the door behind me.
This altar room was the same size as its predecessor, but seemed bigger because of its modern look. The walls were painted white and the floor had been paved with large sand-coloured tiles. Altogether it suggested a moderately prosperous Moscow apartment, except that the designer furniture looked more expensive than that. But there was not much of it: a red sofa and two blue armchairs. On the wall opposite the altar (so far I had not summoned up courage to look in the other direction) hung a plasma TV. Beside it was a bamboo screen with a representation à la Van Gogh of a French night sky, in the illimitable vastness of which burned what looked like hundreds of upturned smart cars. Evidently this was the screen behind which the girls had been told to hide themselves.
‘Greetings,’ said a caressingly tender voice. ‘Why don’t you turn round? Look at me; don’t be afraid. You think I’m some sort of Medusa, and just one glance from me is enough to get you stoned? No, no, my boy. We’re too low here to get high, ha ha. Only joking – just my little joke. Couldn’t you raise your eyes and look at me?’
I raised my eyes.
The altar niche also bore traces of having been recently refurbished. They were even to be seen on skin of the bat’s neck – where it touched the wall it was stained with white emulsion paint.
A woman’s face was smiling at me from the middle of the recess – still, as the saying goes, with traces of her former beauty. From all appearances the head was about fifty years old, but in fact was probably more than that because even my untutored eye could see traces of numerous cosmetic procedures and rejuvenating injections. Only the mouth was smiling while the eyes, encircled by immobile skin, looked out full of doubt and alarm.
The head was crowned by an amazingly elaborate coiffure – a combination of Rastafarian ‘let’s-share-a-joint’ dreadlocks and the cool glamour of a Snow Queen. Below it tumbled a shock of piebald dreads into which were woven beads and bangles of various sizes, while above it the hair had been teased up into a fan of four peacock feathers linked by a shell of golden chains and threads. The tracery of this glittering polygon made one think of a crown. As a hairdo it was certainly impressive: I thought how good it would have looked in the Alien vs. Predator film – on the head of some sharp-toothed cosmic sow. Atop this tired and puffy female face, however, it did look rather absurd.
‘Well then, come to me. Come to Mummy,’ cooed the head. ‘Let me feast my eyes on you.’
I came close up to her, and we kissed one another three times in the Russian fashion, delicately passing the lips to brush the cheek near the mouth.
I was amazed by the head’s manoeuvrability. First she seemed to fly at me from one side, then instantly appear at the other, and finally back to the starting point. During the kiss I just had time to turn my eyes, no more.
‘Ishtar Borisovna,’ said the head. ‘Ishtar to you. Don’t imagine I address everyone like that, only boys as pretty as you, ha ha …’
‘Rama the Second,’ I introduced myself.
‘I know. Sit down. No, wait a moment. How about a little cognac to celebrate our meeting?’
‘Ishtar Borisovna, you’re not to have any more today,’ protested a severe young female voice from behind the screen.
‘Oh, it’s only to toast our acquaintance,’ said the head. ‘Five grams apiece, that’s all. Don’t worry, the young man will help me.’
She nodded towards the altar table.
Here total disorder reigned. The marble slab was piled high with glossy magazines, all muddled up with cosmetic jars and bottles of expensive liquor. Right in the middle of the chaos bulked a massive, heavy laptop computer, the kind one could use as a replacement for a desktop. I noticed that the printed matter on the table was not confined to unadulterated glamour: among the magazines were titles such as Your Property and Refurbishment in Moscow.
‘There’s the cognac,’ said Ishtar. ‘And wee glasses too. Don’t worry, they’re clean …’
From the table I took the bottle of Hennessy XO, whose shape reminded me of the stone females from the early altar rooms I had seen, and poured some cognac into the large cut-crystal goblets the head had referred to as ‘wee glasses’. To me they looked more like vases than glasses – they took just about the whole bottle. No objection was raised to this.
‘Good,’ said Ishtar. ‘You do the clinking yourself … and then help Mummy.’
I tinkled one glass against the other and held one out, not knowing what I should do next.
‘Tip it up, don’t be afraid …’
I inclined the glass and the head deftly dived down below it to catch the yellow-brown stream. Not a single drop reached the floor. It made me think of midair refuelling. Instead of a neck, Ishtar had a furry, sinewy stem more than a metre long, which made her look like an animated tree-growing mushroom.
‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating the blue armchair placed beside the altar. I sat on the edge of it, sipped a little cognac and put the glass on the table.
The head smacked its lips once or twice and closed its eyes in contemplation. I had enough experience of vampires to know what this meant. I passed my hand over my neck and looked at my fingers – and there, sure enough, was a tiny red spot. Obviously she had managed to bite me as we kissed. Opening her eyes, she fixed them on me.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said, ‘when someone …’
‘Well, I do like it,’ interrupted the head, ‘especially when I have a drink. I’m allowed … Well, you know … Hello Rama. Roma as was. You had a difficult childhood, you poor, poor boy.’
‘Why difficult?’ I replied, embarrassed. ‘It was a childhood like any other.’
‘You’re right, a childhood like any other. That’s why it was difficult. Everyone in our country has a difficult childhood. It’s so as to prepare a person for life as a grown-up. Which is going to be so difficult it will totally screw you up.’
Ishtar sighed and again smacked her lips. I could not work out whether she was savouring my red liquid, or the cognac, or both at the same time.
‘You don’t like being a vampire, do you, Rama?’ she concluded.
‘Why do you say that? It’s pretty good, really.’
‘When people like it, they don’t live as you do. They want to spend every day as if it was a jolly Halloween holiday. Like your friend Mithra. But you … You were thinking about your soul again two nights ago, weren’t you?’
‘I was,’ I conceded.
‘What do you think a soul is?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Our people have already asked me that.’
‘So how can you think about it when you don’t know what it is?’
‘Well, you can see that for yourself.’
‘Certainly … Listen, do you think about the meaning of life as well?’
‘Sometimes,’ I replied, embarrassed.
‘About how the world came into being? And about God?’
‘That too. Yes, I have done.’
Ishtar frowned, as if trying to decide what was to be done with me. A tiny wrinkle appeared on the smooth surface of her forehead. Then it disappeared and all was smooth again.
‘I do understand you,’ she said. ‘And I do a lot of thinking too. Especially just recently … But I have reasons to. Concrete reasons. You though? You’re so young, you ought to be living and enjoying yourself. Not like us pensioners!’
It occurred to me that this was how older women often talked, women who had been born under Stalin and who had preserved within themselves a cache of state-sponsored optimism which their schooldays had drummed into their frightened souls. There had been a time when I too had accepted the blister raised by such a burn as the stigmata of the sacred flame. But my course of degustations had cured me of this misapprehension.
Ishtar glanced at my glass and then at me, pulled a sour face, then winked and stretched her mouth into a smile. The whole pantomime took less than a second – her grimaces were so quick they were more like a nervous tic.
I understand what was required. Getting up, I took my glass from the table and we repeated the aerial refuelling procedure. Ishtar made no sound by which anyone sitting behind the screen could interpret what was going on. I took my seat again. Ishtar knitted her brow with an air of martyrdom and expelled a deep sigh.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is how matters stand. I am a Goddess all right, but that does not mean I shall be able to give you any intelligent answers to your questions. You see, the realm in which I am a Goddess is a very constricted one. What you should do is this. You should seek out a vampire by the name of Osiris. He is the guardian of traditional lore. Tell him I sent you. He will explain everything to you.’
‘How will I find him?’
‘Ask someone. Only don’t mention it to Enlil. They are brothers, and have been in a quarrel for many years. I’ve also fallen out with Osiris, you might say.’
‘What about?’
‘It wasn’t really about anything specific. It’s just that he lost contact with me. He’s a Tolstoyan.’
‘A Tolstoyan?’ I repeated.
‘Yes. Do you know anything about them?’
‘No. Never heard of them.’
‘Tolstoyan vampires appeared at the beginning of the last century,’ said Ishtar. ‘The ideas of Count Tolstoy were very fashionable then. The simple life. The sufferings of the people, return to basic truths, all that sort of thing. Some of our people were also attracted to it and were tempted to follow the simple life. But how is a vampire going to simplify his life? They decided not to suck bablos any more and go back to pure red liquid. But without killing anybody, because after all they were Tolstoyans. So there aren’t many left now, but Osiris is one of them.’
‘How did he get into it?’
‘Drugs – that’s what I think, if I’m honest. Narcotics and all sorts of stupid books. You’ll have your fill of talk if you speak with him. He can fuck your brains as well as Enlil can, only from the other direction …’
She laughed. I got the impression that the brandy she had drunk was already having its effect.
‘What is bablos?’ I asked
‘Didn’t Enlil tell you anything about it?’
‘He started to. About the life-force a man radiates into space whenever he thinks about money. Aggregate “M-5”. But he said I would learn the rest … here. If I am considered worthy.’
‘Oy, give me a break,’ groaned Ishtar. ‘Considered worthy, my foot. Double checking, triple checking. I have no secrets from anybody. If you want to know something, just ask me.’
‘Bablos – does the word come from bablo, the Russian slang for money?’
Ishtar tittered, and I heard the girls behind the screen laughing as well.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Bablos is a really ancient word. It may be the very oldest which has come down to us. It has the same root as “Babylon”, and that in turn comes from the Akkadian word “bab-ilu” which means “the gates of God”. Bablos is a sacred drink that turns vampires into gods.’
‘Is that why we have names like we do?’
‘Yes. Sometimes bablos is called “red liquid”. But Enlil goes all scientific when he speaks of it: Aggregate “M-5”, the ultimate condition of money. It’s condensed human life-force.’
‘Does one drink bablos?’
‘One drinks cognac. One sucks bablos. There’s not much of it.’
‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘I think there’s a bit of confusion here. Enlil Maratovich told me that “red liquid” is the correct term for human …’
‘Blood,’ broke in Ishtar. ‘With me you can call it that.’
But by now I was finding it difficult to say the word.
‘He was saying that vampires stopped drinking red liquid when they developed human beings to the point where they could produce money.’
‘Quite correct,’ said Ishtar. ‘But we are still vampires, so we cannot entirely do without blood. Otherwise we would lose our identity and our roots. What is money? It is the symbolic blood of the world. Everything depends on it, both for humans and for us. But the manner in which we depend on it is different, because we live in the real world whereas human beings live in the world of illusions.’
‘Why do they? Surely they cannot all be so stupid?’
‘They are not stupid. It’s simply the way life is arranged. People are born into the world in order to create bablos out of Glamour concentrate. It has different names in different eras, but the formula of human destiny has not changed for many centuries.’
‘What is that formula?’
‘“Illusion – money – illusion”. Do you know what is the principal characteristic of mankind as a biological species? People are constantly chasing after visions that arise within their heads. But for some reason they do not capture them there inside their heads, where they appear, but pursue them in the real physical world, on which the visions are merely superimposed. And then, when the visions dissipate, the man stops and says to himself: oh Mama, what was that? Where am I, and why am I, and what am I supposed to do now? This syndrome applies not just to individuals, but to entire civilisations. To live amidst illusions is the natural habitat for people just as it is for a grasshopper to sit in the grass. Because it is precisely human illusions that produce bablos …’
They’re obsessed with that bloody grasshopper, I thought. All the same, there was something very dispiriting about these older vampires always trying to talk to me in language they thought I would understand.
‘What does it mean, to live in the real world?’ I asked.
‘It was very well put by Count Dracula. He said, “The image is nothing, the thirst is everything.”’
‘Is there a formula for vampires’ destiny?’
‘Yes. “Red liquid – money – red liquid”. If we forget about political correctness, “blood – money – bablos”. The red liquid in the formula is human, but not the bablos.’
‘But how can “red liquid” be the name for both bablos and human … er, you know what I mean?’
‘Because,’ answered Ishtar, ‘they are the same thing on different levels of the dialectical spiral. Not only in their colour but also in their essential quality. Like, for instance, beer and cognac …’
Pronouncing the word ‘cognac’ she glanced at the table, then at me, and winked. Trying not to make any noise, I poured out the remainder of the Hennessy XO into my glass and thence into the mouth of the head. Again with great agility she dived under the glass, and not a drop fell to the floor.
I could not work out where the cognac could be going to, once she had drunk it. Presumably there was some sort of craw in her neck. At all events, the full effect of the alcohol was now visible. Her face was flushed, and I could see what I had not noticed before, lines of scars from plastic surgery just below the ears.
I heard a meaningful cough behind the screen, from the unseen girl. I decided Ishtar would not get any more spirits from me.
‘But the difference consists in the degree of concentration of the essence,’ went on Ishtar. ‘There are five litres of red liquid in a man. But in the whole of his life no more than a gram of bablos can be extracted from him. Do you see?’
I nodded.
‘You can get a whole gram from a WASP in America. Our Russkies are far stingier … I wish I had some to offer you. Hey, girls, have we any bablos?’
‘No,’ said the girl’s voice behind the screen.
‘So you see,’ said Ishtar. ‘The cobbler has no shoes. I’m the one who makes the stuff, and I don’t have any.’
‘How do you make it?’
‘Would you like to know the complete technological process? Want to creep under my skirts? Bablos is my milk …’
Obviously I had once again failed wholly to mask my feelings, because Ishtar burst out laughing. I bit my lip, pasting on to my face a serious and respectful expression. She found this even more amusing.
‘Enlil gave you the drawing from a dollar bill, didn’t he?’ she asked. ‘The one with the pyramid and the eye? That shows how the production is achieved technologically, and it is also at the same time my allegorical portrait. Well, not precisely mine, but any Ishtar in any country …’
‘You’re much prettier,’ I put in.
‘Thank you. The pyramid is the body of the goddess in which the bablos is condensed. The significance of the eye in the triangle is that it represents a disposable head which allows the goddess to see humans and restore contact with them after any catastrophe or major shift in their world. The eye is separate from the pyramid, therefore it makes no difference to vampires what people might believe in, or what kind of paper currency might be circulating among them in a hundred years’ time – dollars or dinars. We are like deepwater fish – we are not disturbed by any hurricane which may arise on the surface; it does not touch us.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘And about me being prettier – well, you’re not very good at pretending. You’re very amusing, all the same … By the way, thanks for your thoughts about my hairdo. I’ll bear them in mind.’
I had said nothing to her about her coiffure, but realised that my initial impression must have had time to embed itself in my red liquid.
‘Please forgive me,’ I said, shamefacedly.
‘No offence, I’m not a fool. You’re quite right. The only thing is, I too get bored and lonely. After all, I have to watch television, and read glossy magazines, and now there’s the Internet. And they’re all so full of advertisements! They keep on at you: “Buy it! Because you’re worth it,” ha ha …’
Ishtar cackled with laughter again, and I realised she was now completely drunk.
‘I do believe it,’ she continued. ‘I know I’m worth it, because I’m the one who keeps the whole schmear on the road. But I can’t go off and buy a Learjet, can I? Or a yacht … well I could, as a matter of fact, but what would I do with it? I tell you what, forget the damn yacht … I saw an ad just a while ago. In a magazine – there it is, have a look …’
She nodded towards the table.
Lying near the edge was a magazine folded open at a full-page photograph. A bride, all in spotless white, was standing beside a wedding limousine, her face buried in a bouquet of lilacs. The cavalcade of wedding cars waited while the groom meditatively twiddled his moustache by the door of the car. The photographer had skilfully caught the envious glance of a woman in a little red jalopy passing from the opposite direction. The caption below the photo read: “OKsana Panty-liners. We Dry Harder!”’
Only now did I finally grasp the point of Enlil Maratovich’s joke about the bush which isn’t. It now struck me as hideously cruel.
‘I may be worth all the money in the world,’ said Ishtar sadly. ‘But I don’t even need those, no matter how hard they try or dry … So why shouldn’t I play about with my hairdo? And my make-up? Stick some earrings in my ears? All that sort of thing? You really ought not to laugh at a foolish old woman.’
I was ashamed of myself. And I also felt a rush of pity for her. Thank God I had not spotted the stitches of the facelift until after she had bitten me. Let her think that at least that was done successfully.
The ringtone of the mobile phone sounded.
‘Yes?’ answered Ishtar.
I could hear the quiet squawking of a male voice coming through the earpiece.
‘With me now,’ said Ishtar. ‘We’re having a talk, yes … Nice boy, very nice. When he gets a bit older I’ll appoint him instead of you, you fat old git, do you hear? What’s that? Did you get such a fright you’ve pissed yourself? Ha ha ha …’
The earpiece resumed its squawking.
‘All right then,’ she agreed. ‘He’d better go, if that’s the situation.’
She raised her eyes and looked at me.
‘Enlil. He says it’s time for you to go back up.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘There’s a lift.’
Ishtar nodded towards the wall.
Now I saw that there was no way out of the room except the one I had come in by. We were in the last room of the gallery. What Ishtar was indicating was not a doorway to the next altar room, but the doors of a lift.
‘I wish I’d come down that way,’ I said. ‘I almost drowned.’
‘There’s no way down to here in the lift. It only goes upwards. And only if you’re lucky. That’s all now; I’ll say goodbye. I’m beginning to feel rather poorly.’
‘Why, what is it?’ I asked in alarm.
‘The bablos is coming on. And I’ve had too much to drink … I get mixed up with my wings … You’d better go. No, before you do, come over here …’
I thought she was probably going to bite me again.
‘Do you want to …?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Just come here, don’t be afraid.’
I came up close to her.
‘Bend down and close your eyes.’
The moment I did as she asked, something wet smacked me in the middle of my forehead, as if a post-office stamp had been put there.
‘That’s all.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, and headed towards the lift.
As I was getting in I turned and looked at Ishtar.
‘One other thing,’ she announced, fixing me with her gaze. ‘About Hera. Be very careful. Many years ago Enlil had a girlfriend like her. They had an affair, went out together, spent their whole time billing and cooing. But they never got as far as going to bed. I once asked Enlil, why not? Do you know what he said? “If you never ask a black mamba to bite you, you can have a long and happy time enjoying her warmth …” I thought then that he was a cold fish, cynical and heartless. But now I realise that that is precisely the reason he is still with us …’
I wanted to ask what this had to do with Hera, but did not have time to, before the doors closed and the lift started to move upwards. Looking at my reflection in the polished steel doors, I saw on my forehead the imprint of Ishtar’s lips – like a scarlet rose.