The front door bell rang just as I was finishing breakfast, at exactly ten o’clock, coinciding with the beeping of the clock. I wasn’t expecting anyone to call.
On the threshold stood Hera’s driver in his fatigues. His expression was, if anything, even more sullen than the last time. He smelt strongly of peppermint pastilles.
‘Letter for you,’ he said, handing me a yellow envelope with no stamp or address, similar to the one in which Hera had sent me her photograph. Right there on the stair I tore the envelope open. Inside was a sheet of paper on which was this handwritten note:
Hello Rama,
I’m terribly upset that everything went so wrong at our last meeting. I’ve been wanting to ring to make sure you had completely recovered, but thought you might be offended or think I was teasing you. So I decided to give you a present. I got the impression you would like to have a car too. I talked to Enlil Maratovich and he has given me another one, so this is now yours, along with the driver. His name is Ivan and he can also act as your bodyguard, so you can bring him with you when we next meet … Are you pleased? You’ll be a real blade now, with your very own bimmer. I hope I’ve raised your spirits just a little. Do give me a ring.
Mwah, mwah,
Hera
P.S. I found out Osiris’s address through Mithra. Ivan knows where it is. Just tell him if you want to go there.
P.P.S. Bablos is going to be soon – I know this for sure.
I looked at Ivan.
‘What sort of a car does Hera have now?’
‘Bentley,’ replied Ivan, enveloping me in a cloud of menthol. ‘What are your instructions for me?’
‘I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘Please wait for me in the car.’
Osiris lived not far from Mayakovsky Square in a big building dating from before the Revolution. The lift was not working so I had to walk up to the fifth floor. The stairs were in darkness because the windows on the landings had been boarded up with sheets of hardboard.
The front door of Osiris’s flat was of a kind I had not seen for ages. It was like a farewell greeting from the Soviet era – assuming, of course, it was not a designer’s retro fantasy: the wall was encrusted with at least ten doorbells, all of them old and covered over by several layers of paint. The names under the bells seemed vaguely menacing, reminiscent of the triumphant proletariat.
I chose one at random and pressed the bell. I could hear it ring on the other side of the door. I waited a minute or two and then tried another button. The same bell rang. Then I pressed each one in turn, all of them proving to be wired up to the same unpleasantly tinny jangle, to which no one responded. I gave up on the bells and started pounding on the door with my fist.
‘Coming,’ came a voice from the corridor, and the door opened.
On the threshold stood a pale, thin man with a horseshoe-shaped moustache, wearing a leather waistcoat over a none too clean shirt outside his trousers. I immediately felt there was something Transylvanian about him, although he had rather too emaciated a look to be a vampire. But I remembered that Osiris was a Tolstoyan. Perhaps it was just the effect of having adopted the simple life.
‘Hello Osiris,’ I said. ‘I’ve come from Ishtar Borisovna.’
The man with the moustache yawned indifferently into his palm.
‘I’m not Osiris. I’m his assistant. Come in.’
I noticed on his neck a little square of sticking plaster with a brown stain in the middle, and all became clear.
Osiris’s flat was a large, shabby communal apartment with signs of emergency repairs all over it: traces of welding on the radiators, holes in the ceilings with plaster filler in them, naked wires snaking along skirting boards as old as Marxism itself. One room, however – the largest, the door to which stood open – looked as though it had been completely refurbished: the floor had been finished with new parquet and the walls painted white. On the door, in black marker pen, was written:
REDQUARTERS
This room did indeed seem to be the spiritual and economic epicentre of the apartment, because while everywhere else appeared entombed in the sleep of ages, a powerful stink of tobacco and the sound of confident male voices emanated from this one. The men in the room seemed to be talking in Moldavian.
I approached the door. A big dining table stood in the middle of the room, and around it sat four men with playing cards in their hands. On the floor were various packages, rucksacks and sleeping bags. The card-players had sticking plaster on their necks, similar to that on the Moldavian who had opened the door to me. All four were dressed in identical grey t-shirts with the word:
BIO
printed in white letters across the chest.
The conversation fell silent, and the four card-players fixed their eyes on me. I returned their look in silence. Eventually the burliest of them, built like a bull, said: ‘Overtime, is it? Triple pay, or you can fuck off right now.’
‘Fuck off right now,’ I replied politely.
The moustache said something in Moldavian, and I immediately ceased to be of interest to the card-players. Moustache took me delicately by the elbow.
‘Not this room. We have to go further along. Come with me, I’ll show you where.’
I followed him down a long corridor.
‘Who were the people in that room?’
‘Immigrant workers,’ replied the Moldavian. ‘I think that’s the right name for them. I’m one myself.’
At the far end of the passage we stopped. The Moldavian knocked on the door.
‘What is it?’ came a quiet voice.
‘Someone to see you.’
‘Who?’
‘Your people, I think,’ said the Moldavian. ‘Men in black.’
‘How many of them?’
‘They are one of them,’ replied the Moldavian, squinting at me.
‘Let him come in, then. And tell those boys to stop smoking. We’re going to be dining in an hour.’
‘OK, Chief.’
The Moldavian nodded at the door and shuffled off. Just in case, I knocked once more.
‘It’s open,’ said the voice.
I opened the door.
The room was in half-darkness, the blinds drawn over the windows. However, I already knew enough to recognise the indefinable but distinctive character of a vampire’s living quarters.
The room reminded me of Brahma’s study in that it also had a tall filing cabinet going right up to the ceiling, only simpler and made of cheaper materials. On the opposite wall was a deep recess for a bed (what I think is called an ‘alcove’, although I had never seen one before). In front of the alcove was a low homemade magazine table improvised from an old mahogany dining table with the legs cut in half. On it was piled all sorts of rubbish – scraps of material, rulers, bits of various broken mechanical instruments, dismembered soft toys, books, clumsy old mobile phones from the late Russian era of the initial accumulation of capital, old power supply units, cups and so on. The most interesting object was a piece of apparatus resembling the product of a lunatic inventor’s mind – a kerosene lamp with two circular mirrors on either side positioned so that the light would reflect precisely from one to the other.
Beside the magazine table was a yellow leather armchair.
I approached the alcove. Inside was a bed, covered with a quilted coverlet. Above it on the wall was a black ebony Stalin-era telephone, surrounded by a blizzard of pencil-scribbled notes. Beside it was a bell push similar to those I had seen outside on the landing.
Osiris lay on his side with one foot propped on the other knee, as if training his muscles for the lotus position. He had on an old cotton dressing-gown and large spectacles. His face and head resembled a balding cactus, with the sort of growth one gets if one starts off with a clean shave all over and then does not shave again for a week but allows the stubble to grow simultaneously over the cheeks and the head. His skin was pale and flabby, and he looked to me as though he probably spent most of his time in the dark. After inspecting me for a few seconds in a disinterested manner, he extended his hand for me to shake his wrist, which was white, soft and cool to the touch. In order to grasp it I had to stoop down so low that I needed to support myself on the junk-strewn table.
‘Rama,’ I introduced myself. ‘Rama the Second.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard about you. You’re instead of Brahma, aren’t you?’
‘You could probably put it like that,’ I replied, ‘although I don’t feel as though I am a substitute for anyone.’
‘Please sit down,’ said Osiris, nodding towards the armchair.
Before doing so I carefully inspected the dusty parquet underneath the chair and moved it a little way along the floor. Osiris laughed, but said nothing.
From where I was seated, Osiris’s head was hidden from me by the corner of the recess, with only his feet visible. The chair had evidently been positioned there on purpose.
‘I’ve come from Ishtar Borisovna,’ I explained.
‘How are things with the old girl?’ asked Osiris amiably.
‘Pretty well. She does drink a lot, though.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Osiris. ‘There not much else left to her …’
‘How do you mean?’
‘That doesn’t concern you. Might I know the purpose of your visit?’
‘When I was presented to Ishtar Borisovna,’ I said, ‘she noticed that I think a lot about abstract questions. About where the world has come from. About God. Things like that. It’s quite true: at the time I was thinking about such things. Anyhow, Ishtar Borisovna told me to seek you out because you are the guardian of the sacred lore and know all the answers …’
‘That I do,’ confirmed Osiris.
‘I was wondering if you could perhaps give me something to read? Some sacred vampire texts?’
Osiris looked at me out of the alcove. His face loomed up in front of me when he bent forward.
‘Something to read?’ he repeated. ‘I’d be glad to. But there are no sacred texts for vampires. The tradition exists only in oral form.’
‘Well, could I hear it, then?’
‘Ask away, whatever you like,’ said Osiris.
I thought for a while. Before, I had seemed to have a great many serious questions, but now for some reason none would come to mind. Those that did seemed silly and childish.
‘Who is Ishtar?’ at length I settled on asking.
‘Vampires believe she is a great goddess who was exiled to this world in ancient times. “Ishtar” is one of her names. Another is the “Mighty Bat”.’
‘Why was she sent into exile?’
‘Ishtar committed a crime, the nature and significance of which we shall never understand.’
‘Ishtar Borisovna? A crime?’ I was astonished to hear this. ‘When I talked to her, I …’
‘You were not talking to the Mighty Bat,’ interrupted Osiris. ‘You were talking to her disposable head.’
‘You mean there is a difference?’
‘Certainly. Ishtar has two brains, a spinal brain and a cranial brain. Her higher nature is connected to her spinal brain, which has no power of language. For this reason it is difficult to communicate with her higher nature. It would be truer to say that vampires communicate with her when they imbibe bablos. But this is a very unusual and specific form of communication …’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘if you say so. But why was our world chosen for her exile?’
‘It was not chosen. Our world was created in the first instance to be a prison.’
‘How? Do you mean that a prison was constructed somewhere here in which to confine the great goddess?’
‘This prison has no address, no location.’
‘But according to the logic of the thing,’ I observed, ‘the prison must be wherever Ishtar’s body is.’
‘You don’t understand,’ replied Osiris. ‘Ishtar’s body is itself part of the prison. The prison is not somewhere, it is everywhere. If you are in a cell and examine its walls through a magnifying glass, you will find that you have entered another cell. You can pick up a speck of dust from the floor, look at it magnified hundreds of times in a microscope, see into yet another cell, and so on and so on, many times over. This is what some philosophers term “the malignant infinity”, organised according to the principle of the kaleidoscope. Even illusions are so arranged that any one element in them can disintegrate into an infinite number of further illusions. The dream which you are dreaming, turns second by second into something else.’
‘So the whole world is a prison of this kind?’
‘Yes,’ said Osiris. ‘And it is very well built, down to the smallest imaginable details. Take the stars, for example. People in ancient times believed they were decorative points in the spheres which surround the earth. In essence, that is what they are: that is their main function, to be golden points in the sky. But at the same time it is possible for a rocket to fly to any of these points and after many millions of years arrive at an enormous ball of fire. Further, it would be possible to land on a planet orbiting this star, to take from the planet’s surface a sample of some mineral deposit, and analyse its chemical composition. There is no end to the number of these ornamental entities. But neither is there any point in journeying to them. All you would be doing is touring round casemates from which there can be no possibility of escape.’
‘Just a second,’ I said. ‘Let us accept that our planet was created in order to function as a prison, and that the stars are merely golden dots in the sky. But surely the universe, including the stars, existed long before the appearance of our planet. Is that not so?’
‘You cannot conceive with what subtlety this prison has been put together. It has been made full of traces of the past. But they are all simply elements in the design of the prison.’
‘How?’
‘Like this. The creation of the world includes the fabrication of a spurious, but at the same time absolutely authentic, panorama of the past. All those illimitable vistas into space and time are no more than stage settings in a theatre. Incidentally, this has already been well understood by those astronomers and physicists who have concluded that the universe is closed. Think about it yourself: even light itself cannot escape from it. There is nowhere else for it to go. What more proof could be needed that we are in prison?’
‘It may be that light cannot escape from this world,’ I said, ‘but surely thought can? You yourself say that astronomers and physicists have established the outer boundaries of space and time.’
‘Yes,’ replied Osiris, ‘they have … But no astronomer or physicist can tell you what that means, because such matters are hidden from the human mind; all the human mind can do is pursue various formulae. The truth still comes down to that same malevolent kaleidoscope of which I spoke earlier, only now applied to theories and deductions. It is one of Mind “B”s by-products, a kind of oil-cake derived from the production of bablos.’
Osiris pronounced the word ‘oil-cake’ as ‘all-cake’. I was not quite sure myself what the word meant, but I thought it was the waste product from oil-yielding plants – what was left after all the oil had been pressed out of them. It was agricultural terminology; Osiris had probably picked it up from his Moldavians.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe that mankind’s knowledge of the origins of the universe is simply oil-cake?’
Osiris emerged from his niche and stared at me as if I were an idiot.
‘I’m not seriously interested in what you believe,’ he replied, ‘but such is the case. Think for yourself: where did the universe come from?’
‘What do you mean by “come from”?’
‘At first people believed that there was a sphere above their heads with gold dots in it. How did this sphere get transformed into the universe? What started it off?’
I thought hard.
‘Well … People began to study the sky, to look at it through a telescope …’
‘Precisely so. And why did they do that?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Let me remind you,’ said Osiris. ‘The great discoveries in the realm of astronomy – Galileo, Herschel, and others – were made in the hope of accumulating riches. Galileo wanted to sell his telescope to the Venetian government, Herschel hoped to sweet talk some money out of King George. That is the reason these stars and galaxies came to our consciousness. And remember this: bablos is soon consumed, but the oil-cake that is left lasts forever. It’s like what happened in camps where nomadic mammoth-hunters lived: the meat got eaten at once, but over the years there accumulated a huge mound of ribs and tusks, which people started using to build dwelling-places. It is precisely because of such ribs and tusks that today we find ourselves living not on a round island in the cosmic ocean, as the church used to teach, but suspended in an expanding void.’
‘And is the micro-world also oil-cake?’ I asked.
‘Of course. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that oil-cake is something negligible. I am referring to the origins of these phenomena, their genealogy, so to say.’
‘Could we please go back to the beginning and recap step by step?’ I asked. ‘We seem to be skipping about rather rapidly. You told me that the Mighty Bat was sent into exile to Earth. Where was she sent from? And who sent her?’
‘That is the most interesting question. Ishtar’s punishment consisted in her not being allowed to remember who she was or where she came from. Initially she did not even realise that she had been exiled – she believed that she had herself created this world and had merely forgotten when and how she had done so. Later she began to have doubts, and she brought us, vampires, into being. To begin with we had bodies – we looked like giant bats. Well, you know all about that. Then, when the climate began to give rise to catastrophic changes, we evolved into Tongues that found lodgings in living creatures better adapted to the new conditions.’
‘Why did Ishtar create vampires?’
‘Vampires were initially creatures selected to assist the Mighty Bat. In a sense, they were projections of her. Their job was to discover the purpose of creation and explain to the Mighty Bat how and why she had made the world. They failed in this task.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘After that the vampires decided to make the best of this world and establish themselves as comfortably as possible in it, and to that end bred the race of human beings, having created for them Mind “B”. You’ve had explained to you the mechanism of how Mind “B” works?’
I shook my head.
‘Mind “B” consists of two mirrors reflecting directly into one another. The first mirror is Mind “A”, and it is common to all living creatures. It reflects the world. And the second mirror is the Word.’
‘What word?’
‘Any and all words. At any given moment only one Word can appear reflected in Mind “A”, but the words can change and succeed one another very quickly, faster than an aircraft gun can shoot bullets. Mind “A” itself, however, is entirely stationary.’
‘Why do the reflections have to be words?’ I demanded. ‘I for one practically never think in words. Mostly I think in pictures. Images.’
‘All your pictures are also made up of words, as a house is made of bricks. But sometimes the bricks cannot be seen beneath the plaster.’
‘But how can a Word be a mirror? What can be reflected in it?’
‘Its meaning. When you place a Word in front of Mind “A”, the Word is reflected in the mind, the mind is reflected in the Word, and between them they create the endless corridor that is Mind “B”. In this endless corridor appears not only the whole world but the person who is seeing it. In other words, what is taking place in Mind “B” is a continuous reaction analogous to atomic fission, only on a much deeper level. The absolute is split into subject and object, and as part of the process excretes bablos in the form of Aggregate “M-5”. What we, vampires, suck is essentially not red liquid but the absolute. But most of us are not capable of grasping this.’
‘Splitting of the absolute,’ I repeated. ‘Is that a metaphor, or is it a real reaction?’
‘It is the mother of all reactions. Consider this: the Word can exist only as an object of the mind. But all objects need a subject to perceive them. They exist only as pairs: the appearance of an object leads to the appearance of a subject, and vice versa. A hundred-dollar bill presupposes the appearance of a person to observe it, like an elevator and its counterweight. Therefore when bablos is produced in the mirrors of the money gland, an illusion is inescapably generated alongside it – of the person who produces the bablos. And thus starts a continuous chain reaction leading eventually to The Iliad and War and Peace.’
‘Could you make it a bit simpler for me?’ I pleaded. ‘Where are these mirrors located? In consciousness?’
‘Yes. But the dual mirror system does not hang there in a fixed position, it renews itself with every thought. Mind “B” is composed of words, and if there is no Word for something, for Mind “B” it cannot exist. Words create objects, not the other way round.’
‘So objects do not exist for animals?’
‘Certainly not,’ replied Osiris. ‘It does not occur to a cat that she is surrounded by, shall we say, bricks. Until someone heaves one at her, of course. And even then, it isn’t a brick, it’s simply a miaow! Do you see?’
‘Yes, sort of.’
‘All right then,’ said Osiris. ‘Now I can explain an unintended effect that arose in Mind “B”. This mind turned out to be a reflection of our universe. But that was not the worst of it. The universe in which we found ourselves also turned out to be a reflection of Mind “B”. And from that time on no one has been able to distinguish one from the other, because now they are one and the same. It is impossible to say: this is the mind, and that is the universe. Everything is made of Words.’
‘Why do you say Mind “B” is a model of the universe?’
‘Any two mirrors juxtaposed to face one another exactly create a malignant infinity. That is our world. The Chaldeans carry on their belts a two-sided mirror which symbolises this mechanism.’
I looked doubtfully at the kerosene lamp with its two mirrors on the table. It did not seem remotely like a model of the universe. The thought came into my head that at best it might just be taken for the first Russian laser, constructed by the autodidact Kulibinin in Samara in 1883. But immediately I realised that with the right kind of spin put on it, the device could indeed become a model of the Soviet universe into which I had been born. Osiris was right.
‘As was precisely the case with the Mighty Bat,’ continued Osiris, ‘man was confronted by the question of who he was and why he had been sent here. People began to seek the purpose of life. And the most remarkable thing is – they proceeded to do so without being distracted from the main function for which they had been bred. To put it at its plainest, mankind failed to explain creation in such a way as to convince the Mighty Bat. But on the way they did arrive at a conclusion about the existence of God. This discovery was yet another unexpected consequence of the workings of Mind “B”.’
‘Is there any way of sensing God?’
‘God is not accessible either to the mind or to the emotions. At least not to human minds and emotions. Some vampires believe, however, that they approach God at the moment of taking bablos. For this reason it used to be said that bablos makes us gods.’
Osiris looked at his watch.
‘But to experience it once is better than to hear about it a hundred times.’