The cream Enlil Maratovich left acted with improbable speed: by morning the bruises below my eyes had disappeared as if I had merely wiped some make-up from my face. If one discounted the two missing teeth I now looked exactly as I had done before, and this did wonders for my mood. The teeth were also growing; my gums were irritated as if I were teething like a baby. Not only that, but my voice had lost its croak and reverted to its former timbre. After taking the prescribed dose of calcium, I decided to telephone my mother.
She enquired where I had disappeared to. This was her favourite pleasantry, signalling that she had been at the brandy bottle and was in a mellow mood. This question would, as night follows day, be followed by the next observation: ‘I suppose you know, don’t you, that sooner or later you’ll disappear for good?’ I allowed her to say it, and came up with a cock-and-bull story about having met an old school friend and gone out of town with him to a dacha, which did not have a telephone. Then I told her I had found a flat to rent and would soon call in at home to collect my things. My mother delivered a chilly warning that drug addicts do not generally live beyond thirty years of age, and hung up. Thus were my family circumstances disposed of.
Not long after, Mithra rang.
‘Are you asleep?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been up some time.’
‘You made a good impression on Enlil Maratovich,’ he informed me. ‘So you can regard yourself as having passed the first test.’
‘He told me some teachers would be coming to see me today.’
‘That’s right. Study hard and don’t think about anything else. You can only become a vampire once you have absorbed the best that the human intellect has produced …’
The moment I put down the telephone receiver, the doorbell rang. Peering through the spyhole I observed two men dressed in black. They were carrying black valises such as obstetricians use.
‘Who’s there?’ I asked.
‘Baldur,’ said one voice, deep and thick.
‘Jehovah,’ added the other, lighter and higher.
I opened the door.
The men I saw standing on the doorstep looked like old-timers from some former KGB unit. I envisaged them fit, ruddy and athletic, driving expensive foreign cars, living in handsome apartments in dormitory suburbs, getting together every once in a while in some out-of-town dacha to booze and play dominoes. All the same, there was a glint in their eyes that did make me wonder whether this mellow exterior might not be camouflage for something else.
I noticed one odd thing about the pair straight away, although exactly what I was to realise only later when Baldur and Jehovah came to see me separately from one another. They were at the same time both very like, and very unlike, one another. Seen together, they seemed to have little in common. Yet when I met them separately, I had difficulty telling which was which, despite the fact that they were of quite different builds and facial appearance.
Baldur taught Glamour, Jehovah – Discourse. The full course in these disciplines occupied three weeks. The scale and range of knowledge that had to be absorbed was comparable to a full university degree course followed by a Masters and a PhD.
It must be admitted that at this time I was a bright young man and inclined to be glib, but there were still a good many words whose meanings I did not properly know. Continually hearing the terms ‘Glamour’ and ‘Discourse’, I dimly imagined the latter to be something wise and hard to understand, the former as chic and expensive. Furthermore, the words seemed to me very like the names of card games played in prison. As it turned out, this was not so far from the truth.
Once we were acquainted, Baldur said:
‘Glamour and Discourse are the two main skills a vampire must master. The essence of them is disguise and control, and therefore power. Do you know how to disguise and control? Do you know how to exercise power?’
I shook my head.
‘We are going to teach you how.’
Baldur and Jehovah settled themselves on chairs in either corner of the study, and told me to sit on the red sofa. This was the sofa on which Brahma had shot himself, and to begin with I felt most uncomfortable sitting on it.
‘Today we are going to instruct you simultaneously,’ began Jehovah. ‘Do you know why?’
‘Because Glamour and Discourse are in fact one and the same thing,’ continued Baldur.
‘Yes,’ agreed Jehovah. ‘They are the twin pillars of contemporary culture which come together in an arch high above our heads.’
They fell silent, expecting me to react.
‘I don’t really understand what you are saying,’ I confessed. ‘How can they be one and the same if they have different names?’
‘They only appear different at first glance,’ said Jehovah. ‘“Glamour” comes from a Scottish word meaning witchcraft. It came originally from the word “grammar”, and “grammar” in turn gives us “grammatica”. In the Middle Ages this word had various meanings relating to aspects of erudition, and one of these was occult practices, which were associated with literacy. In this sense, the meaning is almost the same as “discourse”.’
I found this interesting. ‘What is the derivation of the word “discourse”?’
‘In mediaeval Latin one finds the term “discursus”, literally “running hither and thither”, “flight forward and back”. Carefully peeling off the etymological layers, you find it comes from the verb “discurrere”. “Currere” means to flee, and “dis” is a negative-signifying prefix. “Discourse”, therefore, is forbidding flight.’
‘Flight from what?’
‘If you wish to understand that,’ said Baldur, ‘we had better begin from the beginning and proceed in order.’
He dived into his holdall and produced a glossy magazine. Opening it at the centrefold he turned it towards me.
‘Everything you see in these photographs is Glamour. The columns of type running between the photographs are Discourse. Clear?’
I nodded.
‘You can put it another way,’ said Baldur. ‘Everything a person says is Discourse …’
‘And how he looks while saying it is Glamour,’ added Jehovah.
‘But this explanation only holds good as a starting point …’ said Baldur.
‘Because in reality the meaning of the concepts is much wider,’ finished Jehovah.
I began to feel as though I was sitting in front of a stereo system with two brisk, black-garbed revenants taking the place of the loudspeakers. It was like a retro experience from the sixties, a psychedelic sensation much prized by the early pioneers of rock, who used to chop the wall of sound in two in order to overwhelm the listener with the maximum stereophonic effect.
‘Glamour is sex expressed as money,’ said the left-hand speaker. ‘Or, if you prefer, money expressed as sex.’
‘While Discourse,’ came the response from the right-hand speaker, ‘is the sublimation of Glamour. Do you know what sublimation is?’
I shook my head.
‘Then,’ continued the left-hand speaker, ‘let us put it like this: Discourse is sex, which is lacking, expressed as money, which is absent.’
‘In extreme cases one may find sex having exceeded the brackets of Glamour,’ said the right-hand speaker. ‘Money, expressed as sex, may be seen as money expressed as sex expressed as money, which comes to money being expressed as money. The same applies to Discourse, only with a necessary correction for the hypothetical nature of the factor outside the brackets.’
‘Discourse is the flickering play of the inconsequential concepts produced from Glamour simmering in the furnace of black envy,’ said the left-hand speaker.
‘While Glamour,’ came from the one on the right, ‘is the scintillating glint of insubstantial images produced from Discourse evaporating in the fire of sexual excitement.’
‘Glamour and Discourse together stand in the relationship of yin and yang,’ declared Left.
‘Discourse encases Glamour and acts as an exquisite frame for it,’ elucidated Right.
‘Glamour infuses the breath of life into Discourse and prevents it from drying up,’ added Left.
‘Think of it like this,’ advised Right: ‘Glamour is the Discourse of the body …’
‘… while Discourse is the Glamour of the spirit,’ finished Left.
‘The point where these two concepts meet is the genesis of all contemporary culture,’ said Right.
‘Which thus reveals itself as the dialectical unity of Glamorous Discourse and Discursive Glamour,’ concluded Left.
Baldur and Jehovah pronounced both ‘Glamour’ and ‘Discourse’ with the accent on the wrong syllable, which lent them a sort of pseudo-professional air – much as veteran Gazprom sharks, for instance, like to talk about ‘petrol’ rather than ‘petrol’. It was intended to inspire confidence in their knowledge and admiration for their experience; however, the confidence and admiration I felt did not prevent me from rapidly falling asleep.
They did not wake me up since, as I was subsequently informed, intellectual matter is assimilated four times more quickly as a result of irrelevant mental processes being blocked when one is asleep. Several hours passed before I awakened. Baldur and Jehovah seemed tired, but content. I had absolutely no recollection of what had occurred during this time.
Subsequent lessons, however, were very different.
Talking was kept to a minimum. Very occasionally my teachers would dictate to me something that needed to be written down. At the start of each session they laid out on the table identical plastic racks reminiscent of DNA testing equipment in a laboratory. The racks housed short test tubes with clear liquid and elongated black stoppers, and the tubes were labelled with stickers giving either a description or a number.
These were the preparations.
The procedure was simple. I applied two or three drops of the clear liquid to my mouth and added to them another clear, bitter-tasting liquid known as the ‘fixative’. The result was that my memory was invaded by an explosion of hitherto unknown information – something like a cognitive aurora borealis or a firework display of self-unpacking data. The process was similar to my first tasting, the difference being that the knowledge was now retained in my memory even after the initial effects induced by the preparation had worn off. This was the contribution of the fixative, a complex distillation that acted on the chemistry of the brain. It was damaging to health to be exposed to its influence for long; this was why instruction had to be restricted to sessions kept as brief as possible.
The preparations that were the subject of my tastings were an elaborate cocktail of red liquid from a great number of people, the eidolons of whose personalities overlaid one another in my perception like a crystalline chorus singing various kinds of information. Along with this I was burdened with often distasteful and boring details of their personal life. The secrets thus revealed provoked no interest in me – rather the reverse.
The way I absorbed the information contained in the preparations was different from the way in which a student absorbs a chapter of a textbook or a lecture he attends. I was drinking from a source more like an endless television programme in which instructional material coalesced with soap-opera realism, family photograph albums and amateur pornography usually of a repulsive nature. On the other hand, the manner in which any student assimilates useful knowledge is inevitably accompanied by approximately the same proportion of irrelevant trimmings, so my training could be regarded as essentially similar.
In itself, this swallowing of large quantities of information added nothing to my store of wisdom. But I found that when I started to think about any given issue, new facts and perceptions would rise up unexpectedly from my memory, and as my thought processes developed, they led me to places I could not have imagined. The sense of what happened is best conveyed by a Soviet song I used to hear at the very dawn of my days (my mother had a standing joke that its last line was a reference to Brezhnev’s memoirs about World War Two):
Today I shall rise before dawn
And walk through the wide, wide field –
Something has started in my memory,
I remember everything that happened not to me …
At first this process was extremely unpleasant. Ideas familiar from childhood blossomed with new angles I had not known before, or at least had not thought of. It all happened quite suddenly, resembling one of those cognitive chain reactions when random impressions bring to the surface a long-forgotten dream that instantly infuses everything around with a special meaning. I already knew that similar hallucinations can be symptoms of schizophrenia. But as the days went by the world grew more and more interesting; I soon lost my fear and eventually began to take pleasure in what was happening to my mind.
For example, I was in a taxi one day going along Warsaw Prospect. I happened to look up and see an image of a bear on the wall of a building – the emblem of the ‘United Russia’ party. It suddenly came to me that the Russian word for bear – ‘medved’ – is not in fact the true name for the animal but a substitute. The primeval Slavs invented it because they were afraid that uttering the animal’s real name – ‘ber’ – might inadvertently bring one into the house. And the literal meaning of the word ‘medved’ is itself revealing: ‘the one who is after the honey’. This thought sequence took place so quickly that at the moment when the true meaning shone blindingly through the emblem of the victorious bureaucracy, the taxi was still approaching the wall. I began to laugh, and the driver, thinking I was expressing pleasure in the song that was playing at the time, stretched out his hand to the radio in order to increase the volume …
The main problem I found at the beginning was that I lost my former verbal orientation. Until memory succeeded in restoring order to my ability to focus, I could completely lose my way. A synoptic became a sinful optician; a xenophobe someone allergic to the ubiquitous TV celebrity Xenia Sobchak; a patriarch a patriotic oligarch. A prima donna turned into an old lady smelling of Prima cigarettes, and an enfant terrible – Tsar Ivan IV at a tender age. But the most radical of my distorted insights was this: I interpreted ‘Petro-’ not as relating to the city and palaces founded by Peter the Great but as indicating a link to the oil industry. In accordance with this, ‘Petrodvorets’ signified not the great Peterhof Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland but the sumptuous offices of an oil company. Mayakovsky’s well-known First World War line ‘In that never-to-be-forgotten hour / Our Petersburg became Petrograd’ was transmogrified into a prophecy – a bitter one, but true.
This confusion extended to foreign words, for example the expression ‘Gay Pride’. I remembered that in English ‘pride’ was the name given to a social grouping of lions, and before the lights came on in my memory to illuminate the word’s primary meaning, the quality of ‘being proud’, I imagined a pride of homosexuals (presumably refugees from homophobic regions of Europe) roaming the African savannah: two lop-eared senior males lying in the parched grass near a desiccated tree surveying the expanse of prairie and now and again languidly flexing their muscles; a slightly younger male pumping his triceps in the shade of the baobab tree while around him frisk and frolic the young cubs, irritating their grown-up companion with their fussing and squeaking until with a roar he sends them scattering for safety …
I developed quickly and without particular effort, but at the same time lost my sense of inner space. Jehovah warned me that my studies would make me older, since the true age of a person is determined by the sum of his knowledge. The acquisition of vicarious experiences must be set against the loss of my own inexperience, which is to say of my youth. But in those days the changes I was undergoing caused me no regret, because my reserves of this capital seemed to me inexhaustible. Parting with some of it was like jettisoning unwanted ballast while an invisible aerial balloon was raising me high into the sky.
Baldur and Jehovah assured me that my study of Discourse would reveal to me the hidden essence of contemporary social thought. An important element in the programme was concerned with human morality, conceptions of good and evil. However, our approach to the subject was not extrinsic, an investigation into what people were saying on the record, but internal, via an intimate acquaintance with what they actually thought and felt. Needless to say, this investigation severely shook my faith in humanity.
Looking at a wide variety of human minds, I noticed one interesting general characteristic. Every individual possessed within him his own personal court of moral judgment, to which the mind would unfailingly appeal whenever a dubious decision needed to be taken. This personal moral court malfunctioned on a regular basis – and I began to understand why. This is what I wrote in my notebook on this subject:
People have long believed that in this world evil triumphs while good receives its reward only after death. For a while this equation produced a kind of balance, providing a link between earth and heaven. In our time, however, the balance has become imbalance because the idea of heavenly reward has come to be seen as an obvious absurdity. At the same time no one has succeeded in challenging the hegemony of evil on earth. As a result, any normal human being seeking the positive here on earth will naturally incline towards evil: a step as logical as becoming a member of the ruling political party. The evil to which the person has thus affiliated himself is contained exclusively within his head. But when everyone has enlisted in the ranks of evil, which is located nowhere else but in the head, what need has evil of any other victory?
The concept of good and evil inevitably ran up against religion. But what my lessons had to teach me about religion (a ‘localised cult’, Jehovah called it) genuinely surprised me. As revealed by the preparations I imbibed from the rack of test tubes labelled ‘Gnosis+’, at the dawning of Christianity the God of the Old Testament was regarded by the new teaching as a devil. Subsequently, in the early centuries of our own era, the interests of strengthening Roman hegemony and political correctness led God and Devil to be united in a single object of veneration to whom the orthodox patriot of the declining Empire was obliged to bow the knee. Primary texts were chosen, transcribed and painstakingly redacted to conform to the new genius, while all those not so selected were, as is customary, burnt.
I wrote in my notebook:
Each nation, as each individual, must work out its own religion and not simply continue wearing out the rags of others, swarming as they are with the lice from which all diseases come … The peoples who are on the rise in our own time – Indians, Chinese and so on – import no more than technology and capital; their religions are purely local products and they keep them that way. A member of these societies may be quite sure that the gods he is praying to are his own loony deities, not the latest totemic importations, scribe’s misreadings or mistakes in translation. But for us … to base our world view on a mishmash of texts written by unknown hands in unknown places at an unknown time is equivalent to installing a pirate Turkish version of Windows 95 in a crucially important computer with no upgrade available, completely unprotected against spyware, Trojans and viruses, and with the added bonus – courtesy of an unknown geek – of a fucked-up dynamic *.dll library which causes the computer to crash every two minutes. What people need is a free, uncluttered, open-source architecture of the soul. But Judeo-Christians are extremely crafty and have succeeded in branding anyone who advocates any such architecture as the Antichrist. Truly, to continue crapping so far into the future from a fraudulent arse stuck in the distant past must be counted the most impressive of the miracles wrought by Judeo-Christianity.
Naturally, some of these maxims may strike the reader as somewhat overconfident for a tyro vampire. In my defence I can only say that these sorts of concepts and ideas never meant much, if anything, to me.
I mastered Discourse quickly and easily, although it set me on a generally misanthropic course. Glamour, however, presented me with difficulties from the very start. I understood almost everything up until the moment when Baldur said:
‘Some experts state that there is no such thing as ideology in contemporary society, because none has been formulated in an unequivocal manner. But this is a delusion. The ideology of anonymous dictatorship is Glamour.’
I was instantly gripped by a sense of terminal bewilderment.
‘But what is the Glamour of anonymous dictatorship then?’
‘Rama,’ said Baldur, visibly irritated, ‘this is where we began in the first lesson. The Glamour of anonymous dictatorship is its Discourse.’
The words spoken by Baldur and Jehovah were always in themselves models of clarity, but it was hard for me to understand how images of bimbos with diamond embellishments to their silicone-enhanced tits could represent the ideology of a regime.
Happily, there was an effective method of seeking clarification for knotty questions of this sort. If I could not understand something Baldur said, I would ask Jehovah at the next lesson, and get an alternative explanation. And if something Jehovah said was not completely clear, I asked Baldur. The result was that I forged upwards like a rock climber jamming his feet alternately against the walls of a chimney.
‘Why does Baldur say that Glamour is an ideology?’ I asked Jehovah.
‘Ideology is a description of the invisible aim which justifies visible means,’ he replied. ‘Glamour may be regarded as an ideology because it provides an answer to the question: “In the name of what was all this done?”’
‘What do you mean by “all this”?’
‘Look at your history textbook and read through the chapter headings.’
By this stage I had absorbed enough concepts and terminology to be able to carry on a conversation at an acceptable level.
‘How then would you define the core ideology of Glamour?’
‘Very simple,’ said Jehovah. ‘Disguise. Masking.’
‘Disguise? Changing clothes?’
‘Yes, but “changing” has to be interpreted in a wide sense. Change embraces such things as moving from one part of town to another, say from Kashirka to Rublevka, or from Rublevka to London, transplanting skin from the buttocks to the face, changing sex, all transformations of that sort. In the same way, all contemporary Discourse leads merely to a repackaging of those few topics that are permitted to be discussed in public. This is why we say that Discourse is a variant of Glamour and Glamour is a variant of Discourse. Do you understand now?’
‘Not very romantic,’ I said.
‘Well, what did you expect?’
‘Glamour seems to me to promise something miraculous. Didn’t you yourself tell me that the original meaning of the word was “sorcery”? Isn’t that why people place such value on it?’
‘Yes, Glamour does promise miracles,’ said Jehovah. ‘But the promise obscures the complete absence of the miraculous in life. Changing clothes, disguise and concealment through masking are not merely technology, but the unique content of Glamour. And of Discourse as well.’
‘Are there, then, no circumstances in which Glamour is able to produce a miracle?’
Jehovah thought for a while.
‘As a matter of fact, there are some circumstances.’
‘What are they?’
‘For example, in literature.’
This seemed very strange to me. Literature was as far removed from the sphere of Glamour as it was possible to imagine. Also, as far as I knew, it was a field in which no miracles had occurred for a very long time.
‘After the writer today finishes a new novel,’ explained Jehovah, ‘he devotes a few days to trawling through glossy magazines in order to incorporate brand names of expensive motor cars, neckties and restaurants. The result is that his text assumes a reflected simulacrum of high-budget expenditure.’
This exchange with Jehovah I transmitted to Baldur:
‘Jehovah says that this is an instance of a Glamour miracle. But what is so miraculous about it? It seems to me a classic piece of masking.’
‘You didn’t understand what he said,’ replied Baldur. ‘The miraculous transformation takes place not in the text but in the author. We have transformed engineers of the human soul into unpaid advertising agents.’
I found I could apply this bipolar questioning technique to almost any query. But sometimes it produced more, rather than less, confusion. Once I asked Jehovah to elucidate the meaning of ‘punditry’, a word which I was coming across almost every day on the Internet, reading about some ‘media pundit’ or other.
‘Punditry is neurolinguistic programming in the service of the anonymous dictatorship,’ intoned Jehovah.
‘Come, come,’ grumbled Baldur, when I appealed to him for comment. ‘It’s a good, resonant phrase. But in real life it’s very hard to say who serves whom – punditry serving the dictatorship or the other way around.’
‘How is that?’
‘The dictatorship, even though it is faceless, pays hard cash. But the only tangible result of neurolinguistic programming is the salary earned by professors of neurolinguistic programming.’
The following day I was to regret bitterly having asked my question about ‘punditry’: Jehovah brought in to the lesson an entire rack of test tubes labelled ‘Media Pundits Nos. 1–18’, every one of which I was forced to sample. I wrote in my notebook in the interval between tastings:
Any intellectual today, peddling his ‘expertise’ in the marketplace, is doing two things: sending out signals, and prostituting meaning. These activities are in fact dual aspects of a single act of will, which is the sole raison d’être of any work by any philosopher of today, or any culturologist, or expert of any description. The signals announce the expert’s readiness to prostitute meaning, while the prostitution of meaning is the means whereby the signals are sent out. The new generation intellectual often has no idea who the future commissioner of his work is going to be. He is like a plant growing on the pavement whose roots feed on unseen sources of moisture and nourishment and whose pollen is dispersed beyond the limits of the monitor. The difference is that the plant does what it does without thinking, but the new generation intellectual believes that he is being awarded life-giving nourishment in return for his pollen, and engages in complicated schizophrenic double-entry accounting. Such calculations are the true roots of Discourse – damp, grey, moss-covered, stagnating in stench and darkness.
Before many days passed I knew the word ‘culturologist’. True, I did not really know what it meant: I thought it must refer to a urologist whose knowledge of the human urinary–sexual system was so detailed that he had earned cult status and the right to pronounce on spiritual matters. This in itself did not strike me as particularly strange; after all Academician Sakharov, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had become a universally accepted authority on humanitarian issues, and much the same happened with many other scientists or doctors.
In short, my brains were well and truly scrambled. But this hardly seemed a tragedy to me, since previously they had contained very little of anything.
It was not long before my involvement with Glamour turned sour (much the same had happened to me with Organic Chemistry in school). Sometimes I exhibited nothing short of terminal stupidity. For instance, it took me a very long time to understand what a ‘vamposexual’ could be, and this was a core concept of the course. Baldur advised me to understand the term by analogy with ‘metrosexual’, and I experienced a slight but distinct shock when I discovered that this was not a person who enjoyed having sex while travelling on the Metro.
Baldur explained the meaning of the word ‘metrosexual’ as follows:
‘A metrosexual is a person who dresses like a queer, but in fact is not one. That is to say, he may in fact be queer, but it’s not necessary.’
This was rather confusing, and I appealed to Jehovah for elucidation.
‘Metrosexuality,’ said Jehovah, ‘is just another packaging of “conspicuous consumption”.’
‘What?’ I asked, and at once remembered information gleaned from a recently swallowed preparation. ‘Oh, I know. Consumption for show. A term introduced by Thorstein Veblen at the beginning of the last century.’
I waited until the next Glamour lesson to repeat this to Baldur.
‘Why does Jehovah feel he has to mess with your head like that?’ muttered Baldur crossly. ‘“Conspicuous consumption”, indeed! Why use an English expression? Everything should be called by its proper Russian name. I’ve already told you what a metrosexual is.’
‘Well then, what is a vamposexual?’
‘A vamposexual is what you must become,’ replied Baldur. ‘There is no precise definition; everything depends on your own intuition. It is what you have to become in order to catch the pulse of the times.’
‘And what is that?’
‘Exactly what the pulse of the times is,’ said Baldur, ‘no one knows, because time possesses no such attribute. All there is, really, is a collection of op-ed columns on the pulse of the times. But when enough of the op-ed pieces agree the pulse of the times to be such and such, then everyone starts to repeat it because they want to stay in step with time. But that is absolutely impossible because time has no legs.’
‘Surely normal people don’t believe what editorials and op-ed pieces say?’
‘When did you last meet a normal person? In our country there are not more than a hundred of them left, and they are all under close FSB surveillance. Things are not that simple. On the one hand there is in reality no pulse of the times, nor anything to be in step with. But on the other hand, everyone tries to get a handle on the pulse of the times and to be in step with it, because the corporate model of the world is undergoing continual modification. That’s why people have to grow cool beards and wear silk ties to prove their loyalty. Vampires must conform in order to blend in with their surroundings.’
‘I still don’t understand what a vamposexual is,’ I confessed.
Baldur picked up from the table a test tube which had been left there after the Discourse lesson. Its stopper was labelled ‘German Classical Philosophy Dept. Phil. Mos. State Univ.’ Baldur shook on to his tongue the remaining drops of clear liquid, chewed his lip, frowned and asked:
‘Do you remember the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach?’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘Who wrote it? Why, Karl Marx of course.’
I strained my memory. ‘Oh yes. Just a moment. “Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”’
‘Exactly. Your task, Rama, is not to interpret a vamposexual. Your task is to become one.’
Baldur was, of course, right. Theory in this context counted for little. But the Glamour course was not confined to theory. I was handed ‘expenses’: a weighty block of thousand-rouble banknotes shrink-wrapped in plastic and a Visa card with what struck me as an insanely high credit limit of a hundred thousand dollars. No accounting was required.
‘Time for practical work,’ said Baldur. ‘When you’ve got through that lot, let me know.’
This was the moment when I came to realise that being a vampire was a serious and responsible matter.
There were two places a vampire was expected to buy clothes and other necessities: LovemarX, on Uprising Square and Archetypique Boutique, on Pozharsky Passage.
I had, as it happens, long been struck by a particular sign of the times expressed in the vulgar grafting of fashionable foreign names on to shops, restaurants and even novels written in Russian. They proclaimed: ‘We’re special, not like you, we’re trendy, off-shore, refurbished à l’européenne.’ Usually the only effect it had on me was to make me want to throw up, but I had passed LovemarX and Archetypique Boutique so often that instead of merely irritating me their names began to demand analysis.
From the theoretical part of the Glamour course I knew that the word ‘lovemarks’ refers to brand names which people lust after with all their hearts, seeing in them not merely the outward appearance of the object in question but the framework of their own personality. Presumably the final ‘X’ was a nod to the new Internet orthography – or perhaps to the marble bust of Marx in the sales hall.
Archetypique Boutique proved to be an entire shopping mall of boutiques in which it was easy to lose oneself. The choice of goods on offer was wider than in LovemarX but it was not a place I could warm to. Rumour had it that it had formerly been the headquarters of the Gulag Inspectorate – either the geodetic survey or the permanent administration staff. Discovering this, I could see why Baldur and Jehovah referred to the place as the ‘Glamour Archipelago’ or simply the ‘Archipelago’.
The pictures on the walls of the Archetypique Boutique were mostly photographs of expensive sports cars with silly, jokey titles such as ‘Wheelbarrow No. 51’, ‘Wheelbarrow No. 89’, and so on. One such number would appear on your sales receipt and if you were able to identify correctly the make of the corresponding car you could claim a ten per cent discount.
I understood, naturally, that this was a standard marketing device: the customer is supposed to circumambulate through the Archipelago in search of the right wheelbarrow and catch en route sight of new items which could eventually end up in the shopping cart. Even so, the mutual magnetism of the words struck me as distasteful.
There was one other emporium where one was supposed to buy knickknacks such as expensive watches, pipes and the like. This shop was called ‘Height Reason – Boutique for the Thinking Elite’. In the marketing brochure the Russian name had been collapsed into a single, rather strange word: ‘HIGHTREASON’.
Not being a smoker I had no interest at all in pipes. As for expensive watches, I had always been frightened off by the Patek Philippe advertisement in the same brochure: ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.’
I remembered, from seeing Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a special technique whereby a costly chronometer could be passed to the next generation: in the paternal rectum while doing – and, I suppose, measuring – time in a Japanese prison camp. The situation of the businessman Khodorkovsky has made the subject very topical. Incidentally since then the innumerable photographs of Khodorkovsky behind bars has begun to look like a Patek Philippe ad campaign, the naked wrist of the imprisoned entrepreneur making the message unmistakeable. For my taste, the Patek Philippe chronometer was too big. On its own, perhaps, it might have been able to slip through, but never that bulky great metal bracelet …
The upshot was that I failed to enter the world of the Thinking Elite. Like all losers I naturally consoled myself by reflecting that I had never really wanted to.