Babylon Page 4

  A far more convincing interpretation, however, is based on several sources taken together: the Three Riddles of Ishtar were three symbolic objects that were handed to a Babylonian who wished to become a Chaldean. He had to interpret the significance of these items (the motif of a symbolic message). On the spiral ascent of the ziggurat there were three gateways, where the future Chaldean was handed each of the objects in turn. Anybody who got even one of the riddles wrong was pushed over the edge of the ziggurat to certain death by the soldiers of the guard. (There is some reason to derive the later cult of Kybela, based on ritual self-castration, from the cult of Ishtar: the significance of the self-castration was evidently as a substitute sacrifice.)

  Even so, there were a great many candidates, since the answers that would open the path to the summit of the ziggurat and union with the goddess actually did exist. Once in every few decades someone was successful. The man who answered all three riddles correctly would ascend to the summit and meet the goddess, following which he became a consecrated Chaldean and her ritual earthly husband (possibly there were several such simultaneously).

  According to one interpretation, the answers to the Three Riddies of Ishtar also existed in written form. In certain special places in Babylon tablets were sold imprinted with the answers to the goddess’s questions (another interpretation holds that what was meant was a magical seal on which the answers were carved). Producing these tablets and trading in them was the business of the priests of the central temple of Enkidu, the patron deity of the Lottery. It was believed that the goddess selected her next husband through the agency of Enkidu. This provides a resolution to the conflict, well known to the ancient Babylonians, between divine predetermination and free will. Therefore most of those who decided to ascend the ziggurat bought clay tablets bearing answers; it was believed the tablets could not be unsealed until after the ascent had begun.

  This practice was known as the Great Lottery (the accepted term, for which we are indebted to numerous men of letters inspired by this legend, but a more precise rendering would be ‘The Game without a Name’). Its only possible outcomes were success and death. Certain bold spirits actually decided to ascend the ziggurat without any tablet to prompt them.

  Yet another interpretation has it that the three questions of Ishtar were not riddles, but rather symbolic reference points indicative of specific life-situations. The Babylonian had to pass through them and present proofs of his wisdom to the guard on the ziggurat in order to make it possible for him to meet the goddess. (In this case the ascent of the ziggurat described above is regarded rather as a metaphor.) There was a belief that the answers to the three questions of Ishtar were concealed in the words of the market songs that were sung every day in the bazaar at Babylon, but no information about these songs or this custom has survived.

  Tatarsky wiped the dust off the folder and hid it away again in the closet, thinking that some time he would definitely read it all the way through.

  He never did find his diploma dissertation on the history of Russian parliamentarianism in the closet; but by the time his search was over Tatarsky had realised quite clearly that the entire history of parliamentarianism in Russia amounted to one simple fact - the only thing the word was good for was advertising Parliament cigarettes, and even there you actually could get by quite well without any parliamentarianism at all.

  CHAPTER 4. The Three Riddles of Ishtar

  The following day Tatarsky, still absorbed in his thoughts about the cigarette concept, ran into his old classmate Andrei Gireiev at the beginning of Tverskaya Street. Tatarsky hadn’t had any news of him for several years, and he was astounded at the style of the clothes he was wearing - a light-blue cassock with a Nepalese waistcoat covered in embroidery worn over the top of it. In his hands he had something that looked like a large coffee-mill, covered all over with Tibetan symbols and decorated with coloured ribbons. He was turning its handle. Despite the extreme exoticism of every element of his get-up, in combination they appeared so natural that they somehow neutralised each other. None of the passers-by paid any attention to Gireiev. Just like a fire hydrant or an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, he failed to register in their field of perception because he conveyed absolutely no new visual information.

  Tatarsky first recognised Gireiev’s face and only afterwards began to pay attention to the rich details of his appearance. Looking attentively into Gireiev’s eyes, he realised he was not quite himself, although he didn’t seem to be drunk. In fact he was calm and in control, and he inspired confidence.

  He said he was living just outside Moscow in the village of Rastorguevo and invited Tatarsky to visit him. Tatarsky agreed, and they went down into the metro, then changed to the suburban train. They travelled in silence; Tatarsky occasionally turned away from the view through the window to look at Gireiev. In his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost universe - not the Soviet universe, because that didn’t contain any wandering Tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in parallel with the Soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe, which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity, and just as imperceptibly. Gireiev lived in a crooked black house with the garden in front of it run wild, all overgrown with umbrellas of giant dill half as tall again as a man. In terms of amenities his house was somewhere between village and town: looking down through the hole in the hut of the outside lavatory he could see wet and slimy sewage pipes that ran across the top of the cesspit, but where they ran from or to wasn’t clear. On the other hand, the house had a gas cooker and a telephone.

  Gireiev seated Tatarsky at the table on the verandah and tipped a coarsely ground powder into the teapot from a red tin box with something Estonian written on it in white letters.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tatarsky asked.

  ‘Fly-agarics,’ answered Gireiev, and began pouring boiling water into the teapot. The smell of mushroom soup wafted round the room.

  ‘What, are you going to drink that?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Gireiev, ‘there aren’t any brown ones.’

  He said it as though it was the answer to every conceivable objection, and Tatarsky couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. He hesitated for a moment, until he recalled that only yesterday he’d been reading about fly-agarics, and he overcame his misgivings. The mushroom tea actually tasted quite pleasant.

  ‘And what will it do for me?’

  ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ replied Gireiev. ‘You’ll be drying them for winter yourself.’

  ‘Then what do I do now?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘Is it OK to talk?’

  ‘Try it.’

  Half an hour passed in rather inconsequential conversation about people they both knew. As was only to be expected, nothing very interesting had happened to any of them in the meantime. Only one of them, Lyosha Chikunov, had distinguished himself - by drinking several bottles of Finlandia vodka and then freezing to death one starry January night in the toy house on a children’s playground.

  ‘Gone to Valhalla,’ was Gireiev’s terse comment.

  ‘Why are you so sure?’ Tatarsky asked; then he suddenly remembered the running deer and the crimson sun on the vodka label and assented internally. He reached for his notebook and wrote: ‘An ad for Finlandia. Based on their slogan:

  "In my previous life I was clear, crystal spring water". Variant.’complement: a snowdrift with a frozen puddle of puke on top. Text: "In my previous life I was Finlandia vodka".’

  Meanwhile a scarcely perceptible sensation of happy relaxation had developed in his body. A pleasant quivering rose in his chest, ran in waves through his trunk and his arms and faded away without quite reaching his fingers. And f
or some reason Tatarsky very much wanted the quivering to reach his fingers. He realised he hadn’t drunk enough; but the teapot was already empty.

  ‘Is there any more?’ he asked.

  ‘There, you see,’ said Gireiev, ‘what did I tell you?’

  He stood up, left the room and came back with an open newspaper scattered with dry pieces of sliced fly-agaric mushrooms. Some of them still had scraps of red skin with little white blots, while others had shreds of newspaper with the mirror-images of letters clinging to them.

  Tatarsky tossed a few pieces into his mouth, chewed them and swallowed. The taste of the dried fly-agarics reminded him a little of potato flakes, except that it was nicer - it occurred to him that they could be sold in packets like potato chips, and this must be one of the secret routes to a bank loan, Grand Cherokee jeep, advertisement clip and violent death. He started pondering what the clip might be like, tossed another portion into his mouth and looked around him. It was only at this stage that he actually noticed several of the objects decorating the room. For instance, that sheet of paper hanging in the obvious place on the wall - there was a letter written on it, maybe Sanskrit, maybe Tibetan, resembling a dragon with a curved tail.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked Gireiev.

  Gireiev glanced up at the wall. ‘Hum.’ he said.

  ‘What d’you need it for?’

  ‘That’s how I travel.’

  ‘Where to?’ asked Tatarsky.

  Gireiev shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ he said. ‘Hum. When you don’t think, lots of things become clear.’

  But Tatarsky had already forgotten his own question. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude to Gireiev for inviting him here. ‘You know.’ he said.’ I’m going through a difficult period right now. Most of the time I associate with bankers and other scum who want advertising. The stress is just incredible. But out here with you… I feel just as though I’ve come back home.’

  Gireiev seemed to understand what he was feeling. ‘It’s nothing.’ he said, ‘Don’t even think about it. A couple of those bankers came to see me last winter. Wanted to expand their consciousness. Afterwards they ran off barefoot across the snow. Why don’t we go for a walk?’

  Tatarsky was happy to agree. Once outside the garden gate, they set off across a field criss-crossed by freshly dug ditches. The path led them to a forest and began winding between the trees. The itching and trembling in Tatarsky’s hands was getting stronger, but it still wasn’t reaching his fingers. Noticing there were lots of fly-agarics growing on the ground among the trees, he dropped behind Gireiev and picked several of them. They weren’t red, but dark brown and very beautiful. He ate them quickly and then caught up with Gireiev, who hadn’t noticed anything.

  Soon the forest came to an end and they came out into a large open space, a collective farm field bounded on its far side by the river. Tatarsky looked upwards to where motionless clouds towered up into the sky above the field in the last orange rays of one of those inexpressibly sad sunsets that autumn sometimes produces outside Moscow. They walked on for a while down the track along the edge of the field and sat down on a fallen tree.

  Tatarsky suddenly thought of a potential advertising concept for fly-agarics. It was based on the startling realisation that the supreme form of self-realisation for fly-agarics is an atomic explosion - something like the glowing non-material body that certain advanced mystics acquire. Human beings were simply a subsidiary form of life that the fly-agarics exploited in order to achieve their supreme goal, in the same way as human beings exploited mould for making cheese. Tatarsky raised his eyes towards the orange rays of the sunset and the flow of his thoughts was abruptly broken off.

  ‘Listen,’ Gireiev said after a few more minutes’ silence, ‘I just thought about Lyosha Chikunov again. Sad about him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ Tatarsky replied.

  ‘Weird, that - he’s dead, and we’re alive… Only I suspect that every time we lie down and sleep, we die just the same way. And the sun disappears for ever, and all history comes to an end. And then non-existence just gets sick of itself and we wake up. And the world comes into existence all over again.’

  ‘How can non-existence get sick of itself?’

  ‘Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don’t even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and our world are the same thing.’

  Tatarsky tried to understand what this meant. He noticed that thinking had became difficult and even dangerous, because his thoughts had acquired such freedom and power that he could no longer control them. The answer appeared to him immediately in the form of a three-dimensional geometrical figure. Tatarsky saw his own mind: it was a white sphere, like a sun but absolutely calm and motionless. Dark, twisted fibrous threads extended from the centre of the sphere to its periphery. Tatarsky realised that they were his five senses. The fibres that were a little thicker were sight, the ones a bit thinner than those were hearing, and the others were almost invisible. Dancing and meandering around these motionless fibres was a winding spiral, like the filament of an electric-light bulb. Sometimes it would align itself for a moment with one of them; sometimes it would curl up around itself to form a glowing circle of light like the one left by the lighted tip of a cigarette swirled rapidly in the dark. This was the thought with which his mind was occupied.

  ‘That means there is no death.’ Tatarsky thought happily. ‘Why? Because the threads disappear, but the sphere remains!’

  He was filled with happiness at having managed to formulate the answer to a question that had tormented humanity for the last several thousand years in terms so simple anyone could understand them. He wanted to share his discovery with Gireiev, and taking him by the shoulder he tried to pronounce this final phrase out loud. But his mouth spoke something else, something meaningless - all the syllables that made up the words were still there, but they were jumbled up chaotically. Tatarsky thought he needed a drink of water, and so he said to Gireiev, who was staring at him in fright:

  ‘Li’d winker drike I watof!’

  Gireiev obviously didn’t understand what was going on; but it was clear that whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

  ‘Li’d dratinker wike of wit!’ Tatarsky repeated meekly and tried to smile.

  He really wanted Gireiev to smile back at him; but Gireiev did something strange - he got to his feet and backed away from Tatarsky, who understood for the first time what was meant by the phrase ‘a mask of horror’. His friend’s face was distorted into the most distinct possible mask of precisely that kind. Gireiev took several faltering steps backwards, then turned and ran. Tatarsky was offended to the depths of his soul.

  Meanwhile the evening twilight had begun to thicken. As it flitted through the blue haze between the trees, Gireiev’s Nepalese waistcoat looked like a large butterfly. Tatarsky found the idea of pursuit exciting. He launched himself after Gireiev, bounding high in the air in order not to stumble over some root or hummock. It was soon clear that he was running a lot faster that Gireiev, quite incomparably faster, in fact. He overtook him and turned back several times before he realised that he wasn’t running around Gireiev, but around the remnant of a dry tree-trunk the same height as a man. That sobered him up a little, and he set off down the path in what he thought was the direction of the railway station.

  Along the way he ate several more fly-agarics that attracted his attention among the trees, and soon he found himself on a wide dirt road with a fence of barbed wire running along one edge of it.

  Someone appeared ahead of him, walking along. Tatarsky went up to him and asked politely: ‘Stan gou thecation totet yell he mow? There trun rewains?’

  Glancing sharply at Tatarsky, the stranger took a quick step backwards, then took to his he
els. Everybody seemed to be reacting to him in the same way today. Tatarsky remembered his Chechen employer and thought cheerfully to himself:

  ‘What if I met Hussein now, I wonder if he’d be scared?’

  When Hussein promptly appeared at the edge of the road, it was Tatarsky who was scared. Hussein was standing there silently in the grass and not reacting in any way to Tatarsky’s approach. But Tatarsky slowed his pace, walked across to Hussein with meek, childish steps and stood there paralysed with guilt.

  ‘What did you want?’ Hussein asked.

  Tatarsky said something extremely inappropriate: ‘I just need a second. I wanted to ask you, as a representative of the target group: what associations does the word "parliament" have for you?’ In his fright he didn’t even notice whether he was speaking normally or not.

  Hussein wasn’t surprised at all. He thought for a moment and answered: ‘Al-Ghazavi had this poem called "The Parliament of Birds". It’s about how thirty birds flew off in search of the bird that is called Semurg - the king of all birds and a great master.’

  ‘But why did they fly off in search of a king, if they had a parliament?’

  ‘You ask them that. And then, Semurg was not just a king, he was a fount of great knowledge. That’s more than you can say for a parliament.’

  ‘How did it all end?’ asked Tatarsky.

  ‘When they had endureded thirty trials, they learned that the word "Semurg" means "thirty birds".’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘The voice of God told them.’

  Tatarsky sneezed. Hussein immediately fell silent and turned away his glowering face. Tatarsky waited for a continuation for quite a long time before he realised that Hussein was actually a post with a sign nailed to it saying: ‘Campfires forbidden!’ that he could scarcely make out in the semi-darkness. That upset him - so Gireiev and Hussein were in league now! He’d liked Hussein’s story, but now it was clear that he’d never learn all the details, and in the form he’d heard it, it wasn’t even fit for a cigarette concept. Tatarsky walked on, wondering what it was that had made him stop in such a cowardly fashion by a Hussein-post that hadn’t even asked him to.