Eye, with that immense Soviet-made antenna rising up out of the water somewhere on the Isle of Freedom. This was obviously the payment received for its construction. He replaced the coin in the empty Parliament pack and put it in his pocket, completely confident that there was something else waiting for him.
He wasn’t mistaken. The road was approaching its end at the very top box, in front of which lay a heap of building waste and broken crates. Tatarsky noticed a strange little cube lying in among the waste and picked it up. It was a pencil sharpener in the shape of a television, and someone had drawn a large eye on its plastic screen with a ballpoint pen. The sharpener was old - they used to make them like that in the seventies -and it was remarkable that it was so well preserved.
Cleaning off the mud clinging to the sharpener, Tatarsky slipped it into his inside pocket and looked round, wondering what to do next. He was afraid to go into the box: it was dark in there and he could easily break his neck if he fell into some hole or other. Somewhere up above, a door banged once again in the wind, and Tatarsky remembered there was a small tower on the summit of the building, with a red beacon lamp. He couldn’t see the tower from where he was standing, but there was a short fire-ladder leading upwards.
The small tower turned out to be the housing where the lift motors should have been. The door was open. On the wall right inside the door there was a light-switch. When Tatarsky turned on the light he saw the lingering traces of a soldier’s harsh life: a wooden table, two stools and and empty beer bottles in the corner. It was obvious that these were the traces of a soldier’s life, and not any other, from the magazine photographs of women stuck to the walls. Tatarsky studied them for a while. He thought that one of them, running across the sand of a tropical beach entirely naked and with a golden suntan, looked very beautiful. It wasn’t even so much her face and figure, but the incredible, indefinable freedom of her movement, which the photographer had managed to capture. The sand, the sea and the leaves of the palm trees on the photograph were all so vivid that Tatarsky heaved a heavy sigh - the meagre Moscow summer was already over. He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he fancied he could hear the distant murmur of the sea.
He sat down at the table, laid out his trophies on it and looked them over once again. The palms on the empty Parliament pack and on the photograph were very similar, and he thought they must grow in the same place, in a part of the world he would never get to see - not even in the Russian style, from inside a tank - and if he ever did, it would only be when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:
The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October ‘93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament (digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:
Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland
Parliament slogan:
THE MOTHERLAND’S#1 SMOKE!
"Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.
Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the sand as a souvenir, but he
He wasn’t mistaken. The road was approaching its end at the very top box, in front of which lay a heap of building waste and broken crates. Tatarsky noticed a strange little cube lying in among the waste and picked it up. It was a pencil sharpener in the shape of a television, and someone had drawn a large eye on its plastic screen with a ballpoint pen. The sharpener was old - they used to make them like that in the seventies -and it was remarkable that it was so well preserved.
Cleaning off the mud clinging to the sharpener, Tatarsky slipped it into his inside pocket and looked round, wondering what to do next. He was afraid to go into the box: it was dark in there and he could easily break his neck if he fell into some hole or other. Somewhere up above, a door banged once again in the wind, and Tatarsky remembered there was a small tower on the summit of the building, with a red beacon lamp. He couldn’t see the tower from where he was standing, but there was a short fire-ladder leading upwards.
The small tower turned out to be the housing where the lift motors should have been. The door was open. On the wall right inside the door there was a light-switch. When Tatarsky turned on the light he saw the lingering traces of a soldier’s harsh life: a wooden table, two stools and and empty beer bottles in the corner. It was obvious that these were the traces of a soldier’s life, and not any other, from the magazine photographs of women stuck to the walls. Tatarsky studied them for a while. He thought that one of them, running across the sand of a tropical beach entirely naked and with a golden suntan, looked very beautiful. It wasn’t even so much her face and figure, but the incredible, indefinable freedom of her movement, which the photographer had managed to capture. The sand, the sea and the leaves of the palm trees on the photograph were all so vivid that Tatarsky heaved a heavy sigh - the meagre Moscow summer was already over. He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he fancied he could hear the distant murmur of the sea.
He sat down at the table, laid out his trophies on it and looked them over once again. The palms on the empty Parliament pack and on the photograph were very similar, and he thought they must grow in the same place, in a part of the world he would never get to see - not even in the Russian style, from inside a tank - and if he ever did, it would only be when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:
The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October ‘93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament (digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:
Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland
Parliament slogan:
THE MOTHERLAND’S#1 SMOKE!
"Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.
Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the sand as a souvenir, but he
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