"Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

to sing at that hour.
Besides, one of the men was said to be related by marriage to the
landlady. That's how they got the apartment, which had been used as a storage
space until they'd moved in. Marcia couldn't understand how the three of them
could fit into such a little space--just a room-and-a-half with a narrow
window opening onto the air shaft. (Marcia had discovered that she could see
their entire living space through a hole that had been broken through the wall
when the plumbers had installed a sink for the Shchapalovs.)
But if their singing distressed her, what was she to do about the
roaches? The Shchapalov woman, who was the sister of one man and married to
the other--or else the men were brothers and she was the wife of one of them
(sometimes, it seemed to Marcia, from the words that came through the walls,
that she was married to neither of them--or to both), was a bad housekeeper,
and the Shchapalov apartment was soon swarming with roaches. Since Marcia's
sink and the Shchapalovs' were fed by the same pipes and emptied into a common
drain, a steady overflow of roaches was disgorged into Marcia's immaculate
kitchen. She could spray and lay out more poisoned potatoes; she could scrub
and dust and stuff Kleenex tissues into holes where the pipes passed through
the wall: it was all to no avail. The Shchapalov roaches could always lay
another million eggs in the garbage bags rotting beneath the Shchapalov sink.
In a few days they would be swarming through the pipes and cracks and into
Marcia's cupboards. She would lay in bed and watch them (this was possible
because Marcia kept a nightlight burning in each room) advancing across the
floor and up the walls, trailing the Shchapalovs' filth and disease everywhere
they went.
One such evening the roaches were especially bad, and Marcia was trying
to muster the resolution to get out of her warm bed and attack them with
Roach-It. She had left the windows open from the conviction that cockroaches
do not like the cold, but she found that she liked it much less. When she
swallowed, it hurt, and she knew she was coming down with a cold. And all
because of them!
"Oh go away!" she begged. "Go away! Go away! Get out of my apartment. "
She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which
she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the
Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in
the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will
pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray
to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.
The only strange thing in Marcia's case is that her prayers were
answered. The cockroaches fled from her apartment as quickly as their little
legs could carry them--and in straight lines, too. Had they heard her? Had
they understood?
Marcia could still see one cockroach coming down from the cupboard.
"Stop!" she commanded. And it stopped.
At Marcia's spoken command, the cockroach would march up and down, to the
left and to the right. Suspecting that her phobia had matured into madness,
Marcia left her warm bed, turned on the light, and cautiously approached the
roach, which remained motionless, as she had bidden it. "Wiggle your antennas,
" she commanded. The cockroach wiggled its antennae.
She wondered if they would all obey her and found, within the next few