"Inhabitant of the State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Platonov Andrei)

would fume. "As if the State cannot do without it!" And Pyotr Yevseyevich
would crush the worm to death: let it now live not in the history of
humanity, which is already crowded enough, but in Eternity.
At the beginning of the night Pyotr Yevseyevich would return to his
flat. The sparrows also became quiet then and would not come to eat the
millet; so the tiny seeds would become more ripened and firm through the
night -- it would be harder to peck at them tomorrow. With the consolation
of this thought Pyotr Yevseyevich would finish eating the crumbs of the
morning breakfast and would lay his head to slumber, but could not fall
asleep. He would imagine things: he would listen and hear the stirring of
mice in co-operative enterprises while the watchmen sat in tea-houses
riveted to the function of the radio, not believing it for joy. Somewhere
in a seldom visited steppe the kulaks are chasing a village correspondent,
and the lonely worker of the State falls down powerless under the brunt of
thick force, similarly to the bread of life falling down dead under an
unbalanced storm.
But the memory was merciful: Pyotr Yevseyevich remembered that near
Urals or in Siberia, as the newspaper said, a powerful factory of
complicated threshing machines was started by construction; and at that
recollection, Pyotr Yevseyevich lost consciousness.
In the next morning the old roofers would go to work past his windows;
a glazier carried his material on his shoulder; and a co-operative cart was
transporting beef. Pyotr Yevseyevich sat as if in distress, while he was in
fact delighted by the quietness of the State and the manners of working
people. There, the meek, silent old man Termorezov entered the consumer's
bakery; he daily bought himself a roll for breakfast and left to labour at
the barn of Communist Industrial Union, where the ropes were manufactured
out of hemp for the needs of peasantry.
A barefoot girl tugged a goat by a string to graze in the backyards.
The goat's face with its beard and yellow eyes resembled the devil; it was
however permitted to eat grass on the territory, therefore the goat was
important too.
"Let the goat be also," Pyotr Yevseyevich would ponder. "One could
reckon it a junior calf."
The door to the dwelling opened, and a known peasant, Leonid from the
village Koz'ma, appeared.
"How do you do, Pyotr Yevseyevich," Leonid said. "You should have
waited yesterday with us, but instead you hurried away to your flat..."
Pyotr Yevseyevich became flustered and afraid.
"But whatever has happened? Eh? Is not all well in the village there?
I saw a beggar drop a burning cigarette -- did he burn the estate?"
"Well, the village is well and good out of that cigarette... But right
after you left, there were two carts coming from the other end, and an old
man in a carriage behind them. The old man says, 'Citizens, do you perhaps
need deep water?' We say, 'We do, but we ain't got power to reach at it.'
Then the old man says, 'All right, I am a professor from the State and I
will get you the water from the mother layer.' The old man spent the night
and went away, and two technicians remained with instrument and started to
feel inside the soil. Now, Pyotr Yevseyevich, reckon us as we were with
drinks. For this I brought you a jug of milk: were it not for you, we would