"Lavie Tidhar - The Gunslinger of Chelem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

snails. Or bats.”
“Shimshon.”
“Not capable of dreaming even one whole street.”
 “Anyway.”
“Yes.”
“We want you to go there.”
“To Yokne’am?”
“To Chelem.”
“Where is it?”
“Near Yokne’am—”
****
Raphael woke up. The alarming clock swore at him in Russian.
Alarm, he thought. Alarm clock.
The crock began to make the sound of ten newborn babies being eaten
simultaneously.
Clock, damn it, he thought, and finally heard the normal ring.
Yokne’am, he thought. And then—Chelem.
Where is it?
Coffee. He pulled himself towards the kitchen.
Over the course of the night, the espresso machine had turned into a chicken
and had just laid a brown egg.
He took the egg. It had no shell. He tasted it carefully, shrugged and ate it
whole.
The cigarette pack, he thought. On the table.
When he approached the pack turned into a lizard and moved away with a
cough.
“I was going to quit anyhow,” he said to the air. The air ignored him.
A pat on the chicken’s back produced another egg, and he took it with him on
his way out.
Sum it up for me,” Raphael said. He didn’t feel so well. The singing birds had
almost disappeared to the corners of his eyes and their song—an a capella rendition
of “The Sea of Wheat”—had faded to a whisper.
“His name’s Stephen Cohen,” Michal said. Michal drove. Raphael sat in the
passenger seat, equipped with dark shades and a headache.
 “American?”
“The parents made Aliyah.”
“Can you turn down the music?” Raphael said.
Michal turned her head to him, began to smile, changed her mind and returned
her eyes to the road. “The radio isn’t on.”
“Oy.”
“Do you want a pill?”
“What have you got?”
“Something that’d wake you up.”
He dry-swallowed the pill. It had a bitter, not entirely unpleasant taste. The
birds disappeared. Silence settled on the world.
Raphael liked silence. Raphael liked to sleep, and to dream. Raphael liked his
job at the REM, but silence wasn’t usually a fact of life at the unit. Silence was a
thing of luxury, reserved for those regular policemen who only ever dealt with routine
murders, robbery and theft, blackmail and kidnapping that were the waking world’s
natural lot.