"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

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 for some reason Tatarsky very much wanted the quivering to
reach his fingers. He realised he hadn't drunk enough; but the teapot was