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

he picked it up and moved into a patch of light, he saw it was a pack of
Parliament Menthol. But there was something else much more surprising about
it: on the front of the pack there was an advertising hologram showing three
palm trees.
'It all fits,' he whispered and carried on, keeping a careful eye on
the ground beneath his feet.
The next discovery was waiting one tier higher - he spotted the coin
gleaming in the moonlight from a distance. He'd never seen one like it
before: a Republic of Cuba three-peso piece with a portrait of Che Guevara.
Tatarsky was not at all surprised that a Cuban coin should be lying on a
military construction site - he remembered the final sequence of the film
Golden 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