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

touching (especially the harp buckles) that tears sprang to Tatarsky's eyes.
The shoes were covered by a thick layer of dust: the new era obviously had
no use for them.
Tatarsky knew the new era had no use for him either, but he had managed
to accustom himself to the idea and even take a certain bitter-sweet
satisfaction in it. The feeling had been decoded for him by the words of
Marina Tsvetaeva:
'Scattered along the dusty shelves of shops (No one has bought them and
no one buys!) My poems, like precious wines, will have their day': if there
was something humiliating in this feeling, then it was not he, but the world
around him that was humiliated. But in front of that shop window his heart
sank in the sudden realisation that the dust settling on him as he stood
there beneath the vault of the heavens was not the dust that covered a
vessel containing precious wine, but the same dust as covered the shoes with
the harp buckles;
and he realised something else too: the eternity he used to believe in
could only exist on state subsidies, or else - which is just the same thing
- as something forbidden by the state. Worse even than that, it could only
exist in the form of the semi-conscious reminiscences of some girl called
Maggie from the shoe shop. This dubious species of eternity had simply been
inserted into her head, as it had into his, in the same packaging as natural
history and inorganic chemistry. Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin
had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been
populated by entirely different individuals. But even that was not
important, because Tatarsky understood quite clearly that no matter how
things panned out, Maggie simply couldn't care less about eternity, and when
she finally and completely stopped believing in it, there wouldn't be any
more eternity, because where could it be then? Or, as he wrote in his
notebook when he got home: 'When the subject of eternity disappears, then
all of its objects also disappear, and the only subject of eternity is
whoever happens to remember about it occasionally.'
He didn't write any more poems after that: with the collapse of Soviet
power they had simply lost their meaning and value.



CHAPTER 2. Draft Podium


No sooner had eternity disappeared than Tatarsky found himself in the
present, and it turned out that he knew absolutely nothing about the world
that had sprung up around him during the last few years.
It was a very strange world. Externally it had not changed too much,
except perhaps that there were more paupers on the streets, but everything
in his surroundings - the houses, the trees, the benches on the streets -
had somehow suddenly grown old and decrepit. It wasn't possible to say that
the essential nature of the world had changed, either, because now it no
longer had any essential nature. A frighteningly vague uncertainty dominated
everything. Despite that, however, the streets were flooded with Mercedes
and Toyotas carrying brawny types possessed of absolute confidence in