"Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The snail on the slope" - читать интересную книгу автора

know the meaning of the word. The elder asked me straight out in front of
them all: 'Why shouldn't we?' Buster was standing there, look, where you're
standing, closer even, and Ears just here, say, and over there where your
Nava's lying, there are the Baldy brothers, and he asks me in front of them,
in front of everybody. I tell him don't you realize, I tell him, we're not
alone here. . . . His father was a very wise man, or maybe he wasn't his
father, some say he wasn't and to be sure it doesn't seem like it. 'Why,' he
asks me, 'can't I ask why I shouldn't in front of eyeryone?' "
Nava got up and, passing the pot to Kandid, started tidying up. Kandid
began to eat. The old man fell silent and watched him for a while chewing on
his lip before observing: "That food's not good, you shouldn't eat it."
"Why not?" asked Kandid to tease.
The old man cackled.
"Eh, listen to him! Dummy, you'd do better to keep quiet. You'd be
better off answering what I keep asking, does it hurt much when you have
your head cut off?"
"What's it to you?" shouted Nava. "Why do you keep prying?"
"Shouts at me," announced the old man. "Lifts up her voice against me.
She's borne no child and raises her voice against me. Why don't you have a
child? Living with Dummy all this time and no child. Everybody has them but
not you. You shouldn't go on like this. Do you know what 'shouldn't' means?
It means undesirable, not approved, and since it's not approved it means you
shouldn't. What you should do may not be clear but what you shouldn't do,
you shouldn't. Everybody should know that and you most of all seeing as how
you live in a village not your own, got a house given, got Dummy for a
husband. Maybe he's got a different head stuck on him, but he's got a
healthy body, you've no right not to have a child. So that's it, shouldn't,
not desirable. . . ."
Nava, by now bad tempered and sulky, snatched the bin from the table
and went off into the pantry. The old man looked after her then went on,
snuffling:
"How else can shouldn't be understood? It can and ought to be realized,
shouldn't is harmful. . . ."
Kandid finished his meal and plunked the empty pot in front of the old
man. Then he went out onto the street. The house had been heavily overgrown
during the night and the only thing visible in the surrounding greenery was
the path made by the old man and the place by the door where he had sat
fidgeting waiting for them to wake up. The street had already been cleared,
the green creeper, thick as a man's arm, which had slid out of the network
of boughs hanging above the village on the previous night and put down roots
in front of the house next door had already been chopped up and fermenting
fluid poured on it. It had turned dark and was going nicely sour. It gave
out a strong appetizing smell and the neighbor's boys sat around it and tore
out chunks of the soft brown matter, damp and juicy, and stuffed them into
their mouths. When Kandid walked past, the eldest shouted with his mouth
full, "Dumbling--deadling!" but the cry was not taken up, they were all too
busy. Otherwise the street, orange and red from the tall grass in which the
houses lay drowned, somber, and mottled with dusky green patches where the
sun penetrated the forest roof, lay deserted. From the direction of the
field could be heard the monotonous ragged choir of voices: "Hey, hey, make