"Энтони Берджес. Механический апельсин (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

between good and evil? A Clockwork Orange is all three, dazzling proof of
Anthony Burgess's vast talents.


PART 1


1


"What's it going to be then, eh?"
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie,
and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up
our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter
bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O
my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so
skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being
read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else.
They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against
prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old
moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one
or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen
minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe
with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives
in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready
for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this
evening I'm starting off the story with.
Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point
of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an
alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and
divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry
grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But,
as they say, money isn't everything.
The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those
days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we
called it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights, this being to
protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a
certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker
(a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old
Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's litso (face, that is). Dim
not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a
doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisty jackets without
lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (`pletchoes' we called
them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real shoulders like that.
Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like
whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork.
We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all together, but
there were four of us malchicks and it was usually like one for all and all