"Viktor Pelevin. Generation P (fragment, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

only thing that was left of it was a microscopic stain on the windshield
of the mind. Some totally different landscapes had started to flicker
around.
Tatarsky tried to fight pretending that nothing is really happening, and
was successful for some time. Dealing closely with the others who also
pretended that nothing's happening, one really could believe in it for
some time. The end was sudden.
Once during his walk Tatarsky stopped by the window of the footwear shop
that was closed for lunch. The fat but cute looking saleswoman seemed to
be melting in the summer heat behind the window (Tatarsky called her
Man'ka for himself). Among the variety of colorful Turkish junk there was
a pair of shoes of undoubtedly domestic manufacture.
Tatarsky felt a shocking sensation of instant recognition. These were the
sharp-nosed shoes on quite high heels, made of a good leather.
Reddish-yellow in color, back-stitched with blue thread and decorated with
big golden harp stylized buckles, they were not just tasteless or vulgar.
They completely personified something that one always drunk Soviet
Literature teacher in LitInstitute used to call "Our Geshtallt" (SP?), and
the sight was so pathetic, funny and touching at the same time (especially
those harp buckles) that Tatarsky felt his eyes watering. A thick layer of
dust was covering the shoes - they were obviously not demanded by the
epoch.
Tatarsky knew that he wasn't demanded either but he had already got used
to this feeling and even found some kind of bitter sweetness in it. For
him, it was described by the verses of Marina Tsvetaeva: "Scattered in the
dusty shops / Where nobody ever buys them / The time will come for my
poems / Like for precious old wines." Even if it was something humiliating
in this feeling, it was not for him, but rather for the surrounding world.
Although, standing frozen before the shop window, he realized suddenly
that he's being covered by dust under this sky not like the bottle of
precious wine, but rather exactly like the shoes with harp buckles. He
understood one more thing also: the Eternity in which he used to believe
could only exist as the State subsidy (or, State forbidden, which actually
was the same thing). Even more, the only way it could exist was some kind
of subconscious memory of some Man'ka from some footwear shop. And for
her, as much as for him, this quite obscure Eternity was just plugged into
the head in the same container with Nature Studies and Inorganic
Chemistry. The Eternity could be whatever - if, say, not Stalin would have
killed Trotsky but the other way around, the Eternity would be populated
by some completely different faces. But even this was not important
because Tatarsky understood clearly: in any case Man'ka simply doesn't
give a damn about Eternity, and when she finally stops to believe in it,
there won't be ANY Eternity AT ALL, because WHERE would it be in this
case?! Or, as Tatarsky wrote in his book when he got back home:
"When the Eternity's subject is gone, all its objects disappear as well,
and the only Eternity's subject is someone who at least sometimes
remembers about it."
He didn't write any poems anymore: with the crash of Soviet Power they
had lost any sense or value.