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

themselves and in what was happening, and there was even, if one could
believe the newspapers, some kind of foreign policy.
Meanwhile the television was still showing the same old repulsive
physiognomies that had been sickening the viewers for the last twenty years.
Now they were saying exactly the same things they used to jail other people
for, except that they were far bolder, far more decisive and radical.
Tatarsky often found himself imagining Germany in 1946, with Doktor Goebbels
shrieking hysterically on the radio about the abyss into which fascism had
led the nation, with the former Kom-mandant of Auschwitz heading the
Commission for the Detention of Nazi Criminals, and SS generals explaining
in clear and simple words the importance of liberal values, while the whole
cabal was led by the newly enlightened Gauleiter of Eastern Prussia.
Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but
he still couldn't understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for
an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.
But then, Tatarsky had never been a great moral thinker, so he was less
concerned with the analysis of events (what was actually going on) than with
the problem of surviving them. He had no contacts that could help him, so he
dealt with things in the simplest way possible, by taking a job as a sales
assistant in a trading kiosk not far from where he lived.
The work was simple enough, but quite hard on the nerves. Inside the
kiosk it was half-dark and cool, like inside a tank;
Tatarsky was connected with the world by a tiny little window, scarcely
large enough to allow him to push a bottle of champagne through it. He was
protected against possible unpleasantness by a grille of metal rods crudely
welded to the walls. In the evening he handed over the takings to an elderly
Chechen who wore a heavy gold ring; sometimes he might even manage to
squeeze out a little bit for himself over and above his wages. From time to
time novice bandits would come up to the kiosk and demand money for their
protection in squeaky, still-breaking voices. Tatarsky wearily directed them
to Hussein. Hussein was a short, skinny young guy whose eyes were always
oily from the opiates he took; he usually lay on a mattress in a half-empty
trailer at the end of the string of kiosks, listening to Sufi music. Apart
from the mattress, the trailer contained a table, a safe that held a large
amount of money and a complicated version of the Kalash-nikov automatic
rifle with a grenade-thrower mounted under the barrel.
While he was working in the kiosk (it went on for a little less than a
year), Tatarsky acquired two new qualities. The first was a cynicism as
boundless as the view from the Ostankino television tower; the second was
something quite remarkable and inexplicable. Tatarsky only had to glance at
a customer's hands to know whether he could short-change him and by exactly
how much, whether he could be insulting to him, whether there was any
likelihood of being passed a false banknote and whether he could pass on a
false note himself. There was no definite system involved in all this.
Sometimes a fist like a hairy water-melon would appear in the little window,
but it was obvious that Tatarsky could quite safely send its owner to hell
and beyond. Then sometimes Tatarsky's heart would skip a beat in fright at
the sight of a slim female hand with manicured nails.
One day a customer asked Tatarsky for a pack of Davidoff. The hand that
placed the crumpled hundred-thousand-rouble note on the counter was not very