"Viktor Pelevin. Code of the World " - читать интересную книгу автора

and titanium in the sun. I was greatly occupied by the question what could
be inside. Maybe, star charts? Code tables? Secret weapons? Emergency
rations for extreme situations? I wouldn't dare to ask adults about this for
a long time - out of experience knowing, that after their explanations the
world rarely became more interesting. When I could not hold the question
back anymore, the answer was stunning. "Suitcase?" - asked one of the people
sitting in front of the television again. "They're for shit. See, there is a
hose connecting it to the suit. Cosmonauts are people too, you know."
That such a system of waste disposal was important could not be denied.
However a cosmonaut with a suitcase of shit in his hands seemed so
unthinkable to me, that my clean star world obtained an explicit crack at
that moment. Since then, whenever a new cosmonaut walked to his new rocket,
my eyes, without blinking, looked only at that suitcase. This was probably
because I grew up and noticed, that not only the cosmonauts carried with
them this suitcase; all the Soviet people were doing it. (In
pre-revolutionary Russia it was said that everyone has to carry their cross
- possibly, this suitcase was an atheistic stump of that metaphor.)
Moreover, all the Soviet cosmonautics ended up rooted deep in the stink
of the GULAG, where the main constructor Korolev was, his suitcase always
with him. The symbols that the Soviet rockets carried into the cosmos
(emblems with bundles of wheat, streamers with stars, and so on) were fake,
while this was the very precise symbol, unveiling all the horror: the Soviet
man, who built the first space ships and flew in them to the stars, towards
inhabitants of other words, could not offer them anything besides a suitcase
full of stored shit, tyranny and dark misery. The more I found out about the
world, the bigger became the suitcase, and the harder it was for the
cosmonaut to drag it to the rocket.
This is why it did not surprise me that during the launch of the Soviet
shuttle "Buran" there was not one cosmonaut on board. The invisible suitcase
was at that time so heavy, that there was no space for humans anymore. Later
on, during the time of Elzin, it turned out that this universal symbol also
exists in another one, deeply Freudian incarnation: as a suitcase in a bank
safe. In order for some Russians to keep their incarnation in a Swiss bank,
other Russians have to exists, that drag a different incarnation up the icy
stairs in their houses somewhere in the cold Vladivostok - all this is, so
to say, the law of conservation of energy. The fatter one suitcase, the more
goes into the other one.
Finally, I understood that in Russia there are no communists, no
democrats, nationalists and liberals, and rights and lefts, no matter how
hard the television tries to convince us. There is only this suitcase - the
invisible main property of all the dramas occurring in Russia. It is that
mysterious object that the "Kursk" collided with before its death. At this
moment, it is throwing the station "Mir" down from its orbit. And - who
knows - maybe, it is that case, that one president inherits from another,
and the generals do not cease to assure us in the fact that it is a nuclear
one.
Once, the suitcase and I were still small, I discovered a mysterious
picture in a Soviet children's encyclopedia: white lines zigzag on a black
background. According to the signature under the picture, the picture was
the oscillographically coded words "USSR", "Lenin" and "Peace", which were