Читать книгу Kin - Dror Burstein - Страница 8

THE CITY

In two hundred and fifty million years’ time the continents will be all rolled up and compressed into one mass with a kind of big salty lake in the middle, a big drop left over from the oceans of yore. And it will be very hot with hot winds blowing, and in the streets of the city that the ice will have already wiped off the face of the earth millions of years ago there will be only red sand, blazing heat, desert. And there won’t be a single creature, not even spiders or germs, left in the city, the city will be empty. And all the street signs will be lying in the streets, and all the lamps will be extinguished, far below, upside down, under a layer of rocks and soil and ice and who knows what else for kilometers. Names ground into dust. Pages in the sand. A heavy red silence on the face of the earth. A few minutes pass. A decade passes. Twenty years pass. And nothing moves. Everything has stopped. Come back after a hundred years and nothing’s changed. And already you almost despair. But, like a shattered vase, with a little work, the work of millions of years that is, perhaps they’ll slowly be stuck together again, the pieces, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and after maybe thirty, sixty, ninety million years, look, a squat tree, or a pale green bush, or a tiny creature swimming in some warm water. Bubbles, bubbles in the slime. Such great labor, a tree has already started to grow in a forsaken corner of the single continent, and again an asteroid strikes and annihilates the miniscule fish and the tree, or ice covers the sea again and all the creatures die, and again a time of quiescence, thirty years, thirty million, there’s no clock to count it. And again a tiny fish, this time a little bigger, and with fins. And again moss on a rock. And again sweet water flows in the streams and pours into the sea. And who is this, walking there in the distance, look, it’s a child, he has already entered the picture, sitting on the riverbank and doing a sum. 1 + 1 =

Enough. Get up, Yoel. Get up. The parents are waiting.