Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 9

2.a

Here’s the thing: whenever I look in the mirror while shaving, I recognise some feature of some distant relative in my face. A cousin, say. Or an uncle or, even more likely, my grandmother. Or perhaps I am my own step-twin – the same mother, two different fathers. Technically speaking it is just about conceivable, even though it wouldn’t show our mother in the best possible light. But then again, amid the sheer unpredictability, the sheer randomness of life, what difference would a single, more or less unpredictable, random moment make? I, for one, wouldn’t hold it against her. Such things do happen. You get engrossed in conversation, mental juices end up being exchanged, and so what are the bodies to do? They, too, become friendly, that’s what bodies are like. Unless you are a clairvoyant, you can’t predict what might happen in the course of a single day. And even if you could, you couldn’t stop it happening.

Such things do happen. They have happened to me, too. It may have been – let’s put it this way – a matter of social courtesy: you don’t really want to talk to someone, so you make small talk instead. Or it may be just absent-mindedness, as if you were trying to solve an equation with three unknowns and suddenly bumped into an acquaintance in the street. Lost in thought, you say hello to him in passing but your acquaintance stops and you realise that a conversation is unavoidable. So you accommodate him, just to get it over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to your x’s and y’s.

Or, in a unique moment, someone might be revealed to you in their uniqueness. Things like that do happen. It happened to me, too, except that I didn’t get pregnant in the process.