Читать книгу Deja vu. Love - Sergey Zybolov - Страница 14

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The road to the fontanel, no longer, no less than three quarters of an hour, today clearly reduced due to high spring mood.

“Our old Diti, a fairy-tale old man, nevertheless survived his released term. He’s so old! How old is he, interesting to know? When we settled here with Rond, there were rumors that he had conscientiously worked more than fifty dollars! More than fifty! The same… yes, this figure does not even fit into the head… so it was back then, almost back in the past life. And how much is he now? To think – horror is simple! And they don’t eliminate him, although who wants to fire a working hardworking worker? Eliminate only for objective reasons and lazy ants! You have to go too low to get fired. And this one is a real pro in his field, and, it seems, in his favorite field. He thoroughly knows everything that is necessary and what is not necessary, and he has learned all the ants very well – he must have found his own personal secrets to each tenant, and a significant plus to everything is that he is not at all lazy! He is not lazy, just – well done! I wonder if lazy individuals are in nature, in general, in principle, is this possible? Yes, a total of sixty years or more he worked? How much is it? And he doesn’t want to leave… and where, and why should he leave, if there is work here and he feels that we need, we need society, and somewhere there, somewhere outside our house – he will become, and that’s for sure, ‘Waste slag’ thrown by everyone and left to survive…”

The path to the life-giving fontanel, which served for many centuries as a true “dear life” for the hymenoptera of the city of Kekhidupan*, ran through the entire endless, long Sixty-second street, along a glossy, dry, lifeless wall of monotonous flat, inexpressive multi-storey monsters, occasionally interspersing, variegated motley glass cubes of supermarkets.

The only notable building on the above Sixty-second was the Congress Hall, which amicably combines together with a couple of dozen private minor television studios and press centers, and one state mega-TV channel. Frankly, honestly, the Congress Hall with its ambitious architectural forms was the only building that fully (from an artistic and aesthetic point of view) compensated the entire adjacent gray area of the same type. As if frozen in an unknown architectural ecstasy, in the geometrically regular form of the mystical octahedron, an amazingly beautiful high-rise building could rightly be considered a real work of modern architectural art. And the lower fatal-strange inverted pyramid, as if squeezed from all four sides, and the upper one – are amazingly regular in shape, both were undividedly decorated with multi-colored glass windows, pierced with a mysterious rainbow, more precisely from the ground floor, from the ground, asphalt pavement, to the sharp-pointed peak of twenty eighth, – all the millionth ghostly colors of the rainbow rocker flowed polyphonically from one to another. The sun’s rays of cheerful reflection from the surface of almost ideally mirrored triangles and rhombuses from afar attracted everyone’s attention, captivating the eyes of the townspeople and surprising tourists, sometimes turning into the carapace of a terrible huge ancient amphibian, which in every way murmured with patchwork and scaly modulations in every way.

The sixty-second street, spontaneously breaking off, quite easily turned into a sad wide tunnel, which you had to walk along for another ten minutes to find yourself on Hundred and Forty Street, and from there to the Third Quarter, where the fontanel was located, just a stone’s throw away.

Jumping around his native Sixty-second, Ave with a touch of genuine sadness said to himself that on this clear colorful Sunday there were an unusual number of ants in the streets of a cloudless city: everyone ran in a never-ending string, hurried, rode, was late, stumbled, stopped, colliding, exchanging glances, again continued the way.

A brand new clean bus of an unusually delicate peach color with a wide white stripe and the inscription “SP-Express Special Lines” silently braked quite a bit before reaching the intersection, at the stop of the routes, and two ants smartly jumped out of it, and a two-story liner, releasing a few pops another batch of deadly earthen smoke, as if a caterpillar had curved and turned onto Fifty-sixth Street. In a hurry, Ave almost ran past an ant that got off the bus, but something unusual happened. The jumped-up goose abruptly handed Ave the red paw, blocking, like a barrier, the road to an ant on duty, hastening for business affairs.

– Stop, stop, sto-o-op! On this side of Sixty-second str-r-reet it is strictly for-r-rbidden to walk with empty canister-r-rs!!! Have you not hear-r-rd of the last amendment in Ar-r-rticle 129th?! This is a r-r-real disor-r-rder! Disturbance of or-r-rder! How do you, so easily, ignor-r-e the laws! This is ver-r-ry bad!

Stunned for a minute, Ave looked up at a passerby and, completely unaware of anything, opened his mouth wide to at least something intelligible to answer such an extravegant statement, but, as luck would have it, nothing came to mind. His mandibles began to twitch nervously one after another.

“What terrible rubbish is this? What nonsense! What is going on, green duck? Who is that? Who invented something? What nonsense?!” – Immediately flashed in the head of Ave.

Doing nothing, the opposite ant stood waiting expectantly and stared unpleasantly at Ave, who stopped. But here the ant on duty hooked up familiar lines – either eyes, or scapus, or…, caught it with the very tip of the claw, the slight movement of the clypeus that is above the mandibles, the half-look, he thought that something was wrong here. The awakened memory lifted him by the shoulders for a hundredth of a second and lifted it up well, returning him to the distant past, and he remembered this bird’s eye section, this cheerful gaze, but could not tell for sure where he had met this ant before.

– You… You… Are you confusing something? Is it really… where did you get this from?.. – with an incomprehensible intonation, – either asking or answering, the taken aback Ave squeezed out the words from the crumbs. – Amendments… no amendments have been accepted for half a year already, isn’t that so? Are you kidding me?..

– Old man, Ave, you didn’t recognize me?! I bet twenty units that you did not recognize me! I am A-a-aft! Remember, we plowed together at the radio plant for three years? Well, well, did you forget? Remembered? Come on, come on, remember! Aft! I’m right here, I recognized you right away!

– Ghhh! – just jumped out of Ave in surprise.

– Aft! Remember me? Well, come on already, remember! – the angry ant began to show texture in front and in profile, a little grimacing, and all this was accompanied by his infectious laugh.

– No, of course, I remember, of course, I remember!

– Well!

– I remember… and I look – some familiar ant is standing, but who – I just can’t understand right away?

– Class! Now I’ve found out right away – wonderful!

– And I look… Well, at least you beat me – I can’t do it! Well, you scared me, damn it! Really scared with his cans, hell! What kind of jokes do you have?

– Naturally, you can’t understand, although only seven years have passed! Like seven?

– Seven already?..

– Well, yes, seven are! But what years have passed! What years! Have I changed? And not only I have changed! – blurted out Aft. And only here old friends pounced on each other and hugged tightly. – Forgive me, I didn’t want to scare you, not from evil I… I just wanted to make a joke…

– Yeah, you have changed! Not seven, probably, but six years have passed… – Ave began, but Aft interrupted him.

– Yes, a lot has changed since then, a lot. They then quietly eliminated us and everything started to spin… spun…

– After the then dismissal, rumors circulated that…

– Why, there were” rumors,” – Ave Aft cut off again sharply, emphasizing” what’s there.” – Rumors always go, they are rumors! Aft laughed out loud, then coughed half-vividly and continued again. – About the strike, then? I know that they talked dimly about the rally and something like that… interpreted… well… how can I tell you… eliminated, and that’s all…

– Yes, ah… “eliminated, that’s all”…

– Well yes! Life itself, you know, is not easy… Life is a very difficult puzzle, sometimes there are continuous riddles after riddles!

– So it was all, really was? – Ave asked very hesitantly, pronouncing each word slowly in syllables, and while he spoke he carefully looked around. – Is it true that it was?

– Well, you give, old man! No, of course! – Aft nervously moved his mustache and continued. “They composed everything then!” It was easier to make up than to tell the truth and explain everything…

– For some reason, I thought so… I felt that all this was untrue…

– Of course! There was no strike, and it could not be! So, in fact, there wasn’t any removal… for the sake of appearances, they did everything, although it could have been done differently, according to the normal, without any left-right affairs… everything is done, as always, through one place… I don’t know… I don’t understand why they are so with us…

– In general, it’s strange… why – no one understands at all!

– Well, that was, it was, and now – life goes on! You, I see, as always, you are not lazy, you run away on business matters, are you going to the fontanel? Aft asked, nodding at the cans. “Let’s go, go for a walk, I’ll take a little walk with you at least to the tunnel.”

– Of course, let’s go, we’ll chat a bit though. So many have not seen you… tell me about life!

– Exactly! I’m listening to you about life!

– When we’ll meet again… Come on, let’s go! I haven’t seen each other for six years… this is necessary! Tell me, how are you, what’s going on in your life.

– Yes, as always, according to the template project, we have a house, a job, a house again… Nothing new and interesting… What can happen to a simple working ant in life?

– Mmm, well, a lot of things can be done if you want to!

– Here I’ll think a little! Good idea!

– Do you work now?.. Where do you work? It is necessary to work, it is impossible to be lazy in any way, “only labor helps us to move in life and develop fully”! You remember how we were taught. Come on, let’s go!

It happens in life like this: you accidentally meet an old comrade and, it seems, have not seen each other for a long time, and, like, they are terribly bored of communicating with each other, and, of course, are glad to have an unexpected meeting, but here are a couple of words they said, exchanged superficial, lightweight information about themselves – “what, where, yes, how, yes, what plans”, and all, you can put a “checkmark” in a marker and indifferently say with almost imperceptible bitterness: “ate to the dump”, fed up with fluent communication, and there is no particular desire to continue to listen to his detailed stories about not egkoy fate, and shell, to share their life’s scrapes, too, somehow not really hunting. Moreover, very often it happens, in almost nine out of ten cases. But there are exceptions, however. I came across an ancient acquaintance, it seems I didn’t say that I’ve been a bosom friend, but they began to share their experiences over all the years that they had not seen, and there was no strength to stop, I didn’t want to leave at all, at least kill me. What does it all depend on? Either from a momentary mood, or from an internal magnet to a given individual, or from something else… and, after all, I’m ready to stand and talk endlessly with him about all kinds of nonsense, although you perfectly understand that there isn’t much time for empty talk but you can’t tear yourself away from him or her in any way, even though you crack…