Косс Елена Борисовна
Rat King of mind

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  • Размещен: 20/03/2017, изменен: 29/07/2022. 49k. Статистика.
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  • Аннотация:
    Вниманию читателя предлагается авторский перевод с русского на английский романа " Власть- сознание или крысиный король". Перевод литературы, где главными является метафора, ритм, сложная музыкальная композиция может быть интересным для студентов и переводчиков английского языка. Русский вариант романаhttp://lit.lib.ru/k/koss_e_b/text_0090.shtml
    •    Rat's King of mind by Elena Prokhovnick( Elena Koss)
      
       Fiction, dystopia, a short novel written in arts synthase where main art tools are metaphor, rhythm, composition, form, color.
       This fiction was written in Russian in 2008 and interpreted in English by author in 2015.
       total words- 8,600
       Total pages including title page -18
      
       Chapter 1
      
      
       Growing parts of dust fragments pierced the skin. Shouting words of love toward the underground trains was meaningless and painful.
       Bending low, the suffering, mixed with sand of words, was looking at the face.
       Love, like a broken apple, was helplessly bared in front of the destiny of two people -- looking identical, similar, facing the shadow of separation.
       A bench, long enough for a few people, gave a shelter to someone else. Sand, which had already begun to bury the city, left there - underground - traces all over. Words die down in a throat full of sand and fear.
       The production of energy of the past has started and some day, in the future, unrealized energy of these two, sitting on a bench and becoming silent every time the trains depart and arrive, would be discovered. In hundreds of years this energy of commas and omissions on the energy destitute planet could keep in the air the existence of the entire city.
       The city will become a family, a community based on kinship. Giving children a space only in the areas surrounded by the activities of their parents, a dictatorship, an order, and an ordered perception would be strengthened.
       Communities based on National ideas were breeding by dividing. Spontaneity of love was replaced by respect of the thoughtful alliances between equals, which was economical expenditure of the energy.
       Generating new energy was not necessary, looking at the past, filled with sand, for the spirals of emotions and growing energy fields of unsaid words, that had been placed in the capsules, and had the ability to grow with energy of unrealisation and ambiguity. Cities hung in the air due to the hot surface of the Earth ...
       Since the entire layer of oil had been pumped out and sold to each other, the Earth's core moved closer to the surface, scalding the earth and changing its life forms.
       Like oil, money had almost disappeared; the main currency was food. New national subjects pride themselves with printing their money, the old-fashioned way , to reward themselves for services rendered to the newly-minted homeland.
       The stored energy extracted from the past, were placed on the ground, for which ground space was still required; besides, these storages could be damaged by sustainable unemotionality of modern humans.
       Death has become a privilege of nostalgia for the planet's past. Longing came suddenly and enslaved man completely depriving him of social status .
       Rats organized equal to human being clans. Since then, each community of people was accompanied by several rat's ones.
       Bedbugs disappeared due to anaemia as a norm .
      
      
       Chapter 2
      
       They parted.
       Underground stations were half-filled with sand but sometimes trains passed carrying crowded passengers. Waiting for a train, people getting off going to ground level to breathe. The day was bright, with a few dark spots at the edges. There was no wind and the greedy dry atmosphere was creaking like an old door.
       He went to work every week, returning home on weekends. He hardly spoke to his wife. Two days of Weekends were passing in silence. Every time he felt shame, caressing his wife lying on a narrow folding bed when nights tied them together, but bliss came then to replace that shame. Sensuality absorbed him, and he was losing in this folding bed, the image of another woman****- his mistress- who simultaneously captured his thoughts with easiness and palpable sense of existence. At night he loved his wife with the same joy as at the beginning. In the afternoons they were almost strangers again.
       Marina dropped a cup, serving him a hot tea. Boiling water touched his knees, painful.
       - You are stupid, he forwarded her softly and slowly with prolongation of pronunciation of this short phrase. Her lips trembled.
       At night, kissing her, he gently touched her mouth with his hand, trying to reach the words, but her lips were pressed tightly together; and he- passionate and guilty- opened them up with hundreds of kisses.
       In the daytime, he again sought solitude to think about that other woman, about her words, to interpret them, remembering gestures. And Marina did everything awkwardly, irritating him again. It seemed to him that there was no place for her in their tight home where their children and their parents, his and hers, had been assigned. There was no place for her in his thoughts.
       He had called several times but Lola didn't answer. Running and running through the dusty, bluish evening city, looking for her, finding her among the wreckage of an old street littered with lanterns, finding her with some dark guy in an old battered hat who recently appeared in abnormal quantities in the city.
       Power has spawned hundreds of similars, maybe, officials or keepers of the boundaries of the everyday ordinary life or, maybe, monotony as a criterion for the needs of society. Lola went to them every time he left her in the subway, each time swearing love to him and then going to them, by not choosing from the rich monotony of the same.
       He hurried through the city; it was almost morning, wild, pink, and fragrant with hope.
       The phone rang; he irritably shouted something at Marina; Lola calls him, letting him know that she got home.
       He stood near her home. Several similar passers-by appeared for immediate disappearance. He went up to the seventh floor.
       Lola wasn't home. Dampness crept in black stains under the door. He thought of only one word - Lola - but those thoughts were about everything.
       He rushed into the street and cried, speeding through the city from house to house. A woman sat on a bench. He approached cautiously.
       - Lola?
       The woman's legs were half-covered with sand; she sat motionless, in this captivity.
       - Lola!
       Windless day wearily moved sand under the feet. He could't be on time for work. The streets looked the same, the city made it clear that he was lost.
       Two people with the same faces, a man in a battered hat and Lola, came closer to him. He didn't recognize her, but dutifully obeyed, as always.
      
       Chapter 3
      
       Everything was taken into the family circle, where he, by practicing carefully studied the art methods, placed Lola. The family was sacred still; but he restructured the family.
       Secret Lola, obvious Lola, filled everything inside and outside the family. Family was only his duty. It was his sweet duty to Lola and strict obligation to Marina. He didn't feel any obligations to his mother, accustomed to obey the fear of silence, a stillness- a short-lived freedom-,before awakening from seemingly falling into a abyss.
       He learned to live between orders, reproaches, insults. He lived by excuses as naturally as, seeing dreams dreaming. He was truthful and remained silent, hiding truth, about deviations from commonly understood morality.
       He didn't come up with their morality. Wife is one in spirit and flesh with the man. He felt flesh, but spiritualy he was far away. Centuries-old moral rigidity, attempted to take away his spiritual affinity for the woman whom he found too late, almost became one with him, to take away his desire to constantly think about her.
       He is sick, burning up and raving. He was sick often. In his delirium, asking for water, thirsty, thinking about Lola, not letting out her name, he trembled when his lips touched the cold water:
      - Lola.
      Still sick he'd go questing for her soon. Not unlike everybody he owned highest morality for himself, where the major role is given to the family. One of three faces, where Lola is spirit, Marina is flesh, and as the flesh she is the victim, edification, and pain, and he himself- creator; he is sad and happy to conform to his duty, uniting. Being united; he had surrendered to the fire and to the mercy of society's moral, people and common sense.
       Mother was the fourth side. Having four sides destroys the unity of the Trinity doubting its perfection. Perfection is only in a pyramid. But even this, the only rule he lives for, is not for
       him: mother is in his bones since birth. He is the she, but impulsive, suspicious, outspoken.
       Again the rats give birth to an offspring with a conjoined torso. The ten-headed baby was dragged out to a spot in the sun in front of the half-opened curtain of my window; it tries to crawl on the backs of content and mystically crowded relatives. The sickly smell of the rat"s joy permeates my kitchen. Rats are happy more often than they were before. Sand coming every day gives them shelter. People"s indifference gives them food. All the rats suddenly looked up at my window; it was a bit difficult to hide my artificial smile; I waved to them. Many-headed wagged his tails.
       For a long time there wasn't any glass in the windows and curtains framed them, recognized by neighbours as a border of some privacy. I closed the window tightly with the curtains; evening came, which made it impossible to read. There was nothing to dream about, and to think of the past was meaningless.
      
       Chapter 5
      
       " Frames","frightening", "paintings"",postmodern","realism", "loneliness", "reality". In the corner between the frame and a small portrait of a woman's face, which looks like mechanically collected painstakingly traced muscles, daily a spider with thin lines from its hind-legs created almost invisible lines of sticky webs.
       Those who were not intended simply passed it by, those who were smaller saw chunks of web as big as logs scattered in the air, and those who were bigger than the purpose of this trap could enjoy the perfection of its design.
       A Web is power for its equal ones. Spider kept his slaves alive and motionless: any movement can break the web, disrupt the harmony of a pattern. For larger ones, irrelevant, torn if caught by a sleeve, cobwebs seems only nuisances; one more movement, the web is broken, the spider is crushed. Any web requires strict selection, for the existence of its structure.
      
      
       Chapter 6
      
       The person can be registered, almost attached to the house, or maybe to the apartment, or just to a part of a small room. Dusty corners, dishes in the sink, taped cotton or daubed clay at windows to hide the warm of the room from winter , with a person assigned to all of this among swearing. Family, neighbours ... Everyone clings tight, according to the residence permit, to their corner. Prices for apartments are rising. Fighting for corners becomes harder with time. Movement around or in the corner, seems like a rush to the edge, beyond of which the welcome of waiting joy, peacefully fades.
       Movement - the highest stage, the next step of statics, often dies together with youth by being assigned to the corner.
       Realism as method rules reality from fiction of the real to abstraction of fate. It is the only reality of the angles themselves, one-sided, asymmetrical, high-rise buildings on the street with waves of curtains, different as flags of different countries.
       Evening, fragile and silently pensive is frozen in the moonlight of a puddle. A glass of water on the table seems the personified expressiveness of silence. Tags: love, no, you do not love me, but if you love me. How conditional is pity of desires in opposition to unconditional love.
       Love destroys by the eruption of jealousy from every nook to throw the mind on the street.
       On the streets, on the barricades of coldness and loneliness, a man happily meets freedom. Coldness at night is everywhere.
       -Run, to hide in the corner of the mind, in multiple forms comprehensively trapped in braces indefinitely. Steps, not in a hurry, run over strips of a measured amount of frozen concrete. The seventh floor. Lola is at home.
       -Lola, open. - slightly open your door for the thirsty flame of consciousness.
       - Lola!
       If thoughts are not born from feelings but from energy of another nature, people would sit for life in the corner facing the wall among boxes filled with clichés of formulas and cold as nothingness dictums, several for all. The sensual nature of thinking dooms humans for immortality. Feeling is our connection with the universe. Sensing that, about what"s scary or even impossible to think, we live; not depending of the form
       of movement, which is sometimes like a pendulum, from corner to corner.
       Plagiarism saying, producing what no one felt, by glass balls wraps inside the universe, torn to the size of the greedy pockets. Plagiarism - the power of loss of an entire generation - is immorality of ignorance recognized by authority; its money belonging to the one who stole feelings, which was dispatched.
       She won't open. He writes a book and page after page is covered with Goosebumps of letters. He felt a chill; the curtains could not heat anymore. Sand squeaks under the pen, disobediently outstripping the thoughts. He stopped reading long time ago.
       A cool brook of ink freezes by fear on the hands. Ink- dark-paints the whiteness of the palms, by blots of the desires crawl on the floor, hurrying towards her. The door is ajar. Lola came out putting her fingers to her lips - the Sign of Silence - the symbol from the other side, where there is no fear. He was accustomed to silence, exchanging the need to be understood for the freedom of short-time escapes from home. Silence was next to him, like a spell which drives him to slaughter his feelings to be sacrificed.
       -Love, measured in parts, is power, he told me.
       -Love is a stranger to manipulation, in absolute opposition, I hid from him. He isn't young. It's too late to change the rules by which man lives. He doesn't need to be scared, even by the truth.
       He'll catch drops of love metered for him, poisoning his blood, slowing down servile idolatry.
       Love could be very different, dressing up in everything. Love steals minds from the darkness of corners and runs with it out into the world, stripping off clothes.
      
       Chapter 7
      
       Dense spikes, like they were made of plastic, began to appear in the city. They were growing in the sand. Night dew was enough for them to survive under the scuffed steps of passers-by. Obeying the universal rules, they propagated by dividing. They were splitting quickly in all directions into small parts from any touch, like cracked glass. The windless city was settled by plastic nature. Even the rats didn't eat them, experiencing a strange desolation.
       Grabbing a thorn still covered by sand, I gently put it on the windowsill as an ordinary flower. By evening it had grown and blocked the entire window, continuing to grow onto the street.
       So ended that point of neighbourly relationship with rats, which could possibly be pleasant only from the very beginning from the point of curiosity . The hesitant rats began to retaliate. They made their way out of holes in the floor and spoiled everything, only not touching the thorn.
       They stole a large ginger cat, that grandfather left me many years ago.
       The cat slept most of the time and woke up only once a day, briefly looking around, to search for food. No one could remember his name. How and when did they lure this huge and harmless animal out of the house? I still continued to put food out for him once a day and, following habit, beckoned him to the bowl, still slightly hoping.
      
      
       Chapter 8
      
       A lie is theft with a pleasant voice.
       The Clones were imposed on humanity by science and speculation based on a lust for longevity. Desire for immortality - it's always a problem. The skin of the clone was tattoo injected on genetic level. Tattooed skin was the boundary between the clone and the original. The tattoo made clones look like old-fashioned money.
       I could have been eaten by sinewy gums of loneliness, but the house was filled with colourful look alikes of me, my eternal peers- clones. They all talk like me, loudly resourcefully and all at the same time. We have nothing to argue about; we just speak, from time to time, in a raised voice.
       Once, when I was a child, not knowing, saving money by not buying an ice cream, at first deciding to go to the movies, and later changing my mind, I entered a drugstore and bought a simple device. I never read the Instructions. A first clone came out on the bus. A little girl cried from inside of the green oilcloth bag, I bought at the drugstore. She grew up quickly, I
       tried for us to be friends. She died soon, I cried. I threw the bag away, but the clones continued to appear every nine months. They ate, were angry and died. With time they began to survive. They ate, reproached, were angry, left me, came back, lived in my house for a long time and never listened to me. That's how I became a stranger to my own grown-up and matured cells. Waiting for deeper understanding from someone else was utterly ridiculous. Immortality is false, we were getting old and sick alike. Late clones, born forty years old, disliked me.
       The only thing we all loved equally and passionately and, at the same time, sadly as the loss was an old photo of Simon. We, Simon and I, got married many years ago, but he has long since left the house with my two clones, red and yellow. Since then I don't know anything about them. Maybe, somewhere Simon lives in a red-yellow family with almost my children.
       I found in a garbage pit several green bags and carefully cut them into pieces. Then, the bags were cloned.
       Thus, humanity, striving for immortality, almost trying to grow old in one generation.
       Loneliness continued its painful procedure of self-knowledge. Clones forbade me to open the door when someone came knocking, fearing that was't enough food for all of us. To die at the same time as a single organism seemed a villainous mockery for their already shortened lives. Living with a tightly plastered, clayed door seemed normal to them. They knew the past of their lives only by listening to my hasty stories. I had to live as a tyrant, and then to die piteously in the desert of monuments of myself.
       Lie is a mistake of trust. What generates trust to the liars? It is chaos or it is love.
       Since the military began to use cloning, cloned citizens were banned. The army of clones died as butterflies. living one or two days. Weapons were improved.
       Biological weapons struggled with the cloned humans. Microbes excessively developed for gluttony were destroying child-soldiers-ripened during one week, weakened by copying. Countries competed on whose army is younger. A day or two, or maybe a few hours was needed to grow clones with the veins of tattoos .To be killed in today's battle, knowing that on his bed this night would be sleeping a new soldier the same as him. In reality, all the soldiers standardized by its uniforms - a mirror image of each other with common needs to be alive.
       Ahead of each army the huge, unformed, intricately varied microbes fled as a challenge to the imagination; The identical people, already born twenty years old, were following them with a measured pace to just die without waiting for nightfall. The air was filled with huge slogan of mass slaughterhouses: "- For the Motherland".
       Microbes in a melee with microbes of the enemy loosing their orientation of what is enemy and who is a family, destroyed , destroyed, fighting and multiplying itself. Microbes fraternized, and people were dying till the last one.
       Generals, ready in the morning to lead new troops, hurried to discipline recruits in the evening. Another hour or two before going to bed, encumbered by diplomacy, generals quarrelled with the enemy's generals; and then sat impatiently, again, almost until night fall in the cave, hidden in the hot earth hundreds of meters below, half-asleep and, at the same time, displaying zealous service to the fatherland clearly expressed with a selection of new curses for the upcoming evening, full of words to defeat the enemy.
       Clones could not be generals. According to the international agreement, troops must represent thirty percent of the general's clones. Every army general was guarded and fed no less cautiously than a queen bee.
      
       Chapter 9
      
       A few days passed. Green clouds solemnly as trade fleet sails of the distant past, sailed past the city throwing shadows of darkness on the greying grass.
       New listings were found in the archives. The Art Officials are quite ready for this, searching for worthy ancient namesakes, or even their ancestors or someone else's with a similar name. Suddenly, today's mediocrity could be covered up by honour or accentuates of the brilliant lightning talent resembling yesterday's accomplishments. Let letters intercede for mediocrity, which is rich but clearly can't afford to be sophisticated. Inheritance of mediocrity - gum of plagiarism, chewing on what has already passed through all stages, including the stage of digestion.
       It's how a person can be stuck forever between honour and shame.
       Those who write greeting hymns - rhyming reports of subservience- are officials. An official differs from an artist in that the artist creates to enrich, to feed the arts, and the official is guiding, glorifying himself, the monotonous union of people who feeds from arts.
       Training a crowd using the army step, where the rhythm and rhyme is an art, where the highest stage of images is photography, Society recognizes only similarity as moral and unlikeness for the falsity of ideological aspirations. If you want your singing to be recognized - you need to inherit the ancestor's audience. You want to survive, then be as everyone else: climb into the crowd, there is little light and no possibility to see anything other than the backs of those who are ahead, like being in a heated place.
       Reconciliation of the lists was over. Some of the clones found their ancestors. The Tattoo gene was taken off their skin. It was a chance for only a senior clone of the person sentenced to death. Some of the passers-by found similarities with the past.
       The new lists would be printed after a few months when a decree would be issued. And only then the population would be allowed to take place in line, respectively, by the institutionalized social status. But the chance is always there, it is regulated in advance.
       The Lottery! The meaning of any lottery is coldly planned certainty.
       The Lottery became a national project to implement the people's right to dream.
      
       Chapter 10
      
       At midnight there was an eclipse of the full moon. A black veil of twilight, slowly closed the round impassive face of the moon. The rats squeaked pathetically, hopelessly, unbearable ; and some dogs, stashed by the residents, were barking.
       People rushed to the information centres.
       The President resigned due to a sudden illness a week ago. The new president has demanded recognition of the right to govern the country incognito, then he signed the corresponding decree. Members of the House, called for an emergency; convened to confirm authority, had a dinner. No one would see the president.
       But the moon two hours later was among the household of the sky like a huge copper basin.
       The rats calmed down, turned their soft grey backs to the therapeutic moonlight.
      
       Chapter 11
      
       This winter the snowfalls were more often and bulky ice formations were crushed after falling from the rooftops of old-fashioned buildings. People, afraid to come home, froze in the streets. Some brave: carefree youth, or the elderly, affected by hallucinations of warm beds, ran up to the door of the house.
       Mighty ice floes suddenly falling from ten meters high, easily and permanently breaking people. They could only be released from underneath snow drifts on warm spring days.
       In spring the city, freed from poverty, would start the new construction.
      
       Chapter 12
      
       A Man was standing at the edge of the roof. Nobody raised themselves above this roof. The sun burned through the skin and painful monotony of glare squeezed the head. Cautiously, he sat down on the edge, legs dangling. For several years he had been living on the roof. He had ceased to count the days. Loneliness was hunting him. He walked along the edge of the roof, loneliness clinging, trying to remain in his eyes, promptly fell over the city. At the bottom, the roofs remained upright appearing compact like trampled homes. Some roofs were at the top too; houses dragged behind them, stood on tiptoe, ready to take off from sudden happiness. Happiness is huge as expectation filled him up. He wanted to fly. Loneliness - an absolute freedom. Thoughts of death -a thirst to be understood - can be satisfied only by loneliness. Who could understand, hiding behind the curtains in the houses on a windless night, how it was, walking on the roof all day to think, to think all the time, and at night lay wearily, as after a work, difficult but important, watching the stars, making their way through a pile of clouds, timidly twinkling, close and understandable. Stars fell sometimes quite close, breaking the houses, and then nakedness seemed as a defencelessness and a call: that's for the man, the same as for the stars, to bring a body into the darkness of the night, meeting the differentness.
      
       Chapter 13
      
       A purple sunset flooded half of the city. *****The sun burned the twilight, inking blots, into which everyone seemed to disappear. The houses, the trees, the entire streets were divided into parts - light and darkness. Light hid from the eyes half of a house or a tree, replacing them by shiny red spots. The man stepped out of the light engulfed in the chill of the twilight. *****The sun's face, closed for the night, was a warm line between imagination and dream. There is nothing in the emptiness of prophetic dreams. For what is predestination of the past opened by sleep to a furiously sunny day, where all is shining with newness. Night hid incompleteness, errors and fatigue in the twilight, where the sleeping mind does not grow above grass covering everything. Night frightened by darkness promising joy by fragments of dreams and its own weakness.
       You can stay at the window and look out at the night, artificial light exposes the lives of others, captured in window frames as pictures, thousands scattered in the slumbering city; staying at the window, like a portrait, created by nature and solitude, to think of love as a similarity, where everyone is important, captured by light of the lamp at today's vernissage of the streets night cold.
      
      
       Chapter 14
      
       To break out from the rigid frame into the desert of the night city. To look at the night and the rectangles of the bright windows, attached to the darkness. Become a spectator of the city repeated by chant streets, a herald of fearlessness in front of the dark and insularity propagated windows where the tired sun had been replaced by reading lamps, and only the faint light of its substitutionary saves from the night, by teasing the emptiness of the black cloud.
       Streets always hide hope in the dark of motionless bushes that surround houses, in the sand running out from the feet to the side of the road. Hope lurks in wait of sunrise.
       A huge machine appears from nowhere. Maybe it's the military or the government that did an assessment to mobilize attention. The car moved quickly and suddenly, as if chasing passers-by. He jumped to the side; Lola, laughing, looked out from the car and again put her fingers to the lips. Silent. He would be silent till the startled night would hide hope in the darkness.
      
      
      
       Chapter 15
      
       It's not clear how the city was rapidly filled up with thick and wide iron doors. People picked them up quickly, obstructing, throwing out cheerful chintz curtains. Craftsmen sawed doors to window size to dissociate themselves from the sun, the nights, the sand and the curiosity of passers-by. When the city was slammed shut by all the windows inside. I broke a thorn. The window, windless, shined. The streets were deserted. But it was good to know that people had not disappeared completely, and they only crouched behind the rusted iron. Someday we would meet again, when they get tired of self-imposed exile, to hide themselves into the concrete, entwined with the iron blocks, of their apartments.
       I tore off the door's plasticine and opened the door all the way, knowing that no one else would do the same. A ball of plasticine clay was, lying on the windowsill. Awkwardly small.
      
       Chapter 16
      
       Black holes - border of infinity- attacked at night the town which was becoming like a huge prison where the power, chaining the people inside of it, retreated, calling for anyone when it was necessary. But by day the white again was creating outlines of houses and sludge quickly gnawed the iron of shackles.
      
       Chapter 18
      
       Clones left again looking for Simon. They thought that they were better or maybe younger than me. I knew with him, such carelessness and recklessness of passion; jealousy would be left for their own share.
       Suddenly a siren howeld accompanying the leadership of incognito. People, in apartment chambers behind the iron walls, don't feel fear, but those walking in the streets quickly pressed themselves against the walls of houses trying to be smaller.
       Finely, the Siren - a symbol of vigilance- fell silent and people quietly rejoiced and hurried home.
       - I walked out of the store with bags full of food, he said hastily apologizing, to Marina,
       - A siren wailed, I ran and stumbled, the food was scattered...
       He walked out of the store with bags full of food, the siren wailed, he ran and stumbled, the food was scattered ... Rats locked him in a ring, pushing him against the wall and stole the food. He memorized a few of them, but he didn't believe in justice. Today he wasn't dreaming about Lola. Humiliation fenced him off from love.
       At night the door creaked, and he was laying quietly in silence, then he took pieces of paper, nibbling pockets, and began to write, gently touching the paper, hiding under the blanket,he read in childhood, secretly, so that his Mom wouldn't get angry because he could damage his vision or catch a cold through the gap that he left open to breathe.
       In the morning he found emptiness next to him instead of Marina's presence. His family was having breakfast; an unknown man was talking timidly and justified. Marina was laughing and pretty. With large soles she shuffled a bit on the floor, as in childhood, when children run a chair across the floor space, but still they could not reach it . Mom stroked a man's back gently with her warm palm.
      
      
       Chapter 19
      
       - Simon , happily and forcefully Marina was addressing both men.
       Her face was flushed by cheerful apple halves.
       Mother sat with her back to him. He sat at the table, trying to look into Mom's face. Silence fenced her off.
       - We found the bags with food, the ones you lost, Marina said quickly.
       - There was plenty of food. Then he came out of the room of the old woman, Marina pointed her palm at the newcomer.
       - Simon, Marina said afectionally.
       - You are not at home during the day and at night you are locked in a room to sleep, to sleep with Her. Mom said, not turning her face to him.
       - I work a lot, I wanted ... He stopped when he saw a curious careful look of the twin.
       - Why does he have absolutely clear skin? - oh mama, mama...- She saved him from the stigma of the clone. But how?
       - You were sentenced to death, without turning to him, the old woman said in a dry and loud voice
       - Go, go away: he is tired, his mom showed her care to the new comer.
       Marina attentively looked at him with pity.
       - I did not know ... started the clone making excuses .
       - What did you do, Mom? How are you able to ...?
       - I am a mother, a mother can do everything. A mother can do anything to get her son back!
       Marina's parents appeared in the doorway. They were holding something round in their hands, for a long time, it had been forbidden for them to speak. They just smiled apologetically. But they are always smiling.
       He ran out of the house without saying goodbye to the children. The heavy door creaked.
       Lola was at home.
       - Lola, open. I come to you forever. There is no need to cry, Lola. We'll no longer ever be separated.
       Lola opened the door unexpectedly quickly. Bright light poured into the twilight as the rusty door rattled.
       The twin was sitting at a table drinking tea, he smiled with embarrassment. His hands were stained with ink.
       - Lola, I was sentenced to death, said Simon suddenly. - I'm scared.
       She slid toward him, almost embraced and softly whispered words of love and farewell.
       The other him, the false one, was sitting with his head down; but Simon knew that raging desires and greed are behind this embarrassment and indifference to everything of someone else. The Dictator - the value of the universe. This is no longer a man.
      
       Chapter 20
      
       He ran out into the street, not knowing how to live away from home. He didn't think about the death penalty, he was afraid of the cold; as he was taught by Mother as a child. Inside was an emptiness of the universe. Silence. Cold slowed its steps.
       The Universe groped the city in Her womb.
       A siren wailed, Simon continued to walk in the middle of the street, he was no longer afraid. He went into a café; there was no food. He tried to read the list of decrees which lay on a small plastic table under the glare of the lamp, but sentenced to death, he didn't care what laws the city was subjected to. He only wanted to know the rules that applied to his sentence, and how it happened. Coming out of the café he tried to write on the sand. All his life he was writing for himself, and now, there was no difference to what to write.
       - There is no death; there's a change of life, he wrote with a stick on the uneven sand.
       - Can this inscription survive me, he thought with an absurd hope of being mistaken.
      
       Chapter 21
      
       Simon came to me when I was alone. We sat in the kitchen as brothers silently drinking a tea. The gap between the door and the floor became dark, and I waited for when he would leave.
       He stayed.
       In the morning he began the story at the time that he left me, he didn't remember much.
       My clones escaped with him, died. I listened to the rest of the story just trying to be polite.
       Lola. I knew a prostitute with the same name. He continued to talk about his mother, his children ,... setting the elderly vision of my youth, with beautiful gestures tracing the space of the room as if he creating something out of clay, a different world close to him in which I was not able to set a foot.
       I glanced slightly to the side, at the corner of the table, where a photograph of him was before, and said goodbye to this vision; an echo from the emptiness.
       I waited for him to go away, to cry alone about how a life loses its contours, as the expectation replacing joy fades into the cosmos of loneliness, where everything is unnecessary, where there isn't enough space within you.
       -Execution ? I realized he wasn't going anywhere; he had nowhere else to go, he decided to hide behind youth, in the shadow of my love, in the branches of diffuse pity of help.
       - The Clones can return at any minute, there are seven of them, I said.
       He looked at me apologetically and curious with sullen dark eyes.
      
      
       Chapter 22
      
       Rats are always eavesdropping, but they did not declare the information gotten to officials. I wait for a multi-headed rat to walk by. It"s old and barely dragging himself across the sand. New generations of happy youth noisely accompanying this creature. I went out and stayed on their way. The multi-headed nodded, and I talked about Simon. The multi-headed nodded again to signal that they had agreed to hide Simon.
       He tightly wrapped a scarf, giving me small commissions. I gave him a big jar of ink and a faded book in which it was possible to write again. He went down into the unknown.
       I began to bring food to the rats, fearing that Simon may become a hostage of their hungry existence, they could eat him as their supply of food.
       After the returning of the clones there was no more food left for the rats. And they stopped coming, they left my house.
      
       Chapter 23
      
       A sudden wind howled turning and chasing everything around in the circle of the square Birds fell, caught by wind in the traps of sand. Sand scraped skin and grabbed legs. Mobilization has been declared. The escaped wind quickly pacified and poisoned the processing of energy. But mobilization continued.
       War was declared between the north and south, from north to south, between east and west, from east to west. Furthermore North and South fought each other and the East and West, like windmills. War was everywhere waving blades of posters.
       - You're not at war? The rare passers-by asked each other reproachfully or, fearing that they, themselves, would be called, hopefully with a reprieve.
       Information centres have been closed: mobilization didn't need information. The immensity of the war was the direct opposite of the poverty of information. Who was fighting, isn't known. Who won, doesn't matter. Who led - secretly? Who died - anonymously? War. The Hero was the people. But man was a soldier with a charter to death. War - all living considered to be sent to the front. After being sent to the war, names are no longer needed. Mass death always has the same scenario.
       My seven clones were called to war. They were happy, rubbed their cheeks and lips with sand instead of rouge and lipstick missing in our house; they waited for war vehicles, that would come for them. With flushed and scratched cheeks they were dreaming of how they would rescue the soldiers from the battlefield. I felt sorry for them, plump little girls dropped out of the green bag. Responsibility poisoned and aged me.
       I painted my skin with ink and went to war with the clones.
       Nurses aren't needed in this war: death is inevitable.
       We were sent to the front line on the first day. Each man received an envelope with an order to run five meters and then to die. I tried to explain to my clones the irreversible absurdity of this loss; but political work had already been done by a tall and handsome man dressed in plain clothes, for two hours, shouting through a megaphone:
       - The war, the heroes, death and " cheers"
       I persuaded only one clone to run three meters instead of five and to stay alive. We dug in the sand. The rest of the army died heroically and anonymously and were absorbed in the same sand.
       Who needed the extra two steps in the desert of sand? That's how six of myself were killed, forever waiting for a meeting with Simon.
       We lay in the sand till night, crying from fear and loss, and the whole day, the men, still full of hope, were running over us . Our tears mixed with their blood, and it was not clear whether we were alive or not and, if we were alive, then why was everyone else killed.
       At night the spotlights lit up the field; the sand, clean and crumbly, was blankly new.
       And far away, in the headquarters, hidden away from the war generals, with plans for new attacks, were impatiently waiting for the victory marches.
      
       Chapter 24
      
       The streets were filled with Monotonous, the creak of the door almost disappeared in front of the onslaught of the post-war fun, loud in the streets, and sad in starvation and cold in the twilight of the apartments.
       My clone didn't return home yesterday. She went out in a dressing gown through a creaking door, into the evening to look at the frozen huge stars hanging over the yellow sand city, and never returned.
       I was left alone again. The twilight and cold infinitely crept under the door. I was wrapped in an old coat, hiding from the twilight, closing my eyes.
       The elderly, children, and clones began to disappear in the city.
       Lola often passed by the window, sometimes she was sitting at my door, maybe she was looking for or expecting someone.
      
       Chapter 25
      
       The fused religious symbols of the rats disappeared.
       One night the rats pulled out many-headed, helpless squeaking, their baby - this symbol of life as one family and, quickly almost bloodless as in a call of duty gobbled him up. Something else had come to replace this secular, fierce and unselfish symbol of paganist religion.
       Rats began to march in formation in their uniforms of smooth grey fur, passing by the window.
       All day long they marched, passing the windows with white shields on their backs waiting for unborn revelations sheets of paper.
       A year later, the rats stole my jar of ink, almost captured my house. They became bored and angry with a willingness to order.
       Simon is alive, the heavy stone of responsibility and strange guilt crashed inside me.
       Lola opened my door without a knock, the five monotonous came with her. They searched my house and took the remaining ink, which I inherited from my grandfather.
      
       Chapter 26
      
       Simon created a pattern of power - an isosceles triangle, where there was an absolute lack of equity along height of the hierarchy, where only the horizontal layers are equal towards the top. That no one knows except those who belong to the top. Where the place of the incognito was indicated at the top by the dense dark point.
       - Power is just in the mind, he wrote.
       Sheets of paper full of triangles with thick, as the Blob, point at the top, began to settle in my house Rats were hanging papers on the walls.
       My eyes were hurting dazzled by the endless repetition of neat isosceles triangles. These strange wallpapers images were sprawled by the flies, even on the floor.
       I moved to the kitchen.
      
       Chapter 27
      
       A siren wailed.
       I was sentenced to death.
       The Monotony lifted the curtain with a hand, hidden in a glove and muttered the sentence.
       - For potential awareness.
       Escape. I could only run up to the door.
       Assessment of the sentence with regard to fairness and impartiality incognito had to do himself.
       Simon was lying on the throne bed with Lola. The mother was sleeping next to them, snoring like a rusty, creaking door.
       His twin was in a cage, shaded in ink.
       The dungeon was filled with rats. A number was written on each rat. It was obvious that the inventory was recent. In the centre, they formed a live pyramid triangle.
       - Hierarchy, Simon continued to dream looking at the immaculately frozen pyramid.
       - Lola, Simon said to me, - you betrayed me. Somehow It was not strange for me that Lola's sins be put upon me with her name included, creating the illusion in size of reality.
       - You deserve death.
       I suddenly felt funny in this sad moment filled with the pathos of the lie.
       Simon"s mother woke up, sat on the floor next to the cage, stranded in front of her like her own huge belly.
       - It is so pleasant to be together again, just both of us, she said stridently as snoring, pregnant forever by this huge, human-sized, cage.
       Touching the hand of a clone grown old, captured in a cage of the womb
       -Do not lean against the cold bars, you could catch a cold.
       Simon stared at her.
       I don't have anyone's attention anymore.
       Two rats dragged me to the pit and pushed me into unstable sand.
       Simon threw a handful of sand on top, hitting me in the eyes.
      
      
       Chapter 28
      
       The universe turned at the edge of the Black Hole and threw me into eternity.
       The blazing fires of war were everywhere, the Earth's shell cracked and hurt by increased rested awkward edges at the side of the universe, like a blow-up of gluttony, our liver backed from the inside body, tired of the onslaught of unnecessary food.
       Marina had something in her hands, it was a spider.
       It's holding back the Black holes in the networks of the web, she said in a tired voice,- the spider.
       - Did you see him with Lola?
       - And what about the old woman? Is she with them?
       Marina was smashing the spider in her fist.
       Black Holes were devouring the universe by chomping. White Holes by flocks, like the clouds, seemed to doze, filled up to the limit with what had appeared at the beginning and with those who had managed to be involved. Yawning filled the universe to which life seemed unnecessarily noisy and dead stars captured space. Power became an absolute and not needed by anyone.
      
      
       END
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