«Безгрешность» adlı sesli kitaptan alıntılar, sayfa 10

Вечно носить повсюду то, что совершил однажды импульсивно, – мучительная судьба.

Вы смотрели последнее время какие-нибудь детские мультфильмы? Там всё каждый раз крутится вокруг того, что кто-то особый, избранный. "Только ты можешь спасти мир от Зла" – в таком роде. И плевать, что эта избранность теряет всякий смысл, если все мальчики и девочки избранные. Я смотрели эти фильмы и думала про всех неизбранных, про участников массовки. Про тех, кто просто живёт в обществе, – ведь это трудная работа. Вот кто для меня близкие люди. Кино надо снимать о них.

Через неделю они помирились. Ещё через неделю разошлись вновь. Она подходила ему, он подходил ей, но они не могли придумать способа быть вместе.

Злость выгорела так же быстро, как вспыхнула, осталась только пепельная горечь.

Было бы здорово, если бы я могла просто нырнуть человеку в голову, всего на пару секунд, и убедиться, что всё в порядке, что он не думает про меня тайком ничего ужасного, – и тогда я бы могла ему доверять. Ни для чего плохого я бы этим не пользовалась, нет. Но ведь так тяжело – жить и никому не доверять. Столько сил приходится тратить, чтобы разобраться, чего от меня хотят. Это так утомительно.

Те совсем-совсем близкие пары, которые я наблюдала, там ни для кого больше нет места. Все сводится к тому, какая они чудесная пара. От них несвежими носками какими-то пахнет или разогретыми блинчиками.

The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He couldn’t listen to them without thinking of the Steely Dan lyric So you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last. (Radio in the American Sector had played the song over and over to young ears in the Soviet sector.) The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but inside, victory over the class enemy was assured. Inside, the professor and the engineer were learning at the German worker’s feet. Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized ad hoc communities were rewriting the rules of creativity, the revolution rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.

In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution—the scientific, for example—was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag.

Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she’d left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. “I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,” he’d said to her once. “What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.” And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.