From Babylon by Victor Pelevin:
‘You guys,’ he was saying in a thin voice full of astonishment, ‘you’ll
never believe it! There I was picking up half a litre in the vegetable shop
at the Kursk station, you know. I’m queuing up to pay, and guess who comes
into the shop? Chubais! Fuck me .. . He was wearing this shabby grey coat
and a red mohair cap, and not a bodyguard in sight. There was just a bit of
a bulge in his right pocket, as though he had his rod in there. He went into
the pickles section and took a big three-litre jar of Bulgarian tomatoes –
you know, the green ones, with some green stuff in the jar? And he stuck it
in his string bag. I’m standing there gawping at him with my mouth wide
open, and he noticed, gave me a wink and hopped out the door. I went across
to the window, and there was this car with a light on the roof, winking at
me just like he did. He hops in and drives off. Bugger me, eh, the things
that happen …’
Tatarsky cleared his throat and the old man looked in his direction.
"The People’s Will,’ Tatarsky said and winked, unable to restrain
himself.
He pronounced the words very quietly, but the old man heard. He tugged
on one of the bandits’ sleeves and nodded in the direction of the gap in the
wall. The bandits put down their half-finished bottles of beer on the table
in synchronised motion and advanced on Tatarsky, smiling slightly. One of
them put his hand in his pocket, and Tatarsky realised they were quite
possibly going to kill him.
The adrenalin that flooded through his body lent his movements
incredible lightness. He turned, shot out of the beer-hall and set off
across the yard at a run. When he reached the very middle of it he heard
several loud cracks behind him and something hummed by him very close.
Tatarsky doubled his speed. He only allowed himself to glance around close
to the comer of a tall log-built house that he could hide behind – the
bandits had stopped shooting, because Azadovsky’s security guards had come
running up with automatics in their hands.
Tatarsky slumped against the wall, took out his cigarettes with fingers
that refused to bend and lit up. "That’s the way it happens,’ he thought,
‘just like that. Simple, out of the blue.’
By the next time he screwed up the nerve to glance round the comer his
cigarette had almost burnt away. Azadovsky and his company were getting into
their cars; both the bandits, their faces beaten to pulp, were sitting on
the back seat of a jeep with the bodyguards, and the old man in the brown
raincoat was heatedly arguing his case to an indifferent bodyguard. At last
Tatarsky remembered where he’d seen the old man before – he was the
philosophy lecturer from the Literary Institute. He didn’t really recognise
his face – the man had aged a lot – so much as the intonation of
astonishment with which he once used to read his lectures. ‘The object’s got
a pretty strong character,’ he used to say, throwing back his head to look
up at the ceiling of the auditorium; ‘it demands disclosure of the subject:
that’s the way it is! And then, if it’s lucky, merging may take place …’
…insert me: you know that’s just the kind of nightmare i would have…and old philosophy professor trying to kill me…*sigh*
‘But do they know,’ the quiet voices whispered, ‘that this famous world
of theirs consists of nothing but the condensation of darkness – neither
breathing in, nor breathing out; neither right, nor left; neither fifth, nor
tenth? Do they know that their extensive fame is known to no one?’
‘Everything is the precise opposite of what they think,’ the quiet
voices whispered; ‘there is no truth or falsehood; there is one infinitely
clear, pure and simple thought in which the spirit of man swirls like a drop
of ink that has fallen into a glass of water. When man ceases to swirl in
this simple purity, absolutely nothing happens and life turns out to be
merely the rustling of curtains in the window of a long-ruined tower, and
every thread in those curtains thinks that the great goddess is with it. And
the goddess truly is with it.’
‘Once, my love, all of us were free – why did you have to create this
terrible, ugly world?’
‘Was it I who created it?’ whispered Tatarsky.
yep…this is the insanity i’m reading in russian…the translation is off-line, i don’t like it much, but i haven’t the energy to translate it all myself.