Цитаты из книги Міністерство часу

I had never owned a bike that was not secondhand and coming apart. Brakes were more of an ideological pursuit than a mechanism. So I bought a brand-new bike, cycled it home from the shop, and wheeled it into the kitchen. He was at the table, staring glumly at his cigarettes. A half-filled spatial reasoning test was open at his elbow—the Ministry’s latest line of expat questioning. He looked up. “Oh. A velocipede.” “Bicycle. Bike for short. They’re good for getting around. Isn’t it lovely?” “It looks like a torture device. They were not popular in my time. Unhealthy, I think, not something you would like to take over cobblestones. Though we did not have these… what are these called?” “Tires. They’re made of rubber and filled with air, as a cushion. Stop ringing my bell.”

He was, however, enamored of the concept of endless music, disseminated into any room. It was how he started to learn to type, carefully pecking in the names of symphonies and taking a full minute to find the letter “M.” He said that, in his own time, he had hunted and drilled and drawn up watches to a fragmented gurgle of internal music, like Joan of Arc with a Walkman; now, at last, he could play the music he had always half remembered. He listened to a lot of Bach, which I enjoyed, and Mozart, which I tolerated. He liked Tchaikovsky, didn’t mind Elgar, was intrigued by Vaughan Williams and Purcell, but couldn’t stand Stravinsky. Having failed with film, I tried pop music. I tested some early rock ’n’ roll on him, and he shrugged; I experimented with eighties power ballads, and he was exasperatingly polite about it. My attempts to interest him in non-orchestral music fell on deaf ears until he suddenly, inexplicably, independently developed a liking for Motown.

The expats, loose as dust in narrative time, were schooled mercilessly in description. According to the hypothesis, the more accurate their vocabulary, the more likely they would temporally adjust. “Assimilate” is actually the word we used—they would assimilate if they said “phone” instead of “unholy device” or “car” instead of “horseless carriage”—but we meant survive. The bridges were expected to be day-by-day dictionaries. For the expats, Simellia and I were contextually so unusual that we were asked more questions (“Will your women’s brains not overheat?” from Sixteen-forty-five; “When did you throw off your chains for these—how do you call them—‘pantsuits’?” from Seventeen-ninety three). I was discomfited by this stilted forbearance of our sex and our skin.

He didn’t like twenty-first-century language. “Victorian” was his greatest descriptive enemy, and to be fair, I’d heard people apply the word miscellaneously to any period 1710–1916. But much of what I thought of as quintessentially “Victorian” was in his future and, to him, gargantuan, disproportionate, ungentlemanly, unpious. He didn’t understand my use of the term “classical music,” which meant something to do with formal classicism to him and meant, to me, that it had violins. He hated “text” as a verb, “sex” as an act, “tomato” as a salad product.

When he returned, he blew in like the weather. His jaw was set, which I had started to understand was a sign of enormous agitation. “This city is so crowded,” he said, standing in the hallway in his coat and boots. “Worse even than when I was last here. There are buildings everywhere. No horizons. Only buildings and people as far as the eye can see, and great metal towers strung with rope. Huge gray roads, covered in metallic traffic. There’s no space here. How can you breathe? Is all of England like this? The entire world?”

This is everything I remember about my earliest hours with him. We separated and spent the fading day bobbing shyly around each other like clots in a lava lamp. I was expecting him to have a time-travel-induced psychotic break and perhaps chew or fold me with murderous intent. Mostly he touched things, with a compulsive brushing motion I was later to learn was because of permanent nerve damage from frostbite. He flushed the toilet fifteen times in a row, silent as a kestrel while the cistern refilled, which could have been wonder or embarrassment. At hour two, we tried to sit in the same room. I looked up when he breathed in sharply through his nose to see him pulling his fingers away from a light bulb in the lamp. He retreated to his bedroom for a while, and I went to sit on the back porch. It was a mild spring evening.

“You have enslaved the power of lightning,” he said, “and you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.” “Well,” I said, and I launched into a preplanned speech about class mobility and domestic labor, touching on the minimum wage, the size of an average household, and women in the workforce. It took a full five minutes of talking, and by the end I’d moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension. When I was finished, all he said was, “A dramatic fall in employment following the ‘First’ World War?”