Цитаты из книги Крысиный король

Я расскажу о себе. Я слышу то, что осталось не сказанным. Я знаю тайны домов и вещей. Я читаю слова на стенах. Я живу в древнем Лондоне. Ты хочешь знать, кто я такой? Я преступник и король преступников. Я — зловоние. Я вождь падальщиков, я живу там, где никто не хочет меня видеть. Я незваный гость. Я убил самозванца и забираю тебя себе. Однажды я уничтожил половину вашего континента. Я узнаю о том, как тонут ваши корабли. Я ломаю ваши мышеловки об колено и жру сыр у вас на глазах. Я ссу вам в глаза. У меня самые твердые зубы в мире. У меня усы. Я — герцог сточных труб, я владыка подземелья. Я король. Он повернулся к двери и одним движением сбросил плащ, открыв имя, написанное кривыми черными буквами на рубашке, между рядами стрелок. — Я — Крысиный король.

The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul`s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn — only loss. He udnerstood what his father was trying to offer him. His father was trying to resolve a paradox. He was trying to make sense of his bright, educated son letting life come to him rather than wrestling what he wanted from it. He understood only that his son was dissatisfied. That much was true. In Saul`s teenage years he had been a living cliche, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralysed in the face of a terrifying and vast future, the whole of his life, the whole of the world. Saul had emerged passed twenty unscatched, but his father and he would never really be able to talk together again. That Christmas, Saul had sat on his bed and turned the little book over and over in his hands. It was a leather-bound edition illustrated with stark woodcuts of toiling workers, a beautiful little commodity. What Is To Be Done? demanded the title. What is to be done with you, Saul? He read the book. He read Lenin`s exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, moulded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him, trying to help him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyses is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. This is tar, and this is what it does, and this is the world, and this is what it does, and this is what we can do to it.

The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs. They pass between towers justting into the sky like long-necked sea beasts and the great gas-cylinders wallowing in dirty scrub like whales. In the depths below are lines of small shops and obscure franchises, cafes with peeling paint and businesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. The colours and curves of graffiti mark every wall. Top floor windows pass by so close that passengers can peer inside, into small bare offices and store cupboards. They can make out the contours of trade calendars and pin-ups on the walls. The rhythms of London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zone between suburbs and centre. Gradually the streets widen and the names of the shops and cafes become more familiar; the main roads are more salubrious; the traffic is denser; and the city rises to meet the tracks.