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Chapter 10

WHITE

Two ants, walking amicably in one paw, headed along the street, their unpretentious conversation became more and more lively, and when they crossed the wide avenue – Fifty-sixth, cheerful and cheerful Aft suddenly changed his face and looked around sharply, as if checking that no one was following them, and making sure that there was no ghostly surveillance, with great pleasure that he had a worthy listener, he continued his colorful story.

– After all, then all two hundred ants sent us to Streerets*? – And back came back less than forty.

– How so?

– Yes, like that! I tell you: forty out of two hundred! Can you imagine? Feel the difference: two hundred and forty! Two-o-o hundred and fo-o-orty, two hundred and forty! – Aft singled out both numbers, allowing you to feel the whole salt of the difference between how much was and how much was left.

– It’s… it’s just… it’s a fantastic difference…

– Yes, the wrong word… anyway… well, all the same, these figures are not felt in our simple words… So, what I’ll say: for those endlessly long five years spent, well, that is, in the sense of tattered, worked out in this, unnecessary, in this, abandoned to all distant, distant devils, Streets, we were all given a decent monthly allowance. This feed… so what? Do you hear Monthly allowance! We plowed to death there, worked and worked!.. Someone… Someone died there, someone was taken to a hospital in the capital, but already irrevocably, and we continued to plow. Whoever was taken away didn’t return… We did the allowance, but who needs it? That is the question…

– Mmm, to whom? Probably someone needs it? Aah, no? – The phrase fell out of Ave in a clot of misunderstanding.

– Who needs their allowance now? To whom? No, well, oh… on the other hand, do you think I could drive these… these… international buses for a regular salary? And… I would hardly have been able to… and in general, I’ve come here on business… – Aft said and suddenly felt a nauseating, lumpy lump roll up to his dry throat, he choked, but was still able to squeeze a few words out of himself. – Now I say, wait a minute!..

– Can you help?

Suddenly, the face of Aft turned red, he shook his head negatively, the small, shabby mustache trembled convulsively, and he, with an unsightly bent almost in half, choked in a strong prolonged cough. The ant felt an unpleasant burning pain, felt like a fiery-prickly wave ran through the body, suddenly gray-colored, with a flash-like build-up: from the heart to the very tips of the paws, and mercilessly knocked out the very brain.

– Bjzhzhus-bzhzhzhus! Well, there’s some kind of horror, bjzhzhus, today with me, well, what’s going on! Horror, he is! – as if nothing had happened, continued the interrupted monologue Aft. – No, no, now they pay well at my work, I am not complaining. The manual – of course, it’s all great! That’s just health… health is not that… and not return health, for any money and rewards. Yes, and on such bus liners I do not travel often. It just happened so today… Today, at the Eighteen Seas Artificial Television Studio, veterans of the Streets accident were being collected… health could not be restored – at least someone would say… they were collecting us… – suddenly a new wave of terrifying attack came over Aft, he again painfully shortened, curled up in half, like a crumpled piece of paper, and grunted hoarsely for a long time, coughed.

– Aft, listen, well, maybe something to help you? Run for water? To run off? To help? What to do – say it! – to the embarrassed Ave it was scary to look at the bending Aft, and even more so, to remain indifferent in the trouble of the old comrade.

– Yes, no, no, everything is fine, everything is fine… wait, now… – the ant shook his head strongly, completely denying help, from somewhere in his pocket he quickly scratched a mouse-colored handkerchief, and a piece of fabric disappeared into the depths of the mandibles.

A black oval metal medallion with six or seven embossed numbers and letters crawled out from behind the collar of the shirt, as if a awakened sacred scarab beetle crawled out of hot sand in a dry desert, at the moment when the ant was bent in a painful cough. Ave noticed an unusual distinctive sign unusual for working individuals, and only wanted to ask Aft about him, as he decided to tell himself ahead of all the questions.

– I’m now considered a labor veteran… can you imagine, dear Ave, where am I and where is a labor veteran? Two categories – completely incompatible…

– Well, you give! – only breathed out Ave.

– I’m still so young, my whole life is ahead… And already – a real veteran! Aft anxiously took the dark roundish into a small paw, twisted it nervously, looked philosophically at the inscriptions and showed it to his comrade. – You see, it was handed to us. Do we need this? Yeah, it’s necessary, especially… Some have already been handed over posthumously. Yes, and we are also almost posthumously… There is no health at all, no, and almost no one is alive, but we, what you say, but we are veterans… That’s it! I don’t know what to tell you even this… It’s hard to realize some things, it’s very hard and still I can’t reconcile… Hand-handed, and rejoice, guys – veterans… But how do we continue to live – it is not clear…

– What are you saying? Why posthumously – to you? Live, live! Let’s all live!

– Yes, we are, really, against? We are not…

– Health… Well, health is yes, everything is complicated here… Hopefully, it will recover a little… You are already here, and not there…

– Yes, almost, – Aft interrupted Ave with calm confidence on a rising note of indignation. – We are all already – almost there…

And Ave really introduced this ant, his former spine, a sincere companion, one year younger than him, a labor veteran. Veteran of labor, who became due to a small pinch of past years for the merciless work in Streets. If you look from the sidelines – because of some few years that cost many individuals of life… There are optimistic charged natures in the world who are completely satisfied with everything and quickly get used to everything, that was exactly Aft himself. At one time, it was hard to imagine an ant more compliant and agreeing to everything, but now it was strikingly different from that old self. Such a strong change of character that happened with the decrepit Aft during the time before the comrades saw each other, struck Ave brightly. Life circumstances made him many years older: his appearance changed a lot, almost beyond recognition – wrinkles were significantly added and the body coating, as if all vital juices had been pumped out of his body and left one shell, seemed artificial and pale grayish. Ave remarked to himself that during communication Aft was somehow unusually talking, uncontrollably pushing with his power, not letting him in even a word that there was no such thing before. But Ave knew Aft very well once, but it seems that this “once” irrevocably passed and remained far, far behind, in a completely different, transcendental archaic reality. The unfamiliar voice of the dying Aft, which used to ring like an expertly tuned instrument, today was rather a creak of an unoiled door, now and then interrupted by a wailing cough. Perhaps the only thing left of the former Aft, which Ave knew many years ago, was a wonderful sense of humor. Rarely did Ave meet on his journey with a refined ability to subtly ironize and sharply joke; almost always a cheerful and cheerful Aft, like a fireproof bright light, as he laughed at the whole world a few years ago, he continued to joke about everyday problems and sophisticatedly make fun of issues of national scale. He recalled with noticeable pleasure amusing episodes from a recent extreme life, a truly primitive communal, rooted, canine, and terrible painful life in a gloomy, dilapidated alien city, he narrated in a light, semi-aerial, and peculiar to him manner, as if the grueling, sometimes overwhelming and dangerous work at the emergency nuclear station became for him a festive Sunday walk to the city leisure park.

Ave knew about all the pressures that the workers on Streets had “combed” by the journalists from the weekly news reports, and at that very moment, in the minutes of communication with Aft, he tried to unite in one harmonious picture: the large-scale recovery of the consequences of the accident and his old friend, a participant in these heroic events. In total, more than three thousand specialists from different cities worked at the station at that time, and two hundred professionals came even from the arrogant Moot*, a snob city, which seemed to have fought the whole history of the ant family with the whole world. Only a common misfortune, threatening terrible unimaginable consequences, violated the millennial confrontation of peoples. But, as happens in history, everything is back to square one, and after a two-year lull associated with the sending of worker ants to Streets, the military conflicts provoked by the motivated government of Moot, one after the other, somehow inadvertently resumed. The destructive, bloody war that has become the norm for residents of such a metropolis as Moot, like this arrogant and arrogant Moot, continued to breathe in the cadaverous smell of death. In Streets, by the combined efforts of an army of thousands of specialists, a completely different battle was going on: the life of generations fought fiercely with death, and this hand-to-hand fight could be seen on all TV channels.

Chapter 11

WHITE

At the very end of the Sixty-second, on an immense dry, colorless, half-living wasteland, sheltered by a parking lot filled with huge and tiny, but mostly very old cars to the eyeballs, and surrounded by a low, only one meter with a tail, a colored needle fence, menacingly and rumbled troublesomely, sniffing once and noisily shooting portions of blue rings from the muffler, a truck.

Once, about fifteen years ago, this place and wasteland itself was not there, but a real handsome forest stood out, with impassable thickets, unflappable charismatic oaks and captivating shaggy hickory. And when did you just manage to cut down such a picturesque and such useful walnut oak forest? Nobody even managed to notice, it completely disappeared without a trace with the approach of the city borders, with one sweep of an omnipotent magic wand.

A young, completely still beardless car mechanic in a dirty sand shirt, rubbed in places to obscene holes, nervously delved into the mechanical insides of a bubbling beast, the other – swearing and grumbling roughly and audibly, and fidgeting in place, sitting with a prickly uneasiness at the wheel, every minute he strove to look out the window at half-mast, then with one or two legs he adjusted the fastening of the rear-view mirror, and peered intently at him, evaluating the situation around the hissing car. The grimy ant sitting in the spacious cab shouted crisply at the first, obviously choking on the first syllable, which he only muttered and sharply waved off twice.

From a two-story brick house with a golden gable roof, with one wall, most likely a northern, hopelessly mossy fluffy brown-hazy moss, in which there was a simple auto repair shop, as evidenced by a wide, colorful, bright blue banner with clumsy golden letters, popped up another mechanic and steadily approached the rumbling truck. The ant gently opened the swing-open door, polished to a gloss, and vividly handed the mini-cylinder flashing red and yellow lights to the one sitting there. The astonished driver looked at the smiling comrade, carefully picked up the urgent letter and calmly, without confusion, went, without saying anything, to the workshop to get acquainted with the message. The vacant place in the car was taken by a new ant. Directly across the parking lot, a red-green postman hurried along a rammed gray-reddish crushed stone embankment.

As soon as he approached his native special vehicle, a semicircular “station wagon”, impatiently waiting for him at the entrance to the parking lot, with a gurgling engine, the door opened and he flopped into the front seat. Answering the question of the assistant driver, he gestured, apparently indicating further movement, and after a second the postal service car started. Slowly, leaving the parking lot, the car missed two cheerful pedestrians – Ave and Aft, who were walking and talking animatedly.

A red-green spot – the mailer’s uniform, flickered with a speck somewhere on the side, again resurrected the morning meeting in Av’s memory. The brief flow of his thoughts was interrupted by the exclamation of Aft:

– Ave, everything is very cool, so great that we met! Listen, I’m very-very happy! And-and-and… well, you don’t be offended, you know, to me further – nothing! Well, no way… We have to run, we have to go back. Don’t frown, okay? Well, a lot of time already…

– Yes, what are you doing? Like this? Yes, everything is fine, everything is fine! I understand. I am also very glad that we crossed paths! A miracle happened!

– If you want, if possible, or rather, watch today at half past seven on Channel Nineteen. Like yes, at half past seven, if I’m not mistaken… we will all be shown. Now you have to run! Huh? Come on…

– I’ll see. I’ll definitely look, I promise.

– Look, of course, come on. Be sure to look, yes, and tell Ronda too, let him look too. – Aft held out a hot and slightly damp foot goodbye. – Well, be healthy! Take care of yourself and… and always believe in a bright future, no matter how hard, no matter how completely shit there is in life! See you again, I hope. And about the route “work-home-work” – also, by the way, think about it!

– I will try!

– Think, think, there are some options that you just need to look for, maybe… maybe you’ll change it! – and Aft winked mischievously.

– Of course, see you! Life is unpredictable! – neither Ave nor Aft wanted to interrupt an unexpected pleasant meeting. – You know, I really want to chat with you as a thread for life. Meet me sometime?

– Yes, chat. Just choose the time. Write to me.

– I will write. But where to write something?

Their last phrases flew out like rocket-propelled shots – emotionally, resonantly, quickly, whipping. The endless minute of parting indecently dragged on, and everyone had to run and hurry about their work affairs.

– Listen, find me through the net. I live on 44th Street. Block number four and the apartment are also four.

– A solid quarter-quarter?

– Well, it turns out that yes. It is easy to remember… So remember so then, and be sure to write, do not get lost! I beg you!

– Yes, I will remember, run now. – Ave put canisters on the ground and turned Aft with his paws and, patting his shoulder, added. – All, happily, my friend, otherwise we will not part with you like that! Enormous luck in all matters! And health to you – a full bowl!

– Thank you, happily, Ave!

The ants dispersed in different directions: Ave was in a hurry, he had already lost a bucket of precious minutes, the honored veteran Aft also hurried home, after a few lonely steps, he turned around and began to wave his paws hotly after Ave, melting in the hopeless gray tunnel, but right there I realized that his farewell signs would be ignored, he dashingly turned and waved his paws carelessly.

– Oh-oh-oh, excuse me! I did not want, did not want! – Aft accidentally touched the legs of a passerby. – Excuse me!

– Yeah, what are you! It’s me myself who has flown! You ask me! The passerby muttered embarrassedly, raising his fallen hat.

– Oh, it didn’t work out well! Excuse me! – Only then a deadly scent of a stranger reached Aft, and he involuntarily narrowed his eyes.

At the same time, the veteran suddenly combed his crib and vomited his mandibles, he felt sharply, painfully, to the most incredible obscenity, as an unpleasant odor penetrated into his labyrinth passages with a small poisonous gimlet. “Horrible!” The ant raised its paws to a bubbling nose and prepared to sneeze with all its strength, but such a pale sneezed out that he only smiled to himself. The ant nervously pulled out his favorite handkerchief, with quick, almost feverish movements, wiped his mouse muzzle and took a step away from the strange passerby.

The stranger, frozen for a minute or two after the collision, shuddered feverishly, pulled his hat deep on his head, somehow hiccuped strenuously, unsuccessfully trying to restrain himself, and continued on his way. The chubby old man, relaxing serenely on the lonely bench Aft walked by, apparently dozed off a bit, and the veteran of Streerets woke the half-sitting, reclining one with his blue sneeze, he started slightly and, driven by the instinct of intelligent politeness, immediately blurted out:

– Be healthy, son, be healthy!

For a moment, the astonished Aft thanked the old man, looked at the mechanical watch, which dangled homelessly on a thin paw, and started off running. And somehow, unexpectedly, it turned out briskly for Aft to start, and not to stop. Far behind him already stood a friend Av, and a “hat” passerby, and an old man, and someone else, and another, and behind him another… Aft fled, as if flying above the ground, and behind his back, a shirt, which had no time to unbutton, caught up in a street spring breeze, flipped frivolously. He fled, and in the sky-high eyes he whistled, one after another, freshly printed huge posters all over the walls of houses depicting the president of the country Snai. He escaped, and the monumental phrase under indestructible portraits “Your LIGHT future is in your paws!” constantly catching up with him and with unpleasant meticulousness, annoyingly and clingily, as if striking the back of her head, she asked again and again: “After all, exactly? Is your future in your paws? Or, can you say that I’m wrong? Am I mistaken? Am I mistaken?..”

He, who completely gave his health, his life, all of himself to the altar of service, the idea of universal prosperity, universal life… and… the idea of salvation of the entire ant family.

“Helping others is the highest degree… degree… degree… and what, in fact, is the degree? And why – it’s the highest…” – It seems that they taught us in a boarding school, but I don’t remember everything already…

– But… what do these words mean now? – Aft on the run recalled today’s conversation with reporters of the Nineteenth Channel. “What do they mean now?” Specifically for you, here is for you, they determine something?

– For me, as for all of us, right for everyone, for us, these words helped us to simply survive on Streets, helped to cope with all the small and big difficulties, yeah, big and endless that were born and were born one after another. It’s hard for you to imagine it all… It’s not even very difficult, it’s impossible for you to imagine it. These… these words were sacred to us… This… well, it is impossible to describe in words… Here – as if another world…

– What about now? Do not regret that you made such a choice?

– Do you ask strange questions? Very strange, I would even say… And you yourself would not dare to volunteer when millions of individuals are in danger? Well, or let’s say so – the danger threatens only hundreds of ants… Would you go?

– Uhhh, – the moderator grumbled.

– Well, well, they persuaded, not even hundreds, but let them be ten, or just one ant… Have you really sacrificed yours for someone’s life? – raised to the highest degree of patriotism, Aft looked into the slippery eyes of the journalists present in the studio, ants-viewers, and confusedly, timidly and without initiative, he searched for elementary answers to his questions, which seemed to be the most complicated equations for the listeners. – Listen, we were all taught from early childhood… Yes, and what have they been taught? We have… – here he hesitated a little. – Am I saying something wrong? Not that?.. If I say wrong or illiterate, you correct me. In some things I’m completely uneducated, but somewhere it’s interesting that… somewhere, I understand something, ay-ay. Aft smiled mysteriously, emphasizing the last word, and completed his tirade. – Right or wrong, you have to disassemble the whole team, and I really think so, that is, as I feel with my heart, I say so. I speak from my heart. Thank you for letting me speak. Thank you very much! Thanks to all!

– Yes, you are just a miracle! You are a real miracle!

– Yes, save-and-for, thanks! – Apt shone embarrassedly.

– You say the right words, Aft! Everything is correct and exactly so, smoothly! – the host of the TV show suddenly woke up from such an enthusiastic speech, as if he had just been safely in another parallel world.

He manfully extended his paw towards the veterans sitting in a small handful, bowed to them and applauded wholeheartedly, after him the whole audience was hypnotized by the applause of the honored workers. Aft calmly raised his right paw, asking for general silence, and the audience instantly died down, the ant continued with a completely different mood.

– Only, here… Only who will remember tomorrow about our guys? About my comrades – about Dotra, about Nita, about Skill, about hundreds, thousands of simple working ants? About those who stayed in Streets forever and will not return… About those who will not come back anyway…

– How is it, how is it? We will remember… We… – it began hotly, it was a television journalist, but Aft already closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side, shaking his mustache with noticeable nervousness.

– Not sure, remember. Not at all sure! Is such an accident for the first time? Well, I ask – was such an accident for the first time? Well, no, not the first time! No no! And many have already completely forgotten what happened. So you remember about us, while this pathetic handful of ants is still alive. Well, I’m definitely telling you, in your-our-common vocabulary there is no such phrase, there is no slogan “We will remember!” This is pathos! It’s simply not there. Now there are forty of us left. Now – only forty, but three months a month ago it was twice as much! Mmm, do you understand this simple arithmetic? Twice as much, so what? How many of us will remain in a month? We just came and did our thing. I believe that we have fulfilled our duty to the Fatherland and these are not just beautiful words, but these are… These are we… – here he stammered, and fell silent, he did not want to continue the life-giving speech… The desire evaporated… For whom did he speak? For yourself?

Aft’s sincere monologue quenched all the fiery exclamations of the journalists and continued to keep the audience trembling with excitement that chewed on what the veteran had said. It was unexpected and bold enough, although no one could say anything against it: after all, everything was so, in reality, it was, and will continue to be…

It was decided to take a half-hour technical break. Filming, which went a little beyond the scope of the television show, was resumed only after the slightly petrified journalists proactively talked with other veterans of the accident.

“How many of us will remain in a month?” And will it remain at all? Will it stay? “We have fulfilled our duty to other ants and that’s all… and that’s all, and nothing more special…”

Aft continued to rush through the streets, almost fly, and already rolled up a hot and prickly ball inside, and he felt that there were no forces, no forces and that’s all, and he would have to go for a walk. “Ohhh, okay, I’ll be too late, but I really don’t have the strength to run and run!.. All our lives we all endlessly run somewhere, like mad squirrels in a closed endless wheel, trying to catch up to the ghostly… ghostly happiness… or what? Are we really going to always run after this alluring foggy happiness?”

A veteran award chain with a matte medallion frantically jumped over a tattered shirt. Plik-skokk, plik-skokk. Another painful lump with alarming perseverance rolled up to the flaming throat, along the aching neck plane and pronotom* on which the shirt still held, streams of sweat ran away, the aching body was ablaze with fire, the temples were unstoppably pulsing: tick-by-tick, tick-by-tick… In a muddy head, images and events suddenly seemed to dissolve, as if in a desert a dying mirage. Aft did not hear absolutely anything around, except for the black rhythms and hearts that were beating feverishly on the tom-toms, and his watery eyes distinguished only the narrow path of the tarry sidewalk. Most of all, the ant was afraid to think of an impending disease, which, shifting from one foot to another, in modest anticipation already stood at the threshold of his inner world and strove to cross it. He fought with all kinds of internal means in order not to let her in, not to let her in under any circumstances, but it seems that everything is useless, it was impossible to hold her by any means… maybe he imagined that he was giving up all his life forces, struggling with the inevitable death, trying to escape from his recent past. But how can you leave him or run away?

“Well, that’s almost home!” Almost… There is nothing worse than this “almost”, there is simply either “yes” or “no”, or zero, or ten out of ten, and this unsaid “almost” flies out, and circles a ghostly yellow-bellied tit, and intends to sit right in you legs, but does not sit down, and suddenly it turns out to be not at all a tiny titmouse, but a big-legged stork. Almost at home… almost…”

Choking Aft, with an arrow, jumped out to the intersection of Sixty-second and Fifty-fifth, not noticing the racing pickup of the landscaping service. The crazy driver, trying to avoid a collision with a pedestrian who suddenly appeared, sharply pressed the brake and turned the steering wheel to the left, turned the car around, and with her treacherous right side she threw the veteran to the side with mighty force, as if an elastic tennis ball was bouncing off a racket. He flew soundlessly a few meters and rigidly flattened near the corner of a gray house; the car from such a sharp turn fell awkwardly on its side, young seedlings intended for planting somewhere in the public garden in the neighborhood, and which were still in a covered body a minute ago, spilled out on the road with friendly company.

At first one foot appeared timidly from the broken window of the overturned car, then, more confidently, the other, creaking from what had happened, the driver vigorously squeezed through a narrow glass rectangle – the door jammed from falling. A young ant passing by with a paper bag hurriedly rushed to the nearest phone – to call the medical care service. Passers-by hurried to the lying ant. Aft, spreading all six legs wide, helplessly sprawled on a punched propodeum, from under which a thin stream of transparent liquid – ant blood – slowly flowed out.

The wide-open torn shirt was decisively transformed from pale turquoise to gloomy ultramarine. The torn antennae spontaneously asymmetrically balanced in the air tense from the episode that had occurred – they were both completely broken and barely moving. The two upper legs also hung limply, as if in zero gravity, clearly not wanting to calm down and freeze. In Aft’s open eyes, life was not going to give up; he looked forward, not seeing anything in front of him.

– How many of us, eh?.. – Aft whispered faintly, but hardly anyone heard him. – How much?.. Who can say?..

They encircled the downed Aft from all sides, – well, what interest is there – the most interesting event, and even on the day off – at least some little entertainment for all the loiterers – the ants were stiffened in unnatural poses, and with guarded excitement they looked at their relative, and none of them bent down and touched the downed one, fearing to do something wrong. From the overturned car to the mottled ring of witnesses of the accident, the driver limped limply forcibly limping on his right paw – it seems that the damage to the paw was serious enough, since he could not calmly step on it. The crowd synchronously parted, and when the driver approached Aft, he closed the vibrant, glowing excitement ring again, he sank down to the ant he had knocked down and carefully took his paw in his.

The veteran’s icy sad glass beads seemed completely lifeless, but a tiny stream of hope with a sun-bouncing bunny ran down his gray-red rough wrist, there was no need to worry – everything was probably formed, and the driver was seated on a post here, on mouse pavement-petiol*, slightly bending tergites*, and began to carefully examine its wounded leg: hemolymph*, “ant blood”, there were not so many, but nevertheless, acute pain pierced to the very tips of the claws. Finally, a medical aid driver strained to siren arrived at the emergency intersection. Two ants in bathrobes jumped out of a fiery red-white door together and ran to the victims. A sullen ant doctor squeezed his way through the crowd, side by side, who really did not like to go to the scene of incidents, the number of which in the town had recently increased sharply.

No less nimbly jumped out of the car two more ants from the back door. They had to make the chief physicians, so they did. Dead silence reigned, wired life whistled in all the carriageways, where vehicles of all kinds and breeds were squeezed between a random crowd, an unusually deserted sidewalk and a half-dead “shifter”, slowing down, and some what happened here?”, Frightened drivers and passengers looked. Once in a flash, a sneeze and a wounded Aft were carefully loaded onto a stretcher and thrown into an ambulance.

– At the end of the month… – the veteran continued to whisper.

– What?.. Why are you there? – the doctor did not understand him. – Shut up, come on! Take care of your strength, you need them!

– What to do with the second? – sharply asked one of the white coats. – Take it or what, huh?

– Throw him too. Come on, take him too! He’s not so serious, but for the full set we will arrange it too! – briskly ordered the doctor.