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&039;I don&039;t know,&039; he answered &039;That&039;s the point I couldn&039;t defeat her I did for all the rest, but not her, no way So the game ended there&039;

&039;Why is this memory so iames&039;

&039;Before that I&039;d always succeeded at everything,&039; he said

&039;Absolutely everything?&039;

He nodded

&039;Oh, sure,&039; I said &039;Of course&039;

&039;You don&039;t believe me?&039;

&039;Why not? I believe you I can tell frolanced out of theWe were approaching the beginning of Tverskoi Boulevard

&039;A new restaurant,&039; I said &039;The Palazzo Ducale Have you been there?&039;

He nodded

&039;And what are the customers like?&039;

&039;Oh, the usual&039;

&039;So what do people talk about there?&039;

He thought for a second Then he answered in a ludicrous wohtened to live in the dacha where Stalin&039;s butcher Yezhov lived?&039;

Then he answered himself in an equally ludicrous bass:

&039;What do you mean? It&039;s Stalin&039;s butcher Yezhov who&039;ll be shitting hi in his dacha&039;

&039;And who is this Zhechkov?&039; I asked

He glanced at ht to know I&039;ht, it happens every twenty years or so

&039;I was just giving an exa they talk about there&039;

I remembered Yezhov&039;s dacha as it was in the 1930s I used to like the plaster lions with balls under their paho guarded the entrance - their faces had a slightly guilty expression, as if they could sense they wouldn&039;t be able to protect theiralmost exactly the same used to stand in front of the shrine of the Huayan sect - only he was old and on his side he had an inscription that I still res is that they believe it is possible to cast aside the false and attain unto the truth But when you attain unto yourself, the false becomes true, and there is no other truth to which one need attain after that

What people there used to be around in those times! But nowadays is there anyone who can even understand theof those words? All of theher worlds No one wishes to be born in this hellish labyrinth anyhere on my own in the dark

We stopped at a crossroads

&039;Tell ?&039; I asked

&039;Do you know a good jeweller&039;s anywhere round here? I irl in a boutique with an ad her a brooch that costs as much as a small aeroplane, I&039;ood at creatingto pass off a reproductivefloorthy of a precious setting - and to maintain that illusion, not just for minutes, as we do, but for years and decades, and all without the use of a tail That takes real skill Evidently women, like mobile phones, have some kind of inbuilt antenna

This is what my internal voices say about that:

1 since a woman can pass off a reproductiveflower, fe of children: it also includes at least the skill of brainwashing

2 by its very nature a wonderful spring flower is exactly the sa, only its reen and it brainwashes the bees

3 apart fro, so it&039;s pointless to discuss whether she is worthy of it or not

4 mobile phones with inbuilt antennas have convenient shapes, but poor reception, especially in reinforced concrete buildings

5 mobile phones with an external antenna are inconvenient, and their reception in reinforced concrete buildings is even worse

Woman is a peaceful creature, she only hypnotizes her own male and inflicts no harm on birds and aniical goal, that is, personal survival, the deception here is pardonable, and it&039;s none of our foxy business to go sticking our noses in But when a married man who lives every moment in a dream planted in his head by his wife, coothic, suddenly declares over a glass of beer that wo children, that is very, very funny The man doesn&039;t even realize how comical he is when he says that In this particular case I&039; at Count Tolstoy, whoenerally

But I&039; from the point I just wanted to say that woman&039;s hypnotic abilities are obvious, and anyone who has any doubts about that can easily lay the into a shop that sells expensive trinkets

I didn&039;t realize until the finala present forof the kind I assulaave him perfectly serious advice So I felt quite exceptionally stupid when he finally held out the bag containing the two s it And foxes have to foresee what a s that affect us personally Our survival depends on it

The two identical ss that cost 10,000 and 18,000 dollars - platinuht of a carat, the small one point five four Tiffany Would you believe it - 28,000 dollars! How ht with a feeling that was al was that he didn&039;t want anything fro to the north and he&039;d call when he got back

It wasn&039;t easy buying the rings The sales assistant wasn&039;t prepared to put through such a substantial transaction herself Neither was the cashier

&039;I can&039;t do it without the ot back home to Bitsevsky Park that I realized how tired I was - I didn&039;t even have the strength to check my e-mails I slept until the esian drea like the stor the Yellow Turban rebellion I was one of the defenders and I was throwing heavy javelins down from the walls

No need to explain the symbolism to me, I can&039;t stand that Back in the 1920s I used to drive ro them dreams that I invented: &039;And then our tails fell off and they told us they were lying in a coconut hanging above a waterfall&039; If I sometimes throw javelins in a dreanificance of what&039;s going on And even less does it arbage a long tio Life&039;s less cluttered that way

After a rest,clearly and efficiently, and the first thing I thought about was the financial aspect of as going on My personal solvency index was now tinged a delicate green: the two rings had cost 28,000 in the shop, and that meant I could sell them for 18,000

But it would be a shame to sell theiven such pretty baubles very often In Soviet Russia they were very strict about that kind of thing Even in late Brezhnev ti walked off the street into a jewellery shop and bought a brooch for 30,000 roubles, the entire central press wrote about it indignantly for a week, asking what the conation, 30,000 really was a huge amount of money But then why did they put the brooch in the shop ? As bait? There&039;s really no other way to explain the indignation of the press - they laid down bait and, the fish ate it and just say

At least, that hat the director of Moscow&039;s Grocery Store Nuht h He was a careful man, but passion hadsquad, and I felt sorry for hih I still couldn&039;t force myself to wear the brooch It was a unique exa emerald cucumbers and a ruby beetroot An eternal reminder of the only battle that Soviet Russia lost - the battle for the harvest

After I finished ads, I decided to check my e-mails There was only one letter in my inbox, but it was a very welcome one - from my sister U Hu-Li, whom I hadn&039;t seen for an eternity

Hi there, Red,

How are you getting on? Are you still intofor the exit from the labyrinths of the illusory world? I&039;d really like at least one of our big, ne&039;er-do-well family to find it

But I&039;ve completely lost my way in those labyrinths I&039;h I&039;ve finally left Patthaya In the last thirty years the sea has become really dirty And apart froreat that earning a living fro harder all the ti here has been turned inside out - in hted when they have a son, but here they&039;re delighted when they have a daughter, and they say, quite literally: &039;How good it is that we have a daughter, on&039;t go hungry in our old age!&039; If he heard that, Confucius would hang himself with his own sleeve

The island of Phuket, where I live now, is still clean, but in a couple of years it will be the same as Patthaya There are toobeach and I work in Christine&039;s Massage Parlour We - the masseuses - sit on benches in a special roohtly rouged, looking like evil spirits The pink, sunburned farangs (that&039;s e call the tourists from the West) come in off the street and choose a masseuse After that, it&039;s a separate rooarded as a unique specialist in Thai irls&039;, but even so I still have to earn a bit on the side in the bars on Bangla Road, just fivethe day, and then I have to get dolled up in bright-coloured rags and go out on the stage It&039;s not even a stage really, just a counter that alk around slowly froirls with nus sit at the bar below us, drinking cold beer and take their ti in two places, I&039; well

The very foundations of life have been perverted here Thai girls are modest and as industrious as bees Only in natural conditions bees fly fro nectar But if you tip a bucketful of sugar syrup out beside the hive, they go straight for the sugar, and none of them will fly to the flowers That&039;s exactly the way the West is destroying our tropical garden with its bodily secretions, drenching it with rivers of sweet dollar syrup froreat a sexual exploiter as anyone else here, and the fact that now she is no e of the developed countries doesn&039;t relieve her of her h in a certain sense you could call Thailand a raw-e tooDon&039;t think that I&039;matic, it&039;s just that it was hot today, and I&039;m very tired

By the way, about Russia Just recently I was talking to our sister E, who came to visit us in Phuket with her new husband, Lord Cricket (the fool is perfectly happy) She toldquite incredible Do you remember the prophecy of the super-olf? She says that the placeis certainly ingenious The prophecy says that the super-ill appear in a city where they will destroy a Temple and then restore it in its previous forht thatof the super-as a prophecy that concerned the very end of ti like the Apocalypse But E Hu-Li is sure that we&039;ve simply been hypnotized by Judaeo-Christian symbolism - if there&039;s a Temple, then it has to be the one in Jerusalem

In fact, however, there are no references to Jerusaleo in Moscow they restored the Teot the na the cultural revolution And what&039;s inally built - she&039;s relying on inforot from you there I think you can expect her to visit you soon with her husband, who is totally obsessed with these mystical riddles

This Lord Cricket is not only a mystic He is well known in London as a patron and collector of art, and he deals with alleries Apart froanization you have certainly heard of - the Countryside Alliance, which tried to prevent fox-hunting fro banned I kno hard it is to let a character like that stay alive But please remember that our little sister E hasn&039;t yet decided who&039;s going to be next So gather your willpower up into a tight fist, just as I did Take a detached viehat&039;s going on - his lordship is obsessed with the search for were-creatures absolutely everywhere, except in his own bedroom That&039;s always the ith people There&039;s just one thing I don&039;t understand How did he come to develop such an interest in the supernatural? But then, theclasses often resort to occultism in the attempt to find a justification for their own parasitic existence

I want to ask your advice Should I ood-natured, they tip well and fall asleep quickly because they drink a lot I saw a beautiful tattoo on the chest of one of them - Lenin and Marx with a ha He took a real liking to me He filmed me with his video-camera and then advised me to come to Russia &039;With beauty like yours, you could e parlour, either Hang about with our elite for a year or two and you&039;llis different now in Russia There are sweeping reforms and the people have lots ofabout with? Apart froainst the dollar as our bahts, so I wouldn&039;t suffer any great culture shock Write and tell me what it&039;s like in Moscow and if there&039;s a place there for U Hu-Li

Heads and tails,

U

My little sister UI smiled as I remembered her - serious, solemn and very sincere She was probably the best of us, and so she always ended up bearing the heaviest burden She went through the entire war of liberation with Chairman Mao, she had medals from the Chinese National Liberation Army, and when capitalism was restored in China she burned her party card on Tiananmen Square and went away to Thailand And now she wanted to coht it was still the sairl, I had to persuade her not to come What if she really did, and ended up ot involved with some kind of national bolsheviks? And when the national bolsheviks signed a contract with &039;Diesel&039;, she&039;d stay honest right to the end and then serve obscenely long sentences - it had happened to her so often already

I spent a few seconds searching for an iht I&039;d found one I put my hands on the keyboard

Hello, Little Red,

You can&039;t possibly iine how pleased I was to hear from you up here in our snowbound back of beyond You say you&039;re fed up with Thailand? Try thinking about this: in the countries of the golden billion, people put money away for a whole year in order to come to your coconut paradise for just a couple of weeks I understand that the life in the five-star hotels is very different from yours But, after all, the sea and the sky are the same for all, and that&039;s the real reason why they come to you from their neon catacombs

You say life in Thailand is perverted because the visitors swamp the innocent natives with their poisonous dollar syrup and deprive them of the joy of sis frole: those sa each other&039;s throats out in their offices in order to save up enough of that poisonous dollar slush It&039;s their lives that are really perverted, otherould they coe parlour,that eneralizations that end up with fiftykilled every time?

You ask me what it&039;s like here To be brief, even thethat any hope that the brown sea advancing on us fro away And, as the advert puts it so wittily, it isnot in their hands, but in theirsushi by the ton and bringing billion-dollar court cases But this boom doesn&039;t have much to do with the economy It&039;s just that the money from all over Russia flows into Moscow and moistens life here a bit before it departs for off-shore hyperspace I re that the fundae is the contradiction between money and blood In Moscow its sharpness is blunted somewhat because as yet the blood is spilled far away, and the s to someone else But that&039;s only a temporary state of affairs

Life here is so distinctive, so unique, that it would take a clairvoyant like Oswald Spengler to grasp its true essence Froler&039;s point of view, every culture is based on a certain mysterious principle that manifests itself in a multitude of unrelated pheno kinship between the round for an ancient town, and so on I think that if Spengler were to study modern-day Russia, what he would bethat interests you - the local elite

It is genuinely unique You have beenabout&039; with those folks You can only end up with less h that, otherwise the elite would not be the elite In ancient tiood on the Great Way of Things But here they all set up their own toll bars across the road and only raise them for money And the essence of the social contract lies precisely in the their booms for each other

The elite here is divided into two branches, which are called &039;the oligarchy&039; (derived frole&039;) and &039;the apparat&039; (froarchy&039; is the business corovels to the authorities, who can close down any business at any moment, since business here is inseparable from theft And &039;the upper rat&039; consists of the authorities, who feed on the kickbacks from business The way it works is that the former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve Just think about the kind of people who haveformation in the middle of empty space At the same time, there are no clear boundaries between these two branches of power - one le i to s itself Do you really want to hang about with this perpetually cha uroborus? That is what the alche its own tail is called - but in our case the connotations are ical in nature

The reforms that you have heard about are by noas I can remember What they essentially come down to is the choice, from all the possible versions of the future, of the one that is the in with the declaration that a fish rots from the head, then the reformers eat up the healthy body, and the rotten head swi that was rotten under Ivan the Terrible is still alive today, and everything that was healthy five years ago has already been gobbled up Instead of a bear, the &039;apparat&039; or &039;upper rat&039; here could have used a fish head on its banners Although a bear is a witty choice too: it is the international synation, and there is also the Russian expression &039;greasing the paw&039; The Eski different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the sa a bribe to a state official

But Russians still love their country anyway, and their writers and poets traditionally coht attached to the foot of a giant - otherwise, they say, he would start rushing along too fastOh, but I don&039;t know about that I haven&039;t seen any signs of a giant for a long tiiving itself a royal autocephalic uroborus It sooal of Russian life is to drag this rat across the snoastes, trying to eopolitical sense of all this and inspire the minor nations with it

If you analyse another two interconnected aspects of the local culture - the strictly taboo vocabulary employed for daily coenerally accepted way of life is a crime (which means that the face of every citizen bears the indelible iestalt&039; that you are intending to visit And this list could easily be extended indefinitely: it would include the metal doors with security locks on flats, ood allows evil to feed, because evil allows good to feed, and so on But enough of that

Let me share with you irl here There is a gaentsia calls &039;Robinson Crusoe&039; and the intellectuals call &039;Ulti: a man sits down in a tub of water so that only the head of his penis is visible on the surface Then he takes out of a s have been pulled off in advance and releases it on to that little island The essential content of this northern as of the unfortunate insect across the foreskin (hence the naame) It is a meditation on the hopelessness of existence, loneliness and death Catharsis is achieved here through the stimulation of the head of the male member produced by the rapid aentsia calls &039;Atlantis&039;, and the intellectuals call &039;Kitezh of the spirit&039; (after the sacred underwater city in the Russian folktale) But the details of that are so so them