Bubbles over a drowned man.”
“What?”
A triangular fingernail slid with a quick glissando over the swollen spines gazing down at us from the bookshelf.
“I said, bubbles over a drowned man. Plunge into a pool headfirst and your breath will rise to the surface in bubbles: swell and burst.”
The speaker again surveyed the rows of silent books crowded along the walls.
“You’ll say that even a bubble can catch the sun, the blue of the sky, the green curve of a coastline. Maybe so. But does that matter to the man whose mouth is grazing the bottom?
Suddenly, as if he had run against a word, he got up and, gripping his elbows behind his back, began pacing to and fro between the bookshelf and the window, only rarely meeting my eyes.
“Yes, remember this, my friend: if there is one more book on the library shelf, that is because there is one less person in life. If I must choose between the shelf and the world, then I prefer the world. Bubbles to the day - oneself to the depths? No, thank you very much.
“What?”
A triangular fingernail slid with a quick glissando over the swollen spines gazing down at us from the bookshelf.
“I said, bubbles over a drowned man. Plunge into a pool headfirst and your breath will rise to the surface in bubbles: swell and burst.”
The speaker again surveyed the rows of silent books crowded along the walls.
“You’ll say that even a bubble can catch the sun, the blue of the sky, the green curve of a coastline. Maybe so. But does that matter to the man whose mouth is grazing the bottom?
Suddenly, as if he had run against a word, he got up and, gripping his elbows behind his back, began pacing to and fro between the bookshelf and the window, only rarely meeting my eyes.
“Yes, remember this, my friend: if there is one more book on the library shelf, that is because there is one less person in life. If I must choose between the shelf and the world, then I prefer the world. Bubbles to the day - oneself to the depths? No, thank you very much.
from The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
