The Jealousy Man and Other Stories
- Автор: Несбё Ю
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Alfred A. Knopf
- ISBN: 978-0-593-32100-3
- Переводчик: Robert Ferguson
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Jealousy Man and Other Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
A detective with a nose for jealousy is on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a bereaved father must decide whether vengeance has a place in the new world order after a pandemic brings about the collapse of society; a garbage man fresh off a bender tries to piece together what happened the night before; a hired assassin matches wits against his greatest adversary in a dangerous game for survival; and an instantly electric connection between passengers on a flight to London may spell romance, or something more sinister.
With Nesbø’s characteristic gift for outstanding atmosphere and gut-wrenching revelations, The Jealousy Man confirms that he is at the peak of his abilities.
I knew I should lie still. But I also knew there was half a ton of bull directly behind us, so I rolled sideways to the left. A shadow crossed over me, something big, like a ship blotting out the sun. Then it had passed and looking up I saw the narrow black buttocks of the enormous creature.
It stopped. And turned.
Suddenly everything around me went quiet, so quiet that the solitary scream — maybe it was a girl up on the barricade who saw what was about to happen — chilled me to the bone.
The bull looked at me. The eyes were dead, expressed nothing other than that it saw me. He snorted. Scraped his front hoof against the cobblestones and lowered his horns. I didn’t move. But that tactic was no longer the right one. I had been seen. Separated out from the crowd. That black train of muscle flexed and then exploded in my direction. I was as good as dead. I closed my eyes.
Someone grabbed hold of my foot and started pulling, sweeping me round as my chin bounced and scraped against the stones. The back of my head hit something, for a moment everything went black, and then I opened my eyes again. I had hit the wall of a house. Peter was standing above me, still holding on to my foot. A few metres away from us the man with the shaven head and the newspaper was dancing round the bull, busily distracting it with the aid of another man, also carrying a rolled-up newspaper. Peter positioned himself between the bull and me. A cow passed, and the bull seemed to lose interest and chugged off after her. The rest of the group, five bulls and cows, passed us directly afterwards, but ignored us. In truth they seemed tired of the whole business and just wanted to get away and find somewhere quiet and peaceful.
I sat up with my back against the wall of the house, and Peter squatted down beside me. I breathed. In, then out. And then again. In, then out. Let my pulse gradually slow down as I saw the street emptying as people made their way towards the stadium.
‘Was that the plan?’ I asked after a while.
‘Was what the plan?’
‘This. For me to fall in front of the bulls and you to rescue me. Was that the plan all along?’
I could see that he was on the point of saying something like: ‘What are you talking about?’ or: ‘I don’t understand.’ But maybe he knew that I had understood.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t the plan.’
‘No?’
‘Not to rescue you, no.’ He rested his head against the whitewashed wall of the house. I did the same thing, looking up into the cloudless sky between the rooftops.
On the side streets up and down the route they had already started to dismantle the barricades.
‘So you went to San Sebastián?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I needed to find out what had happened there.’
‘And did you find out?’
‘I saw your body.’
‘That isn’t me. At least not completely.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s hard to explain. It is me, but without my feeling of a self.’
‘Is that why you were able to kill him?’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t easy. It was painful.’
‘But not so painful that you couldn’t do it?’
‘The pain of not getting Miriam would have been worse. The way I look at it, it was a necessary suicide.’
‘You had to kill yourself in order to win her?’
‘Two Peters would have been very confusing, don’t you think?’
‘Got a cigarette?’
He straightened out his legs so that he could reach into his pocket and took two cigarettes from the packet. Lit up for us both.
‘What was it the first Peter did wrong?’ I asked.
‘He failed to see that you and Miriam might have been made for each other.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘Drop the might have been: you two are made for each other. Did you meet her in San Sebastián?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You’re two cicadas. Of course you found each other.’
‘I found her.’
‘Yes, only the male cicada sings.’
I looked at him again. He seemed older now than when we had stood waiting for the bulls. As though he’d aged ten years over a couple of minutes.
‘What happened?’ I asked, dragging on my cigarette. ‘Did you find out how to travel through time?’
‘It took me eleven years,’ he said. ‘Me and a small group of researchers in Switzerland. And you don’t travel through time, you travel between parallel universes or sequences of events. We discovered a way to slip in the back door of a parallel universe, but the problem was in finding which universe to enter, since there’s an infinity of them, and most of them are dead, cold worlds. You can’t change anything in a universe — the sequence of events is fixed — but you create new universes by moving something, even if it’s just an atom, from one universe to another. If you discover a universe that is, up to a particular point — for example, up to the morning after you rescued Miriam — identical to the one you inhabit, and you transport yourself there, a new universe is created in which you feel as though you’ve changed the sequence of events, but actually it’s simply a new one. Although actually it isn’t even really new, it’s just that you’re experiencing it for the first time. Understand?’
‘No.’
‘I discovered a way of finding universes that resemble the one you inhabit. We call it a synchronised habitat. In the universe I come from I’ll be awarded the Nobel Prize for it.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘So you slipped into this universe directly after I rescued Miriam. But why not before?’
‘Because the perfect starting point is that I saved her life. That is, that she believes I’m the one who saved her life. So I needed you first.’ He took a breath. ‘As you know, I’m unable to swim.’
I shook my head. ‘But good God, why didn’t you simply discover a universe where you get Miriam without doing anything?’
‘They exist too, of course, but they’re impossible to find, since a synchronised habitat contains only other universes that are similar. So I had to enter one of these and start to create, or to experience from within it a new one, which would hopefully be the one in which I end up getting Miriam.’
‘You really give a whole new dimension to the phrase “searching for love”,’ I said, and regretted at once my attempt to be funny. Peter didn’t seem to notice.
‘Love is the greatest,’ was all he said, following the drifting cigarette smoke with his eyes. ‘There is an infinite number of universes in which you and I sit together and have this conversation, and in which the smoke curls away in exactly this particular way. And yet another infinity with exactly this same conversation but in which the smoke curls away in a slightly different direction, or in which one particular word is replaced with another. But there is no room for these universes in my synchronised habitat. So in all of those for which I have room, you are the one who gets Miriam. And to create a happy ending for myself I need to go via them.’
‘Because love is greatest?’
‘Greater than anything else.’
‘Love is only a sensation fostered by evolution to ensure that the human race will procreate and protect its genes and its closest family members in an efficient way.’
‘I know,’ said Peter, stubbing out his cigarette on the cobblestones. ‘And yet still it is greater than that.’
‘So great that you’re willing to kill this universe’s version of yourself?’
‘Yes.’