Libertionne. Anna Tishchenko
on a little couch in a cozy cafe, talking about love and forgiveness, and about turning the other cheek. If this is done by a half-naked beauty as part of an elegant game, then he wouldn’t mind. But with four gentlemen who’ve gone berserk in a dark alley – no thanks.
Tiberius returned to reality when he heard a loud shout.
“Don’t move! Police!” To be honest, no one was planning on moving at all. Tiberius’s opponent couldn’t do this for technical reasons. One of them, laying on his stomach, was racking up a huge fine by filling the air with unkind wishes toward Tiberius; two more had no signs of life. The “baby doll,” looking like the ghost of Hamlet’s mother, not even Hamlet himself, father was quietly whimpering against a wall, exactly like Laura’s bulldog Lancelot when someone has taken away his doggy biscuit. Tiberius himself with great regret slowly unclasped his hands, realizing nevertheless that everything turned out for the best. A murder would not have looked good on the resume of a history professor. Bull, having turned the noble color of a revolutionary banner for the second time in one evening, coughed and gasped for breath like a Silver Age aristocrat with tuberculosis.
“Sir, you almost committed murder in the heat of passion.”
Tiberius, still sitting on the chest of his defeated opponent, raised his bloody face. He was lucky. The robot policeman extended his hand to him. If he had had to deal with people, imagine how many issues and problems would there be right now. These things just do their jobs without emotion. How much better the world would be if everyone and everything just did its job. But wait – how did they get here? Given that there was no telephone connection, and the police patrols ignore this place like a cemetery for plague victims. When Tiberius was being taken into the police car, the “baby doll” came up to him, wobbling like a drunk sailor on a ship.
“Why did you save me?”
“Could I have really just walked past?” Tiberius said, slightly surprised.
“Thank you,” uttered the ill-fated adventure seeker, and pensively wandered away.
The price of poetry
In the car, the police officers offered to take Tiberius to the hospital, but he adamantly refused. Right now his mind was occupied by something else – how many years of compulsory vacation would the rescue of the young idiot cost him? Of course, this depended on the extent to which he overdid it with the two who maintained a suspicious silence in such uncomfortable positions on the asphalt. But even in the best case scenario (if they were alive) it would be slightly less than the great Merlin spent locked up in the enchanted cave. But Merlin had an indisputable advantage. First of all, he was a wizard and could probably have conjured up some kind of entertainment for himself, in order to speed up the two hundred and eight-six years, and secondly, he fell victim to this tragic situation due to the fault of the sorceress Nimueh. You could sympathize with him. But here! His thoughts on the topic of timeless examples of human stupidity were interrupted. The car stopped, and the policemen dropped off the dazed warrior of justice at the entryway of his own building. And they drove away, bidding him a good evening and a fast recovery. He stood there for a minute, slack-jawed, then shrugged and went up to his apartment.
As soon as he crossed the threshhold, Tiberius understood why men in the past century were not burning with the desire to be tied with the bonds of Hymenaeus. He didn’t even have time to switch on the light before the wall monitor lit up, and Laura unleashed all of her righteous anger on him:
“Why aren’t you answering your smartphone?!
“It broke,” Tiberius said, showing the empty strap on his wrist.
Laura didn’t let up.
“That’s not the main thing! How could you be so lacking in judgment…”
Not listening to her in the slightest, Tiberius shuffled off to look for the first-aid kit. Thanks to modern medicine, tomorrow he would almost look human again. But opening the syringe with the antibiotics proved to be not so simple. Every inch of his body hurt, and especially his head, and the reprimand from his boss did not bring him any peace and quiet. Especially torturous was the procedure for self-administered nose repair. Stealthily wiping away his unauthorized tears, Tiberius, trying to impart a lightness and effortlessness to his voice, asked,
“Do you want to go to the river? This week? We can take Michael as well. He needs to get away from his wards once in awhile; he hasn’t left the clinic for a month.”
She was not pleased by the sudden change in the topic of discussion, along with the fact that he totally ignored her remarks.
“Come on, that’s just ridiculous…”
She couldn’t have said anything worse. Tiberius, turning away so that she would not see his expression, quoted a long-forgotten line of verse:
“O enchanting one, evil one, can it be true
That you find humorous the holy word friend…”
“Tiberius, what are you doing, those are forbidden lines!” Laura cried, clearly frightened, and he saw her this way for the first time.
“On your moonlit body, you want only
To feel the touch of a woman’s hands?
You don’t need the contact of lips, passionate and shy
Or the gaze of eyes, do you?”
“You’re mad, that’s six months of jail time! Be quiet, I beg you!”
“She begs?” For this alone, six months is worth it. He went to the wash room, brushing his hand against the wall. Along its surface, beautified with “white heavens” (or “snow lilies”? ), bloody lines extended.
“Can it be that a murky vision has never
Haunted you in your childhood dreams?”
“You know the police are already coming.”
“The love of a man – Prometheus’s fire —
Makes demands, and, in demanding, gives…”
There was a sharp ring at the door. This was probably, really the police. Before he touched the door handle, Tiberius turned and looked Laura in the eye:
“Are you coming with me?”
“Yes!”
Satisfied, he nodded and opened the door.
“Good evening, sir. You have violated the law and you have to come with us.
“Only not now,” Tiberius smiled.
He turned once more to look at the monitor and suddenly felt an electric shock to the neck.
A velvet hand in an iron glove
Tiberius opened his eyes and immediately closed them. There was an unpleasant, blindingly white light. The color, even the smell was white: a mixture of chemical cleaners with a fake “lily of the valley” aromatizer, completely unlike the natural scent. “Either I’ve died, or I’m Laura’s office. I don’t know which is worse,” he said, and gathering his strength, he sat down on the bed and looked around.
White walls, floor, and ceiling, and overly ascetic furniture. But not all the walls. One seemed like a continuous, smooth mirror, but his sharp eye caught a thin line in the outline of a doorframe. “I’m in a jail!” he realized, finally, and looked around with animated curiosity.
Noting cheerfully that the dimensions of the cell were twice those of his apartment, and that there were nice luxuries like a coffee table, Tiberius was already imagining, half-seriously, that the food was going to be an improvement over his lonely meals. While he was unconscious, someone’s skillful hands had reset his dislocated joints and stitched up his wounds, and there was no trace of his minor abrasions.
With