Andrei: Static?
Victor: Sure. It’s as if you were driving a car and caught up with a train going in the same direction. At this moment you’d be static relative to each other, and the picture perceived by you would be static and whole. That is, you’d be able to see all the elements of the picture at once, with all their interrelations; in other words, you’d see and you’d comprehend.
Andrei: Still, I don’t quite follow where these additional maxims would come from.
Victor: As I said, they come from a higher level of consciousness and, appropriately, higher speed of perception. While prior to me the only thing they could detect was, say, that the bumble-bee’s wings move up-and-down, I can make out and take into account such things as frequency of their movements, their amplitude, their angular and linear speed, and lots of other factors which, if considered, could both explain and predict any maneuver – whereas for an ordinary eye such maneuvers would seem just chaotic.
Andrei: The analogy is more or less plain. But the issue itself hasn’t become any clearer. Besides, frequency, amplitude, speed are the notions of physics, not philosophy.
Victor: Quite right! It’s only too natural that our material world obeys the laws of physics. Our social relations, too, can be modeled and calculated the way they model and calculate, say, the trajectory of a spacecraft.
Аndrei, finishing his scrubbing and wringing out mop, remarks with bitter irony: So your work is actually a new edition of a dialectical materialism, isn’t it? Why did they lock you up then, for furthering
Marxism-Leninism?
Bachkov popped in: Finished? Hurry up or you may miss your breakfast.
Andrei: It’s Ok, we haven’t finished our talk yet.
Victor, smiling: You’d better go. A stomach stuffed with oatmeal is better than a head swollen with my ravings.
Andrei: Why so?
Victor: With oatmeal, you only risk spending your time in the toilet, with my ravings – time in a psychiatric hospital.
Andrei: OK, I’m going, just want to remind you that we are already there.
Scene in the mess-hall – amnesia
An empty mess-hall. Andrei, getting his bowl of porridge and a cup of chocolate, sits close to Sasha, who’s already had his meal and is now waiting impatiently for something.
Andrei: Had your breakfast?
Sasha: Uh-huh.
Andrei: Won’t you go to get your medicine?
Sasha: Later. The boys in the kitchen are making chifir (a strong tea brew used as a mild narcotic).
Andrei: I see.
Nodding at Sasha’s forearm: You’ve got a beautiful rose tattooed on your forearm. So simple and so delicate.
Sasha: Yeah, I had a real artist for a cellmate in Smolensk.
Andrei: You were in Smolensk prison? What for?
Sasha: Burglary.
Andrei: Locked in a psychiatric ward?
Sasha: They did it later. I didn’t quite get along with the administration, you know.
Andrei: Refused to snitch?
Sasha: Yes. So they certified me, and put in a ward, with a gorilla for a male-nurse. He was serving his time there for rape and murder. Honest thieves wouldn’t take this job, you know. So as soon as I got there he tried to use me for his bum-boy. I wasn’t a match for him physically, so I knifed him twice in the throat. The bastard survived by a sheer miracle, and I got me another eight years, this time for attempted murder.
Andrei: How old are you?
Sasha: 27.
Andrei: So am I.
Sasha: 27 and half of my life behind the bars. Do you know how it all started? When I was a kid, I stole a loaf of white bread – a fucking loaf of bread – they feed it to pigs here.
