Зонт над головой роман перевод на английский

Prologue
The universe does not explode. It does not scream, it does not fall apart with a roar. Sometimes it just makes a quiet, barely audible exhalation. Like an umbrella that opens at the most inopportune moment. That is how the world ended for Matvey - not with an apocalypse, but with the whisper of a nylon dome over his head.

Part One: Gray Watercolor
Matvey was a watch repairman. His life was as measured as the ticking of a pendulum. He lived in a tiny apartment that smelled of machine oil and old wood, where every object knew its place. His world was monochrome: gray asphalt, gray walls of the workshop, gray sky of a big city. Even his feelings were calibrated and muted, like gears under the glass of a clock face.
He avoided everything bright, loud, unpredictable. Unpredictability broke the mechanism. And the main mechanism was his own life, which he carefully protected from any shocks after one, the most terrible failure many years ago.
Rain for Matvey was not the weather, but a state. It fell often, shading the grayness of the city with shimmering reflections on the wet asphalt. And always, always Matvey had an umbrella with him. Neat, folded, black. Not an object of style, but a shield. A shield from bad weather, from looks, from unplanned interactions.
One particularly nasty November evening, when the rain pounded the pavement like a metronome, he saw her.
She sat on a bench by an old fountain, soaking wet, without an umbrella, without a hat, and… laughed. Laughed, throwing her head back to the sky, catching cold drops with her mouth. Her red hair, dark from the water, stuck to her cheeks, and her eyes shone with some kind of crazy, frivolous happiness. She was a splash of yellow paint on his gray watercolor.
Matvey slowed down. His internal mechanism creaked. This was wrong. Illogical. Sitting in the rain and laughing was a sign of something broken.
He walked past. Two steps. Three. His own umbrella shielded him from the chaos. But something clicked. A cog he had long thought dead shifted.
He stopped, turned around, and, feeling like an idiot, walked over to the bench. He opened his black umbrella and, with a stiffly polite gesture, as if he were moving a glass door, moved it so that it covered her as well.
The laughter stopped. She looked at him. Raindrops were running down her eyelashes.
"You won't get me wet," she said, and the corners of her eyes danced with laughter. "I'm already a local landmark. 'Wet girl at the fountain.'"
“You’ll catch a cold,” muttered Matvey, feeling his face burning.
"Do you save strange strangers from catching colds in the evenings?" she asked, without looking away.
- No. The first time.
She smiled. Her name was Alice. And this was the most unpredictable event in Matvey's life in the last ten years.

Part Two: The Mechanism and the Butterfly
Alice was the opposite. A freelance artist, she lived in a world where plans were made to be broken, and paint could accidentally spill onto a clean floor, creating a new masterpiece. Her apartment resembled an art-obsessed junk shop: canvases, scraps of fabric, old photographs, jars of paintbrushes everywhere, and the smell of turpentine, coffee, and pear jam.
She burst into his life like a hurricane. She dragged him to exhibitions in basements where strange music was playing, fed him vegetarian dishes that he considered inedible, made him watch old black-and-white films and cry over them. She said that he was like a secretary cabinet - strict and closed on the outside, but inside there were many secret drawers, and she really wanted to open them all.
Matvey resisted. He fixed the lock on her bag, glued together a broken ceramic cat, silently listened to her crazy theories about the universe, and in the evenings, returning to his place, he inhaled the familiar smell of order with relief. But his shield cracked.
He found himself at dinner imagining how Alice would describe the dish ("This isn't rice with vegetables, Matvey, this is a round dance of emerald princesses on a feather bed made of pearl grains!"). He began to notice shades of gray: the warm gray of the morning sky, the cold steel gray of a wet roof. His monochrome world began to take on a tint.
One day she dragged him to the park and made him lie on his back on the grass that was wet from the rain.
"What are we doing?" he asked, feeling the moisture seeping through his coat.
— Look at the clouds. See, that one over there looks like a sleeping lion. And that one over there looks like a teapot, from which boiling water is about to pour out.
“It’s just a build-up of water vapor,” objected Matvey, the mechanic.
"They're just gears and springs," she countered, pointing to his pocket watch. "But does that make them any less beautiful?"
He looked at her, not at the sky. At her freckles, at the fierce glint in her eyes, at the stubborn strand of hair that always escaped her ponytail. And for the first time in years, he wanted not to fix and organize, but simply to be. To be here and now. With her.
He kissed her in the open air, and somewhere in the distance the rain began to whisper again, but they no longer cared. His umbrella lay on the grass, folded, forgotten.

Part Three: Crack in the Glass
They found their rhythm. Her chaos and his order learned to coexist. He arranged her paints by color, and she painted whimsical frescoes of clocks and birds on his walls. He woke her up in the morning because she could sleep until evening, and she forced him to improvise.
He thought it would always be like this. That he had found a perpetual motion machine, a mechanism that would not break. But he forgot that at the heart of any mechanism lies fragility.
It happened quietly again. Too quietly. Not thunder, not a scream. A doorbell. A man in a strict uniform. An apologetic, professionally indifferent look.
Accident. Drunk driver. Pedestrian crossing. Alice.
The words flew past, not touching his consciousness. They were just sounds, like the sound of rain on a roof. Matvey was taken to the hospital. He saw her through the glass. She was pale as paper, and covered in tubes and wires. Her red hair lay on the pillow like a lifeless halo. Her life machine had malfunctioned. The most terrible one.
The doctors said something about a coma, about injuries, about hope. But Matvey, the mechanic, heard only one thing: the mechanism was broken. Completely. Hopelessly.
He walked out of the hospital. It was that nasty November rain outside. He stood under the stream of icy water, feeling it run down his collar, but he didn't move. He waited for the pain, the despair, the anger to wash over him. But inside there was only silence. The complete, absolute, dead silence of a stopped clock.
He looked at his hands. In one he clutched a folded umbrella. His shield. A useless, insignificant shield that failed to cover what was most important.
He threw it into a puddle. Let it get wet. Let it rust.
His world didn't just go black. It ceased to exist. The gray watercolor returned, but now without a single glimmer of light. Only dust and ash.

Part Four: Time to Gather Stones
Weeks passed. Alice did not wake up. Matvey stopped going to the studio. He sat in her apartment, among her things, her unfinished paintings. He inhaled her scent, which slowly evaporated, and it was worse than any pain. It was a slow, inexorable dying even of memory.
He found her diary. Drawings, poems, incoherent thoughts. And on one of the pages, next to a watercolor painting of that very fountain, was the inscription: “Today I was saved by a knight in a black cloak. No, not a knight. A watchmaker. He brought me his umbrella, but it seemed to him that he brought me only a piece of cloth on a stick. He does not know that his umbrella is an entire universe. There is a place for me in it, too.”
Matvey closed the diary. His hands were shaking. He went to the window. It was raining outside again.
He looked at her easel. An unfinished painting: two silhouettes under one umbrella. The background was blurry, but there was such clarity and such fragile hope in their figures that it took his breath away.
And then he understood. She hadn't broken. She had simply stopped. Like the most precious, most difficult watch that requires patience, love, and faith to start again.
He couldn't stop the rain. He couldn't turn back time. But he could do what he did best. He could wait. He could be that umbrella - not a shield to hide behind, but a shelter to keep what was underneath until the sun came out.
He came to the hospital, sat down by her bed and took her cold hand in his.
“I’m here,” he said quietly. “There’s a whole universe above our heads. There’s room for you in it. Come back.”
He spoke to her every day. He read her the books she loved, told her how he fixed her watch, whispered about his feelings that he never had time to fully express. He was her umbrella. Her quiet, unwavering shelter from silence and nothingness.

Epilogue
She woke up quietly too. Not screaming, not crying. She simply opened her eyes and looked at him. Her gaze was cloudy, unrecognizant. Matvey's heart sank.
She slowly moved her eyes around the room, then looked at him again, at his sunken, stubble-covered face. And she whispered hoarsely, barely audible:
- Watchmaker... You... haven't lost your umbrella?
And then he cried. For the first time in all this time. He cried, not ashamed of his tears, holding her hand and nodding, because he could not utter a word.
It was drizzling outside. But the room was quiet and light. Her hand squeezed his fingers weakly.
He didn't save her. No one can save another person from the rain that sometimes pours from within. But he could be there. Open his umbrella above her - not as a shield, but as a sign. A sign that you are not alone. That even in the most endless downpour, above you there can be a small but strong universe, sewn from nylon and hope.
And that, as it turned out, was enough.