Футляр перевод на английский

Part one
The silence in the apartment was not just the absence of sound. It was a dense, cottony substance that absorbed every accidental rustle, every inadvertent movement. Matvey Stepanovich Belov lived in this silence. He did not simply value it - he was its guardian, its chief priest and beneficiary.
His life was calibrated to the millimeter. At exactly 6:30 the alarm clock did not trill, but gave off a soft, delicate vibration. Slippers stood parallel to each other at an angle of exactly forty-five degrees to the bed. Oatmeal for breakfast - exactly one hundred and fifty grams, without salt, without sugar, because they brought unpredictability to the taste. Working as an accountant in a small office was a continuation of this ritual: the figures were arranged in orderly columns, the reports matched to the penny, and in this there was a mathematical, irrefutable harmony.
Matvey Stepanovich built an ideal case around himself. A case of routine, silence and solitude. The walls of his apartment were covered with sound-absorbing panels, the windows had shutters that he closed at dusk so that the light from the street lamps would not disturb his privacy. He did not make friends, did not communicate with his neighbors. His colleagues had long since given up on him, calling him a "recluse." His world was full because there was nothing superfluous in it.
Everything changed one rainy Thursday.
New tenants had moved into the apartment across the street. He knew about it from the sound of rough male voices, the creaking of carts and the crash of falling boxes. Matvey Stepanovich froze at his door, listening to this chaos, and felt an icy shiver run down his spine. His silence was desecrated.
The next day he saw her for the first time. His neighbor. She came out onto the landing just as he was returning from work. Young, about twenty-five, in a bright yellow dress that screamed in the semi-darkness of the entrance. In her hands she held a violin case.
- Hello! - Her voice was ringing like a bell, and it cut through Matvey Stepanovich's unprotected nerves. - I'm your new neighbor, Vera.
She smiled. Widely, openly. He nodded without saying a word and hurried into his fortress, clicking three locks behind him.
Her name turned out to be prophetic. Vera. She believed in music, in life, in neighborly communication. And she believed that the silent accountant could be "stirred up."
At first, it was minor infractions of his regime. She knocked on his door to ask for salt (salt! He hadn’t eaten salt in ten years!). She forgot to take the key out of the lock, and when he went out, he would stumble upon this protruding metal tail – a symbol of irresponsibility. She listened to music. Not the background music that poured out of the TV, but live music. She played the violin.
Vera's violin became his torture. The sounds seeped through the walls, through his precious sound-absorbing panels. They were quiet, but persistent, like drops of water wearing away at a stone. Sometimes they were scales, repeated with monotonous persistence. Sometimes sad, drawn-out melodies, from which something forgotten and unpleasant squeezed in Matvey Stepanovich's chest. Then suddenly there was an explosion of a virtuoso, impetuous piece - a real sound hurricane, sweeping away everything in its path.
He began to lose his peace. The oatmeal began to taste bland. The numbers on the reports danced before his eyes. He found himself listening, holding his breath. Waiting for the next note. It infuriated him.
One evening, when the violin began to play especially shrilly and mournfully, he could not stand it any longer. Clenching his fists, he went out onto the landing and pressed the button to ring the bell.
The door opened. She stood there with the violin in her hands, the bow hovering in the air. Tears glistened on her cheeks.
- Matvey Stepanovich? Did something happen?
"The music," he croaked. "It's too loud."
- Oh, forgive me! - She brushed away a tear, smiling sheepishly. - It's Tchaikovsky, "Melancholy Serenade". I can't get through this passage. You weren't listening to the music, you were hearing my mistakes.
He looked at her wet eyes, at her trembling lips, at the violin - this instrument that carried so much pain and passion. And something in its case trembled. Not cracked, no. Just trembled.
“It’s okay,” he said unexpectedly to himself. “It doesn’t matter. Keep doing it.”
And he left without giving her a chance to answer.

Part two
From that day on, everything went wrong. His case gave the first crack, and through it poured a strange, unfamiliar world.
Vera became an obsession for him, a disease, a symptom. He caught himself looking through the peephole when she came in or out. He learned her schedule. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she would go out for the day, returning tired but with sparkling eyes. On Saturdays she would receive guests – the same noisy, young and laughing people. Their laughter reached him muffled, but it echoed in his solitude like a dull, unclear echo.
He began to research her. Carefully, with the meticulousness of an accountant. From the envelopes in her mailbox (he glanced at them as he passed), he recognized her last name: Orlova. From snippets of conversation in the elevator, he realized that she taught music at a children's art school. He found her page on social networks. It was a window into a bright, sunny world, full of concerts, travel, smiles, and friends. He looked at these photos, fascinated, experiencing a strange mixture of envy, disgust, and attraction.
One day Vera knocked on his door again. She was holding a plate with a pie in her hands.
- I baked too much, I won't eat it alone. Help yourself, Matvey Stepanovich.
He wanted to refuse. Politely and firmly. But instead he said:
- Thank you. Come in.
He himself did not understand. She had crossed the threshold of his fortress. He watched in horror as she looked around his impeccably sterile, ascetic little apartment, and he felt ashamed. Ashamed of his bare, uncomfortable life.
They drank tea with her pie. He was silent. She talked. About music, about her students, about how hard it was to find inspiration in a gray city. He listened. And for the first time in many years, he didn’t want the sound to stop.
“Did you know,” she said suddenly, “that accounting and music are very similar?”
- What? - He was taken aback.
- Of course! Both have their own scores - musical and accounting. In both cases, the main thing is harmony and precision. One false sound, one wrong number - and the whole system collapses. You, too, probably feel this harmony when everything comes together for you?
He looked at her, and it seemed to him that for the first time he saw not an annoying neighbor, but another person. An artist. A creator. Who saw in his dull world something that he himself had not noticed.
“Yes,” he answered hoarsely. “It fits. It’s… nice.”
After she left, the apartment smelled of vanilla from the pie and her perfume. Matvey Stepanovich did not air it out. He sat in his chair and felt something important crumbling. The walls of his case, which he had so carefully built over the years, melted from simple human warmth.
He fell in love. It was a terrible, painful, uncontrollable feeling. It didn't fit into any of his reports. It was pure chaos. He lay awake nights, thinking up plans on how to talk to her, how to invite her for a walk, to the cinema. But every time his tongue stuck to his throat, and his heart pounded wildly as soon as he heard her footsteps outside the door.
He began writing her letters. Long, detailed, confessional. In them he told her everything: about his loneliness, his fear of the world, about silence as his only salvation. And about how her music and her smile had changed everything. He wrote them by hand, in a neat accountant's handwriting, and he never sent any of them. They accumulated in a drawer of his desk, another secret case inside the big one.

Part three
He made up his mind. He bought two tickets to the philharmonic for a piano concert. He spent a whole week rehearsing the phrase in front of the mirror: "Vera, would you like to go to the concert with me on Sunday?" He said it with different intonations: polite, casual, ingratiating.
On Sunday morning he walked out of the apartment, wearing a mask of determination. Voices came from behind Vera's door. A man's and hers. They were laughing.
Matvey Stepanovich froze. His hand with the tickets dropped helplessly.
The door opened. A tall young man came out of the apartment. He turned around, shouted inside, "See you later, honey!" and whistled cheerfully down the stairs.
Vera stood in the doorway. Seeing her neighbor, she smiled her sunny smile again.
- Matvey Stepanovich! Are you going somewhere? How festive you look!
He swallowed hard in the city.
- Nowhere. So.
He turned and walked back into his apartment. He didn't see how her smile faded, how confusion and slight sadness appeared on her face.
He spent the whole day sitting in his chair, staring at one point. He tore the tickets into small pieces. The case, which he had begun to open little by little, slammed shut with a deafening crash. And it pinched him painfully.
He understood. Her world was a world of light, music, love, and this handsome young man. His world was silence, oatmeal, and numbers. These worlds were not only incompatible. They were hostile to each other. His attempt to transcend himself was a laughable and pathetic mistake, an arithmetic error that needed urgent correction.
He took all the unsent letters out of the desk drawer. All his confessions, all his hopes. He carefully, methodically burned them in the sink, flushing the ashes down the toilet. He erased her phone number (he had once overheard her dictating it to a courier). He blocked her page.
And in the evening, the violin began playing again behind the wall. It played something light, joyful and carefree. Perhaps it was music for that very young man.
For Matvey Stepanovich, this was the music of triumph. The triumph of a world in which he had no place. Each note was a mockery, each sound vibration a blow of a whip to his naked soul.
He stood up, walked over to the wall, and leaned his forehead against it. The cool wallpaper calmed the heat a little. He stood there for perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Until the music stopped.
The next day he applied for leave and left the city. Without saying a word to anyone.

Epilogue
He returned two weeks later. He spent his vacation in a remote village, in a house without internet or even a radio. He walked through the forest, where the only sounds were the rustling of leaves and the singing of birds. He had almost come to his senses. He had almost patched up the holes in his case.
The entrance hall smelled of paint. The door to Vera's apartment was wide open, and stepladders and buckets were visible inside. Repairs were underway.
On the stairs he ran into an elderly woman, the landlady.
- Ah, neighbor! - she said. - Hello.
“Hello,” he nodded wearily. “Are you doing renovations?”
- I'm renting again. Your girlfriend moved out.
His heart sank.
- What... girl?
- Well, the violinist. Such a sweetheart. She moved out suddenly. She said she got a proposal from her fianc;, she's moving to another city. She was so happy - her eyes were full! She asked to terminate the contract. Now I'm doing some renovations, I'll be looking for new tenants.
Matvey Stepanovich slowly went up to his room. He entered. He locked all the locks. There was perfect, dead silence in the apartment. The very silence he had been striving for.
He walked into the room and sat down in his chair. The dust lay in an even layer on all surfaces. Everything was in its place. Nothing had changed.
He sat like that for a very long time. In complete, absolute silence. The silence he loved so much. Which was his case, his protection, his home.
And suddenly he realized that this silence was no longer comfort, no longer salvation. It was emptiness. An abyss. A grave. It pressed on his eardrums with such force that he wanted to scream, just to break this terrifying, all-consuming peace.
He walked up to the wall where Vera had once lived and where her violin had sounded. He put his palm to it. It was quiet there. Empty. Forever.
He was left alone with his silence. And this was the most terrible punishment of all.
His case was intact. But it became his coffin.