Пролетая над гнездом кукушки

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
         К38

© КОРОНА принт, 2004
© КАРО, 2004
Все права защищены
ISBN 978-5-9925-0682-2

Кизи, Кен.
К38
Пролетая над гнездом кукушки : книга для чтения
на английском языке. — Санкт-Петербург: КОРОНА
принт, КАРО, 2015. — 432 с. — (Modern Prose).

ISBN 978-5-9925-0682-2.

Эта книга — одно из самых известных произведений знаменитого американского писателя ХХ века К. Кизи. Неадаптированный текст романа снабжен комментариями, заданиями
на понимание и словарем.
Книга предлагается в качестве учебного пособия для чтения
и перевода в вузах и на курсах иностранных языков, а также
для самостоятельного чтения.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

... one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

                Children’s folk rhyme

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

1

They’re out there.
Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex
acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
They’re mopping when I come out the dorm, all three
of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the
place they’re at here, the people they got to work around.
When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep
along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got
special sensitive equipment detects my fear and they all look
up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces
like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old
radio.
“Here’s the Chief. The soo-pah Chief, fellas. Ol’ Chief
Broom. Here you go, Chief Broom. ...”
Stick a mop in my hand and motion to the spot they
aim for me to clean today, and I go. One swats the backs
of my legs with a broom handle to hurry me past.
“Haw, you look at ‘im shag it? Big enough to eat apples off my head an’ he mine me like a baby.”
They laugh and then I hear them mumbling behind
me, heads close together. Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets. They don’t
bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when
I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much.

KEN KESEY

If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this
dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years.
I’m mopping near the ward door when a key hits it
from the other side and I know it’s the Big Nurse by the
way the lockworks cleave to the key, soft and swift and
familiar she been around locks so long. She slides through
the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her
and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel — tip of
each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like
the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she
touches you with it you can’t tell which.
She’s carrying her woven wicker bag like the ones the
Umpqua tribe sells out along the hot August highway, a
bag shape of a tool box with a hemp handle. She’s had it
all the years I been here. It’s a loose weave and I can see
inside it; there’s no compact or lipstick or woman stuff,
she’s got that bag full of thousand parts she aims to use in
her duties today — wheels and gears, cogs polished to a
hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles,
forceps, watchmakers’ pliers, rolls of copper wire …
She dips a nod at me as she goes past. I let the mop
push me back to the wall and smile and try to foul her
equipment’ up as much as possible by not letting her see
my eyes — they can’t tell so much about you if you got
your eyes closed.
In my dark I hear her rubber heels hit the tile and the
stuff in her wicker bag clash with the jar of her walking as
she passes me in the hall. She walks stiff. When I open my
eyes she’s down the hall about to turn into the glass Nurses’

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

Station where she’ll spend the day sitting at her desk and
looking out her window and making notes on what goes on
out in front of her in the day room during the next eight
hours. Her face looks pleased and peaceful with the thought.
Then … she sights those black boys. They’re still down
there together, mumbling to one another. They didn’t hear
her come on the ward. They sense she’s glaring down at
them now, but it’s too late. They should of knew better’n to
group up and mumble together when she was due on the
ward. Their faces bob apart, confused. She goes into a crouch
and advances on where they’re trapped in a huddle at the
end of the corridor. She knows what they been saying, and I
can see she’s furious clean out of control. She’s going to tear
the black bastards limb from limb, she’s so furious. She’s swelling up, swells till her back’s splitting out the white uniform
and she’s let her arms section out long enough to wrap around
the three of them five, six times. She looks around her with a
swivel of her huge head. Nobody up to see, just old Broom
Bromden the half-breed Indian back there hiding behind his
mop and can’t talk to call for help. So she really lets herself go
and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and
she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can
smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load. I hold my breath and figure, My God this
time they’re gonna do it! This time they let the hate build up
too high and overloaded and they’re gonna tear one another
to pieces before they realize what they’re doing!
But just as she starts crooking those sectioned arms
around the black boys and they go to ripping at her under

KEN KESEY

side with the mop handles, all the patients start coming
out of the dorms to check on what’s the hullabaloo, and
she has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of
her hideous real self. By the time the patients get their eyes
rubbed to where they can halfway see what the racket’s
about, all they see is the head nurse, smiling and calm and
cold as usual, telling the black boys they’d best not stand in
a group gossiping when it is Monday morning and there is
such a lot to get done on the first morning of the week ...
“... mean old Monday morning, you know, boys. ...”
“Yeah, Miz Ratched ...”
“... and we have quite a number of appointments this
morning, so perhaps, if your standing here in a group talking isn’t too urgent ...”
“Yeah, Miz Ratched ...”
She stops and nods at some of the patients come to
stand around and stare out of eyes all red and puffy with
sleep. She nods once to each. Precise, automatic gesture.
Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an
expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend
of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink
little nostrils — everything working together except the color
on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those
big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a
perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.
The men are still standing and waiting to see what she
was onto the black boys about, so she remembers seeing me
and says, “And since it is Monday, boys, why don’t we get a

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

good head start on the week by shaving poor Mr. Bromden first this morning, before the after-breakfast rush on
the shaving room, and see if we can’t avoid some of the —
ah — disturbance he tends to cause, don’t you think?”
Before anybody can turn to look for me I duck back
in the mop closet, jerk the door shut dark after me, hold
my breath. Shaving before you get breakfast is the worst
time. When you got something under your belt you’re
stronger and more wide awake, and the bastards who work
for the Combine aren’t so apt to slip one of their machines
in on you in place of an electric shaver. But when you shave
before breakfast like she has me do some mornings — sixthirty in the morning in a room all white walls and white
basins, and long-tube-lights in the ceiling making sure there
aren’t any shadows, and faces all round you trapped screaming behind the mirrors — then what chance you got against
one of their machines?
I hide in the mop closet and listen, my heart beating
in the dark, and I try to keep from getting scared, try to
get my thoughts off someplace else — try to think back
and remember things about the village and the big Columbia River, think about one time Papa and me were
hunting birds in a stand of cedar trees near The Dalles.
But like always when I try to place my thoughts in the
past and hide there, the fear close at hand seeps in through
the memory. I can feel that least black boy out there coming up the hall, smelling out for my fear. He opens out his
nostrils like black funnels, his outsized head bobbing this
way and that as he sniffs, and he sucks in fear from all over

KEN KESEY

the ward. He’s smelling me now, I can hear him snort. He
don’t know where I’m hid, but he’s smelling and he’s hunting around. I try to keep still. …
(Papa tells me to keep still, tells me that the dog senses
a bird somewheres right close. We borrowed a pointer dog
from a man in The Dalles. All the village dogs are no-‘count
mongrels, Papa says, fish-gut eaters and no class a-tall; this
here dog, he got insteek! I don’t say anything, but I already
see the bird up in a scrub cedar, hunched in a gray knot of
feathers. Dog running in circles underneath, too much smell
around for him to point for sure. The bird safe as long as he
keeps still. He’s holding out pretty good, but the dog keeps
sniffing and circling, louder and closer. Then the bird breaks,
feathers springing, jumps out of the cedar into the birdshot
from Papa’s gun.)
The least black boy and one of the bigger ones catch
me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag
me back to the shaving room. I don’t fight or make any
noise. If you yell it’s just tougher on you. I hold back the
yelling. I hold back till they get to my temples. I’m not
sure it’s one of those substitute machines and not a shaver
till it gets to my temples; then I can’t hold back. It’s not a
will-power thing any more when they get to my temples.
It’s a … button, pushed, says Air Raid Air Raid, turns me
on so loud it’s like no sound, everybody yelling at me,
hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths.
My sound soaks up all other sound. They start the fog
machine again and it’s snowing down cold and white all