Читать книгу Silk - Alessandro Baricco - Страница 18

12.

HERVÉ Joncour left with eighty thousand francs in gold and the names of three men, obtained for him by Baldabiou: a Chinese, a Dutchman and a Japanese. He crossed the border near Metz, travelled through Württemberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, and continued to Kiev. On horseback he traversed two thousand kilometres of the Russian steppe, crossed the Urals into Siberia, and travelled for forty days to reach Lake Baikal, which the people of the place called: the sea. He followed the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border, to the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabirk for eleven days, until a Dutch smugglers’ ship carried him to Cape Teraya, on the western coast of Japan. On foot, taking secondary roads, he went through the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama and Niigata, entered Fukushima, reached the city of Shirakawa, and rounded it on the east side; he waited two days for a man in black, who blindfolded him and led him to a village in the hills, where he spent one night, and the next morning he negotiated the purchase of the eggs with a man who didn’t speak, and whose face was covered by a silk veil. Black. At sunset he hid the eggs in his bags, turned his back on Japan, and prepared to set off on the journey home.

He had just passed the last houses in the village when a man came running up, and stopped him. He said something in an agitated and peremptory tone, and led him back with polite insistence.

Hervé Joncour didn’t speak Japanese, nor was he able to understand it, but he grasped that Hara Kei wanted to see him.