Читать книгу Memory Wall - Anthony Doerr, Anthony Doerr - Страница 23

Three eggs steam on a towel in front of Alma. She cracks one open. Out the window the sky and ocean are very dark. The tall man with the huge hands is waving his fingers around in her kitchen. “Running out of time,” he says. “You and me together, old lady.”

He begins stalking the kitchen, pacing back and forth. The balcony rails moan in the wind, or else it’s the wind moaning, or the wind and railing together, her ears unable to unbraid the two. The tall man raises a hand to the cigarette in his hatband and puts it between his lips, unlit. “You probably think you’re a hero,” he says. “Up there waving your sword against a big old army.”

Roger waves an imaginary sword, slashing it through the air. Alma tries to ignore him, tries to focus on the warm egg in her fingers. She wishes she had some salt but does not see a shaker anywhere.

“But you losing. You losing bad. You losing and you going to end up just like all them other old, rich junkies—you going to blitz out, zone out, drift away, feed yourself a steady stream of those memories. Until there’s nothing left of you at all. Aren’t you? You’re just a tube now, hey, Alma? Just a bleeding tube. Put something in the top and it drops right out the bottom.”

In Alma’s hand is an egg she has evidently just peeled. She eats it slowly. In the face of the man in front of her something suppressed is flickering and showing itself, an anger, a lifelong contempt. Without turning her head she has the sense that out there in the darkness beyond her kitchen windows something terrible is advancing toward her.

“And what about the houseboy?” the tall man is saying. She wishes he would stop talking. “From one angle it probably has the look of sacrifice. Oh, a good boy, fit, speaks English, disease-free, got himself a little piccanin, rides ten miles each way on the bus from the townships to the suburbs to make tea, water the garden, comb out her wigs. Fill the refrigerator. Clip her fingernails. Fold her old-lady underthings. Apartheid’s over and he’s doing women’s work. A saint. A servant. Am I right?”

Two more eggs sit in front of Alma. Her heart is opening and closing very quickly in her chest. The tall black man is wearing his hat indoors. A sentence from Treasure Island comes back to her, as if from nowhere: Their eyes burned in their heads; their feet grew speedier and lighter; their whole soul was bound up in that fortune, that whole lifetime of extravagance and pleasure, that lay waiting there for each of them.

Roger is tapping his temple with one finger. His eyes are whirlpools into which she must not look. I am not here, Alma thinks.

“But from another angle what does it look like?” the man is saying. “Houseboy lets himself in the gate, through the door, watches you dodder about, moves beyond the edges of your memory. Lined up for his inheritance, surely. Fingers in the till. He eats the sausages, too, doesn’t he? Probably pays the bills. He knows the kind of money you’re spending with that doctor.”

“Stop talking,” says Alma. She thinks, I am not here. I am not anywhere.

“I did it to the boy,” he says. “I can tell you, you don’t even know what I’m saying. I found him in the Company Gardens and who was he? Just an orphan. I paid for the operation. I fed him, I took care of him. I brought him back. I keep him healthy, don’t I? I let him wander around.”

The headlights of a passing car swing through the yard, drain through the trees. Alma’s fear rises into her throat. The headlights fade. The wind flies over the house.

“Stop talking right now,” she says.

“You eat now,” says Roger. “You eat and I’ll stop talking and the boy upstairs will find what I’m looking for and then you can go die in peace.”

She blinks. For a moment the man in her kitchen has transformed into a demon: imperious, towering; he peers down at her from beneath a limestone brow. He is waving his terrible hands.

“We all have a gorgon in here,” the demon says. He points to his chest.

“I know who you are.” She says this quietly and with great intensity. “I see you for what you are.”

“I bet you do,” says Roger.