Читать книгу Memory Wall - Anthony Doerr, Anthony Doerr - Страница 28

Alma is in a movie theater with Harold. They are perhaps thirty years old. The movie is about scuba divers. Onscreen, white birds with forked tails soar above a beach. Light touches the tops of breaking waves. Alma and Harold sit side by side, Alma in a bright green dress, green shoes, green plastic earrings, Harold in an expensive brown shirt. The side of Harold’s knee presses against the side of Alma’s. Luvo can feel a dim electricity traveling between them.

Now the camera slips underwater. Rainbows of fish flit across the screen. Reefs scroll past. Alma’s heart does its steady work.

The memory jerks forward; Alma and Harold are in a cab, Alma’s camera bag on the bench seat between them. They travel through a place that looks to Luvo like Camps Bay. Everything out the windows is vague; it is as if, for Alma, there is nothing to look at all. There is only feeling, only anticipation, only her young husband beside her.

In another breath they are climbing the steps of a regal, cream-colored hotel, backed by moonlit cliffs. Gulls soar everywhere. A little gold-lettered sign reads Twelve Apostles Hotel. Inside the lobby a willowy woman in a white shirt and white pants with a gold belt buckle gives them a key on a brass chain; they pad down a series of hallways.

In the hotel room Alma lets out a succession of bright, genuine laughs. She gulps wine. Everything is pristine; two spotless windows, a wide white bed, richly ruffled lampshades. Harold switches on a music player and takes off his shoes and dances clumsily in his socks. Out the windows, range after range of spotlit waves fold over onto a beach.

After what might be a few minutes Harold leaps the balcony railing and takes off his shirt and socks. “Come with me,” he calls, and Alma takes her camera bag and follows him down onto the beach. Alma laughs as Harold charges into the wave-break. He splashes around a bit, grinning hugely. “Freezing!” he shouts. As he walks out of the water, Alma raises her camera, and takes a photograph.

If they say anything more to one another, it is not remembered, not recorded on the cartridge. In the memory Harold makes love to Alma twice. Luvo feels he should leave, should yank out the cartridge, send himself back into Alma’s house in Vredehoek, but the room is so clean, the sheets are so cool beneath Alma’s back. Everything is soft; everything seems to vibrate with possibility. Alma tastes the sea on Harold’s skin. She feels his big-knuckled hands hold onto her ribs, his fingertips touch the knobs of her spine.

Near the end of the memory Alma closes her eyes and seems to slip underwater, as if back into the film at the moviehouse, watching a huge black urchin wave its spines, noticing how the water is not silent but full of soft clicks, and soon the pastels of coral are scrolling past her vision, and little slashes of needlefish are dodging her fingers, and Harold’s body seems not to be on top of hers at all, but drifting instead beside her; they are swimming together, floating slowly away from the reef toward a place where the sea floor falls away and the bottom is too far away to see, and there is only light filtering into deep water, bottomless water, and Alma’s blood seems to swell out to the very edges of her skin.