Читать книгу About Grace - Anthony Doerr, Anthony Doerr - Страница 16

Winkler remembered his mother as a supremely pale woman: hands like they had been dipped in milk, hair a creamy silver. Even her eyes were almost pure white, the irises pale, the sclera devoid of visible capillaries, as though the color had been rinsed out of them, or else her blood ran clear.

She had lived her first thirteen years in Finland before coming to the New World with a grandfather who promptly died of pneumonia. She finned salmon on a floating fish processor, then waitressed for Lido’s Café, then washed sheets at the Engineering Commission Hospital; she worked her way through nursing school, joined the Women’s League, married the milkman. In 1941 they moved into a bankrupt furrier’s storehouse converted to apartments, a small fourth-floor flat blessed with a trio of huge parlor windows that overlooked the pharmacy across the street, the rail yard, and Ship Creek beyond. All during the Second World War P-36 Hawks descended across those windows left to right and disappeared behind Government Hill to land at the airfield at Elmendorf. And every summer thereafter those windows buzzed with the comfortable drone of passing two- and four-seaters, hunters and prospectors, gliding in and out of the bush. Men bent on gold, oil, wilderness. She would live in that apartment the rest of her life.

The rooms existed in his memory as clearly now as they always had: the big-beamed ceilings, the smells of fur still lingering in the corners, as though invisible foxes and marmots moved silently inside the walls. His bedroom was a broom closet with a door that opened inward—he had to fold back his mattress each morning to get out. The smell in there, he decided one night, was of caribou, and he imagined their ghosts snuffling in the sitting room, nosing through the pantry.

His mother loved the building: its drafts and big-paned windows; the way the floors, no matter how much you scrubbed, smelted permanently of tannins. She walked barefoot over the cold boards, and dragged open the curtains, and showed David how if they scratched their names into the panes with a pin, winter frost would freeze around the letters. On the roof she’d gather palmfuls of snow and press them into her mouth and make pronouncements on their quality: sweet or pure, grainy or velvety. “Back home,” she’d say, “there is a snow my grandfather called santa lunta. It came one night a year, always around Christmas. He’d pack it into little tin funnels and pour fruit juice on it and we’d eat it for dessert. Like ice cream. Only better.”

His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page. Bound in cloth, it was a 1931 first edition her grandfather had bought at a rummage sale. She would page through it carefully, almost devotedly, occasionally calling David over to ask him his favorites. She’d hold his finger and trace the outlines of whatever shapes lay hidden within: six hippos’ heads, six dragons’ eyes, six tiny sea horses in profile.

Eight-year-old Winkler would wrap a board in black felt and climb to the roof to catch snowflakes as they floated down. He studied them with a Cracker Jack plastic hand-magnifier. Only rarely was he able to capture an individual crystal, undamaged in its journey from the clouds, and he’d sit with a pencil and a damp notebook, trying to sketch it before it melted: the corollas, the interstices, the kaleidoscopic blades. When he’d accumulated twenty or so drawings, he’d take the damp pages downstairs, staple them together, and present the book to his mother with grave ceremony.

“It’s beautiful, David,” she’d say. “I will treasure it.” She’d set the little booklet on top of Bentley’s Snow Crystals, on the shelf beneath the coffee table.

In grade school he read about irrigation, ice fields, clouds. He could still remember a poster on the wall of his fourth-grade classroom: THE WATER CYCLE—oceanic clouds creeping over a town, dropping rain on steeples and rooftops, rainwater pooling in a river, the river charging through a dam’s spillway, easing back into the ocean, a smiling sun evaporating seawater into tufts of cartoon vapor, the vapor condensing into clouds.

By high school he was beginning to understand that the study of water and its distribution phenomena yielded again and again to sets of reassuring patterns—Hadley cells, cycling air in the troposphere, dark bands of nimbostratus. To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: raindrops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. Rapt, seventeen years old, he mail-ordered posters of seas, lakes, calving glaciers. He caught raindrops in pans of flour to study their shape; he charted the sizes of captured snow crystals on a handmade grid.

His first week in college he met with a counselor and made earth sciences his major. A chemistry unit on the hydrologic cycle that had other students yawning seemed to him a miracle of simplicity: condensation, precipitation, infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration—water moved around and through us at every moment; it leached from our cells; it hung invisibly in front of our eyes. Theoretically, water was inexhaustible, endless, infinitely recycled. The ice in his mother’s freezer was millions of years old. The Egyptian Sphinx was carved from the compressed skeletons of sea animals.

But in graduate school the opportunities to study water, particularly snow, were limited. Professors wanted to teach hydraulics; students wanted curricula with engineering applications. And when he was allowed to study snow it was often in the most mundane ways: stream flow forecasts, precipitation assessments; snow as resource, snow as a reservoir of meltwater.

Winkler was not popular at school. Parties blazed in A-frames set back in the spruce, and couples strolled arm in arm along the boggy paths, and leaves fell, and snow, and rain, and he went on in a state of more or less permanent solitude. He carted around stacks of books; he examined drops of Lake Spenard under a microscope. Water was a sanctuary—not only hot showers or condensation on his window or the sight of Knik Arm on a fall day, but reading about it, collecting it in an eyedropper, freezing it, sublimating it. Two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen—always—at a 104.5 degree angle. The distances between atoms was—always—.095718 of a nanometer. Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere. These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion.

But he sensed, even then, that any real understanding would continue to exist beyond the range of his capacities. The more he studied water, the more he examined snow, the more mystified he became. Ice could be unpredictable and baffling. Unforeseen variables could set the entire hydrological cycle reeling: an unsuspected front, riding an unexpected event (a deep ocean current, a shearing microburst), could transform a clear, blue noon into an afternoon deluge. A predicted blizzard—snowplows rumbling on highway shoulders, workers in roadside salt huts braced over their shovels—did not arrive. Rain threw itself at the windows while the radio burbled out a forecast for sunshine. Scientists had engineered elaborate models, radar, radio beacons—now satellites coasted above the atmosphere, peering in—and still it was nearly impossible to gauge the size and shape of a raindrop. No one knew exactly why an ice crystal bothered with such elaborate geometry; no one knew why liquid water was able to carry so much heat; no calculation was able to account qualitatively for the surface tension on top of a simple puddle.

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.