Читать книгу Mr Thundermug - Cornelius Medvei - Страница 6

THIS IS A GREAT CITY, but it was once even greater. Its ancient walls are evidence of this: a massive sinuous rampart, each of its million bricks stamped with the name of its donor. Even today the confusion of shops and shacks and tower blocks and temples and electric cables that is the modern city scarcely spreads beyond the line of the old walls. In some places it has even withdrawn. On the road out of town you might pass through suburban districts of houses, or even through open fields; then suddenly one of the great gates looms up at the end of a street, or you turn in under the shadow of the wall itself – only then do you realize that you have still not crossed the limits of the old city.

The city stands on the bank of a great river, which flows down through the whole country. Its upper reaches are famous for the beauty of their scenery, for foaming torrents plunging through narrow gorges, but here the river is too wide to be lovely A bend in its course brings it in directly under the city walls. The narrow strip of land between the walls and the bank is crowded with warehouses, wharves and jetties.

On the other side of the city a mountain rises sharply from the foot of the walls. It is covered with beech and chestnut woods, and considered to be at its most beautiful in autumn, when the red and yellow leaves on its slopes are visible, like a conflagration, from every quarter of the city.

Despite its fortifications, the city has been fired, flooded, sacked and looted many times in its history, and the great walls enclose a perplexing jumble of buildings: cracked flyovers carrying traffic above ancient shrines, air-raid shelters converted into shopping centres, glassy skyscrapers growing out of the rubble of entire districts of flattened houses, unhampered by planning regulations. Within the walls, virtually the only piece of the old fabric that remains intact is the crisscross network of its streets, the straight avenues that run for miles between the gates. These avenues are lined with spreading plane trees whose branches meet across the road. In summer, when the trees are in leaf, it is quite dark underneath, so that in a car you have the curious sensation of driving under water.

The sections between the main streets are crammed with houses and shacks in various stages of disintegration, and riddled with narrow lanes that wind in every direction. To venture down one of these lanes is to join an unending stream of traffic, taxis and bicycles and pedestrians, negotiating your way past a succession of obstacles: past makeshift food stalls, card players at tables on the pavement, old women dozing in chairs, and through the milling crowds of spectators that gather round them. It is easy to get lost here: the lanes and junctions are like so many miles of tangled knitting, and all jammed with the same obstructions, swarming with the same crowds and decorated with the same embellishments of plant-pots and slop-buckets, open manholes, trailing vines and telephone cables.

Down one of these lanes that run crazily between the houses, in front of a heavy wooden door decorated with carvings of flowers, ridged and pitted and shiny with age, a monkey sits on the worn stone step. Beside him is a small pile of melon seeds, which he is cracking one by one between his teeth. The ground at his feet is littered with shells. He has the same air of absorption in his task as the stallholders frying dumplings or the gangs of card players. Leaning back against the door, he glances up occasionally at the stream of passers-by, but they pay no attention to him. An interested person could easily identify him as a baboon from his mane and the shape of his head, although he is unusually big for a baboon.

His heavy, chiselled face is rather like that of the stylized beasts carved in stone that guard so many doorways in this city; perhaps that is why no one pays him any attention. His long dog's muzzle and whiskery cheeks recall those dark portraits of Victorian grandees with their lugubrious expressions and mutton-chop whiskers.

This is his portrait: his head and shoulders are draped in a mane of thick hair that covers his upper body like a cape, the kind worn by a cyclist in the rain, or by Sherlock Holmes. He has small dark eyes set together under a battering-ram forehead, which gives him an intense, concentrated expression, as if he is grappling with some philosophical problem. Powerful jaws open to reveal a set of surprisingly small teeth, and no lips. On the side of his head turned towards us, half covered by the hair, is an ear shaped like a human's, but far more mobile.

Below the mane his belly and back legs taper away, so that he seems top heavy. His tail is slightly ridiculous: rounded like a piece of rope, with a thick tuft of hair at the end, it sticks up out of the small of his back, revealing his brick-red backside. Between the scrawny legs his thin pink willy hangs down like a hand-grip on an underground train. His paws are perhaps the most remarkable feature of all – almost human hands in miniature, with four delicate fingers and a thumb; but the fat, padded palms with their deep wrinkles and the thick hairs that cover even the backs of the fingers can only be those of an animal.

He cracks another melon seed between his teeth and spits out the shell. Across the lane a little boy, whose mother is buying dumplings at one of the stalls, stares at him. The baboon bares his teeth. ‘What are you looking at?’ he growls. The little boy continues to stare in fascination. The baboon sighs, cracks another melon seed and begins to scratch his balls.