Читать книгу A Threefold Cord - Howard Goldenberg - Страница 20

Chapter Fifteen

Nystagmus took the knife that Yaya gave him. He wore onion goggles to protect his eyes; he didn’t want to cry. This wasn’t a meeting of the Threefold Cord. This was onion peeling, onion slicing and onion chopping for the shop. This was serious, a grown-up job with a grown-up knife.

Nystagmus concentrated hard. He held the large heavy knife very carefully. Papou had just sharpened the knife on the stone as he did every morning. Papou said a nearly sharp knife was more dangerous than a very sharp one. This one was very sharp. Papou showed him how easily it passed through the flesh of a great fish: “Such a knife can pass through the flesh of a small child, my boy.”

Papou had taught Nystagmus the Three Rules of the Knife:

ONE:	Never walk with the blade pointed upwards – you could trip and stab yourself – or someone else.
TWO:	Only hold the knife when you are using it; it’s a tool. You only hold a tool to use it. Then you put it down.
THREE:	Never hold the knife while you are talking – in case you poke your own eye out.

Papou had lots of terrible stories of people he knew who broke the Three Rules. One got stabbed, one got cut and one – his cousin Aristophanes, whom he called Cyclops – had poked his own eye out while he talked with his hands and waved the knife around at a barbecue.

Carefully, Nystagmus peeled away the brown skin from the onion. He placed the onion on the old timber board that had seen so many onions and had wept as they passed.

Nystagmus held the onion with his left hand, pressing it downward so it wouldn’t slip while his knife hand did the slicing. The slices fell one after another like wet white dominoes. Nystagmus saw them fall, side by side into a tidy heap and he felt a bit proud. He kept cutting, a happy cutter with a grown-up knife, doing a grown-up job. He took no notice of the two people who came into the shop asking for fish, chips and fried onion rings.

When he heard the words “onion rings”, Nystagmus knew he’d be busy slicing for quite a while. He took another onion, peeled it, and sliced. He took a third, peeled, sliced, then took a fourth. The adult customer sneezed. Nystagmus said: “Bless you” and looked up. He looked up and up. He looked up at a tall person dressed all in black, a person wearing a black cape, a large floppy black hat – and no sunglasses. The glasses were in the customer’s hand. The other hand rubbed the customer’s eyes that were full of tears. The hands were white, whiter than Nystagmus’ onion slices. And the eyes! They were unlike any eyes the onion-slicing boy had ever seen: in place of the coloured circle in the centre of the eye, there was a pale purple ring. Otherwise, the eyes were as colourless as the hands. Those strange eyes were blinded at the moment, blinded by tears from Nystagmus’s onions.

The boy looked away, placed his knife down carefully, and said: “Excuse me,” and turned to leave. He said something about going to the toilet and walked fast to the back of the shop. But as he turned he noticed two more things – the eyebrows of the tall person were like snowbrows, and the second person in the shop was a small boy. He recognised that boy.

(Who is the little boy in the fish shop? Has the boy recognised Nystagmus?

Does Nystagmus really and truly need to go to the toilet?

(THE THREE RULES OF KNIVES ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU WILL READ IN THIS BOOK.)