Читать книгу Justine - Iben Mondrup - Страница 8

Water has scattered the pebbles. It flows out of the yard and turns into mud. There are trenches where cars scraped lines in the puddles. Grandpa’s gate is gone. I can walk right in. It crunches, I scrape the surface with my foot. Bitter is how it smells. Small is what it’s become. Flat under the open sky. In the kitchen, pipes stick out of the earth. The sink hangs counterless. My armoire is gone, yes, gone plain and simple. Grandpa’s armchair is just a jumble of springs. Plastic glasses are black clumps. No walls, and the worskshop roof is still on the lawn. The workshop itself, and everything it held, is gone. No walls prop up no works among shards of pots and glass, wood, paper, leather, brushes, sketches, cloth, and there’s the nail gun in a mess of rock wool. The neighbor’s tin shed has acquired a black façade and a fig bush with the fruit dripping syrup.

Now Bent Launis comes.

“It’s just awful. And all your things,” he says.

He looks like he’s about to . . . no, Bent, don’t cry.

“And your grandfather . . . it was one of the society’s finest houses,” he says.

I see the house as he sees it, an afterimage between us. In the absence of red, it looks green, almost turquoise.

“Of course we’d all like to see the house rebuilt. It was one of our gems. You’ve got insurance, right?” he says.

“Just stop,” I say. “Just stop. Don’t you see it’s all red and burnt? I’ve got blisters on my hands—they burned inside, you know.”

I hear myself shouting, and I hold my hands out to him. Bent takes them and says:

“Well, for a start let’s go and put something cold on them.”

He opens the door and pulls me inside.

“Sit down there,” he says and wraps, wraps, wraps, and cools.

“What were you just talking about?” he asks. “What did you say? There wasn’t anyone in the house? Oh hell, there wasn’t anyone, was there, Justine?”

“No, no, no,” I say. “Who said that?”

“Well, you did.”

And then he wraps some more and nods.