Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 13

You have been betrayed. Yes, it’s true. It’s early September in the city where you live and someone has spoken to the authorities. Even now, the chief of police is sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk in the vast ministry, waiting for you to be brought in. All across the city, squads of officers are preparing themselves. Likenesses of your face are being handed out.

It’s true you meant no harm. Also true: there’s no way anyone could know. And yet the real truth remains: someone has given you up. Soon there will be boot-steps on the stairs, a loud knocking at the door. Soon you will be spoken to repeatedly in a loud voice, tied and carried under a policeman’s arm like a parcel to a waiting car.

If only you could make it into the next apartment and beg your life of the widow who lives there, she would hide you, and then how happily and well you would live. But even to stir from your chair is impossible. For the book of your acquaintance has closed on this hundred-hundredth day, and limp clouds are straggling like children across the windowpane. There is no hope. You have been betrayed and the wild exodus of fate from the fated is never-begun and alwaysfinished. The sounds from the street are maddeningly normal. Also, it’s hotter than you like, and you are wearing far too many clothes. As if a bird told a bird a bird’s judgment, the day itself has announced its coming in yellow colors and vague shapes just beyond the edge of sight.