Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 16

By the harbor, a great work has begun. We of this town already think of ourselves differently. Travelers have started to arrive. They say they left their homeland years ago at the news, and have been on the roads for generations. When it is finished this statue will be a portrait-signature upon an uncertain earth, a letter we few shall leave for the crowded centuries that wait inside the hills. And to think, I know the headman, who used to be the town’s mason. I spoke to him, saw him pass in the street just days ago. He was head-to-toe in flat working gray, and could be missed but for the fiendish cast of his eyes. And who but a mad man could make such a statue? A statue of the town in which we live, exact and equal to an inch, yet formed from the hardest stone and rising up out of the water. Already it looms above the town on great marble stilts. I saw myself walking there, or standing as it were, as I once walked, beside a pond with lilies. He saw me, he must have seen me walking there, where I often walked, by that pond where my daughter was drowned. And yes, in the waters of the marble pond, I see he has etched some impression of a face looking up from the depths. He has peopled the houses with scenes from our lives. He has stretched the avenues, and laid them with old parades and angry, roused evenings. In the center square, on which work has just begun, a man is being lynched. But best of all, at the harbor mouth of the statue town, which will come last, he tells me will be built a marble sea in which we all shall be buried, one by one, as years and hours take our hands.