Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 19

There was once in Bao Suk, at the end of a certain unmentionable dynasty, a seamstress living and working in a shop near the gates of the city. Her daughters were lovely and useless, but would serve to wear the clothing that she made, that it might be seen and sold to any who passed by. Her fame had grown over the course of a difficult life, difficult not by any curse of fortune, for indeed, her star had always risen, but difficult because her wishes were not the wishes of her fellow men and women, her ambitions were couched in an obscure turn of thought. As a child she had wandered far and wide with her old father through the mountain range which girdled that ancient piece of land. Of it no good can be said, and even in our modern times, the most scientific of men avoid the treacheries and infidelities of those nameless peaks. In her eighth year, on one such sojourn, she left her father sleeping, and went alone into places even he, faultless and intrepid man that he was, would not go. There she was told the things that she must do. There was given into her keeping the deep heart of her life which would eclipse all things and which in time would itself be eclipsed by a successive and deeper darkness.

Nightfall. An old man is leading a donkey through the city gates. He has come far, from So Lu Chen, and, eager to find a bed, he takes the first turning and passes before the seamstress’s shop where she is seated in the window, addressing herself to first this silk now that, first this thread now that. He stands, transfixed, as a gown takes form beneath her hands that run like water across the supple cloth. All the light in the world issues from a candle in a nearby window. As it gutters and the last light is cast off it like a cloak, the gown lies finished and laid across the arm of a mannequin. The seamstress’s shop is empty. Even the street is empty. The man has moved deeper into Bao Suk, and his donkey trails after him, insensible to the wonders of caprice and adornment.