Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 26

All the letters were dated, either with the date the letter was sent, or with the date it was received. They went into a series of cabinets built expressly for that purpose and set against a low wall behind which at certain hours of the day, one might see the sun setting. The letters were written in a bent scrawl which somehow managed to be perfectly legible. From a distance it almost looked like Arabic or Sinhalese. Up close, it was all too clear. One couldn’t begin reading the letters, because if one did, hours would pass and one would have accomplished none of the tasks that had been set. Oh, it was all too easy to spend the day rummaging and filing, all night reading and rejoicing. For in these letters, these peculiar letters of a most unpublic, unadmired man, were hidden tortuous machinations and intricate apparatuses of invention. Of course, the difficulty lay not in setting the letters in order, for they were already in order, but in putting them out of order. For the man had employed us specifically for that purpose. He wanted no letters of similar subject to remain beside one another. He wanted no date congruent, no place-name beside itself. For physicians had told him he would die on the eighth day of the third month of his sixtieth year and towards that day he was preparing a scheme of complication that his legacy might be a lure to fortune seekers and puzzle solvers. He was not known as an author, yet in his letters were hidden many novels of curious scholarship. He was not known as a scientist, yet in his letters he had concealed equations and documented experiments which would revolutionize many sectors of our uniformed existence. Not a banker, nor an economist, he nonetheless knew the hermetics of currency. Not a statesman nor a saint, he nonetheless made speeches (gone unheard) that gave to the human soul the dignity it lacks. He was not a baker or an engineer, yet he devised ovens which would bake as no oven ever had, and breads that might be baked within such an oven, breads the likes of which you have never tasted.

And perhaps you never will, for my friends and I, we are a wily bunch, and we have had years with which to tortuate our master’s genius. And all the years we have been spoiling and hiding, concocting and puzzling. In his maze of letters there will seem little to be found, though truly, as I have said, there is little in fact that might not be found in this seething bath, this system of letters that will be alluded to in the final sentence of the final article of an interminable and indiscriminate will.