Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 31

Inside the hospital there were several villages. I lived in the first, in a small cottage with my sister. We were not allowed to go to the other villages, nor were they allowed to come to us. But news was always circulating regarding the escape of a villager from one place or another.

How long had we lived in the village? This was a question I posed constantly to my sister. We would sit, glazed eyes mimicking glazed eyes, and mouth answers which we dared not speak. When we had first arrived, my sister insisted on saying we had lived there always. Now that we had lived there always, she insisted on saying that we had just arrived. Her skinny arms hung off the sides of her stiff wooden chair, which she kept trying to rock as if it was a rocker. The artist who had drawn her face must have watered down his ink fearing he would run out, for her features were indistinct—almost absent. She would only wear the one color, a pale yellow, and she thought herself a great beauty, though she had never told anyone this. She was always tempting me, slipping into my bed halfway through the night, or groveling at my feet.

The rest of the villagers hated us. They felt we were newcomers and should be hurt at every opportunity. But we had been there longer than anyone, and refused to allow their tawdry claims. After I put a fellow through a plate-glass window, they left me alone. But my sister was too delicate. I’d find her, huddled somewhere, bruised and crying, her yellow clothes torn. Once, I saw her running naked along the riverbank, chased by four old women. Together we drowned them, and used their clothing for scarecrows in our yard.

Always of an evening, my sister would be tapping at the glass with her fingertips, as I sat composing elaborate logical proofs that might one day prove there were no other villages but ours. I suppose she meant the same by her tapping as I did by my proving. Once, she turned to me, face filthy from contact with our matted floor, and said, “Of all the villages, ours is the most easily understood. Each successive village is less believable. Each is worse. Even so much as a thought arrived at bravely can mean your expulsion from one place, your inclusion in another.”

“But what,” I asked her, “did we think of, to bring us here?”

“Brother of mine, we looked in every cabinet and under every tree for the way back to an earlier village. But with each passage we fall faster.”

With that she removed her dress and began to rub herself against the curtain. Then I realized, the tapping was continuing, but she was not tapping. Looking up, first at this window, then at that, I saw that behind every pane of glass there was an uglier and more spiteful face, beneath which gripped and ungripped, tapped and tapped and tapped again, the many fingers of a great and angry crowd.