Читать книгу Milky Way Railroad - Kenji Miyazawa - Страница 6

The Print Shop

As he went out the schoolhouse gate, Giovanni found seven or eight of his classmates who, instead of going home, had gathered around Campanella by the cherry tree in the corner of the school garden. They seemed to be talking about going to get the gourds which, hollowed out and fitted with candles, would be sailed down the river as part of tonight’s Milky Way Festival.

But Giovanni, with a broad wave of his hand, hurried by and went on out the school gate. Each house he passed in the town had made various preparations for the festival—wreaths of yew leaves were hung out, and the branches of the cypress trees were strung with lights. Giovanni did not go straight home. Instead, he turned three corners and, removing his shoes, went into a spacious room where, although it was still day, the lights were on and a great number of rotary presses were churning and clanging away. Men with bands of cloth and eyeshades fitted around their heads were hard at work reading and counting in singsong voices.

Giovanni went straight to the man sitting at the third table from the front and bowed respectfully. “That’s all we can pick up, is it?” said the man, after searching the shelves of type for awhile. He pushed a page of manuscript over to Giovanni. Taking a small flat box from under the table, Giovanni went over to the brightly lit area where racks of type were lined against the wall and began to pluck out the required bits of grainlike type, one by one, with a small pair of tweezers.

The place where giovanni was rushing so eagerly was a little house on a side street.

“Hey, Bug-eyes! How’re you doing?” called a man wearing a blue vest as he passed behind Giovanni. Four or five men working nearby laughed mockingly, but did not turn around. Giovanni had to wipe his eyes often as he laboriously picked out the type, and finally, a little after six o’clock, he took the flat box, now full of the type he had compared with the manuscript, and brought it back to the man at the table. The man took the box without speaking and nodded slightly.

Giovanni bowed as he went out through the door and stopped at the accountant’s desk. There a man dressed in white silently handed over a small silver coin to him. Giovanni’s face suddenly brightened and, in high spirits, he took his bag of schoolbooks from the place where he had left it and went running out of the print shop. Whistling vigorously, he stopped at the bakery to buy a loaf of bread and a bag of sugar cubes before racing on at full speed.