Читать книгу Heart of Atlantis - Группа авторов - Страница 2

He was eating corn pones while Kayumba was watching him perplexedly. She could hardly control herself. It must have seemed to him from the outside that she, a daughter of Atlantis, did not know what it was to cry, to be lost in doubts! Did he want to be reputed to be a hero? And what about her?

“No, I’m incapable of feats either for the sake of duty or glory”, she touched his hair, “My happiness is here. Here it is, in my palm. I just want to live – quietly, peacefully, calmly. I’m tired of being afraid. And I don’t want to hear anything else about war, death, stone-mortars and barbarian customs. I feel frightened. Protect me!”

Umanga just stubbornly shook his head in silence. He didn’t want to hear anything. If his were free at that moment, he would stop up his ears. Kayumba flared up.

“I don’t understand why you, a son of the chief, should be sacrificed! Who will stay alive if the best among the best perish like that, pointlessly? Cowards, punks? You are among strangers, Umanga. I’m your house, your home, your abode. Wake! You have been betrayed! You are being killed! Not like a hero but like a victim!”

She imagined what it would be like if … She stayed alone. Everything would lose its meaning. In the moonlight his hair was streaked with the gold of meadows reminding of fields sown with wheat. The corn smell was so homely … Umanga was so close. She wanted to welcome every morning with him. To mix up days looking into his brave, lively eyes. To make pones, to cook soup, to make the bed, to drink every instant, to catch every glance, to feel every sigh. He was so close and so far.

“You are saying the wrong thing, the wrong…” responded the youth and looked into Kayumba’s eyes with a long penetrating, clever and commanding look.

“I love you.”

“The wrong thing…”

“Let’s flee, Umanga! Let’s flee.”

“It’s wrong… It’s absolutely wrong!”

He moved awkwardly as if he wanted to dismiss something irrelevant.

“I will not just step into the precipice, I will accomplish a feat in the name of those who have a sixth feeling, whose heart has bled out, whose mouth has dried up from hollow words and false promises. In the name of those who want to win this war! I am foreordained to revive. To revive out of emptiness if I do THAT! There is no light in the escape for me. What’s the point of living in the platitude after that?”

There came a long silence. She felt herself perishing under the heaviness of his look, so strange and cold. Then something incredible happened. All her hopes, all her joy, all her childlike touching dreams seemed to flow out of her. They flowed out and sank into the clay of this damp pit. Her hands weakened. Kayumba gave in.

“What else can I do for you?”

“That’s it. I knew you would understand me. I believed that. You will leave in the morning and will cut the liana so that it wouldn’t occur to anybody to save me. And to prevent anybody from thinking that I wanted to flee. I’m not a coward!”

“Leave you? I can’t!”

“You can. You must. And not only for my sake. Not only for our sake. In the very heart of Atlantis there is a secret passage where you will take the tribe in case of danger.”

“Why me?”

“Because you will be the only person to know how to find the way there. I know a secret, listen to me…”

… They talked long. The words interlaced like branches in a thick forest. It was impossible to untwine them, to unfasten, to separate them with one’s hands. Snatches of phrases jumbled together clutching at one another with their curves. The midnight sounds echoing the young Atlantes soared upwards into the sky and then fell with yellow leaves into the dark night. And music was born carrying their non-childish dreams into the world of semireality, into semidreamland.