Читать книгу The Promised Land - Mary Antin - Страница 18

My father and mother could tell me much more that I have forgotten, or that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from those broken recollections only which, recurring to me in after years, filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance. I want to string together those glimpses of my earliest days that dangle in my mind, like little lanterns in the crooked alleys of the past, and show me an elusive little figure that is myself, and yet so much a stranger to me, that I often ask, Can this be I?

I have not much faith in the reality of my first recollection, but as I can never go back over the past without bringing up at last at this sombre little scene, as at a door beyond which I cannot pass, I must put it down for what it is worth in the scheme of my memories. I see, then, an empty, darkened room. In the middle, on the floor, lies a long Shape, covered with some black stuff. There are candles at the head of the Shape. Dim figures are seated low, against the walls, swaying to and fro. No sound is in the room, except a moan or a sigh from the shadowy figures; but a child is walking softly around and around the Shape on the floor, in quiet curiosity.

The Shape is the body of my grandfather laid out for burial. The child is myself—myself asking questions of Death.

I was four years old when my mother's father died. Do I really remember the little scene? Perhaps I heard it described by some fond relative, as I heard other anecdotes of my infancy, and unconsciously incorporated it with my genuine recollections. It is so suitable a scene for a beginning: the darkness, the mystery, the impenetrability. My share in it, too, is characteristic enough, if I really studied that Shape by the lighted candles, as I have always pretended to myself. So often afterwards I find myself forgetting the conventional meanings of things, in some search for a meaning of my own. It is more likely, however, that I took no intellectual interest in my grandfather's remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a First Recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it, to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness. If I really committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs.

The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in which our little self seems lost. Somehow I have failed of this illusion. My grandfather's house, where I was born, stands, in my memory, a small, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys. Such as it was, the house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the street by a board fence, outside which I am sure there was a bench. The gate into the yard swung so high from the ground that four-footed visitors did not have to wait till it was opened. Pigs found their way in, and were shown the way out, under the gate; grunting on their arrival, but squealing on their departure.