Читать книгу The Snow Queen - Michael Cunningham - Страница 16

Beth is looking for something.

The trouble: She can’t seem to remember what it is.

She knows this much: She’s been careless, she’s misplaced … what? Something that matters, something that must be found, because … it’s needed. Because she’ll be held accountable when its absence is noticed.

She’s searching a house, although she’s not sure if it (what?) is here. It seems possible. Because she’s been in this house before. She recognizes it, or remembers it, in the way she remembers the houses of her childhood. The house multiplies into the houses in which she lived, variously, until she went away to college. There’s the gray-and-white-striped wallpaper of the house in Evanston, the French doors from Winnetka (were they really this narrow?), the crown molding from the second house in Winnetka (was it wound in these white plaster leaves, was there this suggestion of wise but astonished eyes, peering through the leaves?).

They’ll be back soon. Somebody will be back soon. Someone stern. The harder Beth searches, though, the less sense she has of what it is she’s lost. It’s small, isn’t it? Spherical? Is it too small to be visible? It might be. But that doesn’t alter the urgency of its discovery.

She’s the girl in the fairy tale, told to turn snow into gold by morning.

She can’t do that, of course she can’t, but there seems to be snow everywhere, it’s falling from the ceiling, snowdrifts shimmer in the corners. She remembers dreaming about searching through a house, when what she needs to do is turn snow into gold, how could she have forgotten …

She looks down at her feet. Although the floor is dusted with snow, she can see that she’s standing on a door, a trapdoor, contiguous with the floorboards, made apparent only by its pair of brass hinges and its tiny brass knob, no bigger than a gumball.

Her mother gives her a penny for a gumball machine outside the A&P. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother that one of the gumballs is poisoned, no one should put a penny into this machine, but her mother is so delighted by Beth’s delight, she’s got to put the penny in, hasn’t she?

There’s a trapdoor at her feet, in the sidewalk in front of the A&P. It’s snowing here, too.

Her mother urges her to put the penny into the slot. Beth can hear laughter, coming from underneath the door.

An annihilating force, a swirling orb of malevolence, is what’s laughing under the trapdoor. Beth knows this to be true. Is the door beginning, ever so slowly, to open?

She’s holding the penny. Her mother says, “Put it in.” It comes to her that the penny is what she thought she was searching for. She seems to have found it, by accident.