Читать книгу Uncle Rudolf - Paul Bailey - Страница 12

Muraturi was the old word on my lips this morning. Why was I thinking of pickled vegetables – of cauliflower and carrots; of green and red peppers; of radishes and red cabbage? I hadn’t eaten the dish in a lifetime, not since…and then, with an involuntary cry of anguish, I pictured a lake, and clear blue sky, and saw my mother and me tickling my father, who is pretending to be asleep on the grass. The vegetables are glistening on little plates on that summer afternoon in 1936.

Why has this scene – of the kind so many English poets call sylvan – never come to me in dreams?

—I will have my revenge, you scamp, says my father, waking with a start, as if from a nightmare.

His revenge, his sweet revenge, is to tickle his son’s tummy, until the happy boy is weak with giggling.