Читать книгу Uncle Rudolf - Paul Bailey - Страница 6

I woke up yesterday morning with the old words on my tongue. There they were again, for the third time this year. In those first moments of consciousness, I could hear myself talking of blood and snow and storks on chimney tops in the language I put behind me. The disconnected phrases made no sense at all, but I understood their meaning.

—Shut up, I said aloud, in English. Go back where you belong.

Where do they belong? In my earliest childhood, I suppose, when I had a mother and a father. I spoke them as a little boy, whose name was Andrei, in the country I left at the age of seven. I babbled them, rather, the way children babble. Yes, I have a memory of babbling about the snow as it fell and then settled, turning – I imagined – the whole world white.

—There is no snow in India and Africa, my father corrected me. Except high up on the mountains. The Indians and Africans who live on the ground never see it.

I was sorry for the Indians and Africans who lived on the ground, because I loved to watch the snowflakes falling from heaven, making that beautiful carpet.