Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan
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Название: Wonders of a Godless World
Автор: Andrew McGahan
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007352654
isbn:
Occasionally exhaustion overcame him and he slept, but the touch of water on his feet would wake him again. A madness of thirst grew in his chest. If only he could reach behind, the water was there! But he was stretched taut. To drink would be to wait until the flood rose to his mouth, and thus to drown. His clothes were gone, he was naked, and the cold was such that even shivering was beyond him now. But still he clawed his way forward. And perhaps even the mountain and the rubble and the river had to admit that there was no crushing his resolve, because finally the stumps of his fingers were clutching open air, and there was no more weight above him.
He crawled forth from the avalanche. The orphan saw that it was night again—although how many nights it had been since the landslide, there was no way to be sure, except that the moon was a different shape now. The villager lay stupefied upon the rubble. It was clear that he had not been buried by the main fall, but merely caught under the apron of the slide. Before him reared a sloping wall of rock and gravel, rising up to nearly fill the valley. And above that, the cloven remains of the mountain itself, a gigantic scoop of pale stone showing fresh on its face.
The man began to climb the wall of debris. It didn’t matter that his ankle was broken and that muscle and bone gleamed where his skin was torn away—he climbed. There was no other sign of life. No searchers, no rescuers. The valley was as cold and deserted as when the orphan had first seen it. The wind muttered the same way, the icy peaks of the mountains frowned unchanged. No one cared that the villager lived, no one saw him creep and drag himself, hour by hour, ever upwards.
It was close to dawn when he reached the landslide’s crest. In the chill light he looked upon the further side. A moan escaped him, the first sound he had made since emerging from the rubble. There was nothing beyond, only the far side of the fall itself, reaching down again to where the river, dammed now, pooled and spread. There were no survivors, no indication that a village had ever stood there. His wife, his unborn child, his friends, his animals—they were all dead.
But he was alive. He had denied the earth.
The villager bared his teeth to the sky. He levered himself upright to see the rising sun, barely recognisable as human, so torn and bloody was he. Not the same man anymore, it seemed to the orphan. He was someone different. Something different. Stripped down to bone and sinew, then fashioned anew.
And so I was born, said the foreigner.
The orphan woke to hands touching her. Fingers. They were exploring her body, probing into all sorts of places, skin upon skin, unhindered by any clothing, as if she was completely naked. In fact, coming more awake, she realised that she was completely naked. And the hands kept pawing at her.
She shrugged angrily and the fingers vanished. Her eyes opened. She was in her own room, in her own bed, under the sheet. She was aware of someone hunched by the bedside, but her gaze, blinking and blurred, was drawn to the window. Sky was visible through the glass. Blue, clear of ash or clouds. It felt like early morning, but that didn’t make any sense. Had the day gone backwards?
There was movement at the door, a shape appearing. Her vision clarified. It was the old doctor. He bent over the bed, examining her. The truth came gradually—she must have been asleep a whole day and night. Was she hurt? She blinked again, turned her head, and saw the night nurse sitting in the chair by her pillow. He had been there all along, she supposed. And then she remembered—those roving hands…
Ha! She was quite awake now, and fixed the night nurse with a stare. His watery eyes shied away, but his hands curled reflexively in his lap. She had never really looked at his hands before. The fingers were long and thin and grubby.
The orphan felt her skin twitch.
Then the old doctor was speaking to her, and she had to concentrate, because she found it unusually hard to understand him, as if her skull was especially dense today. But she gathered that she wasn’t hurt. He was telling her not to worry, that she had merely fainted during the fuss with the volcano. He thought it was because of all the ash in the air. But it was over now and there was no reason to be afraid.
The orphan wanted to protest. She had never been afraid, let alone afraid enough to do something so silly as faint. But now that she tried, she couldn’t really recall exactly what had happened. The mountain had farted, and there were billowing clouds, and people had run away, and then she had turned and seen…
Seen what?
The doctor was talking again, but the orphan couldn’t focus and didn’t understand him. Then, with a last smile, he was gone. The night nurse slouched out too—how ugly he was in the daylight—and she was alone.
She stared at the ceiling, not sure what to do. If she was fine, then she should get up. But she felt drained and sore, and her room lulled her with its comforts. She was very fond of her room. It was in a little hut, off on its own behind the kitchen block. It was actually just an old storeroom, but it had a door that she could lock, and a window, and a cupboard, and a mirror on the wall. And there was a socket into which she could plug her radio—the only object she had inherited from her mother. She liked to listen to it at night, even if the noises it made were meaningless.
She flicked the switch on the radio now, but nothing happened. There was no power. The volcano must have damaged the lines. The orphan sighed, stretched her limbs, and rolled over to peer at the floor. Her clothes were strewn across the concrete. Whoever had undressed her hadn’t bothered to fold them or hang them over the chair. She felt sure it must have been the night nurse. She imagined his long fingers tugging at her underwear. Anything could have happened. A whole day and night were lost to her, and there seemed no way to get any of it back.
Except—there was somewhere…a stony place…cold…
The memory wouldn’t come.
Nor would sleep, no matter how drowsy she felt. The orphan climbed out of bed. Arms stiff, she pulled on her clothes and then went out to her front step, into the sunshine. And stopped short, amazed at what she saw.
Ash. It was everywhere, smothering the jungle, the grounds, the hospital buildings. She remembered the cloud rolling down the mountainside, and then white flakes falling from the sky, mixing with rain and turning into mud. Now everything was blanketed in a thin, gritty layer of the stuff, deadening to sight and sound, and a deep silence had settled upon the world, a hush after the great event.
Presiding over it all was the volcano. The orphan gazed at the rocky profile of the peak. Was the mountain different now? Was it fractured slightly, and slumped in on itself? Empty, that’s how it looked. The fires below had gone out. And there were no vibrations anymore, humming under her feet.
Even so, something about the volcano disturbed her. She imagined the upper cliffs bulging forward and overbalancing and toppling down. It was almost like something she had already seen. And again she seemed to remember a biting coldness, and a grey landscape around her, not of ash, but of rock and ice…
A dream? Perhaps. She felt half in a dream even now, her head thick. She stepped out into the ash, and heard it crunch underfoot, a distinct sound in the quiet. She walked around the edge of the kitchen block. A few СКАЧАТЬ