Sleet. Stig Dagerman
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Название: Sleet

Автор: Stig Dagerman

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Контркультура

Серия:

isbn: 9781567925135

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СКАЧАТЬ night the relatives arrived in cars from Uppsala and Gävle. The farmers who lived a long ways off came in yellow horse-drawn wagons. The bank clerk came and the store manager came, and in a short time the house was filled with laughter, talk, and the smell of food. Håkan stayed out in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and drying glasses. His mother ran between the living room and the kitchen with warm food and china. At one point, the store manager made a speech which tempted them out of the kitchen. They stood in the doorway, listening and watching. The store manager was already a little drunk and his voice seemed to lose itself in his throat. With a little trouble he pulled out a gold pocket watch from his vest pocket and presented it to the septuagenarian. Håkan’s grandfather wept in silence, a few small tears dropping stealthily into his brandy snifter. Next one of the tenant farmers talked, and then the bank clerk and the relatives from Uppsala and Gävle. Håkan’s mother nudged him in the side suggestively; soon it would be their turn.

      The store manager had brought along a phonograph. It was sitting on the dresser next to the radio. Without drawing any attention to himself, Håkan smuggled the record over there. When they met in the dark, empty hallway, his mother whispered to him.

      “Wait till after the coffee,” she said. “I’ll give you a nod.”

      They drank their coffee with brandy, and spirits were high. Håkan’s mother cleared the table while he walked around the living room, passing out cigars and cigarettes. When he saw his mother step into the doorway a couple minutes later, Håkan caught the look in her eyes and made his way carefully over to the dresser. Meanwhile, his aunt was busy setting up the card table. The bank clerk, the store manager, and the organist dragged their chairs to the green card table and sat down. Håkan began to wind up the phonograph. The bank clerk dealt. Håkan’s mother nodded to him from the doorway. The four players picked up their cards, their faces glowing from liquor and laughter. Håkan’s grandfather was dealt a possible straight flush in spades, and he had the first bid. He was so beside himself with excitement that he dropped his cigar on the floor. Then he heard the radio come on, loud and irritating, from the corner of the room. It sounded like a lecture. He whirled around on Håkan.

      “Will you turn that goddamn thing off!” he screamed. “…Two spades.”

      Håkan turned it off. It no doubt put a big scratch in the record, but that made no difference. The pain ran through him, cold as an eel. A fine mist settled over his eyes and the red drunken faces in the room took on a dull metallic cast. Someone from Uppsala or Gävle laughed. And it was that laugh which drove him from the room, out through the hallway and into the darkness of the small back room. He came to a stop in the middle of the room with the record still in his hands. And it seemed to grow and grow, until at last it was as heavy as his own life. The door creaked open, and from the stream of light his mother stepped quietly towards him. He slipped into her arms with his pain, and her warm wet whispers caressed his cheek.

      “Don’t cry, my boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you cry.”

      But she herself was shaking and in tears.

      Sleet

      No, there will never be another afternoon like this. It simply couldn’t happen. Because it’s only once in the world that you’re nine years old, chopping the heads off carrots with your new Mora knife, having sleet in the middle of October, and with an aunt – or should I say your mother’s aunt – coming from America at seven-thirty. So here we are, sitting in the barn, cutting the tops off big muddy carrots. If you want to, it’s easy to pretend other things, like how it’s not really carrots that are losing their heads, but something totally different, like kids at school that you don’t like, or even vicious animals. Most of the time we don’t talk. We just cut, the green tops tumbling down between our feet, the headless carrots tossed out in long looping arcs to disappear in the bushel basket.

      It smells good from all the freshly dug carrots. The tops are wet and when you get really dirty you can even wash yourself with them. Just like what Alvar does to Sigrid when she’s not watching out – how he jumps up from the upside-down pail, grabs her around the neck and rubs her face with the wet carrot tops till she screams and laughs. But this just makes Grampa lose his temper and start pointing his finger at Mama, who’s sitting next to me on the stool that Alvar uses when he shoes the horses.

      “You keep an eye on little brother there …,” he says. “And make sure he don’t try no funny stuff with the girl.”

      This makes Sigrid’s face flush red. But Mama, she doesn’t answer Grampa. Nobody answers him most of the time. Maybe because he’s so old. I’m just about the only one that ever does. And then all he does is holler at me. But Mama, she always sticks up for me.

      Alvar’s sitting back down on the pail again.

      “You just set there on the cutter and mind your own business,” he says to Grampa. “You mind yours and I’ll mind mine.”

      Nobody dares to look right now, because sometimes Grampa gets so mad that his face turns beet-red. And that’s when he knocks over his chair and all the other chairs in the kitchen. That’s when he yanks his work shirt down from the hook, throws it to the floor, and starts stomping up and down on it. You only dare to look a little bit. But this time there isn’t much to see, except of course that Grampa’s sitting there on the chaff-cutter. “Why can’t you just sit on a pail like the rest of us,” Alvar said to him when we were getting ready to chop. But Grampa said if he couldn’t sit on the chaff-cutter, then we could go ahead and do it without him. So Mama and Alvar helped him up onto the machine. Sigrid was laughing so hard she had to run into one of the stalls and shut the door behind her. And Mama got mad, because she doesn’t like it when Sigrid laughs at Grampa, and she started scolding him about walking around and making a damn fool of himself in front of other people with his ridiculous carrying-on. But Grampa, he just shrugged and said if he couldn’t sit there on the chaff-cutter, then we could do it without him, and that’s all there was to it.

      So that’s where he is now, sitting on the chaff-cutter, after all that fuss. Alvar went and dumped a whole bunch of carrots into the shoot and put a pail underneath so all Grampa has to do is drop the headless carrots into it. But Grampa, he almost never hits the pail. He almost always drops them right beside it. Just like when he eats. Mama’s forever laying into him about that.

      “You could at least stop spilling it all over yourself!” she says. “Maybe we should buy you a bib.”

      At times like this it’s hard to keep from laughing, but if you laugh you’ve got to leave the table. So it’s not easy. The worst is when we eat oatmeal, because the oatmeal gets stuck in his beard and then it’s pretty much hopeless trying to get it out, says Mama. It sets just like cement.

      But sometimes Grampa grins at the supper table and tells Mama how she ought to be thankful she’s even got a father.

      “It’s not every child that’s got one,” he says, grinning at me. “Is it?”

      And then Mama jumps up so quick that her chair hits the floor with a bang, and she runs into the bedroom and bolts the door. At times like this it’s impossible to do anything with her.

      It’s nice to sit out here in the stable. The pile of carrot tops is growing and growing. Rain fingers the roof’s shingles, and Sigrid says how it sounds so homelike.

      “Yeah, if we only had a home,” says Mama. “Then it sure would be real homelike.”

      The cat is jumping around up in the hayloft. All of a sudden he comes ripping down. He crawls into the СКАЧАТЬ