Mister God, This is Anna. Papas
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Mister God, This is Anna - Papas страница 8
Название: Mister God, This is Anna
Автор: Papas
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Словари
isbn: 9780007375677
isbn:
Mum always said that she pitied the girl that I married, for she would have to put up with my three mistresses – Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Gadgetry. I would rather read and practise these subjects than eat or sleep. I never bought myself a wrist-watch or a fountain-pen, and very rarely did I buy new clothes, but I never went anywhere without a slide-rule. This device fascinated Anna and soon she had to have a slip-stick of her own. Having mastered the whole business of counting numbers, she was soon extracting roots with the aid of her slip-stick before she could add two numbers together. Users of slip-sticks soon fall into a stable method of using this device. It’s held in the left hand, leaving the right hand free to hold the pencil; the ‘cursor’ can be moved with the thumb and the sliding-scale tapped against the work-bench. One of my particular pleasures was seeing the copper-crowned diminutive child doing her ‘workings out’, as she called it – looking down from a height of six foot or more and saying, ‘How you doing, Tich?’, seeing her head screw round and upward and watching one delicious wiggle start from her toes, pass up her body, to be tossed off the top of her head in a foam of silky copper thread, with a grin of absolute joy.
Some evenings were given over to piano-playing. I play a fairly good honky-tonk piano, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Chopin, and a few pieces like ‘Anitra’s Dance’ just for good measure. On the top of the piano were several electronic devices. One device, the oscilloscope, held all the magic of a fairy wand for Anna. We’d sit in this room for hours on end playing single notes, watching the green spot on the ‘scope do its glowing dance. The whole exercise of relating sounds that one heard with the ears to the visual shape of those sounds actively seen on the little tube’s face was a source of never-ending delight.
What sounds we captured, Anna and I! A caterpillar chewing a leaf was like a hungry lion, a fly in a jam-jar sounded like an airship, a match being struck sounded like an explosion. All these sounds and a thousand more were amplified and made available, both in sound form and visible form. Anna had found a brand new world to explore. How much meaning it had for her I didn’t know, perhaps it was only an elaborate plaything for her, but her squeals of delight were enough for me.
It was only some time during the next summer that I began to realize that the concepts of frequency and wavelength were meaningful to her, that she did, in fact, know and understand what she was hearing and looking at. One summer afternoon all the kids were playing in the street when a large bumble-bee appeared on the scene.
One of the kids said, ‘How many times does it flap its wings in a minute?’
‘Must be millions,’ said another kid.
Anna dashed indoors humming a low-pitched hum. I was sitting on the doorstep. With a few quick prods at the piano she had identified the note, her hum and the drone of the bee. Coming to the door again, she said, ‘Can I have your slip-stick?’ In a moment or two she shouted out, ‘A bee flaps its wings such-and-such times a second.’ Nobody believed her, but she was only a few counts out.
Every sound that could be captured was captured. Meals began to be punctuated with such remarks as, ‘Do you know a mosquito flaps its wings so many times a second? or a fly so many times a second?’
All these games led inevitably to making music. Each separate note had by this time been examined minutely, and a sound depended on how many times it wiggled per second. Soon she was making little melodies to which I added the harmonies. Little pieces of music entitled ‘Mummy’, ‘Mr Jether’s Dance’, and ‘Laughter’ soon began to echo around the house. Anna had begun to compose. I suppose Anna only had one problem in her little life – the lack of hours per day. There was too much to do, too many exciting things to find out.
Another of Anna’s magic carpets was the microscope. It revealed a little world made big. A world of intricate shape and pattern, a world of creatures too small to see with the naked eye; even the very dirt itself was wonderful.
Before all this adventuring into these hidden worlds, Mister God had been Anna’s friend and companion, but now, well this was going a bit too far. If Mister God had done all this, he was something larger than Anna had bargained for. It needed a bit of thinking about. For the next few weeks activity slowed down; she still played with the other children in the street; she was still as sweet and exciting as ever, but she became more inward-looking, more inclined to sit alone, high in the tree in the yard, with only Bossy as her companion. Whichever way she looked there seemed to be more and more of everything.
During these few weeks Anna slowly took stock of all she knew, walking about gently touching things as if looking for some clue that she had missed. She didn’t talk much in this period. In reply to questions she answered as simply as she could, apologizing for her absence by the gentlest of smiles, saying without words, ‘I’m sorry about all this. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve sorted this little puzzle out.’ Finally the whole thing came to a head.
She turned to me. ‘Can I come to bed with you tonight?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Now,’ she replied.
She hopped off my lap, took my hand, and pulled me to the door. I went.
I haven’t told you Anna’s way of solving problems, have I? If Anna was confronted with a situation that didn’t come out easily, there was only one thing to do – take your clothes off. So there we were in bed, the street lamp lighting up the room, her head cupped in her hands, and both elbows firmly planted on my chest. I waited. She chose to remain like that for about ten minutes, getting her argument in its proper order, and then she launched forth.
‘Mister God made everything, didn’t he?’
There was no point in saying that I didn’t really know. I said ‘Yes.’
‘Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?’ The pollywogs were those little creatures that we had seen under the microscope.
I said, ‘Yes, he made everything.’
She nodded her agreement. ‘Does Mister God love us truly?’
‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘Mister God loves everything.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?’ Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question had been thought and it had to be spoken.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There’s a great many things about Mister God that we don’t know about.’
‘Well then,’ she continued, ‘if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?’
I could see that this was going to be one of those times, but thank goodness she didn’t expect an answer to her question for she hurried on: ‘Them pollywogs, I could love them till I bust, but they wouldn’t know, would they? I’m million times bigger than they are and Mister God is million times bigger than me, so how do I know what Mister God does?’
She СКАЧАТЬ