The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ exhaled in a long, slow whistle. “The laymen aren’t supposed to smoke any, but they do. I’ll let them get away with it, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. Catch one occasionally and make an example. See, they think this stuff gives them knowledge. Actually, it doesn’t even get you doped up.” Charles took another hit. “Besides,” he said with a smile, “it suits me if they keep looking for knowing with smoke.”

      “So you have them growing weeds instead of crops they could eat.”

      Charles rolled his eyes. “Let’s not talk about agriculture. I like you better as the voice of the free world than as an anthropologist. So,” said Charles, leaning back with an imperial air, “did Franklin D. string our boy Adolf from the top of the Washington Monument?”

      “Roosevelt is dead. Hitler killed himself. —This is like Reader’s Digest Condensed World Wars,” said Gray with frustration.

      “Go on.”

      Gray decided to save the atomic bomb for later.

      Then she realized she could leave it out altogether if she felt like it. She could even have told Charles that Hitler now ruled Eurasia, the United States, and South America, and then this would be the truth in Toroto. It was a curious little moment of power.

      “A number of Nazis are on trial right now in Nuremberg for war crimes,” she continued, thinking it was a little late in the day for inventing a whole new ending to an awfully big story.

      “On trial?”

      “Why not?”

      “Seems pretty feeble is all. Why not shoot the guys and be done with it?”

      “Out of respect for legal process. To reinstitute order.”

      “Come on. Laws are just to give you an excuse for shooting somebody when you were going to shoot them anyway.”

      “That’s ridiculous,” said Gray.

      “Nope. I know about laws. I make them.”

      “Is there anything you don’t know about?”

      “Not that I know about.” He added, “Except. I don’t know about you.”

      Whenever he turned the conversation to her, Gray got inexplicably nervous. They sat in silence again.

      “Hitler—” she ventured.

      “Hmm?”

      “He killed six million Jews.”

      Charles looked up. “No shit,” he said noncommittally.

      “Not in battles. In factories.”

      “Huh,” said Charles.

      Gray watched his face. “What do you think of that project?”

      “Well,” said Charles, snuffing out his cigarette on the arm of his chair. “Seems like a real—waste of time, anyway.” He shot Gray a shrug.

      Gray looked back at him in stony silence until she couldn’t take it anymore and started to laugh.

      “I missed the joke,” said Charles.

      “You are the joke! You’ve been trying to impress me, haven’t you?”

      “How’s that?”

      “You think if you’re blasé about six million Jews that’s going to impress me.”

      “You figure that’s what Adolf was trying to do?” he said gruffly, looking away. “Impress little Eva?”

      “Seriously, Charles, you want me to admire that, don’t you? I mean, that’s twisted, even horrid, but it’s sweet, too. Quaint.” Gray kept chuckling in her hammock. Charles rose brusquely from his chair. Errol knew these moments—Gray could be nasty in a light, lovely way, and she could turn a situation on a dime. Surprise, Charles Corgie.

      “I’m going to bed,” he said coldly. “So are you.” He towered over her hammock, giving her a moment of nervousness Gray for once richly deserved. She stopped laughing.

      “Where?”

      “In my house.”

      “Maybe I’ll stay outside.”

      “No, you won’t. You’re a god now, Miss Kaiser, and you’ll sleep in Olympus with the rest of us.”

      Gray got up cautiously from her hammock. “I’m sorry, I—”

      “On the floor,” he assured her. “Believe me, it will give me far more pleasure to have you up half the night beady-eyed with worry than to do what you will worry about.” With that he blew out the lamp perfunctorily and strode inside, throwing her a hard, leathery skin for a blanket. “Good night, dear,” said Charles, crawling inside his own soft bed stuffed with feathers and pulling the warm, woolly skin over his head.

      As it happened, Gray was up half the night. While Charles Corgie’s thrashing and mumbling on the bed did keep her on edge, Gray’s real problem was far more prosaic: she did not know what gods did with honey wine once they were through with it.

      When Gray told this story it was very funny. She could get tablefuls of international guests rolling on the floor. On the floor of that stilted African cabin, however, Errol imagined she had not been so amused. She couldn’t sleep. The ladder was pulled up from the ground and she didn’t know how to replace it, nor whether there were too many natives about for such a mortal safari. And the situation was not, of course, improving. She’d enjoyed the wine and had drunk her share; Gray’s abdomen gradually billowed higher, until—a magic moment in Gray Kaiser’s life—she cared nothing for power and reserve; her fantasies slipped from huge tribal celebrations in her honor and lines of obsequious good-looking men at her feet to ordinary indoor plumbing. Love, humor, and courage fell away. Money and fame, art and human history fell away. World War II and six million Jews fell away. Even, at last, remaining aloof with Lieutenant Charles Corgie fell away, and Gray found herself numbly climbing up off the floor and standing by his bedside at four in the morning.

      “Charles—” she said softly. “Lieutenant—”

      He only grunted and turned away. She put a hand on his shoulder. Charles sprang upright and in a single motion had a rifle pointed a few inches from Gray’s chest. His eyes were completely open and alert.

      “Don’t shoot!” Corgie’s rifle had very nearly taken care of Gray’s problem abruptly.

      Charles did not put down the gun. He said something in garbled Masai that Gray didn’t understand.

      “Please,” she said in a small voice. “I need your help.”

      Slowly he lowered the gun as he recognized her by the moonlight coming through the window. “If you were thinking you could get this gun—”

      “No!”

      Charles looked at her more closely. “Come here.” He reached up and touched her cheek, then inspected his fingers. “No СКАЧАТЬ