The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver
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Название: The Female of the Species
Автор: Lionel Shriver
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007564026
isbn:
After putting away the camera, Errol found Gray in the hut where they were staying.
“Why did you walk off like that?” asked Errol.
“I felt claustrophobic,” said Gray.
“How can you feel claustrophobic in the middle of a field?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she said after some silence, “I’d like to take a shower.” She lay flat on her back, staring at the thatch ceiling. The hut smelled of sweet rotting grass and the smoke of old fires. It was a dark, crypt-like place, with a few shafts of gray light sifting from the door and the cracks in the walls. Gray’s palms lay folded on her chest like a pharaoh in marble. Her expression was peaceful and grave, yet with the strange blankness of white stone.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Errol.
“I would like,” she said, “to have warm water all over my body. I would like,” she said, “at the very least, to hold my hands under a tap and cup them together and let the water collect until it spills over and bring it to my face and let it drip down my cheeks.” She took a breath and sighed.
But Errol had never worried about her. “Gray?”
“I feel absolutely disgusted and tired and stupid,” she said in one long breath, and with that she turned over on her side and curled into a small fetal ball, with her arms clasped around her chest, no longer looking like a pharaoh at all but more like a child who would still be wearing pajamas with sewn-in feet. In a minute Gray had gone from an ageless Egyptian effigy, wise and harrowed and lost in secrets, to a girl of three. It was an oddly characteristic transition.
Errol wandered back outside, calm and relaxed. His eyes swept across the village of Toroto, the mud and dung caking off the walls, the goats trailing between the huts, the easy African timelessness ticking by, with its annoying Western intrusions—candy wrappers on the ground, chocolate on children’s faces, gaudy floral-print blouses. In spite of these, Errol could imagine this place just after World War II, and it hadn’t changed so much. It was good to see this valley at last, with the cliffs sheering up at the far end, and good to finally meet Il-Ororen, with their now muted arrogance and wildly mythologized memories. All this Errol had pictured from Men without History, but the actual place helped him put together the whole tale; so as the sun began to set behind the cliffs and the horizon burned like the coals of a dying fire around which you would tell a very good story, Errol imagined as best he could what had happened here thirty-seven years ago.
It was fitting that Gray finally do a documentary about Toroto, for in some ways Errol had already made this film. Errol’s great indulgence—it bordered on vice, or at least on nosiness—was a curious sort of mental home movie. His secret passion was piecing together other people’s lives. Going far beyond the ordinary gossip, Errol pitched into history that was not his own like falling off a ledge, in a dizzying entrancement with being someone else that sometimes frightened him.
Naturally, Gray Kaiser’s life was his pet project. Assembling the footage on Charles Corgie had been especially challenging, for whole reels of that material were classified. Twenty-four years is a long time, however, and with plenty of wine and late nights Errol had weaseled from Gray enough information to put together a damned good picture. In fact, for its completeness and accuracy, Kaiser and Corgie promised to be one of the highlights of his collection.
Errol could see her in 1948 at the age of twenty-two, holed up in the back rooms of the Harvard anthropology department, gluing together some godawful pot. It was late, two in the morning maybe, with a single light, orange, the must of old books tingling her nostrils, the quiet like an afghan wrapped around her shoulders—those fine shoulders, wide, peaked at the ends. The light would fill her hair, a honey blond then, buoyant and in the way.
Gray would be telling herself that Dr. Richardson was a first-rate anthropologist and she was lucky to be his assistant, but Gray Kaiser would not like having a mentor, even at twenty-two. Richardson told her what to do. He did all the fieldwork, and she was desperately sick of this back room. She loved the smell of old books as much as the next academic, but she loved the smell of wood fires more, and of cooking bananas; she certainly yearned for the wild ululation of the Masai over this suffocating library quiet.
Padding dark and silent down the well-waxed linoleum halls of that building, a tall Masai warrior came to deliver her.
“I will see Richasan.”
Gray started, and looked up to find a man in her doorway. He was wearing a gray suit which, though it fit him well, looked ridiculous. The man didn’t look ridiculous; the suit did. His hair was plaited in many strands and bound together down his back.
“Dr. Richardson won’t be in for six or seven hours.” For God’s sake, it was three in the morning. Then, an African’s sense of time was peculiar. If you made an appointment with a Kikuyu for noon, he might show up at five with no apology for being late. With a Masai you did not make appointments. He came when he felt like it.
“I wait, then.” The man came in and stood opposite Gray, balancing perfectly on one leg, with his other foot raised like a stork’s. His long face high and impassive, he stood immobile, as he had no doubt poised many times for hours in a clump of trees, waiting for a cheetah to pass in range of his spear. Six or seven hours was nothing.
“Can I help you?”
“No.”
“I am Dr. Richardson’s assistant.”
“You are his woman?”
“I am no man’s woman.”
The Masai looked down at her. “Pity.”
“Not really. I don’t need a man.”
“You are silly fool, then, to shrivel and dry soon.”
Gray couldn’t bear his towering over her any longer. “Won’t you sit down?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll stand.” When she did so the Masai glanced at her with surprise. Gray was six feet tall, and looked him in the eye now. “Anything you want to say to Dr. Richardson will have to go through me first. You want him to do something for you, right?”
The Masai’s eyes narrowed. “Yez … but I wait for Richasan.”
“What is it?” Gray stood right next to him, close enough to make him uncomfortable. “An apartment? Or you want into Harvard?”
“I do not come for myself,” he said with disgust. “For others. These, not even my people—”
“Who?”
The man turned away. “Richasan.”
Gray was beginning to get curious. She tried polite conversation. “How long have you been in the U.S.?”
“One day.”
“What are you here for, to study?”
“Yez …” he СКАЧАТЬ