"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would love. Did this
child-woman not have such a face, he'd thought? Would the camera not grow stupid
with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera
fell, could the public be far behind?
He'd inquired as to the girl's name. She was one Katya Lubescu from the
village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of cabbage
rolls and cheese, what he was thinking. She was curiously sanguine about his whole
proposal; practically indifferent. Yes, she conceded, it sounded interesting, but
she wasn't sure if she would ever want to leave Romania. If she went too far from
home, she would miss her family.
A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in Americaєshe no
longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her managerєthey'd revisited
this very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her how uninterested she'd seemed in
his grand plan. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she'd confessed; a way in
part to keep herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to
prevent her hopes getting too high.
But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which the
indifference she'd demonstrated that first day they'd met (andєmore recentlyєin the
cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her, perhaps, by a bloodline that
had suffered so much loss and anguish over the generations that nothing was allowed
to impress itself too severely: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was,
by her own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses
only for public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the square
had come to witness night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash
when she appeared before the cinematrographic camera.
Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the
previous day.
In fact, it was almost as though she'd been playing a part: the role of a
rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her gaze had been
respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than usual, her
vocabularyєwhich often tended to the saltyєsweet and compliant.
Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated; but
the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point he'd put his
hand under Katya's chin to raise her face, telling her there was no reason to be
shy.
Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called shy woman
was capable of! The parties she'd master-minded up in her Canyonєthe place
gossip-columnists had dubbed Coldheart Canyon; the excesses she'd choreographed
behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was capable of inventing when
the mood took her. If the mask she'd been wearing had slipped for a heartbeat, and
the poor, deluded Father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have
locked himself in a cell and sealed the door with prayers and holy water to keep her
out.
Page 7
Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.
Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi's whole life had now become a performance.
When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering, abused orphans half
her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to believe that this was reality.
Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of sight of the people who thought she was moral