"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

Zen pressed the pause button of the remote control unit,
stilling the video.
'Why are you up, mamma?' he asked, trying to keep his
irritation out of his voice. This was breaking the rules.
Once she had retired to her room, his mother never re-
appeared. It was respect for these unwritten laws that
made their life together just about tolerable from his point
of view.
'I thought I heard something.'
Their eyes still held. The woman who had given Zen life
might have been the child he had never had, awakened by
a nightmare and seeking comfort. He got up and walked
over to her.
'I'm sorry, mamma. I turned the sound right down...'
'I don't mean the TV.'
He interrogated those bleary, evasive eyes more closely.
'What, then?'
She shrugged pettishly.
'A sort of scraping.'
'Scraping? What do you mean?'
'Like old Umberto's boat.'
Zen was often brought up short by his mother's refer-
ences to a past which for her was infinitely more real than
the present would ever be. He had quite forgotten
Umberto, the portly, dignified proprietor of a general
grocery near the San Geremia bridge. He used the boat to
transport fruit and vegetables from the Rialto market, as
well as boxes, cases, bottles and jars to and from the cellars
of his house, which the ten-year-old Zen had visualized as
an Aladdin's cave crammed with exotic delights. When
not in use, the boat was moored to a post in the little canal
opposite the Zens' house. The post had a tin collar to
protect the wood, and a few moments after each vaporetto
passed down the Cannaregio the wash would reach
Umberto's boat and set it rubbing its gunwale against the
collar, producing a series of metallic rasps.
'It was probably me moving around in here that you
heard,' Zen told her. 'Now go back to bed, before you
catch cold.'
'It didn't come from in here. It came from the other side.
Across the canal. Just like that damned boat.'
Zen took her by the arm, which felt alarmingly fragile.
Widowed by the war, his mother had confronted the
world alone on his behalf, wresting concessions from
tradesmen and bureaucrats, labouring at menial jobs to
eke out her pension, cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending
and making do, tirelessly and ingeniously hollowing out
and shoring up a space for her son to grow up in. Small
wonder, he thought, that the effort had reduced her to this
pittance of a person, scared of noises and the dark, with no