"DiChario,_Nick_-_Sarajevo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dichario Nicholas A)

She had the sort of pinched face that made a smile look pained and exaggerated. She smelled too strongly of powdery perfume, putting Ahmo in mind of the funeral homes her clients were one step away from. He said, "I'm glad you can find some pleasure in this."
His grandmother frowned. "Don't be like that."
"It's okay," said Miss March. "We at Hemlock are often treated like _betes noires_. We learn to overlook it."
"Miss March is a kind young girl, Ahmo. You know I want this or she wouldn't be here."
"I know, but that doesn't mean I want it." Ahmo knelt beside his grandmother and held her hand. "Can't I talk you out of this?"
"Stubborn boy, just like your grandfather. We've been all through this. I'm one-hundred-twelve years old and modern medicine has run out of miracles for me. It's time for me to go."
"Time to go! Time to go!" snapped Grandfather. He stormed into the kitchen. "That's all you've said for the past three months. Go then. Get it over!"
Ivana smiled. "You'll watch out for your grandfather when I'm gone, won't you, Ahmo? He's not so young anymore."
"Of course I will," Ahmo answered uneasily. He knew Grandmother Ivana was ready to die. She had made all of the preparations with Hemlock and had undergone the required psychological evaluations. She had even thought to make Ahmo executor of her estate, whatever that meant to a woman who coveted so few possessions. But Ahmo was not ready to let her go.
He thought about his family. Ahmo's parents, along with his sister and brother-in-law and their three children, lived a long way off, in George Washington Province, the new American colony in Canada. They would be angry when they learned of Ivana's passing. They would want to know why Ahmo hadn't notified them sooner. It was Grandmother's wish, he would tell them. She had not wanted anyone else to watch her die.
"It's time! It's time!" Grandfather hollered from the kitchen. "Let her go!"
Miss March placed what looked like a hard-plastic fishing creel on the end table. She snapped it open and removed some needles wrapped in white linen.
Ahmo glanced around the small parlor where he had spent so much of his time since the rest of his family had moved north. The antique poster on the wall from the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo glinted in its burnished frame. His parents had bought it at an auction and had given it to Ivana on her one-hundredth birthday. He'd often caught his grandmother staring at it, appearing as if she might cry. The tiered curio table in the corner of the room had been cleaned and polished recently, along with all of the miniature pewter teacups his grandmother had collected over the years. He touched the large, round area-rug at his knees that he and his sister had helped Grandmother Ivana braid and sew when they were just children. Ahmo suddenly wished he'd gotten stuck in the tube, or lost in the crowd downtown. Anything, anything other than this.
Ivana cupped Ahmo's chin and gently pulled him closer. She kissed his forehead. She had the most beautiful
plum-colored eyes he'd ever seen. They flashed liquid and hypnotic in the dim light of the room, like wine and candlelight. Ahmo couldn't imagine no longer having those eyes to look into for warmth, for comfort, for his own sense of family and personal history. It was amazing that this old, frail woman had come to mean so much.
"Ahmo," she said, "what are you holding on to? I'm happy. I'm free to say, _this is how I want to die_. Do you understand?"
Ahmo understood, but he could not embrace it. His love was too strong.
Ivana brushed her fingers through his coarse hair. "Listen to me. I have something important to ask of you. A last request. Will you promise to do something for me after I'm gone?"
"Of course. Anything." Ahmo kissed his grandmother's fingers. Her palms were clammy. He noticed that he'd been trying to warm her hands with his own, caressing them as if they were sticks he might alight by rubbing them briskly together.
"I want you to go back. I want you to go back to Sarajevo for me."
"Go back? Grandmother, I, I don't know...Sarajevo..."
"Please," she said. "It is my last wish. I have set aside the money for the trip. It will cost you nothing but your time."
Ahmo hesitated. He did not relish the thought of seeing the Miracle of Ghosts, of watching his ancestors die their horrible deaths.
"Your mother will never go. She's afraid. I can't blame her. Maybe she's too close to it."
What choice did Ahmo have? How could he say no to this beautiful woman, his precious grandmother? This was her last wish. "All right, if it's that important to you."
Ivana lifted her left hand and removed the gold ring from around her finger. She placed the ring in Ahmo's hand. "Take this ring and bring it to Dobrinja, bring it to my home. I have all the information written out for you, with a map. When you get there, just leave the ring on the ground. That's all I ask. The ring has been with me all these years, and I want to return it. This is my dying wish." Ivana's lips quivered, her delicate jaw trembled, her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, look at me. I promised I wouldn't cry."
"I hate to sound all business," said Miss March, "but I'll need Ahmo to sign the witness statement now." She said this to no one in particular, but Ahmo felt it as a blow to his heart.
"All right." He stood and quickly signed the paper without reading it. He did not want to linger over this task. He felt as if he were signing his grandmother's death sentence.
"Is it done yet?" Grandfather yelled from the kitchen. "Are you dead yet, Ivana?"
Ivana laughed nervously and brushed away her tears. "No, not yet. Make a pot of coffee. By the time it's perked I'll be dead. Make decaffeinated. You'll be up all night if you don't."
"We're out of decaf!" he shouted. "I put it on the list but you never bought it."
"I bought it. Look in the refrigerator behind the pickles. How are you going to live without me? Tomorrow I won't be around to tell you where to find things." Then she looked into Ahmo's eyes. "_Cuvajte se_, little Ahmo, take care of yourself. I love you with all my heart."
Ahmo clutched the ring in his hand, and stepped behind the sofa, where Grandmother Ivana could not see his pain.
* * * *
Ahmo walked past "sniper alley" in Sarajevo, and watched an ambulance driver lose control of his vehicle after he'd been shot in the neck. The ambulance spun out of control, flipped over, and crashed silently into a cafщ. The injured victims in the ambulance spilled out onto the street like lumber from a broken sheaf.
Outside the general headquarters of UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, a woman from the humanitarian agency Equilibre burned to death after being caught in the flames of a Molotov cocktail. She was most likely killed by a Chetnik guerrilla. The Chetniks took great pleasure in the killing of volunteers, women, and children.
The sky was cloudless, the sun beat down mercilessly. Ahmo's eyes stung and his mouth felt sandy from the blowing dust. He could feel the skin on the back of his neck beginning to sunburn. He walked the road between Butmir and Dobrinja. The southwest was one of the hardest hit in all of Sarajevo during the war. There were no trees or mountain ranges to protect it.
At the old airport, Hercules airplanes packed with medical relief and rice and beans from the West came under heavy anti-aircraft fire, and crashed one after another as they attempted to land. There was a phosphorescent glean to their aerial distress that made the sky itself look drunk and confused.
Ahmo watched for a while, and began to wonder if these tired old airplanes were fed up with crashing and burning over and over again, if their pilots had long ago given up trying to set down safely. Had Allah truly asked them to do this great thing, to make this sacrifice? _Haunt Sarajevo! _ Ahmo imagined Allah commanding, and then he saw thousands of Sarajevans, legions of the dead, spirit-zombies, obeying their one true God.
A smartbot from the Bureau of Tourism approached Ahmo as he stood in front of the airport. It said, "Slovсk? English? Deutsch? Italiano? Franчais? Espaёol? -- "
"English," Ahmo interrupted.
"Good day, sir," it began without pause. "Do you know what started all the killing in Sarajevo? Do you know the details behind the Bosnia-Herzegovina vote for independence from the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, and how the Serbian Democratic Party violently disagreed? Would you like to learn the truth about the evil war criminals Milosevic and Karadzic and their policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide?"
This smartbot was tall and thin with a galeate head, a newer model sporting copper alloy legs, a pristine voice chip, and glass eyes that looked almost real. Its exoskeleton was the color of almond, giving it the appearance of a walking corpse. The 'bot wore a navy-blue smock with an official patch on its breast, and held a neatly wrapped computer virtuware package in its dull, brass hand.
It clicked and hummed forward. "Why did the Europeans and Americans, the holy and righteous people of the civilized world who prided themselves on their humanitarianism, allow the slaughter of innocent victims when they could have easily put an end to it? Why was this peaceful city allowed to degenerate into the world's largest concentration camp? You can learn all about it from this commemorative Sarajevo virtuware, the only presentation package sanctioned by the Sarajevo Historical Society."
Ahmo looked past the smartbot. Another aircraft spun out of control on the runway, tipped over, and snapped a wing. A fiery mushroom of bleached smoke consumed the plane.
"Walk the streets of Sarajevo, the City of Tolerance, before it was completely destroyed by the war and inhabited by ghosts. Learn how the Croats, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and even the Serbs lived in peace for centuries, side by side. See exclusive interviews with Sarajevans who miraculously escaped the violence. Hear theories from internationally renowned mystagogues on why the hauntings continue to transpire. All of this can be yours for only two-thousand dinars, the same amount of money it once cost for one-half kilo of macaroni here in Sarajevo during the terrible war of aggression!"
Ahmo donated the money to the Historical Society in German Deutchmarks, the preferred tender in the Balkan region, but told the smartbot he did not have the stomach for its virtuware.
In Dobrinja, there was nothing left but collapsed mosques and synagogues, ruined minarets and housing complexes, and ghosts forever dying. Ahmo was swiftly learning to ignore them, just as the world had learned to ignore the real thing so many years ago. But Ahmo felt as if he had earned this right. He was one of them now, under siege with the incendiaries, mortars, cannons, and snipers silently stalking him.
Ghosts, now, were everywhere...
_dancing_...