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

_dancing_...
So many had died here that the phantoms expired in paranormal heaps, creating numinous silhouettes of multiple executions, of blood and brains and entrails superimposed over torn flesh, exposed bone, and silently screaming faces -- a macabre choreography of vision and light, transparency and color, life and death. There was an absurd, mythical quality to all of it that was just now beginning to take shape in Ahmo's mind, a fuzzy surrealism, a sense of floating adrift in a psychotic nightmare that neither permitted him to succumb to its terrors, nor played itself out of its own accord. Ahmo was nothing more than a prisoner waiting to be set free from Sarajevo, this land of restless, tortured spirits.
Finally it was the ring, of all things, the ring burning in Ahmo's hand that released him, centered him, reminded him of who and what he was and why he had come. Somehow Grandmother Ivana's ring had gotten from his hip pack into the palm of his hand and had it not been for this delicate band of gold, he might very well have become a ghost himself.
By the time Ahmo found his grandmother's building, he was both mentally and physically exhausted. He felt the hot wind on his face. Sweat streamed down his ribs. He sipped water from the canteen he'd purchased in the gift shop at the Sarajevo Marriott. He wanted only to fulfill his promise and be gone.
Ahmo watched a family blown to literal bits in his grandmother's old building. At first they were just sitting there. Then a little girl ran into the room. The bomb hit and the room caved in on them. The little girl looked so much like his grandmother that Ahmo watched the scene unfold again and again, trying to peer through the other ghosts and study her face.
His grandmother had been one of the lucky children. She'd gotten out before the winter, before temperatures of below zero forced people to burn furniture in their stoves to keep from freezing. When the mortar fire hit, Ivana was not killed. The rest of her family had died but she'd survived with only minor cuts and bruises and some ringing in her ears that would not clear for many months. The day after the bombing, a delegation from The Children's Embassy spirited her away among a group of Italian journalists. From there she'd been placed in an American home.
This girl's resemblance to Ahmo's grandmother was uncanny -- the structure of her cheeks and the curvature of her jaw, the delicate nose and lofty forehead, the upturned lips and small mouth. Ahmo had heard that as people grew older they began to resemble their childhood likenesses. Perhaps this thought moved him forward. The ghost of the young girl glanced in his direction, and Ahmo saw clearly, for the first time in this hauntingly familiar child, his grandmother Ivana's dark, plum eyes.
No. It was not possible. His grandmother had escaped to America. She could not have been killed in Sarajevo. Perhaps this was a cousin, or even a sister he'd never heard about. How many of his ancestors had died in this building? It was so long ago. Perhaps Ahmo was beginning to see ghosts of his own design on top of ghosts on top of ghosts.
Whatever it was, he'd had enough. He could not take the sight of anymore death. He placed the gold ring on the ground, among the ruins, just as Grandmother Ivana had instructed him to do. He was ashamed to admit that he was glad to be rid of it. He turned his back on the building and strode away. But something stopped him. Ahmo could not say what. He turned around to look one last time at the young girl who had died her horrible death over and over again in this building, her eternal coffin.
But on this occasion something very different happened. The girl did not go running into the room. She stopped short. Her beautiful wine-colored eyes caught a golden wink in the summer sunlight on the ground where Ahmo had laid his grandmother's ring. She walked over to it and reached for the tiny band of gold. The grenade struck again, but this time the girl was not in the room. This time she was thrown out onto the street. She rolled across the pavement, almost to Ahmo's feet, and began to cry.
She was alive!
And then the scene faded. The little girl vanished. She no longer lay crying on the street. She no longer appeared in the ghostly reincarnation of her family's death. She was not _anywhere_.

Ahmo walked back to the place where he'd dropped Grandmother Ivana's ring. It was gone. His grandmother's ring was gone.
* * * *
Ahmo sat on the quilted sofa and cradled Ivana's head and shoulders. She was so light her spirit might have already fled her body. It had been six minutes since the Hemlock technologist, Miss March, had administered the fatal injection. Miss March said it would take no more than ten minutes for his grandmother to die, for the Seconal and Lace to furnish her a painless, peaceful, dreamy death.
Ivana's eyes were closed, but she smiled thinly, and whispered, "Ahmo."
"I'm here, Grandmother."
"Have I ever told you how fortunate I was to survive Sarajevo? Not so many people were lucky like me." Her voice was very weak.
"You were meant to live," Ahmo whispered in her ear. He gently squeezed his grandmother's shoulders, as if his hands held the power to keep her forever by his side.
"Sometimes I dream of Sarajevo," she said, "but in my dreams it is always beautiful and peaceful. No one is afraid. I am with my family. We are all alive and happy. Isn't that nice, Ahmo? It was strange when the bomb hit our home. I was running to my mother, but then I saw a light, just a twinkle of light, and I thought it was Allah calling me."
His grandmother had not mentioned Allah in many years. Ahmo's family had given up the old ways, the old religion. Ahmo himself had followed his parents in having no particular religious associations. He wished now that it was not so. It would have been nice to have a god to pray to at a time like this, a god who cared.
"I can see that light again, Ahmo," she said. "I can see it. A twinkle...just a twinkle...far off...calling me..."
Ahmo forced himself to smile through his tears. He gripped the ring in the palm of his hand and thought of Sarajevo. For some reason the journey no longer frightened him. Grandmother Ivana had made him feel special one last time.

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