"Thomas M. Disch M - Casablanca" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

of her illness. She went out into the hall, but returned almost immediately. "The door into th
toilet is padlocked," she said. Her eyes were wide with terror. She had just begun to
understand what was happening.


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That night, after a frugal dinner of olives, cheese sandwiches, and figs, Mrs. Richmond trie
look on the bright side. "Actually we're very lucky," she said, "to be here, instead of there,
when it happened. At least we're alive. We should thank God for being alive."
"If we'd of bombed them twenty years ago, we wouldn't be in this spot now. Didn't I say
way back then that we should have bombed them?"
"Yes, darling. But there's no use crying over spilt milk. Try and look on the bright side,
I do."
"Goddamn dirty reds."
The bourbon was all gone. It was dark, and outside, across the square, a billboard
advertising Olympic Bleue cigarettes (C'est mieux!) winked on and off, as it had on all oth
nights of their visit to Casablanca. Nothing here seemed to have been affected by the
momentous events across the ocean.
"We're out of envelopes," Mrs. Richmond complained. She had been trying to compose
letter to her daughter.
Fred was staring out the window, wondering what it had been like: had the sky been fill
with planes? Were they still fighting on the ground in India and Angola? What did Florida l
like now? He had always wanted to build a bomb shelter in their backyard in Florida, but h
wife had been against it. Now it would be impossible to know which of them had been righ
"What time is it?" Mrs. Richmond asked, winding the alarm.
He looked at his watch, which was always right. "Eleven o'clock, Bulova watch time." I
was an Accutron that his company, Iowa Mutual Life, had presented to him at retirement.
There was, in the direction of the waterfront, a din of shouting and clashing metal. As it
grew louder, Fred could see the head of a ragged parade advancing up the boulevard. He
pulled down the lath shutters over the windows till there was just a narrow slit to watch the
parade through.
"They're burning something," he informed his wife. "Come see."
"I don't want to watch that sort of thing."
"Some kind of statue, or scarecrow. You can't tell who it's meant to be. Someone in a
cowboy hat, looks like. I'll bet they're Commies."
When the mob of demonstrators reached the square over which the Belmonte Hotel look
they turned to the left, toward the larger luxury hotels, the Marhaba and El Mansour. They w
banging cymbals together and beating drums and blowing on loud horns that sounded like
bagpipes. Instead of marching in rows, they did a sort of whirling, skipping dance step. On
they'd turned the corner, Fred couldn't see any more of them.
"I'll bet every beggar in town is out there, blowing his horn," Fred said sourly. "Every
goddamn watch peddler and shoeshine boy in Casablanca."
"They sound very happy," Mrs. Richmond said. Then she began crying again.
The Richmonds slept together in the same bed that evening for the first time in several
months. The noise of the demonstration continued, off and on, nearer or farther away, for
several hours. This too set the evening apart from other evenings, for Casablanca was usua
very quiet, surprisingly so, after ten o'clock at night.