"George Alec Effinger - Marid 2 - A Fire In The Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

was a kid, sitting or standing in the aisle with fifty other boys and men and maybe another
two dozen clinging up on the roof. The buses passed by my home then. I saw turbaned
heads, heads wearing fezes or knit caps, heads in white or checked keffiyas. All men. That
was something I planned to ask my father about, if I ever met him. "O my father," I would say,
"tell me why everyone on the bus is a man. Where are their women?"
And I always imagined that my fatherтАФI pictured him tall and lean with a fierce dark beard, a
hawk or an eagle of a man; he was, in my vision, Arab, although I had my mother's word that
he had been a FrenchmanтАФI saw my father gazing thoughtfully into the bright sunlight,
framing a careful reply to his young son. "O Marid, my sweet one," he would sayтАФand his
voice would be deep and husky, issuing from the back of his throat as if he never used his
lips to speak, although my mother said he wasn't like that at allтАФ"Marid, the women will
come later. The men will send for them later."
"Ah," I would say. My father could pierce all riddles. I could not pose a question that he did
not have a proper answer for. He was wiser than our village shaykh more knowledgeable
than the man whose face filled the posters pasted on the wall we were pissing on. "Father," I
would ask him, "why are we pissing on this man's face?"
"Because it is idolatrous to put his face on such a poster, and it is fit only for a filthy alley like
this, and therefore the Prophet, may the blessing of Allah be on him and peace, tells us that
what we are doing to these images is just and right."
"And Father?" I would always have one more ques-tion, and he'd always be blissfully patient.
He would smile down at me, put one hand fondly behind my head. "Fa-ther? I have always
wanted to ask you, what do you do when you are pissing and your bladder is so full it feels
like it will explode before you can relieve it and while you are pissing, just then, the
muezzinтАФ"
Saied hit me hard in the left temple with the palm of his hand. "You sleeping out here?"
I looked up at him. There was glare everywhere. I couldn't remember where the hell we were.
"Where the hell are we?" I asked him.
He snorted. "You're the one from the Maghreb, the great, wild west. You tell me."
"Have we got to Algeria yet?" I didn't think so.
"No, stupid. I've been sitting in that goddamn little coffeehouse for three hours charming the
warts off this fat fool. His name is Hisham."
"Where are we?"
"Just crossed through Carthage. We're on the out-skirts of Old Tunis now. So listen to me.
What's the old guy's name?"
"Huh? I don't remember."
He hit me hard in the right temple with the palm of his other hand. I hadn't slept in two nights.
I was a little confused. Anyway, he got the easy part of the job: Sitting around the bus stops,
drinking mint tea with the local ringleaders and gossiping about the marauding Christians
and the marauding Jews and the marauding heathen nig-gers and just in general being
goddamn smooth; and I got the piss-soaked alleys and the flies. I couldn't remember why we
divided this business up like that. After all, I was supposed to be in chargeтАФit was my idea
to find this woman, it was my trip, we were using my money. But
Saied took the mint tea and the gossip, and I gotтАФwell, I don't have to go into that again.
We waited the appropriate amount of time. The sun was disappearing behind a western
wall; it was almost time for the sunset call to prayer. I stared at Saied, who was now dozing.
Good, I thought, now I get to hit him in the head. I had just gotten up and taken one little step,
when he looked up at me. "It's time, I guess," he said, -yawning. I nodded, didn't have
anything to add. So I sat back down, and Saied the Half-Hajj went into his act.
Saied is a natural-born liar, and it's a pleasure to watch him hustle. He had the personality
module he liked best plugged into his brainтАФhis heavy-duty, steel-belted, mean mother of a