"Finch,_Sheila_-_The_Old_Man_and_C" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finch Sheila)

Later, with his son and granddaughter, he took the sailboat far out on Lake Zurich, tilting gently in a mild breeze and grand weather, sailing under the lee of slopes covered with ripening vineyards, presided over by the hump of the Albishorn.
Millie was right, he thought. All the tiny joys had to add up to something.
"I picked up a translation of a new thing that came out last year from this American writer, Hemingway," Eddie said, as Lisl trailed fingers in the cold, clear water, shattering the drowned light in its depths into diamond fragments. "It's about an old man fishing, and sharks."
"I don't like to fish."
"You'd like this story!"
He gazed at his younger son, a banker, already thickening into comfortable middle-age. "I don't have as much time to read as you, apparently."
"Nonsense! You read the wrong things -- about wars and terrible things like that. You should read fiction."
"So many wars. Where will it all end?"
"Pfft!" Eddie made a derisive sound. "These Asians are all alike. The Koreans will run out of steam just as the Japanese did in 1947. You'll see. The Americans hate to do anything violent. They'll make another treaty."
"_Opa_," Lisl interrupted, hanging over the low side of the boat, brown hair trailing through sun-spangled water. "Are there sharks in this lake? May I go swimming?"
"Careful!" Eddie warned. "You'll fall in fully clothed, and then your grandmother will scold!"
The sun's slanting radiance scattered from the child's flowing hair. He stared at it, fascinated. The play of light had always obsessed him.
"_Opa?"_ Lisl urged.
"A man should leave a mark," he said, watching the flash and dazzle in the lake. "It's not enough just to have lived."
"Exactly the point of the Hemingway story I referred to!" his son said with obvious satisfaction. "I took the liberty of putting my copy on your desk, Papa."
The child began to cry.
Venus, the evening star, was already burning in the western sky. They heeled over and brought the sailboat swooping back to the dock.
* * * *
The map does not indicate which is the best road, only that more than one possibility exists. One afternoon many years ago (perhaps early May, for he remembered the cuckoo's melancholy call outside the open window) he had been at his desk in the patent office in Bern. Splinters of sunlight fell through green branches onto the papers he was reading. The work was sterile, soul-killing. He lived for the evenings when the street lamps were lit; then he walked under pale yellow flowers of the linden trees to the back room of a small Gasthaus. There, he joined a string quartet, exploring their way across Beethoven's stark territory, the rich jungles of Brahms, the tidy gardens of Johann Sebastian Bach. He had just recently graduated from the Polytechnic Academy, where he'd studied mathematics. But music had proved to be his lorelei.
This particular day, he remembered, he had trouble chaining his mind to the endless march of dull papers across his desk, while outside the marvelous vernal light called to him. Instead, he played with numbers (the abstract language of music, he had always thought) that combine and recombine in mysterious ways, numbers like the swarming stars that dazzled overhead in the clear Alpine night.
"Ho, Jew-boy!" The supervisor, a spindly little man with a receding hairline who had taken an instant dislike to the new employee, stopped by his desk.
He hastily slid a pile of half-finished forms over the mathematical doodlings. The supervisor leered over the desk, hoping to catch him in blatant error so there would be cause to fire him.
"Is the report ready, young genius? Or have you been too busy to bother?"
"I'll have it done on time."
"You certainly will -- or you'll look elsewhere for employment!"
He was not born to work behind a desk, filling out forms, following someone else's orders. But he was also not capable of ignoring a challenge. For two hours he worked without stopping till the report was done, far more thoroughly than even the thin supervisor had a right to expect.
That evening at music practice, a warm spring breeze blowing, full of starshine and promises, he received his first request to give tuition on the violin to the child of the Gasthaus keeper.
The next morning he gave notice at the patent office.
* * * *
Rosa worked the bow smoothly across her instrument, moving through the difficult passage that led inexorably up the scale to high C, her nemesis.
He leaned back in the armchair, eyes closed, evaluating, trying to hear the Rachmaninoff the way the judges would. Rain spattered the closed window, and Millie had lit the lamps in the middle of the afternoon. One week to make a mark, to change the path of the stars that told man's fate, to mold the universe to one old man's will.
He was tired all the time now. The Earth under his feet tugged at him, bending him out of shape.
Then she faltered once again on the high note, and he leaped up from the chair, forgetful of stiff joints.
"No! No! No!" He seized the instrument from her hands. "What have I told you? You aren't milking cows here! You must glide up the notes like a fish swimming in a river! Like this."
He ran the bow smoothly up and down the scale, arthritic fingers for once remembering how they had moved in their youth when he had been the soloist with the orchestra in Paris and Vienna and at the Albert Hall.
Rosa lowered blond lashes over her ruddy cheeks, and he caught the gleam of tears in the glow of the lamps.
He relented. "All right now. We've worked hard enough for one lesson. Perhaps it'll go better tomorrow, or the next day."
"I'm sorry, Herr Professor. I don't wish to let you down."
But perhaps he had let himself down? Perhaps if he had stayed longer in the patent office, used the time to think about numbers?
"Let me try it again," she pleaded. "I _will_ get it right."
He gave her back the violin, thinking about possibilities and life that had a habit of squeezing them down.
His Uncle Jakob had urged something else, but Mama had her heart set on music. And music had been good to him, he could not deny that. He had moved back to Zurich, married his university sweetheart, and raised two young sons in relative comfort. In his orchestra days, he had seen something of the world. He had books and music and friends around the globe who wrote to him and came to visit. He had had good students -- more silvers and bronzes than any other teacher in the canton, and a respectable number of golds. One had even gone on to world class competition -- he remembered a brief, breathtaking visit to New York.
And now he was at home with the lake and the boat and the crisp Alpine light sculpting the mountains.
If he had been someone like Van Gogh, he would have painted that light. Sometimes he thought about the incandescent heart of distant galaxies, spewing brightness through the universe to break at last under its own weight on the shores of Lake Zurich. It made his heart ache to think of it.
Rosa tried the passage again. This time he did not have to wince as she reached high C.
That evening, drinking his coffee with whipped cream and chocolate, sitting beside Millie, hand in hand, on the balcony, watching the moon come and go in the scudding clouds over the lake, he thought about the mystery of roads where one made decisions in darkness.
"Do you never wonder, Millie, if your life might have been different?"
"How so, different?" she asked suspiciously.
"Do you never entertain the idea that perhaps you might have done something else with your time, something you might have been _better_ at?"
"No," Millie said.