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

He sighed. "We could have travelled. We could have seen more of America."
"We could have had problems and divorced!" she said sourly.
He patted her hand. "Never."
The ache persisted, nevertheless.
* * * *
The next morning, Hans Albert telephoned from Berlin, where he was a professor of physics.
"Have you read the newspaper, Papa?"
Behind the telephone in the hall, the wallpaper -- Millie's favorite pattern, clumps of creamy roses festooned with little pink ribbons -- glowed in the warm sunshine. He stared, imagining the artist making the very first drawing from a real vase of roses, the blooms illuminated by a ray of sunlight falling like a benediction on the studio. In some sense, it was all happening now: the painter, the roses blooming in the garden before somebody cut them, the old violin teacher gazing at wallpaper. The past, like the future, was only a stubborn linguistic illusion.
"Papa?"
"Ah. What should I have read?"
"The war, of course! Don't you always read about the war in Korea?"
Yes, the war. The strangeness of the place-names: Seoul, Pyongyang, Pusan. And the stupidity of young boys killing other young boys in jungles and rice paddies where light slanted through palm trees and bamboo thickets, light that had crossed the darkness of space from a distant star to illuminate a scene for painters.
"They're still fighting?"
"Papa!" Then another idea seemed to occur to his son. "Are you feeling well?"
"You're going to tell me that the American airplanes dropped a most peculiar bomb on a Korean town with a name as singular as roses. Isn't this so?"
"Yes -- but, roses? Anyway, let me tell you about this weapon, Papa! A great advance -- the future beckoning! -- You see what they've proved? A particle of matter can be converted into enormous outbursts of energy. This is something we've been working on here at the university, splitting uranium atoms."
"Light," he said. "It travels so fast! No time at all, really, from our point of view."
Hans Albert was silent. After a while he said casually, "Is Mama there? Let me speak to her."
* * * *
The afternoon was warm, but Millie insisted he wear his hat anyway. He had the impression if he had argued, she would have dragged out muffler and gloves too. _Stop at the barber's on the way,_ she had ordered. _Your hair is all over the place again!_
He descended the narrow street that took him from his house, built during Zwingli's Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, to the violin maker's shop on Bahnhofstrasse in the center of the modern tourist district. Strange, the road that unwound in time from one to the other, he thought, and he too trudging down it. A Mercedes-Benz with German license plates blared at him as he stepped off a curb without looking. A donkey cart clopped by in the opposite direction, its driver wearing a peasant smock that Zwingli might have recognized. There was no such thing as past or future, he saw. It all happened at once in the wonderful, brimming light. He felt the weight of it, soft as petals on his face and hands.
The shop was cool and dim inside until his eyes adjusted. Sawdust muffled his footsteps. His nose filled with the scent of pine and ebony, maple and resin. Unstrung instruments hung on the wall like dreaming angels, waiting to wake and sing. He would not -- could not -- deny he loved music. He ran his fingers over wood like satin and velvet.
"Stradivari's design remains the standard of excellence, even today."
He glanced up at the speaker, a pale stooped young man who carried on his father's and grandfather's craft of making some of the best violins in Europe.
"That's my latest copy you're holding."
The young man took the instrument from his hands, tightened pegs, plucked strings, then took a bow and drew from the instrument a cascade of sound so rich it was like listening to a river of radiance pour down from the sky.
"High C," he said. "Let me hear it."
The young man demonstrated a pure, singing note.
He nodded. "Ah. And it lies easily under the fingers?"
"Very much so," the young man agreed. "But why does that concern you, my friend, excellent musician that you are?"
"I have a student with a great deal of talent and a small hand."
The violin maker glanced quizzically at him. They were, after all, speaking of violins not pianos.
"And a present might give her the confidence she needs to take the gold."
"I see." The young man laid the violin in its case and closed the lid. "On your account?"
"On my account, thank you."
And if it had not been music, he thought as he was leaving the shop, his gift in his hand, what then? What grand enterprise would have filled his life?
Whatever might have been, surely it would have been sufficient. God was subtle, but He was not malicious.
* * * *
One time, when he had been perhaps eleven or twelve, there had been a conversation around the kitchen table in his parents' home in Munich. An early snow sifted down outside, and his mother had pulled heavy velvet curtains across the windows. In his memory, the kitchen was hazy with blue-grey smoke from his uncle's pipe, like a stage scene painted on gauze.
"Another poor report!" his father said, his hand over his eyes as if the mellow amber glow of the table lamp was too much for him. "I don't see why you don't just leave school now and come and join your uncle and me in the factory, instead of wasting your time and my money in the classroom."
"It was just low marks in history and geography, Hermann!" his mother pointed out. She stood with his father's bierkrug in her hand, on the way to the cellar to refill it. "It said nothing about other subjects."
"Ah, leave the boy alone," Uncle Jakob counselled. "He's a slow learner, but he's capable of good things."
"You say so?" his father asked. "Well, I don't see it."
A small fire chuckled to itself behind the glass doors of the potbellied stove; it was not yet cold enough in the room to open the doors.
"Sometimes ..." he began hesitantly, not because he was afraid of his father but because he was not sure himself what he wanted to say. "Sometimes I think there's some great work for me to do."
His father forked up a slice of cold meat and added it to a hunk of dark bread and cheese he had been preparing before the subject of young Albert's bad marks came up. "Electrical engineering is great work, lad! It's the future."
"He's good at mathematics, a natural," Uncle Jakob said thoughtfully. "Too good to be just an engineer, like you and me, Hermann."
"Music is like mathematics, isn't it?" his mother asked, coming back into the room with a full krug. Foam leaked out from under the pewter lid.
"Then let him be a civil servant!" his father said. "But this schooling is a waste."
"There's something I have to do," he insisted. "I think there's a plan to my life. A riddle I have to solve -- "