"Golden, Arthur - Memoirs of A Geisha" - читать интересную книгу автора (Golden Arthur)

Perhaps this is why when he spoke to me, tears came stinging to my eyes.

Mr. Tanaka raised me into a sitting position. I thought he was going to tell me to leave, but instead he said, "Don't swallow that blood, little girl. Unless you want to make a stone in your stomach. I'd spit it onto the floor, if I were you."

"A girl's blood, Mr. Tanaka?" said one of the men. "Here, where we bring the fish?"

Fishermen are terribly superstitious, you see. They especially don't like women to have anything to do with fishing. One man in our village, Mr. Yamamura, found his daughter playing in his boat one morning. He beat her with a stick and then washed out the boat with sake and lye so strong it bleached streaks of coloring from the wood. Even this wasn't enough; Mr. Yamamura had the Shinto priest come and bless it. All this because his daughter had done nothing more than play where the fish are caught. And here Mr. Tanaka was suggesting I spit blood onto the floor of the room where the fish were cleaned.

"If you're afraid her spit might wash away some of the fish guts," said Mr. Tanaka, "take them home with you. I've got plenty more."

"It isn't the fish guts, sir."

"I'd say her blood will be the cleanest thing to hit this floor since you or I were born. Go ahead," Mr. Tanaka said, this time talking to me. "Spit it out."

There I sat on that slimy table, uncertain what to do. I thought it would be terrible to disobey Mr. Tanaka, but I'm not sure I would have found the courage to spit if one of the men hadn't leaned to the side and pressed a finger against one nostril to blow his nose onto the floor. After seeing this, I couldn't bear to hold anything in my mouth a moment longer, and spat out the blood just as Mr. Tanaka had told me to do. All the men walked away in disgust except Mr. Tanaka's assistant, named Sugi. Mr. Tanaka told him to go and fetch Dr. Miura.

"I don't know where to find him," said Sugi, though what he really meant, I think, was that he wasn't interested in helping.

I told Mr. Tanaka the doctor had been at our house a few minutes earlier.

"Where is your house?" Mr. Tanaka asked me.

"It's the little tipsy house up on the cliffs."

"What do you mean . . . 'tipsy house'?"

"It's the one that leans to the side, like it's had too much to drink."

Mr. Tanaka didn't seem to know what to make of this. "Well, Sugi, walk up toward Sakamoto's tipsy house and look for Dr. Miura. You won't have trouble finding him. Just listen for the sound of his patients screaming when he pokes them."

I imagined Mr. Tanaka would go back to his work after Sugi had left; but instead he stood near the table a long while looking at me. I felt my face beginning to burn. Finally he said something I thought was very clever.

"You've got an eggplant on your face, little daughter of Sakamoto."

He went to a drawer and took out a small mirror to show it to me. My lip was swollen and blue, just as he'd said.

"But what I really want to know," he went on, "is how you came to have such extraordinary eyes, and why you don't look more like your father?"

"The eyes are my mother's," I said. "But as for my father, he's so wrinkled I've never known what he really looks like."

"You'll be wrinkled yourself one day."

"But some of his wrinkles are the way he's made," I said. "The back of his head is as old as the front, but it's as smooth as an egg."

"That isn't a respectful thing to say about your father," Mr. Tanaka told me. "But I suppose it's true."

Then he said something that made my face blush so red, I'm sure my lips looked pale.

"So how did a wrinkled old man with an egg for a head father a beautiful girl like you?"