"Alexander Green - Crimson Sails" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Alexander)

spot? The kind of wine that's buried there would make many a drunkard
agree to having his tongue cut off if he'd be given just a little glass of it.
Each cask holds a hundred litres of a substance that makes your soul
explode and your body turn into a blob of dough. It's darker than a cherry,
and it won't pour out of a bottle. It's as thick as heavy cream. It's locked
away in casks of black oak that're as strong as iron. They have double rows
of copper hoops. And the lettering on the hoops is in Latin and says, 'A
Gray will drink me when he'll be in Heaven.' There were so many opinions
as to what it means that your great-grandfather, Simeon Gray, had a
country estate built and named it 'Heaven' and thought in that way he
could reconcile the mysterious inscription and reality by means of some
harmless wit. And what do you know? He died of a heart attack as soon as
the first hoops were knocked off. That's how excited the old gourmet was.
Ever since then nobody's as much as touched the cask. They say the
precious wine will bring misfortune. Indeed, not even the Egyptian Sphinx
asked such riddles. True, it did ask a sage: 'Will I devour you like I devour
everyone else? Tell me the truth, and you'll live', but only after giving it
some concerted thought...."
"I think the spigot's leaking again," Poldichoque would say, interrupting
himself, and would head at a slant towards the corner from whence,
having tightened the spigot, he would return with a bland, beaming face.
"Yes. After giving it some thought and, most important, taking his time
about it, the sage might have said to the Sphinx: 'Let's go and have a
drink, my good fellow, and you'll forget all about such nonsense.' 'A Gray
will drink me when he's in Heaven!' How's one to understand that? Does it
mean he'll drink it after he's dead? That's very strange. Which means he's
a saint, which means he doesn't drink either wine or spirits. Let's say that
'Heaven' means happiness. But if the question is posed like that, any joy
will lose half of its shiny leathers when the happy fellow has to ask himself
sincerely: is this Heaven? That's the rub. In order to drink from this cask
with an easy heart and laugh, my boy, really laugh, one has to have one
foot on the ground and the other in the sky. There's also a third theory:
that one day a Gray will get heavenly drunk and will brazenly empty the
little cask. However, this, my boy, would not be carrying out the prophesy,
it would be a tavern row."
Having checked once again on the working order of the spigot in the big
cask, Poldichoque ended his story looking glum and intent:
"Your ancestor, John Gray, brought these casks over from Lisbon on the
Beagle in 1793; he paid two thousand gold piasters for the wine. The
gunsmith Benjamin Ellian from Pondisherry did the inscription on the
casks. The casks are sunk six feet underground and covered with the ashes
of grape vines. No one ever drank this wine, tasted it, or ever will."
"I'll drink it," Gray said one day, stamping his foot. "What a brave
young man!" Poldichoque said. "And will you drink it in Heaven?"
"Of course! Here's Heaven! It's here, see?" Gray laughed softly and
opened his small fist. His delicate but well-formed palm was lit up by the
sun, and then the boy curled his fingers into a fist again. "Here it is! It's
here, and now it's gone again!"
As he spoke he kept clenching and unclenching his fist. At last, pleased
with his joke, he ran out, ahead of Poldichoque, onto the dark stairway