"Joe Haldeman - Lindsay and the Red City Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

LINDSAY AND THE RED CITY BLUES
"The ancient red city of Marrakesh," his guidebook said, "is the last large oasis for
travelers moving south into the Sahara. It is the most exotic of Moroccan cities, where Arab
Africa and Black Africa meet in a setting that has changed but little in the past thousand
years."
In midafternoon, the book did not mention, it becomes so hot that even the flies stop
moving.
The air conditioner in his window hummed impressively but neither moved nor cooled the
air. He had complained three times, and the desk clerk responded with two shrugs and a
blank stare. By two o'clock his little warren was unbearable. He fled to the street, where it
was hotter.
Scott Lindsay was a salesman who demonstrated chemical glassware for a large scientific-
supply house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Like all Washingtonians, Lindsay thought
that a person who could survive summer on the banks of the Potomac could survive it
anywhere. He saved up six weeks of vacation time and flew to Europe in late July. Paris was
pleasant enough, and the Pyrenees were even cool, but nobody had told him that on August
first all of Europe goes on vacation; every good hotel room has been sewed up for six
months, restaurants are jammed or closed, and you spend all your time making bad travel
connections to cities where only the most expensive hotels have accommodations.
In Nice a Canadian said he had just come from Morocco, where it was hotter than hell but
there were practically no tourists this time of year. Scott looked wistfully over the poisoned
but still blue Mediterranean, felt the pressure of twenty million fellow travelers at his back,
remembered Bogie, and booked the next flight to Casablanca.
Casablanca combined the charm of Pittsburgh with the climate of Dallas. The still air was
thick with dust from high-rise construction. He picked up a guidebook and riffled through it
and, on the basis of a few paragraphs, took the predawn train to Marrakesh.
"The Red City," it went on, "takes its name from the color of the local sandstone from
which the city and its ramparts were built." It would be more accurate, Scott reflected,
though less alluring, to call it the Pink City. The Dirty Pink City. He stumbled along the
sidewalk on the shady side of the street. The twelve-inch strip of shade at the edge of the
sidewalk was crowded with sleeping beggars. The heat was so dry he couldn't even sweat.
He passed two bars that were closed and stepped gratefully into a third. It was a Moslem
bar, a milk bar, no booze, but at least it was shade. Two young men slumped at the bar,
arguing in guttural whispers, and a pair of ancients in burnooses sat at a table playing a static
game of checkers. An oscillating fan pushed the hot air and dust around. He raised a finger
at the bartender, who regarded him with stolid hostility, and ordered in schoolboy French a
small bottle of Vichy water, carbonated, without ice, and, out of deference to the guidebook,
a glass of hot mint tea. The bartender brought the mint tea and a liter bottle of Sidi Harazim
water, not carbonated, with a glass of ice. Scott tried to argue with the man but he only
stared and kept repeating the price. He finally paid and dumped the ice (which the guidebook
had warned him about) into the ashtray. The young men at the bar watched the transaction
with sleepy indifference.
The mint tea was an aromatic infusion of mint leaves in hot sugar water. He sipped and
was surprised, and perversely annoyed, to find it quite pleasant. He took a paperback novel
out of his pocket and read the same two paragraphs over and over, feeling his eyes track,
unable to concentrate in the heat.
He put the book down and looked around with slow deliberation, trying to be impressed
by the alienness of the place. Through the open front of the bar he could see across the street,
where a small park shaded the outskirts of the Djemaa El Fna, the largest open-air market in
Morocco and, according to the guidebook, the most exciting and colorful; which itself was