"Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

convalesce in a village in the hills behind Marseilles, where I lived with old friends of my father. It was a
hot, dry place, very still, very slow; I spent my time sitting in the village square and quickly became a part
of the tiny community.

Letters from my brother Christian, who had returned to Oak Lodge after the war, arrived every month
throughout the long year of 1946. They were chatty, informative letters, but there was an increasing note
of tension in them, and it was clear that Christian's relationship with our father was deteriorating rapidly. I
never heard a word from the old man himself, but then I never expected to; I had long since resigned
myself to the fact that, even at best, he regarded me with total indifference. All his family had been an
intrusion in his work, and his guilt at neglecting us, and especially at driving our mother to taking her own
life, had blossomed rapidly, during the early years of the war, into an hysterical madness that could be
truly frightening. Which is not to say that he was perpetually shouting; on the contrary, most of his life
was spent in silent, absorbed contemplation of the oak woodland that bordered our home. At first
infuriating, because of the distance it put between him and his family, soon those long periods of quiet
became blessed, earnestly welcomed.

He died in November 1946, of an illness that had afflicted him for years. When I heard the news I was
torn between my unwillingness to return to Oak Lodge, at the edge of the Ryhope estate in Herefordshire,
and my awareness of Christian's obvious distress. He was alone now, in the house where we had lived
through our childhood together. I could imagine him prowling the empty rooms, perhaps sitting in father's
dank and unwholesome study and remembering the hours of denial, the smell of wood and compost that
the old man had trudged in through the glass-pannelled doors after his week-long sorties into the deep
woodlands. The forest had spread into that room as if my father could not bear to be away from the rank
undergrowth and the cool, moist oak glades, even when making token acknowledgement of his family. He
made that acknowledgement in the only way he knew: by telling us - and mainly telling my brother -
stories of the ancient forestlands beyond the house, the primary woodland of oak, ash, beech and the like,

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in whose dark interior (he once said) wild boar could still be heard, and smelled, and tracked by their
spoor.

I doubt if he had ever seen such a creature, but that evening, as I sat in my room overlooking the tiny
village in the hills (Christian's letter a crushed ball still held in my hand) I vividly recalled how I had
listened to the muffled grunting of some woodland animal, and heard the heavy, unhurried crashing of
something bulky moving inwards, towards the winding pathway that we called Deep Track, a route that
led spirally towards the very heartwoods of the forest.

I knew I would have to go home, and yet I delayed my departure for nearly another year. During that time
Christian's letters ceased abruptly. In his last letter, dated April 10th, he wrote of Guiwenneth, of his
unusual marriage, and hinted that I would be surprised by the lovely girl to whom he had lost his 'heart,
mind, soul, reason, cooking ability and just about everything else, Steve'. I wrote to congratulate him, of
course, but there was no further communication between us for months.

Eventually I wrote to say I was coming home, that I would stay at Oak Lodge for a few weeks, and then
find accommodation in one of the nearby towns. I said goodbye to France, and to the community that had
become so much a part of my life. I travelled to England by bus and

train, by ferry, and then by train again. On August 20th I arrived by pony and trap at the disused railway