"Kindl, Patrick - The Woman In The Wall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kindl Patrick)

won't bore you, I'll tell you the story of my life. So far,

anyway.

I have always been shy. The urge to hide came over me at a very early age. My mother says I was a good baby; I never fussed at all. Both of my sisters came
out of the womb with mouths wide open, screaming their heads off, their hands outstretched to grasp at whatever life offered. I, on the other hand, never
even whimpered as I entered the world. I just lay there quietly in my incubator and tried to fit in. I had no longings for power or domination. I didn't
want to intrude in any way; I simply wanted to blend into the scenery with as little fuss as possible. In this I succeeded.

"Where's the baby gone?" my mother would say, poking around in the crib blankets. "She's got to be right here; I put her there myself two seconds ago. Anna
is a naughty girl, hiding from Mommy.

"Anna!" my mother's cry would echo from cellar to cupola. "Where are you, Anna?"

That was what she always wanted to know. Even today, all I have to do is close rny eyes and say aloud, "Anna! Where are you, Anna?" and those long-ago

3 days come to mind, perfectly clear in every detail. A tendency to disappear, you see, is and always has been my leading characteristic.

I don't really disappear, not exactly. I'm just not very noticeable. I'm small and thin, with a face like a glass of water. And I like to hide.

I believe that I inherited this trait from my father. I never really knew him. After a series of temporary van-ishings, each longer than the last, Father
faded out of our lives altogether, and we never saw him again. I was only three years old at the time.

I can't tell you much about my father, except that he bought a very large and dilapidated house for his bride, amassed an impressive collection of tools
and materials with which to repair it, and then disappeared.

I don't think that it was the size of the job that frightened him off. No, I'm afraid that as the years went by he felt that the house, big as it was, was
getting too full of daughters. He grew more nervous and jumpy, my mother says, after the birth of each child, and his absences became longer and more frequent.

My older sister, Andrea, remembers him best, and she says that whenever she entered a room where our father was sitting, he would duck behind a newspaper
or book and sit perfectly still, apparently hoping not to be noticed. If she spoke to him, he would shut his eyes and hum quietly to himself.

4 "He had a retiring disposition," my mother said. "Like you, Anna."

We don't even have a good photograph to remember him by. Family snapshots show only an ear, or an elbow, or the back of his head, as he sidled crabwise
away from the eye of the camera.

The last my mother heard of him was more than a year after he left. It seems that he had taken a job at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and
he'd given her name as a contact in case of emergency. They called her because my father was lost somewhere in the building and no one could find him.
It's quite a large place, I understand, with something like two hundred and seventy miles of bookshelves. It's easy to see how a man like my father could
get mislaid in a place like that.

The library guards swore he couldn't have left the building, but they never did find him. Eventually he was officially presumed dead by the authorities
and our lives went on. I always liked to think that he was still alive in there, living off library paste and sandwich crusts from the staff's brown bag
lunches. My mother says that that's just a fantasy and that we have to face facts, but it makes me happy to think of him like that, and after all, it could
be true.

I did wish that he had stayed with us a little longer, that he had given me more of a chance to be a daughter to him. I believe that he and I would have
had much in common.