"Nancy Kress - The Mountain to Mohammed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

parents what had happened. Twice in April he picked up a public phone, and twice
he saw again the plastic ducks marching across the artificial lawn, and something
inside him slammed shut so hard not even the phone number could escape.


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 One sunny day in May he walked in the Public Garden. The city still maintained
it fairly well; foreign tourist traffic made it profitable. Jesse counted the number of
well-dressed foreigners versus the number of ragged street Bostonians. The ratio
equaled the survival rate for uninsured diabetics.
"Hey, mister, help me! Please!"
A terrified boy, ten or eleven, grabbed Jesse's hand and pointed. At the bottom
of a grassy knoll an elderly man lay crumpled on the ground, his face twisted.
"My Grandpa! He just grabbed his chest and fell down! Do something!
Please!"
Jesse could smell the boy's fear, a stink like rich loam. He walked over to the
old man. Breathing stopped, no pulse, color still pink...
No.
This man was an uninsured. Like Kenny, like Steven Gocek. Like Rosamund.
"Grandpa!" the child wailed. "Grandpa!"
Jesse knelt. He started mouth-to-mouth. The old man smelled of sweat, of fish,
of old flesh. No blood moved through the body. "Breathe, dammit, breathe," Jesse
heard someone say, and then realized it was him. "Breathe, you old fart, you
uninsured deadbeat, you stinking ingrate, breatheтАФ"
The old man breathed.
He sent the boy for more adults. The child took off at a dead run, returning
twenty minutes later with uncles, father, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some
language Jesse couldn't identify. In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed
tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who
breathed carefully and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass. The tourists
glanced at him and then away, their faces tightening.
The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher. Jesse
put his hand on the arm of one of the young men. "Insurance? Hospital?"
The man spat onto the grass.
Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own
bed. He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand.
Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his
hospital supply of nitroglycerin. The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing
orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and
jabbered in her own tongue.
"You a doctor?" the child translated. The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was
missing. Congenital? Accident? Ritual mutilation? The ear had healed clean.
"Yeah," Jesse said. "A doctor."
The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door. Jesse
gazed at the walls. There were no deathbed photos. As he was leaving, the woman
returned with ten incredibly dirty dollar bills.
"Doctor," she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her
top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what
might have been early signs of scurvy.
"Doctor," she said again.