"Ian McDonald - Tendeleo's Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

were benches for the people, a lectern for the sermon and a high chair for when the
bishop came to confirm children. Behind the altar rail was the holy table covered
with a white cloth and an alcove in the wall for the cup and holy communion plate.
We didn't have a font. We took people to the river and put them under. I and my
mother sang in the choir. The services were long and, as I see them now, quite
boring, but the music was wonderful. The women sang, the men played instruments.
The best was played by a tall Luo, a teacher in the village school we called, rather
blasphemously, Most High. It was a simple instrument: a piston ring from an old
Peugeot engine which he hit with a heavy steel bolt. It made a great, ringing rhythm.

What was left over from the church went into the pastor's house. It had poured
concrete floors and louvre windows, a separate kitchen and a good charcoal stove a
parishioner who could weld had made from a diesel drum. We had electric light, two
power sockets and a radio/cassette player, but no television. It was inviting the devil
to dinner, my father told us. Kitchen, living room, our bedroom, my mother's
bedroom, and my father's study. Five rooms. We were people of some distinction in
Gichichi; for Kalenjin.

Gichichi was a thin, straggly sort of village; shops, school, post-office, matatu
office, petrol station and mandazi shop up on the main road, with most of the
houses set off the footpaths that followed the valley terraces. On one of them was
our shamba, half a kilometre down the valley. The path to it went past the front door
of the Ukerewe family. They had seven children who hated us. They threw dung or
stones and called us see-what-we-thought-of-ourselves-Kalenjin and
hated-of-God-Episcopalians. They were African Inland Church Kikuyu, and they
had no respect for the discipline of the bishop.

If the church was my father's Eden, the shamba was my mother's. The air was cool
in the valley and you could hear the river over the stones down below. We grew
maize and gourds and some sugar-cane, which the local rummers bought from my
father and he pretended not to know. Beans and chillis. Onions and potatoes. Two
trees of finger bananas, though M'zee Kipchobe maintained that they sucked the life
out of the soil. The maize grew right over my head, and I would run into the
sugar-cane and pretend that two steps had taken me out of this world into another.
There was always music there; the solar radio, or the women singing together when
they helped each other turn the soil or hoe the weeds. I would sing with them, for I
was considered good at harmonies. The shamba too had a place where the holy
things were kept. Among the thick, winding tendrils of an old tree killed by
stran-gling fig the women left little wooden figures gifts of money, Indian-trader
jewellery and beer.

You are wondering, what about the Chaga? You've worked out from the dates that I
was nine when the first package came down on Kilimanjaro. How could such
tremendous events, a thing like another world taking over our own, have made so
little impression on my life? It is easy, when it is no nearer to you than another world.
We were not ignorant in Gichichi. We had seen the pictures from Kilimanjaro on the
television, read the articles in the Nation about the thing that is like a coral reef and a
rainforest that came out of the object from the sky. We had heard the discussions on
the radio about how fast it was growingтАФfifty metres every day, it was ingrained on
our mindsтАФand what it might be and where it might come from. Every morning the