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

as far as I could see. As they reached the top of the pass the low light from the east
caught them and burned them to gold.

The trucks went up the road for two days. Then they stopped and the refugees
started to come the other way, down the road. First the ones with the vehicles:
matatus piled high with bedding and tools and animals, trucks with the family
balanced in the back on top of all the things they had saved. A Toyota microbus,
bursting with what looked like bolts of coloured cloth but which were women,
jammed in next to each other. Ancient cars, motorbikes and mopeds vanishing
beneath sagging bales of possessions. It was a race of poverty; the rich ones with
machines took the lead. After motors came animals; donkey carts and ox-wagons,
pedal-rickshaws. Most came in the last wave, the ones on foot. They pushed
handcarts laden with pots and bedding rolls and boxes lashed with twine, or dragged
trolleys on ropes or shoved frightened-faced old women in wheelbarrows. They
struggled their burdens down the steep valley road. Some broke free and bounced
over the edge down across the terraces, strewing clothes and tools and cooking
things over the fields. Last of all came hands and heads. These people carried their
possessions on their heads and backs and children's shoulders.

My father opened the church to the refugees. There they could have rest, warm chai,
some ugali, some beans. I helped stir the great pots of ugali over the open fire. The
village doctor set up a treatment centre. Most of the cases were for damaged feet
and hands, and dehydrated children. Not everyone in Gichichi agreed with my
father's charity. Some thought it would encourage the refugees to stay and take food
from our mouths. The shopkeepers said he was ruining their trade by giving away
what they should be selling. My father told them he was just trying to do what he
thought Jesus would have done. They could not answer that, but I know he had
another reason. He wanted to hear the refugee's stories. They would be his story,
soon enough.

****

What about Tusha?

The package missed us by a couple of kilometres. It hit a place called Kombe; two
Kikuyu farms and some shit-caked cows. There was a big bang. Some of us from
Tusha took a matatu to see what had happened to Kombe. They tell us there is
nothing left. There they are, go, ask them.

This nothing, my brothers, what was it like? A hole?

No, it was something, but nothing we could recognize. The photographs? They only
show the thing. They do not show how it happens. The houses, the fields, the fields
and the track, they run like fat in a pan. We saw the soil itself melt and new things
reach out of it like drowning men's fingers.

What kind of things?

We do not have the words to describe them. Things like you see in the television
programmes about the reefs on the coast, only the size of houses, and striped like