"Destroyer - 027 - The Last Temple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

"Yes," said Ben Isaac Goldman forcefully. "And what is great about lettuce is that it is not hamburger." He laughed.

"Or ice cream," said Ida, and laughed with him, and their strides lengthened as they searched more diligently for a restaurant that served good vegetables. And lettuce.

So this at last was the promised land, Ben Isaac Goldman thought. What life was all about. A job, a place to live, a woman on his arm. The meaning of life. Not revenge. Not destruction. Here, there was no one checking on him, no meetings, no bugged telephones, no dust, no soldiers, no sand, no desert, no war.

He talked all through dinner at a little place with wrinkled peas, white carrots that grew soggy, and lettuce no crisper than wet blotting paper.

By the time their coffee came, weak and bitter as it was, Ben was holding Ida's hands in his on the table.

"America is truly a golden country," he said.

Ida Bernard nodded, watching Ben's broad, jolly face, a face she had seen every day going to work at the hamburger palace, and that she had finally conspired to meet at the glove-disposal unit in the parking lot.

She realized she had never seen Goldman smile until now. She had never seen the twinkle in his deep brown eyes or color in his pale cheeks until now.

"They think I am a dull old man," Goldman said, waving his arm to sweep together every frizz-haired hamburger jockey in the country who resented assistant managers who told them not to pick their noses near the food. Goldman's swinging arm bumped against a newspaper tucked precariously into the pocket of a man's raincoat hanging on the coat rack. It fell to the floor, and Goldman, looking around embarrassedly, bent to pick it up. As he leaned over, he kept talking.

"Aaah, what do they know?" he said. "Children. They have notЕ" His voice trailed off as his eyes fixed on a corner of the newspaper.

"Yes?" said Ida Bernard. "They have not what?"

"Seen what I have seen," said Goldman. His face had gone ash white. He clutched the paper in his hand as if it were a baton and he were a world-class relay runner.

"I must go now," he said. "Thank you for a nice evening."

Then, still clutching the paper, he stumbled up out of his seat and left, without looking back.

The waiter tiredly asked Ida if that would be all. He did not seem surprised at Goldman's sudden departure. The restaurant's culinary arts often had that effect on the digestion of senior citizens, people old enough to remember when things had been better.

Ida nodded and paid the check, but as she got up to leave, she noted Goldman's hat on the coat rack. He was not to be seen on the street outside, but on the inside band of his hat, his name and address had been printed twice in indelible ink.

His address was only a few blocks from where she stood, so she walked.

She passed the devastated blocks of business, their doors chained and their windows fenced in against the human storm of Baltimore. She passed the open doors and boarded windows of a dozen bars. The Flamingo Club and the Pleze Walk Inn. She passed a block of squat four-family houses, each with the same design, the same television aerials, and the same fat old mommas out on the stoops in their rocking chairs, fanning the soot away from their faces.

Goldman lived in an apartment building that was, to Ida's eyes, a forbidding brick square, chipped and worn, like a stone castle that had been under attack by the Huns for the past two hundred years. The street on which he lived had survived the murderous race riots of ten years ago, only to die, instead, of natural causes.

Ida felt another twinge of pity for the little man. The maternal instincts that had lain dormant since the death of her husband, her dear Nathan, rose up like a desert wind. She would sweep away Goldman's past and give them both something to live for. Then she would cook for him, clean for him, remind him to wear his rubbers on wet days, buy him new white gloves every day, and never serve hamburgers or ice cream.

Ida found the barely discernible "Goldman" inked under a button inside the front door, and pushed it. After thirty seconds of silence, she pushed the button again. Could he have gone somewhere else? She pictured him wandering the city, being attacked by roving groups of winos and junkies.

The intercom crackled. A small voice said, "Go away."

Ida leaned up close to the intercom and shouted: "Ben, it's Ida. I have your hat."

Silence.

"Ben? Really. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's me. Ida."