"Mary Renault - Greece 5 - Mask Of Apollo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

to the door, my mother and grandmother and sister flinging their arms across him wailing, the small room
full of neighbors and actors edging and shouldering in and out to pay respects and hang on the door their
black-ribboned locks of hair. I can still feel the pull on my scalp as I stood in a dark corner, hacking at
mine with my mother's scissors. It was short already, like every actor's; being fair and fine it seemed to
go to nothing, however close I cut. I tugged and hurt myself, my eyes running with the pain, and with
grief, and from fear I should not have enough to show up in the grave-wreath.
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From time to time the wailing broke off as some new caller spoke his lines. The neighbors left
soon-outsiders don't know what to say about an actor-but his fellow artists hung about, for he was
always a well-liked man. So indeed they kept saying -how good he was to work with, and always ready
to help a friend. (My mother, I thought, would sooner have had the news that he had saved a little.) He
never dried, they said, he could keep going through anything; and they told some tales that made me
stare, not having learned yet that anything can happen on tour. What talent he had, they said, poor
Artemidoros! A disgrace he was passed over at the Lenaia; no one remembers seeing Polyxena done
with more feeling; but the lot fell on some poor judges this year.

I put down my scissors and ran inside, my hair half-shorn like a felon's, leaving my clippings on the towel.
As though everyone would not have approved my weeping, I hid like a dog, gulping and choking on my
bed. It was not the mourners I was hiding from, but my father on his bier, as silent as an extra, masked in
his dead face, waiting for his exit.

I'm not sure how long I had known I had more talent than he had. Two years-no, three; I was sixteen
when I saw him as the young Achilles in The Sacrifice at Aulis, and I doubt if it came new to me even
then. He always moved well, and his hands could say anything. I never heard his voice more charming.
He made Achilles a delightful youth, spirited, sincere, with an arrogance too boyish to offend. They could
have eaten him up; they hardly noticed his Agamemnon, waiting for him to come back as Achilles. Yes;
but the shadow of all that darkness, of that black grief beside the shore, the dreadful war yell whose rage
and pain scared all the horses, it is close ahead, his goddess mother knows already. One ought to feel it
breathe. It crept in my hair, where he speaks of his slighted honor; I shivered down my backbone. And I
heard another player, hardly yet knowing whom.

If he had been self-satisfied, jealous or hard to work with, I should have learned to justify myself. But he
had all an artist needs, except the spark from the god. No one knew better than I did what he was like
backstage. I had been on with him almost since I could stand alone.

At three, I was Medea's younger son, though I can't remember it; I don't suppose I knew I was on a
stage. My father told me later how he had brought home his Medea mask beforehand, in case it
frightened me; but I only stuck my fingers through its mouth. It is hard to make actors' children take
masks seriously, even the most dreadful; they see them too soon, too near. My mother used to say that at
two weeks old, to keep me from the draft, she tucked me inside an old Gorgon, and found me sucking
the snakes.

I do remember, though, quite clearly, playing Astyanax to his Andromache. I was turned six by then, for
Astyanax has to work. The play was Euripides' The Women of Troy. My father told me the plot, and
promised I should not really be thrown off the walls, in spite of all the talk about it. We were always
acting out such tales as a bedtime game, with mime, or our own words. I loved him dearly. I fought for