"Geoff Ryman - Pol Pots Beautifull Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

In Cambodia people are used to ghosts. Ghosts buy
newspapers. They own property.
A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at
the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had
murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to
inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded
up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.
Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She'd
done her research and could claim to be the last surviving
relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold
the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground
floor into a photocopying shop.
The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.
At first, single black and white photos turned up in the
copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The
father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared
fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other
photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each
other. The background was hazy like fog.
One night the owner heard a noise and trundled
downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture
after another of faces: young college men, old women,
parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in
uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing
happened.
He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding
out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever
children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies.
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 Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter
by Geoff Ryman


They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when
Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.
News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost
relatives. Women would cry, "That's my mother! I didn't have
a photograph!" They would weep and press the flimsy A4
sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and
humidity as if it too were crying.
Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every
morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the
owner announced that each morning's harvest would be
delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.
Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the
shop and found it blocked. He went 'round to the front of the