"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

full of homeless--far too much, in short, like their
too-close friends, the Americans.)
My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her
mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley
MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size
of rappers' jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster.
Her husband, the Iranian emigre', is an architect. His
family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered
Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting
vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White
Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father
looks rather tired.
Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in
Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound
Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on
a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days
later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory
preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears
and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech
that America simply never possessed. A some

how
monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don
Quixote.
The Hague is a nineteenth-century government
town of close-packed four-story townhouses. The
pavements, built on sand, ripple and warp like the
sagging crust of an old pie. Advertisements in the
bus-stops brutally abolish any air of the antique,
though: "Mag ik u iets persoonlijks faxen? De Personal
Fax van Canon. CANON--Meeten al een Voorsprong!" Dutch
is close enough to English to nag at the ear, but it's
landmined with liquid vowels and odd gutturals. The
streets--"straats"--are awash with aging Euro baby-
boomers, leavened with a Dutch-born populace of
imperial emigres -- Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Surinamese,
Dutch-Chinese.
On Wednesday, Moluccan separatists bombarded the
Indonesian embassy, near my hotel, with Molotov
cocktails. A dozen zealots were injured. Nobody
outside Holland and Indonesia know much about the
Moluccans, an Asian Moslem ethnic group with a
nationalistic grievance. They'd love to raise hell at
home in Indonesia, but when they do they're shot out
of hand by fascist police with teeth like Dobermans,
so they raise a stink in the old Mother Country
instead, despite the fact that Holland can do almost
nothing for them. Europe is full of exiles--and full
of its own micro-nations: the Flemish, the Magyars,
Gypsies, Corsicans and Bretons, Irish who remember