"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

So it took several days for them to notice that young Kiimrod had disappeared.

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As of that morning, the presidency of the Innere Stadt, the Inner City of Vienna enclosed by the Ringstrasse, was in the hands of the United States Army, which was in charge of security for one month. On Kфrntnerstrasse, in front of the well-lit door of the Military Police station, it was an MP from Kansas who sat down next to the driver. The three other members of the International Patrol-an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian-squeezed in the back.
The car started for the fourth watch of the night, in the direction of St. Stephen's Cathedral, whose two towers were just becoming visible in the first light of dawn.
They drove slowly, in the middle of the empty street. It was June 19, 1945, and it was now 5:50 A.M.
The Jeep reached Franz-Joseph Quay. On the opposite bank of the Danube canal, beyond the half-destroyed Baths of Diana and the sea of rubble left by the war, they could see, against the pink sky, the black skeletal circle of the Prater's Big Wheel. They turned left, went along Gonzagagasse and then south. They could now see the baroque splendors of the Bohemian Chancellery.
They could also see the boy.
The Englishman saw him first but remained silent. He was sulking. He couldn't bear the bitter smell of the Frenchman's tobacco; he despised the American, who exasperated him with his never-ending stories of baseball games and feminine conquests made during his stay in London, before June of 1944; he detested the Russian, who wasn't even Russian, since he had slanted eyes, Mongolian features, and the intellectual vivacity of a pudding. As for the driver, who was Austrian, and, worse
yet, Viennese, his constant cynicism and especially his refusal to consider himself a defeated enemy made him unbearable.
A few seconds later, the American looked up, and exclaimed. The five men turned, looking toward a small baroque house of three stories, six windows, with balconies across the first two, and a columned entrance.
All they saw was a silhouette, spread-eagled against the building on the top floor like a crucified figure. This image struck them. Everything conspired toward it: the incredible leanness of the tall body, on which floated pants and a shirt that were at the same time too large and too short, the bare feet, the emaciated face hollowed even more by two huge eyes, so light they seemed almost white in the beam of the searchlight, and the mouth, half open in a grimace of effort and suffering.
In truth, the scene lasted only a few seconds. Using the handle of a window, holding Onto the ledge, the silhouette had moved. The light beam caught it one last time before it scaled the railing of a balcony. They heard glass breaking, the slight squeak of a window being opened and closed. Then silence.
"A burglar," said the Viennese phlegmatically. "But it was only a kid, in spite of his size."
The intent was clear. The International Patrol could intervene only in cases where a representative of the occupying forces was implicated. Ordinary misdemeanors were the responsibility of the Austrian police. The central police station was alerted. Ten minutes passed before the arrival of an inspector and two policemen.
This was enough time for Reb Klimrod.
For twenty, maybe thirty, minutes, two sorts of noises reached him in a strange superimposition.
First, the real noises, those made by the policemen entering the house and searching it from bottom to top, opening and closing doors, walking on the marble tiles of the ground floor and on the wood floors above, once so carefully polished. As he had expected, they followed the trail he had traced for them, using what energy he had left: they followed his bloody footsteps to the attic, found the small circular window open, concluded, naturally, that he had escaped that way, over the roofs,
came back down, speaking louder, looked around one last time, left.
Those noises, and then the others, the imaginary ones, spilling from his memory with an acuteness that made him tremble:
Mina's lively footsteps running or skipping in the hallways, Katarina playing Schubert on the piano, their mother's voice, with that slight Polish accent she never lost, her calm voice, her soothing voice, which created a serenity all around her the way a pebble thrown into the water of a pond causes successive concentric circles, saying during the evening of July 2, 1941:
"Johann, we will go to Lvov, the children and I, thanks to the passports Erich has gotten for us. We will arrive there on Saturday, and we will stay until Monday. Johann, my father and mother have never seen their grandchildren
Reb Michael Klimrod had the eyes of his mother, Hannah Itzkowitch Klimrod, born in 1904 in Lvov, where her father was a doctor. She would almost have hoped to succeed him, but for the double handicap of being a woman and a Jew. She had instead studied literature in Prague, where the quota for Jewish students was less limited, and, using the vague pretext of an uncle in business in Vienna, had then gone there to study law. Johann Klimrod had been her professor there for two years. He was fifteen years her senior; the eyes that came from the steppes had caught his professorial gaze, and her exceptional intellectual sharpness and humor had done the rest. They were married in 1925, had Katarina in 1926, Reb in 1928, Mina in 1933. .
He heard the heavy front door slam as the policemen left. Then the muffled sounds of a discussion between the Austrians and the International Patrol, followed by the rumbling of engines starting up, whose noise then decreased. Silence returned to the house. Reb tried to straighten up. He had to twist himself, very slowly, inch by inch. A hundred times, as a child, he had hidden this way, curled up in this nook, deriving mysterious pleasure from this voluntary confinement, the first few times forced to fight an unspeakable panic and not resting until he had overcome it, forcing himself to press against the damp cold stone wall where whitish things crawled. At least he thought they were white, he had forsaken light in order to
preserve the mystery and, mostly, the capacity to be scared, and, eventually, to dominate himself.
Under his fingers, the board finally gave way. He put out a leg, then one shoulder, and slipped through the opening. He found himself in the closet and, from there, in the room that had been his and was now empty of all furniture. He went into the hallway. To his right was Mina's room; further down, Kati's. Those rooms were also empty; there was nothing left. It was the same in what had been the game room, the conservatory, and what Hannah had given him as a study, him, Reb.
And also the three guest rooms, the two rooms where the French governess lived, from which even the framed etchings of the Place des Vosges and the Pont des Arts in Paris, a view of the Loire near VendЇme, where Mademoiselle was born, another of an inlet in Brittany, and one of the Pyrщnщes had been removed.
On the next floor, only one of the servants' rooms seemed to be still lived in, or had been recently. He found two camp beds and some very neat packing. There was a slight aroma of mild tobacco in the air. Some khaki underwear had been hung to dry on a line in the bathroom.
He went back down to the second floor.
This was the floor where his parents had always lived. Hannah had turned the large hallway with the marble floor into a border, which neither children nor servants could cross without her express permission. On one side, the one whose windows faced the front, were the common rooms: the two living rooms, the dining room, lengthened at a right angle by a huge pantry and the kitchen and, at the other end, perpendicular to the serving rooms, the library, so large that it reached both sides and, in a way, united them.
He pushed open the doors to his right. This had been Hannah's private apartment, forbidden territory. Now completely empty. Even the tapestry had been removed, with great care. Hannah's large bed had been there, between these two windows facing the inner courtyard. Reb had been born in that bed, as had his sisters. Walking in a direction parallel to the hallway, he came to her boudoir. Empty. Then to her study, where,
between his birth and Mina's, Hannah had prepared, successfully of course, a doctorate in philosophy. Empty also.
The next room beyond the connecting bathroom had been his father's. It was completely furnished. But he did not recognize the furniture. Also, the bed would not have suited his father; it was too high; the invalid could not have lain down on it without help.
He opened one closet, then another. Inside them, uniforms, many of them, similarly bedecked with stars and decorations. Underwear and shirts, meticulously ironed, were piled on the shelves. He saw shoes of all kinds, some low-heeled, with laces. On two coatracks, some unquestionably civilian clothes. He touched them .
but his gaze was already on the last door, the one leading to the library.
He turned the handle, but didn't open it right away. For the first time since he had entered the house, his face showed some emotion. His pupils widened, his lips parted as if he were suddenly out of breath. He leaned his temple, then his cheek against the door frame and closed his eyes. His features clenched in despair. He could hear, probably more clearly than if the noises had been real, the smooth and familiar sound, hardly hissing, of the rubber wheels of the wheelchair belonging to Johann Klimrod, whose legs had been paralyzed by an attack of hemiplegia in 1931, in the spring when Reb Michael was not yet three years old. He could hear his father's voice talking on the telephone, or speaking to his associate Erich Steyr, or to one of the four assistants or one of the three secretaries. He could hear the clicking of the small elevator his father used to go from his ground-floor law office to the library and his private rooms .
could hear his father saying to Steyr: "Erich, I am afraid of this trip to Lvov. In spite of these permits you have obtained for them . .
He opened his eyes, pushed the door, went in. The room contained the long polished oak table he had always known, an old carpet, a rickety chair. The walls, covered with garnet silk above the paneling, still bore outlines of the paintings that had hung on them. Some of the shelves accessible from an oakrailed balcony had been torn down. There remained not one of
the fifteen or twenty thousand books collected by Johann Klimrod over forty years and, before him, by the four or five preceding generations of Klimrods, one of whom had been a high-ranking official under Joseph H, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. Nor did there remain any part of the marvelous collection of madonnas in polychromed woods, slender, smiling, dressed in brocade, four and a half centuries old. .

In the ravaged library, fantastically resonant, daybreak began filtering through the closed shutters. He walked toward the elevator the way you go toward a last resource. .
To reach Vienna this dawn of June 19, he had traveled the almost one hundred miles separating Mauthausen from the capital on foot, moving only at night, sleeping during the day, stealing food from farms. He had covered the last twenty-two miles in one stretch.
Many years later, David Settiniaz asked him the reason for this frenetic, solitary rush-when he and Tarras would certainly have helped him return to Vienna-and he replied, in his faraway tone: "I wanted to find my father, and find him by my own means."
When the elevator had been built, in order to conceal it a tabernacle panel from some parish church in the Tyrol or Bohemia had been fastened to a simple wood panel, and that to the grille. It dated from the fifteenth century, and those who had ransacked the house hadn't missed it; the panel had disappeared, leaving only the ash one.
He opened it. The metallic cage was narrow, the exact size of the wheelchair. And the wheelchair was there, empty.
Rob Klimrod was certain that his father was dead. Standing before the empty chair, he cried.

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