"Lavie Tidhar - Angels Over Israel_Three Slides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

rose from the black water.
Sometimes he submerged the angels he had caught in the water, holding them
against the bottom until they stopped fighting and became silent dolls in his hands.
He played with the dolls, creating worlds in which angels fought each other
like winged knights, and others where they were fighter planes that left curving lines
of smoke across the sky.
MichaelтАЩs nights were dark. The same officer who reported his fatherтАЩs death
now visited his mother in the nights. His face remained embarrassed. In the darkness
of night his grunts changed to the coughs of a long-term smoker. The angels
penetrated the flat then and circled in the air like drunks, suffusing MichaelтАЩs room
with the scent of purity.
Michael hit at them but they would not leave him alone, and finally he hid
underneath the blanket and tried to not believe in angels. He knew most people
believed in them even though they couldnтАЩt see them. It did not occur to him to ask
who the angels themselves believed in.
In the mornings Michael prepared himself breakfast and then went down to the
yard to play. He hit the angels with a broken table leg, the bat whispering through the
air before hitting. He collected the silent bodies and made them into dolls.
Michael played with the silent angel dolls; and he dreamed of a world where he
himself was an angel, and he floated alone in the blue skies, holy and pure, and
hunted clouds.
A Year of Angels
THE BLIND ANGEL stood on the corner of Rehov HaтАЩatzmaut,
Independence Street, his fingers spread before him in a silent plea for help. A chasid
walking past threw a coin into the offered hand absent-mindedly, and the angelтАЩs
blind, pale face turned and followed him as he passed through the crowds of people.
It was a good year for army officers and politicians; a bad year for angels.
The angelтАЩs face turned now towards the sun, and he began to march down
the street, the stumps of his wings moving helplessly. As much as it can be said, he
felt frightened amongst the crowds.
Perhaps he remembered earlier days, years that came and went like pine
needles falling. Remembered the forced assembly, the soldier who hit his brother,
Raphael, with the butt of an Uzi. GabrielтАЩs public hanging in the square, his delicate
neck broken inside a rolled-up New Party flag. Perhaps he remembered an attempt to
escape: to spread wings and fly into the open sky.
Perhaps he remembered the helicopters that waited for them there, in the sky.
Remembered, maybe, the bullets that severed his wings, and his final fall to earth.
The soldiers began calling them, the survivors, the fallen. From a legend, a
myth, an ancient story they have become a joke. Lame, they were no longer scary,
became subject to ridicule, things children pointed at in the streets and sometimes
threw stones.
But those were other times, and who knows, after all, the way an angelтАЩs alien
mind works? Who knows what he thought of, if he thought at all, while he made his
lonely way through the human streets, searching ... for what? A place to sleep at
night? A covered entrance to a block of offices or flats, where he could lie covered
in newspapers? Who knows what they want, those refugees from God.
 The angel, anyhow, remained expressionless, butтАФperhaps instead of an
answerтАФbegan to climb the Carmel. How and when that king of the skies became a
resident and beggar of the city of Haifa I do not have an answer for. But he began to
march, heavily, stubbornly, up the mountain, and as became obvious almost