"TUROW, SCOTT - THE BURDEN OF PROOF" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turrow Scott)

thought of a note, some communication, provided, against all reason, a
surge of hope.

"You'd just as well stay out of there," the policeman said, gesturing
vaguely behind him.

Stern nodded with the instruction, but after an instant he

took a single step forward.

"Oncemore," he said.

The policeman waited only a moment before opening the door.

He was known as Sandy, a name he had adopted shortly after his mother
and sister and he had arrived here in 1947, driven from Argentina by
unending calamities--the death of his older brother, and then his
father; the rise of Peren.

It was his mother who had urged him to use this nickname, but he was
never wholly at ease with it. There was a jaunty, comic air to the
name; it fit him poorly, like someone else's clothing, and, therefore,
seemed to betray all that helpless immigrant yearning for acceptance
which he so ardently sought to conceal, and which had been in truth
perhaps his most incorrigible passion.

To be an American. Having come of age here in the 1950s, he would
always hear the whisper of special obligations in the word. He had
never bought a foreign car; and he had forsaken Spanish years ago.
Occasionally, in surprise, a few words, a favored expression might
escape him, but he had arrived here determined to master the American
tongue.

In his parents' home there was no single language--his mother addressed
them in Yiddish; with each other, the children used Spanish; his father
talked principally to himself in windy high-flown German, which sounded
to Stern as a child like some rambling machine. In Argentina, with its
deep Anglophile traditions, he had learned to speak the English of an
Eton schoolboy. But here the idioms of everyday life flashed in his
mind like coins, the currency of real Americans. From the first, he
could not bear to use them. Pride and shame, fire and ice, burned away
at him always; he could not endure the sniggering that seemed to follow
even the slightest accented misuse. But in his dreams he spoke a rich
American argot, savory as any jazzman's.

American optimism, on the other hand, he had never absorbed. He could
not leave aside the gloomy lessons of foreign experience, of his
parents' lives--emigrants, exiles, souls fleeing despots, never at rest.
Certain simple propositions he took as articles of faith: things would
often turn out badly. Seated in the living room in an overstuffed