"Kim Wilkins - The Autumn Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilkins Kim)

Gerda shrugged. "Believe what you like. Do you want another drink?"

Christine looked at her empty beer, then nodded. "Yeah, a big one."

She watched Gerda go to the bar. The band was still playing, Jude was still talking in the corner, the air
was blue and thick with smoke and conversation. But she felt lonely and isolated and strangely afraid,
and it had something to do with a twenty-five-year-old blurred memory of black wings.

CHAPTER TWO



from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.



I first conceived of the Bone Wife as a child of eight in Bremen. My mother had taken me to a traveling
exhibit of puppets, dolls, and automatons in the town square. I had always been, and continue to be,
overly interested in contraptions, inventions, gadgets with wheels and cogs. The exhibit was set up in the
shadow of the DomтАФits dark spires pointing toward the broad skyтАФon a summer afternoon that
stretched on for miles. I wandered between the exhibits, clutching my mother's fingers in one hand, and a
sticky ice cream in the other. Such an array of painted faces: some plain with round black eyes and
pointed noses, some so garishly colorful that even I could sense their brightness; clown faces, girl faces,
boy faces, cat faces, elephant faces; spindly legs, silk feet, straw-stuffed arms, antique lace, and stiff
linen. I was swept away by the sea of ghastly wooden smiles and laughing fur eyebrows. One doll in
particular caught my eye as it was the exact image of my mother, but without her stern hairstyle and
clothes. This little doll had perfect ringlets and a pretty frilled dress. Oh, I cried for that doll!

"Mama," I said (in German, of course, as it is my native language), "if you do not buy that doll for me I
shall die."

"Nonsense," she replied, dragging me farther into the exhibit.

She did not understand that I needed to possess it, to have a version of my mother with pretty curls and a
frilly dress. I hated her for dragging me away from it. We stopped in front of a display of an automaton,
which from the front looked like an ordinary doll but from the back was a mass of whirring wheels and
gears. The doll's ownerтАФa hefty, mustachioed man dressed like a nineteenth-century traveling
salesmanтАФwound it, and the doll began to bounce up and down, its arms scissoring through the air and
its head bobbing, its mouth articulating silent words. Then the mustachioed man placed a peanut on the
table in front of it, and the doll bent down to pick it up. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and
all the way home to our farmhouse at Niederb├╝ren I pictured that automaton over and over, and in my
mind the face of the mother-doll became imposed over it, for it was often that I had seen my mother pick
up the objects that my father and I left behind us when we had tired of them.

I secluded myself in my bedroom that evening, drawing plans for a mother-doll. A life-size automaton
shaped like a woman, who could pick up my toys and could not speak. That, I thought, would be the
perfect wife for me. I was not interested in women then, and I'm not now. Don't make the mistake of
thinking that I am interested in men either. I have never experienced the faintest twinge of the sexual urges
with which the rest of the world is obsessed. I believe it to be a legacy of the genetic damage suffered by
our family, and I have never envied the passions of others, as they too often lead to vulnerability.