"Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

of course, growing louder as David grew bolder, would in time attract the attention of
Mr Million, our tutor. Mr Million would enter the room in perfect silence, his wide
wheels gliding across the uneven floor while David pretended sleep. The panpipe
might by this time be concealed under his pillow, in the sheet, or even under the
mattress, but Mr Million would find it.
What he did with those little musical instruments after confiscating them from
David I had forgotten until yesterday; although in prison, when we were kept in by
storms or heavy snow, I often occupied myself by trying to recall it. To have broken
them, or dropped them through the shutter on to the patio below would have been
completely unlike him; Mr Million never broke anything intentionally, and never
wasted anything. I could visualize perfectly the half-sorrowing expression with which
he drew the tiny pipes out (the face which seemed to float behind his screen was
much like my father's) and the way in which he turned and glided from the room. But
what became of them?
Yesterday, as I said (this is the sort of thing that gives me confidence), I
remembered. He had been talking to me here while I worked, and when he left it
seemed to me--as my glance idly followed his smooth motion through the
doorway--that something, a sort of flourish I recalled from my earliest days, was
missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the appearance had been,
eliminating any skepticism, any attempt to guess in advance what I "must" have seen;
and I found that the missing element was a brief flash, the glint of metal, over Mr
Million's head.
Once I had established this, I knew that it must have come from a swift upward
motion of his arm, like a salute, as he left our room. For an hour or more I could not
guess the reason for that gesture, and could only suppose it, whatever it had been, to
have been destroyed by time. I tried to recall if the corridor outside our dormitory
had, in that really not so distant past, held some object now vanished: a curtain or a
windowshade, an appliance to be activated, anything that might account for it There
was nothing
I went into the corridor and examined the floor minutely for marks indicating
furniture, I looked for hooks or nails driven into the walls, pushing aside the coarse
old tapestries. Craning my neck, I searched the ceiling. Then, after an hour, I looked
at the door itself and saw what I had not seen in the thousands of times I had passed
through it: that like all the doors in this house, which is very old, it had a massive
frame of wooden slabs, and that one of these, forming the lintel, protruded enough
from the wall to make a narrow shelf above the door.
I pushed my chair into the hall and stood on the seat. The shelf was thick with
dust in which lay forty-seven of my brother's pipes and a wonderful miscellany of
other small objects. Objects many of which I recalled, but some of which still fail to
summon any flicker of response from the recesses of my mind . . .
The small blue egg of a songbird, speckled with brown. I suppose the bird must
have nested in the vine outside our window, and that David or I despoiled the nest
only to be robbed ourselves by Mr Million. But I do not recall the incident.
And there is a (broken) puzzle made of the bronzed viscera of some small
animals, and--wonderfully evocative--one of those large and fancifully decorated
keys, sold annually, which during the year of its currency will admit the possessor to
certain rooms of the city library after hours. Mr Million, I suppose, must have
confiscated it when, after expiration, he found it doing duty as a toy; but what
memories!
 My father had his own library, now in my possession; but we were forbidden to