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

go there. I have a dim memory of standing--at how early an age I cannot say--before
that huge carved door. Of seeing it swing back, and the crippled monkey on my
father's shoulder pressing itself against his hawk face, with the black scarf and scarlet
dressing gown beneath and the rows and rows of shabby books and notebooks behind
them, and the sick-sweet smell of formaldehyde coming from the laboratory beyond
the sliding mirror.
I do not remember what he said or whether it had been I or another who had
knocked, but I do recall that after the door had closed, a woman in pink whom I
thought very pretty, stooped to bring her face to the level of my own and assured me
that my father had written all the books I had just seen, and that I doubted it not at all.
╖
My brother and I, as I have said, were forbidden this room; but when we were a little
older Mr Million used to take us, about twice a week, on expeditions to the city
library. These were very nearly the only times we were allowed to leave the house,
and since our tutor disliked curling the jointed length of his metal modules into a hire
cart, and no sedan chair would have withstood his weight or contained his bulk, these
forays were made on foot.
For a long time this route to the library was the only part of the city I knew.
Three blocks down Saltimbanque Street where our house stood, right at the Rue d
"Asticot to the slave market and a block beyond that to the library. A child, not
knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway
between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly
accepts the most improbable occurrences. My brother and I were fascinated by the
spurious antiques and bad bargains of the Rue d"Asticot, but often bored when Mr
Million insisted on stopping for an hour at the slave market.
It was not a large one, Port-Mimizon not being a center of the trade, and the
auctioneers and their merchandise were frequently on a most friendly basis--having
met several times previously as a succession of owners discovered the same fault. Mr
Million never bid, but watched the bidding, motionless, while we kicked our heels
and munched the fried bread he had bought at a stall for us. There were sedan
chairmen, their legs knotted with muscle, and simpering bath attendants; fighting
slaves in chains, with eyes dulled by drugs or blazing with imbecile ferocity; cooks,
house servants, a hundred others--yet David and I used to beg to be allowed to
proceed alone to the library.
This library was a wastefully large building which had held government offices
in the French-speaking days. The park in which it had once stood had died of petty
corruption, and the library now rose from a clutter of shops and tenements. A narrow
thoroughfare led to the main doors, and once we were inside, the squalor of the
neighbourhood vanished, replaced by a kind of peeling grandeur. The main desk was
directly beneath the dome, and this dome, drawing up with it a spiraling walkaway
lined with the library's main collection, floated five hundred feet in the air: a stony
sicy whose least chip falling might kill one of the librarians on the spot.
While Mr Million browsed his way majestically up the helix, David and I raced
ahead until we were several full turns in advance and could do what we liked. When I
was still quite young it would often occur to me that, since my father had written (on
the testimony of the lady in pink) a roomful of books, some of them should be here;
and I would climb resolutely until I had almost reached the dome, and there rummage.
Because the librarians were very lax about reshelving, there seemed always a
possibility of finding what I had failed to find before. The shelves towered far above
my head, but when I felt myself unobserved I climbed them like ladders, stepping on