"Once Upon The River Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Makine Andrei)11Her body is a softened, glowing crystal on a glassblower's pipe… Can you hear me clearly, Utkin? Under your fevered pen, the woman I'm telling you about in our transatlantic conversation tonight will flower. Her body, this glass with the hot brilliance of a ruby, will become a softer color. Her breasts will become firmer, turning a milky pink. Her thighs will bear a swarm of beauty spots – the hallmarks of your impatient fingers… Speak of her, Utkin! The closeness of the sea can be guessed at from the light on the ceiling. It is still too hot to go down to the beach. Everything is drowsing in this great house lost amid the greenery: a broad-brimmed straw hat, glowing in the sunlight on the terrace; in the garden, twisted cherry trees with motionless branches and trunks oozing resin. And then this newspaper, several weeks old, with its columns that carry news of the ending of our distant empire. And the sea, a turquoise incrustation between the branches of the cherry trees… I am stretched out in a room that seems to be tilting across the great glassy bay with its sparkling expanse of sea. All is white, all is sunlight. Apart from the great black stain of the piano, a refugee from rainy evenings. And in an armchair: At this moment she is bored with the long wait of the afternoon. She gets up, crosses to the piano, opens the lid. The slow notes stir as if unwillingly, quiver like butterflies whose wings are weighed down with pollen, and sink into the sun-drenched silence of the empty building… I stand up in my turn. With the litheness of a wild animal. I am quite naked. Does she sense me drawing close? She does not even turn her head when I embrace her hips. She continues to plunge her long, lazy notes into the air liquefied by the heat. She pauses and cries out only when she suddenly feels me inside her. And seeking to recover her balance, overtaken by a joyful delirium, she leans on the piano, no longer looking at the keys. With both hands. Her fingers fanned out. A thunderous drunken major chord erupts. And the wild sounds coincide with her first moans. As I penetrate her, I push her, I lift her, I take her weight. Her only point of support is her hands, moving on the keyboard once more… A chord noisier and still more insistent. She is all curved now, her head thrown back, the lower part of her body abandoned to me. Yes, trembling, rippling, like a red-hot mass on a glassblower's pipe. The beads of sweat make this oval of flesh swaying beneath my fingers quite transparent… And the chords follow one another, more and more staccato, breathless. And her cries answer them in a deafening symphony of pleasure: sunlight, the clangor of the chords, the loud outbursts of her voice, mingling happy sobs with cries of fury. And when she feels me exploding inside her, the symphony breaks up into a stream of shrill and feverish notes, bursting forth beneath her fingers. Her hands drum furiously as she clings to the smooth keys. As if they were clinging to the invisible edge of the pleasure that is already slipping away from her body… And in this silence, still throbbing with a thousand echoes, I can see her glowing transparent form slowly suffused with the bronzed opacity of repose… Utkin calls that "raw material." One day he telephoned me from New York and asked me, in a slightly bashful voice, to tell him in a letter about one of my adventures. "Don't polish it," he warned me. "In any case I'll change everything around… What interests me is the raw material." Utkin writes. He has always dreamed of writing. Even when we were boys in the depths of eastern Siberia. But he lacks subject matter. With his lame leg and his shoulder that sticks up at an acute angle, he has never had any luck in love. This tragic paradox has tortured him since his childhood: why was he the one to be catapulted under blocks of ice in the frenzied breakup of a great river, which crushed his body and then spewed it out, irremediably mutilated? While the other one, myself… And I would murmur the name of the river – Amur – that bears the same name as the god of love, and enter into its cool resonance, as if into the body of a woman in a dream, one created from similar matter, supple, soft, and misty. All that is long ago now. Utkin writes. He asks me not to polish. I understand him; he wants to be the sole architect. He wants to outwit blind fate. And as for the sea's turquoise incrustations between the branches of the cherry trees – it is he who will add them to my story. I do not make refinements. I present him with my mass of red-hot glass just as it is. I do not engrave it with the point of my chisel or inflate it with my breath. Just as it is: a young woman with a bronzed back, a woman crying out, sobbing with pleasure and beating the clusters of her fingers against the keys of the piano… |
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