"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

"There are certainly plenty of people in need of help," Zeffer said. He had
been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the
locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky
earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountainsуthe
Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Fagaras Mountainsуtheir bare lower slopes
as gray as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were
like in this place: when even the dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river
froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from
the mountain heights.
The day they'd arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she
could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he'd had proof aplenty of
the conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not the resting places
of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that
marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple
frailty. The grief that was represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him
deeply: the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It was
nothing he had remotely expected, and it had made him sick with sorrow.
For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of her
memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world
in which she'd been raised; it wasn't so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this
suffering for granted. Hadn't she once told him she'd had fourteen brothers and
sisters, and only six of them were left living? Perhaps the other eight had been
lain to rest in the very cemetery where they'd walked together. And certainly it
would not be uncommon for Katya to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was
what made her so strong; and it was her strengthуvisible in her eyes and in her
every movementуthat endeared her to her audiences, particularly the women.
Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he'd spent time here with
her. Seeing the house where she'd been born and brought up, the streets she'd
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance in their
midst as something close to a miracle: this perfect rosebud child whose dark eyes
and bright smile set her utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact,
Katya's mother had put such beauty to profitful work at the age of twelve, when the
girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets, andуat least
according to Katyaуoffer her favors to men who'd pay to have such tender flesh in
their bed for the night. She had quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what
she'd had to do for her family's sake she had no choice but to do for herself. By
the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing for her supper on the streets
of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment
to all who witnessed it. For three nights he'd come to the square where she sang,
there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this
child-enchantress. It hadn't taken him long to conceive of the notion that he should
bring her back with him to America. Though he'd had at that time no experience in
the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and film was a
fledging), his instincts told him there was something special in the face and
bearing of this creature. He had influential friends on the West Coastуmostly men
who'd grown tired of Broadway's petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were
looking for a new place to put their talents and their investmentsуwho reported to
him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the West Coast