"Bradbury, Ray - Death Is A Lonely Business" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

The old men glanced at each other, nervously.
"It's urgent," I said.
The old man stirred a final time.
"Canaries," murmured the oldest man.
"What?"
"Canary lady." His pipe had gone out. He lit it again, his eyes troubled. "But don't bother him. He's
all right. He's not sick. He'll be along."
He was protesting too much, which made the other old men writhe slowly, secretly, on the bench.
"His name...?” I asked.
That was a mistake. Not to know his name! My God, everyone knew that! The old men glared at me.
I flushed and backed off.
"Canary lady," I said, and ran out the door to be almost killed by an arriving Venice Short Line train
thirty feet from the shop door.
"Jackass!" cried the motorman, leaning out and waving his fist.
"Canary lady!" I yelled, stupidly, shaking my fist to show I was alive.
And stumbled off to find her.
I knew her address from the sign in her window.
canaries for sale.
Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls,
hoping no one will buy.
There is hardly an old house with unwashed curtains which does not sport a sign in the window.
1927 NASH. REASONABLE. REAR. Or
BRASS BED. HARDLY USED. CHEAP. UPSTAIRS.
Walking, one thinks, which side of the bed was used, and how long on both sides, and how long
never again, twenty, thirty years ago?
Or VIOLINS, GUITARS, MANDOLINS.
And in the window ancient instruments strung not with wire or cat-gut but spider webs, and inside an
old man crouched over a workbench shaping wood, his head always turned away from the light, his hands
moving; someone left over from the year when the gondolas were stranded in backyards to become flower
planters.
How long since he had sold a violin or guitar?
Knock at the door, the window. The old man goes on cutting and sandpapering, his face, his
shoulders shaking. Is he laughing because you tap and he pretends not to hear?
You pass a window with a final sign.
ROOM WITH A VIEW.
The room looks over the sea. But for ten years no one has ever been up there. The sea might as well
not exist.
I turned a final corner and what I was searching for was there.
It hung in the sunbrowned window, its fragile letters drawn in weathered lead pencil, as faint as
lemon juice that had burned itself out, self-erased, oh God, some fifty years ago!
canaries for sale.
Yes, someone half a century ago had licked a pencil tip, lettered the cardboard and hung it to age,
fixed with flypaper adhesive tape, and gone upstairs to tea in rooms where dust lacquered the banister in
gums, choked the lightbulbs so they burned with an Oriental light; where pillows were balls of lint and
shadows hung in closets from empty racks.
canaries for sale.
I did not knock. Years before, out of mindless curiosity, I had tried, and, feeling foolish, gone away.
I turned the ancient doorknob. The door glided in. The downstairs was empty. There was no furniture
in any of the rooms. I called up through the dusty sunlight.
"Anyone home?"