"Avram Davidson - Polly Charms, The Sleeping Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman
by Avram Davidson


INTRODUCTION BY GENE WOLFE



This is, as you will already have guessed, Avram Davidson’s variation on the ever-popular
sleeping beauty theme.

Ever popular because it is ever fertile, never more so than here. Nor will you, I think, find any
variant quite so difficult to harvest as this. It is elfinfield, to be reaped only by the seventh son of
a seventh son, wielding a silver sickle by moonlight. Don’t worry, I am here to help you.

But first let me recommend three more-recent variations on the same theme : Briar Rose, by Jane
Yolen; “Summer Wind,” by Nancy Kress; and “Waking the Prince,” by Kathe Koja. You can read
all three, I promise you, and this story as well, without ever reading the same story twice .

In the high and far off times before women warred upon men, the tale of the sleeping beauty was
told at firesides so that young women might know they slept but might someday be awakened,
and so that young men might know young women sleep, and that gallantry and chivalry are
needed, not threats or force. Perhaps the best way to explain the sleeping beauty story is to say
that it is the other side of the story about the frog who is kissed.

The frog story is about men, and so lapses only too readily into comedy. The sleeping beauty story
is about women, and so flashes with new colors in each new hand; for men are always much the
same, but every woman is a new woman with a new man.

You will not have to be told that in “Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman” Davidson is
burlesquing the detective story. He pokes so much broad fun at it that no one could miss that.
Very possibly, however, you must be told that nothing could be more like Davidson than to
burlesque the detective story in a real detective story, or to omit the scene in which Doctor
Engelbert Eszterhazy collects Frow Grigou, Dougherty, Commissioner Lobats, and (one rather
hopes) Ignats Louis and Explains Everything.

Davidson was never one to explain everything.

No more am I. But to his multitude of clues I will add two additional hints. The first is that the
Ancients knew that it was possible to torture the dead by burning the hair of the corpse. The
second is that the worst crime is not murder. And the third (Did you really expect me to tell you
everything when I numbered them?) is that you may wish to consider the fifty daughters of
Endymion and the Moon.
 POLLY CHARMS, THE SLEEPING WOMAN


Visitors to the great city of Bella, capital of the Triune Monarchy of
Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, have many famous and memorable sights to see, and will
find many guides to show them. Assuming such a visitor to be so limited, unfortunately, in
his time as to be able to see but three of these sights, and assuming the guide to be of any