"Thomas M. Disch - After Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Thomas M. Disch
After Postville

It was a gray, blowy April day, and there wasn’t a moving car anywhere along
the length of Main Street, north or south, and not a soul on the sidewalks,
with the exception of the young man in the yarmulke on the curb standing
outside Pathmark and bowing rhythmically in the direction of the Corner Cafe
across the street. He looked as though he wanted to cross the street but
couldn’t. As though he were tethered to that particular block of concrete by
some invisible linkage that only allowed enough wiggle-room to maintain his
bob-bob-bobbing motion, like one of those birds from a novelty store that dips
into a water glass, and tips back, and dips again.

Terry had sometimes peeked inside Mount Zion Yeshiva and watched the Jews
inside possessed by the same strange rictus while they read their little
prayer books. It seemed comical, as though the whole roomful of grown men were
desperate to go to the bathroom but someone was already in there–forever.
After a while Terry had felt sad, as when he’d watched the television
documentary about Bellevue mental hospital in New York City, where a mob of
people, men and women, lined the corridors, some seated, some standing, and
all writhing to a tune audible to no one else. Some blissed out, some
wretched, but all off the wall. All throwing their lives away for no good
reason like this poor fellow transfixed in front of the Pathmark.

Finally Terry walked up to him and asked, "Is there some way I can help you?
Do you want to cross the street?"

The guy went on with his bobbing motion, refusing even to glance in Terry’s
direction, the only indications he had heard him a slightly more fraught
cording in his neck, a more determined clenching of his right hand over his
left wrist.

This was typical behavior among Postville’s Hasidic newcomers. For them the
other residents of Postville simply didn’t exist. They didn’t say Hi, they
didn’t wave, they almost didn’t slow down for you if they were in one of their
minivans and you were crossing the street. It went beyond unfriendly, but it
was all theoretically okay because it was based on their religious faith as
Jews, plus the fact that their ancestors had been killed by the Germans in the
Holocaust. Before they’d come to town to open up their slaughterhouse,
Postville had been something like fifty per cent German, so you could
understand why they might be unforthcoming, why they would just look at the
hand being offered them to shake and think... Unclean! You could tell that was
what they were thinking by the puckering of their lips.

And as to their not eating at the Corner Cafe or anywhere else in Postville,
that’s because they were Orthodox and would only eat kosher food of the sort
they made a business of. They also couldn’t use plates or silverware that had
ever touched nonkosher food, which of course were all the plates and
silverware in Postville but their own. Plus they had their own weird clothes
that they could not have bought at any store in Iowa that Terry had ever been