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

away a burger and fries and chatting with Deborah Carr, the lunchtime
waitress. George was giving most of his attention to the burger, because it
was still oozing juices from the grill and his shirt was fresh that morning
and had to last another couple of days.

"Rabbi Rosen," said Terry, crossing the untrafficked street, "good morning.
Enjoying the June weather?"

The rebbe’s tongue darted from the right side of his mouth, even as his lips
puckered in a wincing Disabilities Awareness smile. The look seemed more at
home on his face than on the faces of the newly dead goyim of Postville for
whom irony was a novel sensation. He hadn’t had to die to develop a sense of
humor.

"Yes," Rosen answered, "but I wish I could enjoy that hamburger instead."

"Hungry," said Terry. An observation, not a question.

"Should a dead man salivate like this? The longer I am dead the worse the
hunger gets."

"Would you feel the same if he were eating pork?"

Rosen laughed. "If you don’t like kosher law, go argue with Moses. But to
answer your question: yes. Starvation is no respecter of law. If he were
shoveling down the shit of a pig and not its spiced ground flesh I’d feel the
same envy in my gut. Whatever my tongue could taste I would lick with
pleasure. They built Auschwitz to teach that lesson to the living. The dead
can learn it for free." He stroked his gnarled, red-and-gray beard as a kind
of seal, or Selah, to his brief lamentation.

"I don’t suppose you’ve ever eaten anything at the Corner Cafe."

"No. And that is a sign of what? That I disdain your town, your people, your
faith?"

"Is it, Rabbi Rosen?"

Again, but chillier, the laugh; the flick of the tongue; the smile that mocked
all miseries. "Of course it is. I can’t deny it, if I wanted to. But why
should I want to? What pleasure have I now but honesty? Don’t you despise this
town, these people, a faith that proved untrue?"

The compulsion to speak the truth was not reciprocal, and Terry did not have
to answer the rebbe’s questions. He just stood there in his scout uniform, the
politest of interrogators.

"This town was dying, you know, when we came here," the rebbe went on. "It was
moribund, almost bankrupt. Only the taxes we paid kept it alive. Our taxes
kept the schools open, though our children don’t attend them."