"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 into. Now they even had their own garage that charged ten cents less a gallon for premium, and that’s where they all went, as a result of which Fred & Frieda’s was slowly going out of business, what with one customer after another opting for the nameless new filling station where two Mexicans worked the pumps.

"Hello," Terry said again. "Do you need help getting to the other side?"

This time the guy let his head tilt back at the upward limit of his bob, and his eyes rolled sideways in an expression of polite despair. "Go away," he said in a raspy voice. "Just go. Go!"

"It’s sad," Terry volunteered, "about the fire."

"I can’t hear you!"

"I only ever saw the outside of the synagogue. And you couldn’t tell much from that. Just the concrete and the hedges. But it probably looked nice inside. Right?"

The man pressed his eyes tight closed and increased the tempo of his bobbing.

"I mean, why build a church at all unless it’s going to look special in some way? Or a synagogue. My name is Terry, by the way." He held out his hand. "Terry Goren."

The eyes stayed shut, the bobbing continued.

"And what’s your name?" Terry insisted.

The man froze. His eyes opened. When he spoke, it was as though a dentist were pulling each word from his mouth. "I am David Golden."

"You’re dead, David. Did you know that?"

"No."

"Yes, you are," said Terry, choosing to interpret his No as denial rather than a straightforward answer to the question he’d been asked. "You died in the explosion that destroyed the synagogue. That was a month ago. The wreckage has already been cleared away." He nodded in the direction of the charred open space at the far end of Main Street, across from the sign (now highly inaccurate) that welcomed visitors to Postville, Iowa, Population, 1,480.

"And your body has been cremated," Terry went on. "As much of you as they could find."

David Golden bowed his head and closed his eyes and recommenced his rocking motion. A gust of wind lifted a tattered yellow plastic carrier bag from the gutter–a rarity in Postville for there to be such refuse on the street–and whirled it about the inconsolable ghost. Briefly Terry forgot David Golden and savored the fleeting instant, the wreathing interplay of plastic and ectoplasm.

Then he resumed his task as Postville’s awakener and guide to the afterlife, its Hermes Hypnopompe. Slowly, with many repetitions, like a schoolteacher teaching the multiplication tables, he instructed David Golden in the laws governing his altered existence, how he must remain in Postville until, like compost worked into a garden’s soil, he had been entirely assimilated, until the wind and rain had worn away all that was dross and his spirit could at last see clearly the shape of the life it had lost. This, Terry told him, would probably take a long time, for the shape of any life is a function of the lives in which it is enmeshed, and often there is a great tangle to unravel.

"None of this," said David Golden, "pertains to me. I’m Jewish."

"Do you want me to help you across the street?" Terry asked again.