"George Alec Effinger - Marid1 - Marid Changes his Mind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

on the roofs of shuddering, rattling buses that are more
trouble to keep in service than the long parades of camels
used to be. I remembered what those bus rides were like
from when I was a kid, sitting or standing in the aisle with
fifty other boys and men and maybe another two dozen
clinging up on the roof. The buses passed by my home then. I
saw turbaned heads, heads wearing fezes or knit caps, heads
in white or checked keffiyas. All men. That was something I
planned to ask my father about, if I ever met him. “O my
father,” I would say, “tell me why everyone on the bus is a
man. Where are their women?”
And I always imagined that my father—I pictured him tall
and lean with a fierce dark beard, a hawk or an eagle of a
man; he was, in my vision, Arab, although I had my mother's
word that he had been a French imam—I saw my father
gazing thoughtfully into the bright sunlight, framing a careful
reply to his young son. “O Marîd, my sweet one,” he would
say—and his voice would be deep and husky, issuing from the
back of his throat as if he never used his lips to speak,
although my mother said he wasn't like that at all—"Marîd,
the women will come later. The men will send for them later.”


3
 Marid Changes His Mind
by George Alec Effinger


“Ah,” I would say. My father could pierce all riddles. I could
not pose a question that he did not have a proper answer for.
He was wiser than our village shaykh, more knowledgeable
than the man whose face filled the posters pasted on the wall
we were pissing on. “Father,” I would ask him, “why are we
pissing on this man's face?”
“Because it is idolatrous to put his face on such a poster,
and it is fit only for a filthy alley like this, and therefore the
Prophet, may the blessing of Allah be on him and peace, tells
us that what we are doing to these images is just and right.”
“And father?” I would always have one more question, and
he'd always be blissfully patient. He would smile down at me,
put one hand fondly behind my head. “Father? I have always
wanted to ask you, what do you do when you are pissing and
your bladder is so full it feels like it will explode before you
can relieve it and while you are pissing, just then, the
muezzin—”
Saied hit me hard in the left temple with the palm of his
hand. “You sleeping out here?”
I looked up at him. There was glare everywhere. I couldn't
remember where the hell we were. “Where the hell are we?” I
asked him.