"The Tartar Steppe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dino Buzzati)

"Get a transfer?" and he laughed heartily, "after being up here for twenty-five years? It's too late, my boy, I should have thoUght of it sooner."
Perhaps he wanted Drogo to contradict him again, but since the lieutenant said nothing he began to talk business. He invited Giovanni to .sit down, made him give his name and surname which he wrote in the prescribed place on the form according to the regu­lations.
"Well then," he concluded, "you suffer from a car­diac disorder, don't you? Your system doesn't stand up to the height, isn't that it? Shall we say that?"
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"Yes, let's say that," Drogo assented. "You are the best judge of these things."
"Shall we prescribe convalescent leave while we're at it?" said the doctor, winking.
"Thank you," said Drogo, "but I don't want to overdo things."
"Just as you like. No leave. At your age I had no such scruples."
Instead of sitting down Giovanni had gone over to the window and every now and then looked down on the soldiers drawn up on the white snow. The sun had barely set ; a blue shadow had spread over the walls.
"After three or four months, more than half of you people want to get away," the doctor was saying with a certain sadness in his voice ; he too was now wrapped in shadow so that it was difficult to see how he could write. "If I could have my time again I would do the same. Yet it's a pity."
Drogo listened without interest, so intent was he on looking from the window. Then he seemed to see the yellowing walls of the courtyard rise up into the crystal sky, with above them, higher still, solitary towers, crooked battlements crowned with snow, airy outworks and redoubts which he had never seen before. A bright light from the west still illuminated them and thus they shone with an inscrutable life. Never before had Drogo noticed that the Fort was so complicated and immense. At an almost incredible height he saw a window—or perhaps a loophole open on to the valley. Up there there must be men whom he did not know—perhaps even an officer like himself with whom he could be friends. In the abyss between bastion and bastion he saw geonietrical shadows, frail bridges suspended among the rooftops, strange postern gates barred and flush with the walls, ancient machicolations now blocked up, long roof-trees curved with the years.
Against the dark blue background of the courtyard he saw in the light of lanterns and torches soldiers of
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great height and proud bearing unsheath their bayonets. On the brightness of the snow they formed black, im­mobile files, as if made of iron, They were very beauti­ful to see and stood like stone while a trumpet began to sound. The blasts spread through the air, gleaming and alive, and struck straight into the heart.
"One by one you all go away," Rovina was mur­muring in the dusk, " we will end up by being left by ourselves, we old ones. This year . . ."
Down in the courtyard the trumpet S was calling, the pure sound of brass and human voice together. It shook once more, warlike and dashing. When it fell silent it left even in the doctor's office an enchantment no words could describe. The silence became such that you could hear someone's long pace crunch on the frozen snow. The colonel had come down in person to take the salute. Three trumpet calls of extraordinary beauty cleft the sky.
"Who is there of you?, " the doctor continued his recriminations. "Lieutenant Angustina is the only one. Even Morel, I bet he will have to go down to the city next year to be looked after. I bet he finishes by falling ill too."
"Morel?" Drogo could not help replying if only to show that he was listening. " Morel ill?' he asked, without grasping the last words.
"Oh no," said the doctor. "It's a manner of speak­ing."
Even through the closed window they heard the steps of the colonel. In the dusk the lines of bayonets were silver bars. From impossibly far off there came the echo . of trumpets—perhaps the first call sent back by the labyrinth of the walls.
The doctor was silent. Then he rose and said : "Here is the certificate. I'll go now and get it signed by the commandant."
He folded the paper and put it in a file, took down his great coat and a great fur cap.
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"Are you coming too?" he asked. "What on earth are you looking at?"
The new guards were moving off one by one to the various parts of the Fort. The rhythm of their steps made a dull noise on the snow, but overhead flew the music of the fanfares. Then, strange as it might seem, the walls—already beleaguered by the night—rose slowly towards the zenith and from their topmost height, framed with patches of snow, white clouds began to rise like great birds sailing between the stars.
The memory of his native city passed through Drogo's mind—a vague image of noisy streets in the rain, of plaster statues, of damp barracks, tuneless bells, tired and misshapen faces, endless afternoons, dirty dusty ceilings.
But here the deep mountain night was approaching with clouds flying up over the Fort, harbingers of wonders to come. And from the north, from the north invisible there behind the ramparts, Drogo felt the onset of his own destiny.
They doctor was already in the doorway.
"Doctor, doctor," said Drogo, almost stammering, "I am all right."
"I know," answered the doctor, "What did you think?"
"I'm all right," Drogo repeated almost unable to recognise his own voice, "I'm all right and want to stay."
"Stay here in the Fort? You don't want to leave any more? What has happened to you?"
"I don't know," said Giovanni, "but I can't leave." "Oh," exclaimed Rovina coming up to him, "if you're serious then I assure you I am glad."
"I'm quite serious," said Drogo who felt his state of exaltation change into a strange pain which was near to happiness. "Doctor, throw away that form."
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IT WiLs bound to come to this—had perhaps been ' destined long before on that distant day when, along
with Ortiz, Drogo first came on to the plateau and the Fort appeared to him under the burden of the bright midday.
Drogo has decided to stay ; what keeps him there is a longing, but more than that alone—for perhaps the heroic cast of his thoughts itself would not have sufficed. For the time being he thinks he has done something noble, and is genuinely surprised to find himself a better man than he had thought. Only many months later, looking around him, will he recognise the paltry ties which bind-him to the Fort.
Suppose the trumpets had sounded, suppose he had heard martial songs, suppose disturbing messages had come from the north—if that had been all there was to it Drogo would have left just the same; but he had within him dull sluggishness born of habit, military vanity, love for the accustomed walls which were his home. Four months passing with the monotonous rhythm of routine duties had been enough to en-trammel him.
He had got used to guard duties, which the first few times had seemed an unbearable burden ; little by little he had learned the rules, the turns of speech, the whims of his superiors, the topography of the redoubts, the sentry-posts, the corners out of the wind, what the trumpets said. He derived a special pleasure from his mastery of the routine and savoured the growing respect of soldiers and N.C.O.'s ; even Tronk had noticed that Drogo was serious and painstaking and had almost come to like him.
He had got used to his colleagues—he now knew them so well that even their most subtle hints did not
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take him unawares ; and in the evening they sat together chatting about what went on in the City—of events which by their very distance had become of exaggerated importance. He had got used to the good and comfortable mess, the welcoming fire in the ante­room always lit day and night ; the attentions of his batman—a good creature called Geronimo—who had little by little learned his particular wishes.
He had got used to the trips every so often with Morel to the nearest village, a good two hours on horseback through a narrow valley which by now he knew by heart—an inn where there were new faces to be seen at last, lavish dinners and the fresh laughter of girls with whom one could make love.
He had got used to the wild races up and down the level ground behind the Fort where on free afternoons he vied with his comrades in dashing horsemanship, and to the patient games of chess in the evenings which Drogo often won ; but Captain Ortiz told him : " It's always like that, the new people always win to begin with. It happens to them all—they think they are really good but it's really only a question of novelty; then the others learn our system too and one fine day we can do nothing right any more."
Drogo had got used to his room; to reading quietly at night, to the crack in the ceiling above his bed which looked like a Turk's head, to the dripping of the cistern —become friendly with time—to the hollow his body moulded in the mattress, to the blankets which in the early days had seemed so inhospitable and were now gently expectant, to the movement now instinctive and precisely measured by which he put out the oil lamp or laid his book on his little table. He now knew how to place himself in the morning as he shaved before the mirror so that the light would fall on his face from the correct angle, how to pour water from the ewer into the basin without spilling, how to open the way­ward lock of a drawer by holding the key down a little.
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He had got used to the creaking of the door when it rained, to the point where moonlight fell through the window and its slow shifting with the passage of the hours, to the hubbub every night in the room beneath his at half past one precisely when the old, wound in Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolosi's right leg awoke myster­iously and interrupted his sleep.
All these things had now become part of himself and it would have hurt him to leave them. But Drogo did not know, he did not suspect, that his departure would have been an effort nor that life in the Fort would swallow up the days one after another one exactly like the other, at a giddy speed. Yesterday and the day before it were the same; he could no longer have dis­tinguished one from the other. Something which hap­pened three days before or three weeks before seemed equally distant. Thus unknown to him time fled on its way.