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

Drogo thought that, if only out of courtesy, his com­rade would have invited him to play with the phan­toms. But no. Angustina seemed not to notice his friend and did not even look round when Drogo called him : "Angustina ! Angustina!"
Instead, with a tired gesture, his friend opened the window and leant out to the spirit which clung to the sill as if they knew each other and he had something to tell it. The spirit made a sign and, following the direc­tion in which it pointed, Drogo turned his gaze to a great square which stretched out in front of the houses, completely deserted. Across this square a little proces­sion of spirits advanced, some thirty feet above the ground, bearing a litter.
Formed, apparently, from the same substance as themselves, the litter overflowed with veils and plumes. With his usual expression of detachment and boredom Angustina watched it approach ; evidently it came for him.
The injustice of it struck Drogo to the heart. Why did Angustina get everything and he nothing? With some­one else it would not have mattered—but with Angus­tina who was always so proud and arrogant ! Drogo looked at the other windows to see whether there were someone who might perhaps intervene for him—but he could see no one.
At last the litter stopped, swaying directly in front of the window and all the phantoms clustered around it suddenly in a wavering circle. All were turned towards Angustina—no longer obsequiously but with avid and almost malignant curiosity. Left abandoned, the litter remained in mid-air as if suspended from invisible threads. Suddenly Drogo felt all envy drain from him for he knew what was happening. He saw Angustina standing upright at the window and his eyes fix themselves on the litter. Yes, it was for him they had come tonight, the fairy messengers, but on what an errand ! So the litter had to serve for a long journey and would not come back before the dawn, nor the next night, nor the next night again, nor ever. The salons of the palace would await their master in vain, a woman's hands would cautiously close the window which the fugitive had left open and all the others too would be bolted to brood in the dark over the lamenting and desolation.
So the phantoms, which had seemed so friendly, had not come to play with the moonbeams, they had not come like innocent creatures from scented gardens, but derived from the abyss.
Other children would have cried, would have called on their mothers, but Angustina was not afraid and talked calmly with the spirits as if to clear up some points of ceremonial. Clustered round the window like a drift of foam, they climbed on top of each other, pressing forward towards the child and nodding to him as if to say : "Yes, yes, we quite agree." At last the spirit which had been the first to cling to the sill—perhaps their leader—made a slight imperious gesture. Still with his air of boredom Angustina climbed over the window sill—he seemed already to have become as light as the phantoms—and sat in the litter like a great gentleman, and crossed his legs. The cluster of phan­toms dissolved in a fluttering of veils ; the enchanted litter moved gently off.
A procession formed—the apparitions carried out a semicircular evolution between the wings of the houses before rising into the sky towards the moon. As they wheeled in the semicircle the litter, too, passed close to Drogo's window ; waving his arm he tried to shout his last greeting : "Angustina, Angustina."
Then at last his friend turned his head towards
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Giovanni and looked at him for a moment or two—and to Drogo it seemed as if he could read in his glance an excessive air of seriousness for such a small child. But slowly Angustina's face unfolded in a smile of com­plicity as if he and Drogo could understand a great deal the phantoms did not know—a last desire to make a joke, the final opportunity to show that he, Angustina, did not need anyone's pity. This was an ordinary occurrence, he seemed to say,, there was nothing to be surprised at.
As the litter bore him off, Angustina looked away from Drogo and turned his head to the front, in the direction of the procession, with a sort of curiosity which was at once amused and distrustful. It was as if he were experimenting for the first time with a toy which did not interest him in the slightest but which for appearance sake he could not have refused.
Thus he went off into the night with almost inhuman nobility. He gave not one glance at his palace, nor at the square before it nor at the other houses nor at the city where he had lived. The procession wound slowly through the sky, rising higher and higher; then it became a confused streak, then a wisp of mist, then nothing.
The window had remained open, the rays of the moon still illumined the table, the vase, the ivory statuettes, which had continued to sleep. Inside, in another room, on a bed by the trembling light of the tapers, lay perhaps a tiny lifeless body whose face was like Angustina's ; and it would be wearing a little velvet dress, a big lace collar and a smile frozen on the white lips.
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XII
NTEXT day Giovanni Drogo was guard commander
in the New Redoubt. It was an outlying fortress three-quarters of an hour from the main fort set on top of a rocky cone commanding the Tartar steppe. It was the most important keep, was completely isolated and had the task of giving the alarm if any threat approached.
Drogo left the fort in the evening in command of some seventy men—all that number of soldiers was needed because there were ten sentry posts without counting the two gunners. It was the first time he had set foot beyond the pass ; to all intents and purposes the frontier had been crossed.
Giovanni was thinking of the responsibilities of his task, but in particular he was pondering over his dream about Angustina. It was a dream which had awakened in his heart something that would not die away. It seemed to him that there must be some obscure link there with future events; yet he was not particularly superstitious.
They entered the New Redoubt ; the sentries were relieved, then the old guard marched off and at the edge of the parapet Drogo stood watching them move away along the rough stony path. From there the Fort looked like an immensely long wall—a mere wall with nothing behind it. The sentries could not be distinguished for they were too far off. Only the flag could be seen now and again when the wind shook it.
For twenty-four hours the sole commander in the solitary redoubt would be Drogo. Whatever happened no aid could be asked for. Even if enemy came, the fortress had to look after itself. For twenty-four hours the king himself was of less account than Drogo.
As he waited for night to come, Giovanni stayed and
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watched the northern steppe. From the Fort he had been able to see of it only a little triangle because of the mountains in front. But now he could see it all, right to the limits of the horizon where there hung the usual barrier of mist. It was a sort of desert, rock-covered, with here and there thickets of low dusty bushes. To the right, far, far away, there was a dark strip which might well have been a forest. On either flank harsh chains of mountains. They were immensely beautiful, some of them, with sheer unending ramparts and their crests white with the first autumn snows. And yet no one looked at them ; everyone—Drogo and the soldiers—tended to look instinctively towards the north, towards the desolate steppe, which had mystery but no meaning.
Whether it was the thought of being completely alone in command of the fortress, or the sight of the unin­habited country or the memory of his dream about Angustina, Drogo began to feel a slight feeling of anxiety grow upon him as night spread.
It was an October evening, the weather unsettled ; with splashes of reddish light scattered here and there on the ground, reflected from some unknown source and slowly swallowed up by the leaden twilight.
As usual at sunset a kind of poetic excitement came over Drogo. At this hour he was always full of hope and he began to meditate once more upon the heroic fan­tasies he had so often put together on the long spells of guard duty and each day, adding new details, had made more perfect. Usually he imagined a desperate battle which he and a few men had joined against an in­numerable enemy, as if that night the New Redoubt had been besieged by thousands of Tartars. For days and days he held out. Almost all his comrades were dead or wounded. He too had been struck by a missile —a serious wound but not too serious, one which allowed him still to retain command. But now the cart­ridges are running out—he attempts a sortie at the head of the last men—he has a bandage round his brow; then
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at last reinforcements arrive ; the enemy disbands and turns to flight ; he falls exhausted clutching his blood­stained sabre. But someone is calling him.
"Lieutenant Drogo, Lieutenant Drogo," someone calls and shakes him back to life. And Drogo slowly opens his eyes—the King, the King in person is bending over him and says : " Well done "
At this hour he was always full of hope and he thought over these heroic tales, tales which probably would never come true but still served to make life worth living. Sometimes he was more easily satisfied—he gave up the idea of being the only hero, gave up the wound, gave up the idea that the King said to him "Well done." After all it need only be an ordinary battle—one single battle but a real one, so that he could charge in full uniform and smile as he rushed to­wards the inscrutable faces of the enemy. One battle and perhaps then he would be happy for the rest of his life.
But that evening it was not easy to feel heroic. The world was already shrouded in shadow ; the northern plain had lost all colour but had not yet fallen asleep—as if it were giving birth to sorrow.
It was already eight in the evening and the sky had filled with clouds when it seemed to Drogo that he could see a little black spot moving in the plain, slightly to his right and immediately below the redoubt. " My eyes must be tired," he thought, "I have been looking so long that my eyes are tired and I am seeing specks." The same thing had happened to him once before when he was a boy and was sitting up at night studying.
He tried keeping his eyelids closed for a second or two then looked at things around him ; at a bucket which must have been used for washing the terrace, at an iron hook in the wall, at a small bench which the officer on duty before him must have carried up to sit on. It was only after a few minutes that he turned to look down to where he had first seemed to see the tiny black spot. It was still there and was moving a little.
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"Tronk," Drogo called in an excited voice.
"Sir?" he replied immediately, his voice so close that it made Drogo start.
"Ah, there you are," said Drogo recovering himself, "Tronk, I don't want to make any mistake but it seems to me--it seems I can see something moving down there."
"Yes, sir," Tronk replied in a regulation voice. "I
have had it under observation for some minutes." "What?" said Drogo, "You have seen it too? What
do you see?"
"The thing that is moving about, sir."
Drogo felt a surge of panic. This is it at last, he thought, completely forgetting his warlike fantasies, it had to happen to me—now something terrible will happen.
"So you have seen it, too?" he asked again in the absurd hope that the other would deny it.
"Yes, sir," said Tronk, "for about ten. minutes. I had gone down to see that the cannon were clean and when I came up again I saw it."
Both were silent. Even for Tronk it must have been something strange and disturbing. t,

"What do you say it is, Tronk?"