"Lisa Goldstein - Lilyanna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

woman in the photograph, luminous, mysterious. What did that mean? Was she
haunting me, haunting the library?
I got off the computer, stood up and stretched, and went through the library
shutting off the lights. As I headed toward the front door I saw the swirl of white
again, and I turned quickly. It took on shape, moving slowly in the shadows. The
unfurling of a skirt, the turn of a pale leg...
The library seemed colder now, the shadows in the distant corners blacker. I
stood still, my skin clammy. No, I was imagining the chill, the darkness—why would
she want to frighten me? I groped for a light switch and turned it on, and she frayed
into nothingness and disappeared.
I was trembling now. I went into my office and grabbed the photograph, the
ticket, and the pearl. Then I left, locking the door firmly behind me.
Outside the moon shone from behind the clouds, but otherwise the street was
dark. I walked quickly toward the bus stop, toward light and people. I got home
very late; only then, when I looked at my bedside clock, did I realize that I’d been on
the computer for hours.
In the morning the fear from last night seemed unreal. Lilyanna needed me; she
had sought me out for some task she had left unfinished in life. She was remote in
the picture, yes, and as regal as an effigy on a tomb, but she would never harm me.
What had prompted me to turn on the light again, to make her vanish like that?
I could have seen her whole, talked to her, found out what she wanted at last.
I dressed and went to my computer. It sometimes seems odd to me that
someone who distrusts change as much as I do should take to the Internet, but in
fact I like it a great deal. It’s like a library in many ways, a library built out of an
infinity of knowledge. A library of the air.
As the morning waned, though, I began to think the whole thing was
impossible. How could I guess what the word “pearl” meant to Lilyanna and her
friends? In desperation I left the main thoroughfares of the search engines and
headed down dirt roads and dim alleyways, sites tended by obsessives interested in
movies or jewelry or the thirties.
I broke for lunch. Sun came through the kitchen window, and I began to
wonder about my own obsessiveness. What was Lilyanna to me, after all? Why was
I wasting all this time on someone I had never met? I sat in my kitchen, in the warmth
and light, eating a chicken sandwich I’d made out of leftovers, and my mind strayed
to other things: Nina, of course, and work I’d left unfinished at the library, and the
book I was reading. Then the tattered clouds returned, shrouding the sun, and I went
back to Lilyanna and the Pearl.
On Sunday I visited a few of the places I’d seen on the Internet, restaurants
and bars and businesses with the word “pearl” in their names. I had no car, which
had never seemed like a hardship before; I enjoyed taking the bus to work. But I
soon found out that many of the routes were slower than my usual bus, and that the
Bay Area Rapid Transit line didn’t run anywhere near where I wanted to go. I
planned to go to Oakland first, because of the connection with the Paramount, but as
time passed I realized that just the places in Oakland would take the whole day.
The first three sites I tried had not even existed in the thirties. I continued on,
growing discouraged as I saw business after business dating from the eighties or
nineties.
It was near midnight when I finally quit and headed for home. The streets were
cold and silent; I heard nothing but my own footsteps. Every so often a car drove
by, its lights glowing out of the darkness and then passing on. My bus stop was dark