"Songbirds of Pain by Garry Kilworth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kilworth Garry)

He shrugged huffily inside his overcoat and stepped onto the landing. She closed the door and then went into the living room to clear away the coffee things. She carried them into the kitchen, but as she placed the tray on the working surface, her arm knocked over the percolator, which was still on. Hot coffee splashed onto her leg, and the pain sent her reeling backward.
"Philip!" she cried.
She inspected herself. There was a red weal the size of a handprint on her thigh, as if she had been slapped hard.
Philip. Damn him. He was never there when he was needed most. That was one of the disadvantages of being a kept woman. The partner was not on call. Christ that hurts, she thought. She put her leg under the cold water tap and turned it on. The water would bring down her skin temperature. Afterward, she felt a little better and took several aspirin before crawling into bed. Funny, she thought, lying in bed, when she was a child they said the worst thing one could do with a burn was put cold water on it. A dry bandage was the recommended treatment. Now, they, whoever they were, had decided to reverse the treatment completely. The world was controlled by whims. The last
thing she remembered before she fell asleep was that her leg still hurt her.
The flight to Brasilia was long and uncomfortable, but Anita was excited, not only by the thought of the impending operation, but by the idea of being in South America.
She made her visits during the next day and took in the nightlife of the city in the evening. There was no real enjoyment in it for her though, because she wanted to share it all with Philip, and he was several thousand miles away.
She telephoned him, but the instrument had always been impersonal to her. She could not feel close to him, even while she was listening to his vaguely distorted voice.
"Philip . . . it's Anita."
An echo of her voice followed each word and then a long, deep silence in which it seemed to her that the ears of the world were tuned in to their private conversation.
". . . lo, darling . . . are you?" Parts of his speech were lost to her. It was a distressing business. She wanted to reach out and touch him, not exchange banalities over thousands of miles. Damn, what was that clicking? She could not hear him properly.
"Fine, everything's fine," she said.
It sounded hollow, flat. There was more of the same.
"Look after yourself," he finished, after a very unsatisfactory five minutes. When she replaced the receiver she felt further away from him than before
the call had begun. Hell, it was supposed to bring them closer, not emphasize the vast distance that separated them. She needed him desperately. If she had asked him, he would have come running, but there was no real excuse-not one of which he would approve. Just a longing for his company, which was almost a physical hurt inside her.
The flight to the hospital, over the dark-green back of prehistoric jungles, was short but not uneventful.
They flew low enough in the small aircraft for her to study the moody rivers, the sudden clearings studded with huts, the forests pressing down a personal night beneath their impenetrable layers of foliage. Down there were big cats, deadly snakes, spiders the size of soup plates, and alligators with skins like tank tracks.
On landing, she went straight to the hospital. It was a small, white building on the outskirts of the town, surrounded by gardens with trees of brilliant hues. The color of the blossoms was so light and buoyant, it seemed that only the buried roots held the splendid trees to the earth: Should the roots be severed, they would rise slowly like balloons, to take her up into the atmosphere.
Anita's fanciful thoughts, she knew, stemmed from her desire to steer herself away from considering the forthcoming operation. When she was confronted by the surgeon, however, she knew she would have to face up to the ordeal. His office was on the second floor. He had switched off his air conditioner and flung windows and balcony doors open wide, letting in the smell of vegetation. She could see out, over the balcony and beyond the hospital gardens. The light
seemed to gather near the edge of the dark jungle, as if the forest perimeter was a dam to hold back the day, to stop its bright wave rolling in to defile the old trees and ancient, overgrown temples.
The surgeon spoke; his words, perhaps subconsciously, were timed exactly to coincide with the metronomic clicking of the auxiliary overhead fan.
"You realize," he said, "there will be a great deal of pain."
He was an elderly American with a soft accent and gentle eyes, but she had difficulty in not looking down at his hands. Those narrow fingers, as white as driftwood with continual scrubbing, would soon be cracking her bones. They were strong-looking hands, and the arms to which they were joined, powerful. Many limbs had been purposefully broken with cold, calculated accuracy, by those hands.
"We can only give you drugs up to a certain point. The whole operation is a long business-a series of operations in fact-and we don't want to send you out a morphine addict."
She nodded. "I understand."
What sort of instruments are used? she wanted to ask, but was too afraid of the answer to actually do so.
She imagined ugly steel clamps, vises, and mechanical hammers that were fitted with a precision more suited to a factory jig than a medical instrument. This is the way we break your bones. We screw this here, that there-can you feel the cold metal against your skin? The plates gripping the bones?-then, once we have lined it up and in position -whap! -down comes the weight between the guide blocks and
crack! goes the bone. Easy, isn't it?
"Of course, once we're finished with you, you will be . . . ah, even more beautiful than you can imagine."
"That's what I want. I don't care about the pain so long as the result is good."
"Not good but breathtaking. We'll straighten out any defects in the limbs, give you a jawline that Cleopatra would envy, small feet, slender hands. We'll also graft a little flesh here and there. Take away any excess. The eyes, we can do much with the eyes. And we'll have to break those fingers, one or two of them . . . am I being too blunt?"
"No, no." She had paled, she knew, at the word break. The other words were fine. She could take terms like straighten the limbs-but break had a force behind it that shook her confidence.
"I'll be all right," she said. "It must be the journey, the heat or something. Please don't worry. Please go on."
Her body was alive with feeling, as if electricity were coursing through her veins instead of blood. She concentrated on his words as he began to describe what her experience would be, to ensure, he said, that she knew exactly what to expect. If she wished, she could leave now, and there would be no charge.
Outside the window, the birds were singing, and she concentrated not on his descriptions of the forthcoming mutilations of her body but on their songs.
At first the pain was a patchy, dull feeling, its location in her body specific to certain areas, like her
forearms, which were the first to be broken. An aching that was difficult but not impossible to bear.
At night, when she was left alone, she could feel the pain throbbing and pulsing in the various parts of her limbs. Later, it developed a sharpness and spread like a field fire through her whole anatomy, until there was no pinpointing its source.
The pain was her, she was the pain. It reached a pitch and intensity that filled her with a terror she had never before thought possible, could not have imagined in her worst nightmares. It had shape and form and had become a tangible thing that had banished her psyche, had taken over completely her whole being. There was nothing inside her skin but the beast pain: no heart, no brain, no flesh, no bones, no soul. Just the beast.
It was unbearable, and she refused to bear it. She tried, with all her willpower, to remove it from her body. It was then that the pain began to sing to her. It called in the birds from beneath their waxen leaves, the fabric blossoms: It summoned the night singers, the small, green tree frogs and the booming bulls from their mudbank trumpets; it persuaded the chitchat lizards to enter in, and the insects to abandon the bladed grasses for its sake. When it had gathered together its choirs, the beast pain sang to her. It sang unholy hymns with mouths of needle teeth, and the birds, frogs, and insects sang its song. Gradually, over the many days, she felt the sharp sweetness of their music giving her a new awareness, lifting her to a new, higher plane of experience, until there came a time when she was dependent upon their presence.
Tomorrow they would break her legs. She lay back
in her bed, unable to move her head because of the clamps on her jaw. Her arms were completely healed. The plaster had left them pale and thin, with her skin flaking off, but the doctor assured her they would soon look normal. Better than normal, of course. Then her jaw had been reshaped. That was almost healed.
The surgeon was insistent she wait for her legs to be remodeled, even though she told him she wanted the process hurried so that she could get back to Philip. Her legs.
She knew the worst pain was yet to come. Then, of course, there were the minor operations: her nose, fingers, toes, and ears. (Afterward she could wear her hair shorter. Would not need to cover those ugly ears, which would then be beautiful.) The surgeon had also mentioned scraping away some of the bone above her eyes, where there were slight bulges. (She had never noticed them, but he had obviously done so.) Also there were her shoulder blades to adjust-the scapulae-she was even beginning to learn the Latin names ....
Sweet pain! What delicious strains came from its small mouths. Sing to me, she whispered, sing! She needed more and more.
"The hands haven't gone too well; we're going to have to rework them," he said.
She smiled, as much as the wire brace would allow.
"If you have to."
"You're a brave woman."
"I try to be," she replied, drifting off into her other world, the real world, where she became herself. Her actual self.