"Koja-LadyLazarus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)

Black stones, the poem told her, were in essence secret monuments to suffering
scattered across the unforgiving earth as grave markers for sadnesses and
sorrows yet to be: and the job of each to find and gather the stones belonging
to him, to her, to pile them in a cairn that was itself a monument to the human
capacity for self-inflicted pain. And what -- pen in hand and in the dark, what
is in your pike, what lies in half-completion waiting agonies to be?

The baby made a noise; a car passed outside. Her bladder ached lightly and she
stood for a moment, one hand on the chair's back, the other on her own, pressing
where the pain seemed to be. So many pains below the surface; so many spots she
could not reach. On the chair, draped like mockery the party dress, blue bodice
glittering false and sweet; she looked away; she looked down. Sitting in the
ear, hands in her lap she had been sitting in the car and suddenly there was her
neighbor, knocking on the window, was she all right? People were always asking
her that; was she? The blue bodice tight as a secret against her heart and she
had told him she was fine, then too, just fine; I'm thinking she had said. I'm
going on a nice long holiday, a long rest. She might have said, I'm going off to
war; for war you need weapons; perhaps that was in the poem, too, hidden like a
snake in the pile of stones. So many stones.

Here a stone for her father's death, dark sugary light surrounding it like
infrared; red-eyed and eight years old, she had composed a document for her
mother to sign: I WILL NEVER MARRY AGAIN. What a big stone that was, yet
unheavy; without trying she could lift it with the bent tip of her nail. Beside
it another stone for her mother, a small one shaped like a kidney; and a smaller
stone still, for a baby unborn.

More--so many? -- for men, most so small her own sad contempt might have goaded
her into overlooking them had she not stumbled, stubbed her toes (like her
father, in fact, before her, and what were those red marks creeping like
unhealed scars up her legs?), understanding like a job begun in the vertiginous
moment that these stones too were hers to carry and to keep. In her hands they
were not so heavy, though walking in the cold made them more so, the long cold
shadow born of the darkness of the biggest stone of all. That one she
deliberately sidestepped, big and black as a monument itself, heavy as the
weight of his body in the dark; it was, she thought (and said; did she say it
aloud?) no longer hers to carry: let her carry it instead, the covetous bitch,
let her bear the burden now.

Other stones -- the New Yorker disappointments, the O'Connor class, all of it
now as if seen from a painless distance, yet the edges of each stone still shone
with a particular and vindictive clarity, as if they had been freshly sharpened
not an hour before. Newer rejections (as he, the bastard, was basking in light)
made their own pile, their own deadly memorial heap and beyond them more, a
field of them, a waterless strand: her poverty, her loneliness, even the cold
made a carpet of black all the way to the horizon, an endlessness like the tears
of the dying of those who die alone. Despairing of bearing them, she let fall
the ones in her arms; there were too many, it was all too much, an army equipped
with a pile this big fierce black edges like excised teeth and the world itself
one howling mouth, velvet-dark like the jaws of a guard dog, slick and