"LeGuin-Olders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

she was fully alive. She was as tender and powerful as a red-deer doe, as
unconsciously splendid. He wondered if there were fawns, and then saw the child
standing behind her chair. The room, its shutters closed, was all shadow with a
spatter and dappling of broken light across the islands of heavy furniture, the
footboard of the bed, the folds of the coverlet, the child's face and dark eyes.

"Hamiddem," the Farmwife said--despite her absorption in her husband she had
caught his name, then, with the desperate keen hearing of the sickroom, where
every word carries hope or doom--"I still cannot see him breathe."

"Lay your ear against his chest," he said, in a tone deliberately louder than
her whisper. "You'll hear the heart beat, and feel the lungs expand. Though
slowly, as I said. Dema, I brought this for you. Now you'll sit here, see, at
this table. A little more light, a shutter open, so. It won't disturb him, not
at all. Light is good. You are to sit here and eat breakfast. Along with your
daughter, who must be hungry, too."

She introduced the child, Idi, a girl of five or six, who clapped her hand on
her heart and whispered "Give-you-good-day-dema" all in one glottal-stopped word
before she shrank back behind her mother:

It is pleasant to be a physician and be obeyed, Hamid reflected, as the
Farm-wife and her child, large and little images of each other in their shirts
and full trousers and silken braided hair, sat at the table where he had put the
tray down and meekly ate the breakfast he had brought. He was charmed to see
that between them they left not a crumb.

When Makali rose her face had lost the knotted look, and her dark eyes, though
still large and still concerned, were tranquil. She has a peaceful heart, he
thought. At the same moment his physician's eye caught the signs; she was
pregnant, probably about three months along. She whispered to the child, who
trotted away. She came back to the chair at the bedside, which he had already
relinquished.

"I am going to examine and dress his wound," Hamid said. "Will you watch, dema,
or come back?"

"Watch," she said.

"Good," he said. Taking off his coat, he asked her to have hot water sent in
from the kitchen.

"We have it piped," she said, and went to a door in the farthest shadowy corner.
He had not expected such an amenity. Yet he knew that some of these island farms
were very ancient places of civilization, drawing for their comfort and
provision on inexhaustible sun, wind, and tide, settled in a way of life as
immemorial as that of their plow-lands and pastures, as full and secure. Not the
show-wealth of the city, but the deep richness of the land, was in the steaming
pitcher she brought him, and in the woman who brought it.