"Seeing Deeper by Mary Soon Lee" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lee Mary Soon)

She shook me away. "There isn't time. From the bottom of my dresser, get the sandalwood chest. Place soil inside, an inch deep, and cover it with silk. Place Madeleine on the silk, and bury her beneath our rose bushes."

"I can't just take her. We need to call an undertaker, choose a cemetery. I know you're upset -- we're upset -- but this is ridiculous."

"Grandfather said . . ."

"I don't care what he said. Maybe he doesn't know any better, he's probably going senile. But you're from New York, not some village by the Ganges. It's about time you grew up."

Geetha stared at me, her eyes liquid.

The tight knot in my chest subsided. I brushed her bare shoulder, my fingers shaking. "I'm sorry. When I came home, when I saw you crouched in the flower-bed, for a moment I thought you were going to die."

"Part of me died." Geetha's fingers crept toward me, entwined themselves in mine. "Please, Robert. Do this for me, as best you are able."

I knelt down beside the bed, and rested my head on her shoulder. "I'll do what I can."



Even in our small rural town, it seems there is an assault course of ordinances and regulations concerning burials. Although I made a fool of myself first to the hospital staff, then to the undertaker and a lawyer, I couldn't convince them to let me bury our daughter in our garden. If I had been prepared to delay for a week or two, to allow the lawyer time to wade through the bureaucracy, then perhaps -- but Geetha was growing more agitated by the minute.

So I compromised. The undertaker agreed to use the little sandalwood chest as a coffin, and barely raised an eyebrow when I asked him to put some earth inside it first.

And at twilight, twenty-six hours after my daughter was born, she was laid to rest at the edge of an old cemetery. Two of our friends came, and an aunt of Geetha's who lives within driving distance. I muttered some acknowledgement as they offered their condolences, my face stiff. They left almost immediately, and I lingered by the fresh grave.

The wind gusted chill, scattering scarlet and gold leaves across the grass in sudden glory. It made no sense to me: cycles and rhythms and the wheel of nature. Why should anything end before it had a chance to begin?

In the distance, I saw an elderly woman hunched over another grave, her arms full of violets. I took a pair of miniature primrose-colored socks from my pocket, something my mother had knitted in hasty anticipation. Our baby hadn't been due until late December. I put the socks on the grave, weighted them down with a stone.

Two weeks later, I brought Geetha to the cemetery. She was wrapped up in her winter coat, her face half-hidden beneath the hood. She didn't speak; she'd scarcely said three sentences to me since that day in the hospital. She didn't cry. Only the press of her cold fingers against mine told me that she knew I was there.

When we got home, she sat in the downstairs bay window, and asked me to comb her hair. I ran the old metal comb through her long thick hair, easing the worst of the tangles apart with my fingers. The dwindling sunlight caught on the worked metal of the comb's handle, glistened against Geetha's hair.

And she started to talk.

"In India, in the village my grandfather came from . . ." my hand jerked, snagging her hair, but I bit back the sarcastic remark that came to mind ". . . there's a sacred stand of trees, and there everyone is buried, all without gravestones, in that one place. When strangers from some big city -- Bombay, I think -- came to visit the grove, they described merely straggling trees. But, seeing deeper, the villagers recognized the souls of the dead climbing to the next life. My grandfather remembers how the leaves shimmered with the blue-green of peacock tails, each sapling rooted in a corpse, shooting up in a single month."

She paused, her mouth twisting as it does when she is mocking herself. "I know you think me foolish, Robert. But I wanted to believe. I wanted Madeleine's tree to grow near us, so I might help her on her way." Her mouth twisted further. "I could feel her dying inside me, so I tried to make a sacred place within our garden."

The roughness in her voice tugged at me. "Maybe," I said. "Maybe it doesn't matter where she is; she'll find her own way."

Geetha swung round, her eyes bright as sunlit frost. "_I need to know._ I need to know she's all right."

Folding my arms around her, I rocked her gently, back and forth, ignoring her last words. Surely it was a good sign that she'd talked about this, surely things would be better now.

But that night I woke up, missing something. Geetha's side of the bed was empty. I ran through the house, shouting her name, then out into the driveway. A silhouette bent down to the car door.

"Geetha!" I ran over to her. She was barefoot, her nightdress rippling in the wind, one hand tight round a garden spade. "Geetha, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to the cemetery. I need to check Madeleine's safe, that her soul-tree grows well."