"Ian R. MacLeod - The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

The Roads
Ian R. MacLeod

I'll always believe that my father came back from the front late in the summer of 1917. I could barely
remember the time when he'd lived at home, and his visits on leave had been brief, strained, somehow
theatrical. He'd hand me creased-over postcards of foreign towns -- a few of them even had unsent
messages on them, my name and address -- We're busy here taking a bash at the Hun. And I'd stare at
them as he stood in the front room and placed his hands on my sister Marion's shoulders and said how she'd
grown. My mother would wait in the corner -- nodding, smiling, lost of words, really, as we all were. I
half-feared him, this green-clad man, filling our front room with his own rough scent and that of trains and
disinfectant. Little as I was, I resented him, too. I liked being the only male in the house.

He'd change soon afterwards, bathing with his back shining though the open scullery door before putting
on the clothes that fitted him so loosely now. My mother then ran an iron, steaming and spitting, along the
seams of his uniform to kill the lice. Then tea and a cake from one of the neighbours, and everyone
smiling, grinning. The house frozen with half-finished words and gestures, our figures blurred as if in a
photograph, fanning wings of limbs, faces lost from all sense and meaning. Each night that my father was
at home my mother's bedroom door would be closed and I would lie prisoner in the unloved sheets of my
own bed, praying for that last morning when the cardboard suitcase reappeared in the hall.

"You'll take care? You'll look after Ma and Marion for me?"

I'd nod, knowing it was just his joke. And he'd stoop to hug me, encased once more in green and brass
and buttons. The pattern remained the same over the war years; as much a fact of life as rules of
grammar or the rank smell that filled our house when the wind blew east from the tanneries; and each time
my father and the cardboard case he brought with him seemed smaller, more sunken, more battered. It
was only late in the summer of 1917 when the war, if I had known it, was soon to end, that any of that
ever changed.

I was wandering in the town Arboretum. You had to pay to get in in those days but I knew a way through
the railings and I was always drawn to the bright scents and colours, the heaped confections of flowers.
There was a lake in the centre -- deep and dark, a true limestone cavern -- and a small mouldering
steamer that had plied prettily and pointlessly between one shore and the other before the war.

Each day of that changeable summer was like several seasons in itself. Forced outside to play by our
mothers between meals, we had to put up with rain, wind, sunshine, hail. In the Arboretum -- watered and
warmed, looming in flower scents, jungle fronds, greenish tints of steam -- everything was rank and
feverish. The lawns were like pondweed. The lake brimmed over. I remember wandering along the paths
from the white blaze of the bandstand, ducking the roses that clawed down from their shaded walk,
pink-scented, unpruned; sharing in that whole faint air of abandonment that had come over our country at
that time.

I saw a man walking towards me. A mere outline against the silvered lake -- but clearly a soldier from
the cap he wore, from the set of this shoulders. I stopped. I could tell that he was walking towards me, and
I felt a faint sinking in my heart even before I realised that it was my father.

"I thought I'd find you here," he said.

"Where's your case?" I asked.