"The Little Goddess" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

me to the jharoka to wave to the people in the court and I saw a hundred Chinese
faces upturned to me, then the high, excited voices. I waited and waited but two
tourists would not go away. They were an ordinary couple, dark local faces,
country clothes.
“Why are they keeping us waiting?” I asked.
“Wave to them,” Tall Kumarima urged. “That is all they want.” The woman saw my
lifted hand first. She went weak and grabbed her husband by the arm. The man
bent to her, then looked up at me. I read many emotions on that face; shock,
confusion, recognition, revulsion, wonder, hope. Fear. I waved and the man
tugged at his wife, look, look up. I remember that against all the laws, I
smiled. The woman burst into tears. The man made to call out but Tall Kumarima
hastened me away.
“Who were those funny people?” I asked. “They were both wearing very white
shoes.”
“Your mother and father,” Tall Kumarima said. As she led me down the Durga
corridor with the usual order not to brush my free hand along the wooden walls
for fear of splinters, I felt her grip tremble.
That night I dreamed the dream of my life, that is not a dream but one of my
earliest experiences, knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of my
remembering. This was a memory I would not admit in daylight, so it must come by
night, to the secret door.
I am in the cage over a ravine. A river runs far below, milky with mud and silt,
foaming cream over the boulders and slabs sheared from the mountainsides. The
cable spans the river from my home to the summer grazing and I sit in the wire
cage used to carry the goats across the river. At my back is the main road,
always loud with trucks, the prayer banners and Kinley bottled water sign of my
family’s roadside teahouse. My cage still sways from my uncle’s last kick. I see
him, arms and legs wrapped around the wire, grinning his gap-toothed grin. His
face is summer-burned brown, his hands cracked and stained from the trucks he
services. Oil engrained in the creases. He wrinkles up his nose at me and
unhooks a leg to kick my cage forward on its pulley-wheel. Pulley sways cable
sways mountains, sky and river sway but I am safe in my little goat-cage. I have
been kicked across this ravine many times. My uncle inches forward. Thus we
cross the river, by kicks and inches.
I never see what strikes him—some thing of the brain perhaps, like the sickness
Lowlanders get when they go up to the high country. But the next I look my uncle
is clinging to the wire by his right arm and leg. His left arm and leg hang
down, shaking like a cow with its throat cut, shaking the wire and my little
cage. I am three years old and I think this is funny, a trick my uncle is doing
just for me, so I shake back, bouncing my cage, bouncing my uncle up and down,
up and down. Half his body will not obey him and he tries to move forward by
sliding his leg along, like this, jerk his hand forward quick so he never loses
grip of the wire, and all the while bouncing up and down, up and down. Now my
uncle tries to shout but his words are noise and slobber because half his face
is paralyzed. Now I see his fingers lose their grip on the wire. Now I see him
spin round and his hooked leg come free. Now he falls away, half his body
reaching, half his mouth screaming. I see him fall, I see him bounce from the
rocks and cartwheel, a thing I have always wished I could do. I see him go into
the river and the brown water swallow him.
My older brother came out with a hook and a line and hauled me in. When my