"Michael Moorcock - London, My Life or The Sedentary Jew" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

relationships for me. My present wife is a theoretical physicist and her
favourite feminist is Andrea Dworkin. She’s read Proust four times in
French and a couple of times in English. She knows all about my situation
and is fascinated by it. It’s a happy marriage. No children. I stopped having
them a while ago, as soon as it became safe. In fact, if it wasn’t for my
unforgettable desire for one particular woman, things would be perfect now.

Yes, that is a problem. I’ve been in love with the same person for
about fifteen hundred years and it never gets any better, but I’ll tell you
about that when the time comes. Would I have liked to have seen more of
the world? Probably. But it’s not my reason for wanting to travel. That, too,
I’ll tell you about. For now, let’s just say I’m settled, if not totally content.

Not that I always feel so reconciled. I’m not as rich as you’d think I
could be. I’ve lost as many fortunes as I’ve made. I’ve had my feckless
moments, that I’m not particularly proud of. Luckily, because I was rarely of
an Orthodox disposition, I also had plenty of guiltless fun. When you’re
being punished for eternity under the weight of a serious (and basically
unjust) curse laid on you, you’ve already paid a high price, so what’s to feel
guilty? To say I’ve paid my debt to Jesus is to put it mildly. Not that it was
actually Jesus who laid the curse on me in the first place. I hold no
grudges, believe me. God was just paying back a debt to this guy, Joseph
of Arimathea, who turned up in the settlement of Londinium with his spear
and his cup and his followers. Admittedly, I could have been nicer to him,
but frankly I found his claims a bit thin.

In those days the Romans were in charge of Britain as well as
Palestine where I’d been born. You might not know much, but you’ll have
heard of the Roman Empire and doubtless, since you’re actually able to
read, you have a rough idea of the dates. By then I’d settled in the far West,
near what’s modern Tunis, and was a Carthaginian trader, practising my
calling with reasonable success. I was planning a Mediterranean winter at
home on the profits of our voyage, when this boat came beating up the
Thames, striped sail swelling in the rainy wind, and deposited a bunch of
sorry-looking men and women east of the wooden bridge, where most
travellers came ashore. They clearly weren’t used to the weather.

I was holding the fort, finishing off some business and waiting for my
own ship to return from a side trip to Market Zion, Cornwall, to offload some
woad and pick up some tin. Although the Romans were already building a
city to rival the Empire’s capital, with a huge forum, temples, law courts and
villas, that bridge over to Southwark, along with a growing system of straight
roads, they didn’t really get down to the western end of the island much and
were perfectly agreeable to us doing what trading we could with our
traditional contacts, mostly hard-working tin-miners who wanted our various
dyes and cotton, especially since we always gave them a decent deal on
the tin.

When Joseph and his entourage came ashore on what in those days
was already a very presentable wharf they looked as if they’d had a rough