"Bruce Holland Rogers - These Shoes Strangers Have Died Of" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

 "Fuck if you did," he says. "They'd have come back for me."
"I told you. There have been no new tracks in the snow. They haven't been back."
"Fuck you," he says, but he must know his confederates, must understand the truth as I tell it to him.
"You'd be frozen solid without me," I say, "so whatever I do to you now, it's better than that, right? It's
better than being dead."
I force the gag back into his mouth before he can answer. If I don't, he'll shout his lungs out and I
won't be able to concentrate.
I go back to work.
***


I earn more for Nina than all of her other clients combined. If she worries that I will have a heart
attack, it is only because of the money.
She is not without compassion, but some of the things she has done for me have hardened her. The
Auschwitz crossbeam was one.
I grant few interviews. Shouldn't the work speak for itself? But sometimes an interview brings its
surprises. I once regretted aloud that there was no wood from Auschwitz for me to carve. A month after
my words were in print, Nina had a call from the Israeli government. They'd have preferred a Jewish
artist, but no one else achieves my effects.
The crossbeam came from one of the barracks torn down after the war. It had, for a time, supported
the roof of a Polish barn.
When they flew me in to inspect it, I did not ask how the beam had come to Israel, to a warehouse
where it lay in a military truck bed like a missile.
The Deputy Minister of Culture, standing before the truck, waved some documentation under my
nose. I stepped past him and touched the wood. Even after forty years, it was alive with ghosts.
"We will give it to you," he said, "on the condition that you cut it in half and produce two finished
works, one of which you will return to us. For the memorial."
I agreed.
They could not know how dense the wood was with tortured faces, with gestures of pain and despair.
Back in the States, I cut the beam in half, as agreed. Then I split each half lengthwise and carved four
pieces instead of two. Let the Israelis imagine that I'd had to carve deep to find the images I gave them.
Let them think the missing wood littered the floor of my studio as chips and dust.
All four finished pieces were a tangled knot of victims.
Nina told me, "You can't sell the extras. You'll give yourself away."
"We will sell them," I said. "Sealed bids. Secret bids. We'll give slides for Hauptmann to circulate
among likely buyers."
Nina's arms were crossed. "Not Hauptmann. I won't go through Hauptmann again. Even talking to him
on the phone, I feel dirty."
"So write him. Mail him the slides."
"But the bidders he will bring us...."
"It's what I want, Nina."
"This is the last time I go through Hauptmann."
I said nothing. No one else knew the people Hauptmann knew.
A month later, Nina flung the list at my face. "Do you see where these bids are coming from? Do you
see?"
I picked up the loose pages from my floor, looked at the names and offers. "Here," I said, and pointed
at a bid from El Salvador. "This can only be Rosado himself. It's not the highest bid, but I want you to sell
it to him."
"If we weren't using Hauptmann's list, I could find someone else," Nina said. "A collector. An investor
who would put it away in a vault for his heirs. The money would be better, and-- "