"Lavie Tidhar - Angels Over Israel_Three Slides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

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Angels Over Israel: Three Slides
by Lavie Tidhar
Author’s Note: “I was sitting on an Israeli writers’ panel at Icon, the annual Israeli
SF convention, and the final question was, to each of us: ‘What do you need in
order to write the other’s stories?’
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‘Easy,’ my friend Guy Hasson said when they all got around to discuss what makes
a Lavie Tidhar story. ‘It needs to have angels in it, and something to do with Israel,
and—’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’ve just given me an idea for a story.’
So this is it—them, for there ended up being three, in the end—written in
Hebrew, and first published on the Israeli webzine Bli Panika (www.blipanika.co.il).
They were 500 words each in the Hebrew version, slightly longer in English, and I
had fun writing them. Though I’m kind of laying off the angel-dust, for the moment
at least...”
Hunting Angels in the Yard
MICHAEL SAW THE ANGELS wherever he turned. Tiny in size, the angels
hovered in the unmoving summer air, their wings rippling in the sun’s blaze.
Like butterflies, thought Michael before he tried to pet one of them. The
winged creature attacked him then, its little face twisting in an animalistic mask of
anger. Long sharp teeth bit into Michael’s finger and returned bloodied.
I won’t cry, Michael told himself over and over again, I won’t cry. And then
surprised himself with the composure with which he hit the angel until the tiny body
fell to the pavement. Then Michael stepped on it.
He remembered the sound the angel’s body made, like a balloon emptying
gradually of air. His foot rose and fell until a black, oily stain remained alone on the
ground. Michael had to wash his shoes in the tap of the housing estate’s great yard:
but very quickly he found out it didn’t matter, since no one knew about the angels
and could not see them, or their remains.
Since that first time Michael repeated his actions many times: he wandered the
great yard and hunted angels.
Michael’s mother, Mrs. Tavori, worked long hours. His father, Mr. Tavori,
was killed in the line of duty. Michael remembered the embarrassed-looking officer
who used those words one late-night hour in the flat’s small living room. He stood in
the small room, his face tired, his black hair thinning. But how Mr. Tavori—a
shoe-seller whose military role was as a supply sergeant—was killed, that the officer
could not explain. There was a firing accident, he said, but how and why, that he
couldn’t say.
Killed in the line of duty. The words became a kind of rosary in Michael’s
head, the syllables beads he moved from side to side. He remembered the sound the
angels’ bodies made against the window: they rose in a cloud at the sound of the
words and tried to break into the flat, beating themselves against the glass. He
collected a heap of bodies from the grass the next morning, fallen angels.
In the mornings Michael prepared breakfast for himself and then went down to
the yard to play. The old automobile lying on its back, lacking wheels or windows,
was first, followed by the brook that ran from the estate into an invisible
underground tunnel. Michael played in the brook despite the smell that sometimes