"Jeff VanderMeer - Mahout (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

The waitress smiles as she leans over to take your plate. You smile back,
her face blank to you. You can only sense the pain, enter minds through
agony. Sometimes you block it by concentrating on dust motes or the
pattern of raindrops on a blade of grass. You can escape it.
When you are with the solid shadows of your elephants, all the sharp edges
fade away. Your clenched hands untense.

"Suddenly, Mary collided its trunk vice-like about his body, lifted him
ten feet in the air, then dashed him with fury to the ground. Before
Eldridge had a chance to reach his feet, the elephant had him pinioned
to the ground, and with the full force of her biestly fury is said to
have sunk her giant tusks entirely through his body. The animal then
trampled the dying form of Eldridge as if seeking a murderous triumph,
then with a sudden…swing of her massive foot hurled his body into the
crowd."
--Johnson City Staff, Sept. 13, 1916, pg. 3

You grew up in Jaipur, under the maharajah's benevolent neglect; a man who
employed your parents as servants. A man who, twenty years later, would
sell his elephants to the Americans to pay his debts, and your services
with them.
Every day you suffered headaches or crying spells. The leper woman with
her bag of shriveled flowers would ask you for coins and you saw the young
woman inside her, the pretty one who would have married, laughed many days
by the washing stones. If not for the decaying flesh. You ran from her,
not understanding how or why you had these visions.
The merchant at the market would say, "Nice boy: have a sweet," smiling at
your parents and you would hear, from deep inside his coiled thoughts:
Ugly child. Scrawny. No good for lifting sacks. The headaches would pick
away your skull. You wondered why people lied so much.
Then, when you were seven, you met the elephant and its mahout. You went
with your parents on holiday - to see the Amber Palace, a tilted terrace
of fortifications and tile buildings and minarets atop a mountain ridge.
The snake of road circled higher and higher. Below: fields and a lake.
You gnawed your lip bloody listening to the desperation beneath beggars'
prayers and your father's impatience with them as you trudged along. Your
mother you could not read. Never could.
Then, sweaty, half-way up:
The elephant. Straddling the road, one front foot alone larger than you
and your parents. Trunk curled, tusks capped in gold, a gilded carriage
upon its back. You gasped, stumbled. And looked into its eyes.
Long-lashed, black, with no hint of reflected light. Age wrinkles spiraled
down into the eye. The elephant stared at you, measured you. You shivered.
Ganesh, you thought. The elephant-headed god of luck and wisdom.
You wanted a ride. You begged your father, clutched at your mother's sari.
They, tired of walking, smiled, said yes.
That was when the mahout stepped out from behind his elephant: a shriveled
man with no flesh on his bones so that his head, small on another man,
seemed large. A holy man. A wise man.
You stared at your future teacher unabashedly and he bowed, pressed his