"Connie Willis - Daisy, in the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

Introduction “Daisy, in the Sun”
During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day,
the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going.
It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow
impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing
London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that
had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.



Daisy, in the Sun
Connie Willis
None of the others were any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and
said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked
at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?”
she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at
Grandma’s. All about the sun.”

He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the
dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.

“It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have
snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”

It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she
didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She
went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the
measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without
sound.

Daisy waited until it was the kitchen again. The red cafe curtains hung streaked and limp across the
bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly, but her
grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash
around her.

Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her
grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged
here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.

Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and
shut the door.

The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow
ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up
in her room. She remembered that quite clearly. She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door
barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had
happened afterward.

Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed
against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together.