Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
When the sugared coffee had been drunk, Ginchy took down the elders’ names and offered to send them a truckload of food and clothes. The leader, whose name was Charlie Durochie, was unmoved and didn’t thank him.
“That was a strange one,” Ginchy said when they were gone.
“They’re right, though,” Russ said. “The work here seems like make-work.”
“That’s some other fellow’s decision. I have to tread carefully, you know. Roosevelt wanted the army in charge of these camps.”
“But we’re supposed to be here serving, not building picnic tables.”
“The service I perform is keeping men out of the war. If that means building picnic tables…”
Russ asked him for permission to deliver the supplies to Tuba City.
“They didn’t seem much interested in charity,” Ginchy said.
“They didn’t say no.”
“You have a tender heart.”
“You do, too, sir.”
The next morning, in a truck driven by the quartermaster’s assistant and loaded with flour, rice, beans, and some work clothes left behind in the Depression, Russ rode north to Tuba City. In his innocence, he’d pictured tepees or log cabins in Indian country, tall trees with horses tied to them, clear streams running past mossy stones; he’d actually pictured mossy stones. The arid bleakness of the landscape he entered, after crossing Route 66, had not been imaginable. Dust hung in the air and coated every rock along the road. Lifeless buttes shimmered in the distance. Out on the parched plain were hogans more like piles of refuse than dwellings. In the settlements were houses of unpainted gray wood, roofless adobe ruins with holes in their walls, expanses of ash-darkened sand littered with rusted cans and broken roof tiles. Some of the smaller children, black-haired and round-faced, waved tentatively at the truck. Everyone else—old women wearing leggings beneath their skirts, old men with caved-in mouths, younger women who looked like they’d been born brokenhearted—averted their eyes.
Tuba City was a proper town, better shaded by cottonwoods, but scarcely less bleak. Russ now saw how comparatively much like Lesser Hebron the high forest was; how comparatively paradisal. The streams there were full, the forest double-carpeted with snow and pine needles, everything wet and white and fresh-smelling, and the men there, too—every last one of them—were white. To enter the reservation was to become aware of whiteness. Until he took a train to Arizona, Russ had never been more than sixty miles from Lesser Hebron, and although some of the non-Mennonite farmers had been ruined by the Depression, he’d never seen true privation. The Navajos had been stuck with barren land, seldom rained on. Witnessing their endurance of it, he had a curious sense of inferiority. The Navajos seemed closer to something he hadn’t known he was so far from. He felt, from his white height, like a Pharisee.
“Jesus Christ, this place is depressing,” the assistant quartermaster said.
The house to which they were directed seemed unfittingly tiny for a tribal leader, but a familiar black truck was parked in the dirt outside it, its front end elevated on stacks of earthen bricks. Charlie Durochie was watching a younger man hammer on a wrench connected to the truck’s undercarriage. One of the tires lay next to an emaciated dog licking its penis. From the doorway of the house, which stood open to the cold, a little girl in a frilly, faded dress stared at the white men in their better truck. Russ hopped out and reintroduced himself to Durochie, who was dressed exactly as he’d been the day before.
“What do you have,” Durochie said.
“What Mr. Ginchy promised. Some food, some clothes.”
Durochie nodded as if the delivery were more burden than relief. From beneath the old truck came a thud, a strong oath, a wrench skittering out into the dirt. In Russ’s grandfather’s shop, it was a sin against a wrench to hammer on it. Always better, Clement said, to use leverage.
“Do you have a longer wrench?” Russ couldn’t help asking.
“If I had a longer wrench,” the younger man said coldly, “would I be using this one?”
He reached for the wrench, and Russ extended a hand to shake. “Russ Hildebrandt.”
The man ignored the hand and picked up the wrench. His shoulders were broad in a chamois shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail that had no gray in it. He might have been fifteen years older than Russ, but it was hard to tell with Indian faces.
“Keith is my brother’s son,” Durochie remarked.
In a canvas bag in the cab of the camp truck, Russ found a longer wrench. Keith took it from him as if he expected no less. Russ asked Charlie where they should put the supplies.
“Here,” Charlie said.
“Just on the ground?”
Apparently yes. By the time Russ and his partner had unloaded the sacks of food and two bales of clothing, Charlie had disappeared. The little girl now sat in the dirt watching Keith hammer on a steering arm. “What’s your name?” Russ asked her.
She looked uncertainly at Keith, who stopped hammering. “Her name is Stella.”
“Nice to meet you, Stella.” To Keith, Russ added, “You can keep the wrench.”
“Okay.”
“I wish there were more we could do.”
Keith sighted along the steering arm, checking its shape. Already then, he had a presence that later served him as a tribal politician, a charisma that invited touch and trust. Russ just wanted to keep looking at him. The assistant quartermaster was in the camp truck, tapping his fingers on the wheel. The thing about a Navajo silence was the sense that it could last indefinitely—all day.
“Say we sent a crew up here,” Russ said. “What would we do?”
“I told my uncle not to bother with you. All he got was a broken truck.”
“I’d like to help, though.”
“My uncle thinks from a different time. I try to tell him the new lesson, but he won’t learn.”
“What is the lesson?”
“Your help is worse than no help.”
“But if I came back with a crew? What would be entailed, exactly?”
“Go home, Long Wrench. We don’t want your help.”
When Russ returned to the reservation, two months later, Keith Durochie continued to call him Long Wrench, possibly a reference to his height, more probably to his thinking he knew better. Being given a nickname was traditional, but he didn’t know this when he left that day. He felt disliked by someone he wished had liked him. In the weeks that followed, whenever he had hours of leave in Flagstaff, he went to the library and read what he could find about the Navajos. Despite being intransigent and thieving—to the point where they were rounded up and marched, en masse, to a prison camp in New Mexico—they’d been granted an immense piece of territory, which, according to various authors, and in contrast to the peace-loving, farm-tending Hopis, they’d proceeded to overgraze with herds of horses too numerous to be of practical use. To the U.S. government, the Navajos were a problem to be solved by force. To Russ, who was haunted by their faces, what needed solving was the mystery of them. He later had the same feeling about Marion.