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...
he-ye ye ye ya ŋa
’ėėla do kwii-yi – na
kį gó di yá – ’e – hya ŋa
he ye ye ye ya
Though the language was foreign, the voices of a congregation, raised in bright morning sun, deepened Russ’s sense of having come home. As the singing continued, Keith invited him to join the group for mutton and corn bread.
Only the children, Stella in particular, looked at him, and for a long time Keith was busy hosting. Russ might have grown bored if he hadn’t been so fascinated by the faces. When the party finally broke up, the entourage returning to their horses and trucks, Keith sat down and asked him where he was going next. Russ again mentioned his charge from George Ginchy.
“I told you not to bother,” Keith said.
“You said you’d talk to me after the sing.”
“It just started. We still have three days.”
“Three days?”
“That’s the new way. We don’t do the long sings anymore.”
“The thing is, the only people I know here are you and your uncle.”
“You won’t get to my uncle in your truck.”
“Well, so.”
Keith turned and, for the first time, looked at Russ directly. “What are you doing here?”
“Honestly, I want to know more about your people. The work is just an excuse.”
Keith nodded and said, “That’s better.”
He went to help his kinspeople, and Russ fell asleep on the ground. He was awakened by the smell of gasoline. Keith was filling the tank of a small truck through a funnel with a muslin filter. Already seated on the cargo bed were Stella and a slender young woman with a bundled baby. “You ride in front with me,” Keith said.
Making the woman sit in back didn’t seem right to Russ, but to Keith the matter was already settled. The little truck had a suspension well suited to the rutted canyon road. After a long while, as Keith drove, his silence became so trying that Russ asked him what a sing was.
“We’re helping our friend,” Keith said. “He came back from the Pacific out of harmony. He walks bad, from shrapnel, and he doesn’t sleep—the enemy’s burned flesh is in his nose. The enemy looked like us, not like the bilagáana, and their spirits got inside him. He brought home an enemy shirt that he can smell the war in. It will be part of the sing.”
Though Russ didn’t understand every detail, the communal healing of a man brutalized by war made thrilling sense to him. He had many more questions, but he made himself parcel them out slowly as the truck retraced his morning drive. He learned that the woman in back was Keith’s wife, the baby his two-month-old son. Keith’s father-in-law, riding ahead of them on horseback, carrying the ceremonial black stick, was a medicine man and a friend of Charlie Durochie from a boarding school in Farmington, New Mexico. Keith had attended the same school and worked for some years on oil rigs before he married into the Fallen Rocks clan. He now managed his in-laws’ ranch on the mesa.
Each fact Keith offered seemed to Russ a precious stone. He felt hopelessly inferior to Keith, as lovers do, and was reluctant to take his eyes off him. What Keith thought about Russ was less clear. Russ had the sense of being more than just tolerated, of being at least amusing in his ignorance, but Keith showed little curiosity about him. The only question he asked on the drive was “You a Christian?”
“Yes,” Russ said eagerly. “I’m from the Mennonite faith.”
Keith nodded. “I knew their missionaries.”
“Here? On the reservation?”
“In Tuba City. They were all right.”
“So—are you—do you worship?”
Keith smiled at the road ahead of them. “Everyone drinks Arbuckle’s coffee. All over the world, Arbuckle’s coffee. Your religion is like that— I guess it must be pretty good coffee.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We don’t send our coffee around the world. You have to be born here to drink it.”
“But that’s what I love about the Bible. Anyone, anywhere, can receive the Word—it’s not exclusive.”
“Now you sound like a missionary.”
Russ was surprised to feel ashamed.
Many miles down the main mesa road, they reached an encampment where fires were being built, blankets shaken open, slabs of raw mutton handled, a flaccid basketball kicked around a grassless pasture by shouting boys. Several hundred people were at the camp. The sight of them created a pressure in Russ’s head, a sense of too much immersion too quickly. To relieve it, he set off down the road by himself, into the setting sun.
A raven was croaking, jackrabbits browsing in sagebrush shadows. A snake, both startling and startled, went airborne in its haste to leave the road. As soon as the sun dropped behind a ridge, a breeze came through the valley, carrying smells of warmed juniper and wildflower. Turning back, he saw smoke rising from a distant bonfire, the cliffs behind it pink with alpenglow. He saw that he’d been wrong about the Navajos’ land. The beauty of the national forest was friendly and obvious. The beauty of the mesa was harsher but cut deeper.
Feasting was in progress when he returned to the camp. He hadn’t known to bring anything but the clothes he was wearing, his pocket knife and wallet, so Keith gave him blankets from the truck. Even if Keith’s wife hadn’t been nursing, Russ would have been too shy to speak to her, because she was Keith’s wife. While he ate mutton and beans and bread, competing songs wafted over from other cook fires. Someone was beating on a drum.
The dancing started when the sky was fully black. Standing with Keith, Russ watched a young woman circle the bonfire, stepping in rhythm with the drum, while a crowd clapped and chanted. Other young women joined her, and soon some of the older men were dancing, too. The pressure in Russ’s head had given way to exhilaration and gratitude. He was a white man alone among the Indians, hearing the women sing and chant. Resinous knots of juniper exploded in orange sparks, the stars dimming and brightening in swirling smoke, and he remembered to thank God.
One of the younger girls peeled off from the fire and came over to him. She touched his shirt sleeve. “Dance,” she said.
Alarmed, he turned to Keith.
“She wants you to dance.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“Dance with me,” the girl insisted.
She wore a bulky shawl and a skirt with a Mexican ruffle, but her calves were bare and slim. Her forwardness was so alien to Russ’s experience, she was like a threatening animal, and he didn’t know how to dance; it had been verboten in Lesser Hebron. He waited for her to go away, but she stood patiently, her eyes on the ground. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and he was a tall, white, older stranger. He found himself touched by her courage.
“I’m not a dancer,” he said, taking a step toward the fire, “but I can try.”
The girl smiled at the ground.
“You need to give her a little money,” Keith said.
This bewildered Russ. But the girl, too, seemed confused. Her smile, in the firelight, was edged with disappointment. Not wanting to offend her, he took a greenback from his wallet. She snatched it and hid it in her skirt.
He had no idea what to do, but he joined the circle and stepped as well as he could, following the girl, who did know what to do. The slimness of her legs and the shimmy of her hips brought out the queasiness in him. But now, in the flickering orange light, amid the beating of the drum and the chanting of female voices, he understood that the queasiness had nothing to do with pity or revulsion. It was heart-quickening excitement. Beneath the girl’s shawl and skirt was a body that a man could want; that Russ himself could want. A suspense that had hitherto existed only in disturbing dreams, dreams that ballooned into apocalyptic heat and ruptured in the soiling of his pajamas, had invaded the world he was awake in. What made the dreams so disturbing was how painless it was, how ecstatically pleasurable, to be consumed in flame.