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...
“Okay, listen up,” he said. “We’re going straight to the chapter house and see if we can get some dinner. I don’t want to hear any complaining about the food. You hear me? We’ll see a lot of mutton stew and frybread—if you don’t like it, you’ll eat it anyway. We need to remember, at all times, that we are guests of the Navajo Nation. Our attitude is gratitude. We come with our privilege, come with all our nice things, and we need to remember how we look to the Navajos. Do not ever leave your things unattended, except where we’ll be sleeping. Do not ever leave the school area by yourself. Are we clear on that? I want to see groups of four people or more, and no one ever leaves the school after dark. Understood?”
There was no electricity or telephone at Kitsillie—except for the chapter house and the school building, still unfinished after five years of work, there wasn’t much of anything—but, Wanda be praised, Daisy Benally and her sister were waiting for the bus. Daisy, an aunt of Keith’s by marriage, hadn’t been young when Russ met her in 1945; now she was stooped and shrunken. Her sister, Ruth, was nearly as fat as the average Hopi. The two of them had made a vat of stew in the chapter-house kitchen, which smelled of hot oil, and they now proceeded, by lantern light, while the Crossroads group settled into the common room, to cook the frybread. The room’s chill pervaded the concrete floor, the dented metal folding chairs, the particle-board tables. Russ asked Frances what she was thinking.
“I’m thinking, yikes. You told me it was primitive, but.”
“It’s not too late to go to Many Farms. Ollie can take you back.”
She bristled. “Is that how you think of me? The lady who can’t hack it?”
“Not at all.”
“I wouldn’t mind finding a bathroom, though.”
“Brace yourself.”
As he weighed whether to sit with Alice Raymond—whether it would make her self-conscious about her mother’s death, and whether his concern about making her self-conscious concealed a craven fear of her bereavement—he thought of Ambrose, whose instincts with teenagers were unerring. He was relieved when Carolyn Polley sat down with Alice. He didn’t have to be good at everything, he only had to be good at getting Frances. He ate his dinner with her and Ted Jernigan.
“Not to complain,” Ted said, “but there’s something not right about the bread.”
“The oil’s a little rancid, maybe. It’s only a taste—it won’t hurt you.”
“Where is the mutton?” Frances said, poking at her bowl. “All I have is turnips and potatoes.”
“You can ask Daisy for some meat.”
“I’m dreaming of the beer nuts in my suitcase.”
Outside the chapter house, a truck banged by in a roar of downshift. Russ didn’t give it a thought until he’d finished his dinner and stepped outside. The temperature had plunged but Ollie was in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and looking up the rough road to the school building. A hundred yards up, a pickup truck’s headlights were aimed down at the bus. The sound of its engine was distinct in the still, cold air. Wanda had promised to come up and check on the group, but Russ didn’t think the truck was Wanda’s. Hoping there might be some other benign explanation, a lost calf, a relative fetching Daisy and Ruth, he rounded up the group and got everyone on the bus.
In its headlights, as Ollie steered it up the road, Russ recognized the pickup from their encounter with it earlier. Ollie slowed down and tapped the horn, but the truck didn’t move. There was menace in its headlights. Frances again clutched Russ’s hand.
“Stay here,” he said.
As he got out and approached the truck, its doors opened and four figures jumped out. Four young men, three of them in hats. The fourth, in a jean jacket, his hair loose on his shoulders, stepped forward and looked directly, insolently, into Russ’s eyes. “Hey, white man.”
“Hello. Good evening.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“We are a Christian youth fellowship. We’re here to perform a week of service.”
The man, seeming amused, looked back at his companions. Something in his manner reminded Russ of Laura Dobrinsky. The younger Navajos don’t like you, either.
“Would you mind letting us through?”
“What are you doing here?”
“In Kitsillie? We will be working to finish the school building.”
“We don’t need you for that.”
Anger rose in Russ. He had an angry white thought—that, year after year, the tribe itself did little to finish the school—but he didn’t speak it. “We are here at the tribal council’s invitation. They’ve given us a job, and I intend to do it.”
The man laughed. “Fuck the council. They might as well be white.”
“The council is an elected body. If you have a problem with our being here, you can take it up with them. I have a busload of very tired kids who, if you wouldn’t mind, need to sleep.”
“Where you from?”
“We’re from Chicago.”
“Go back to Chicago.”
Russ’s blood rose further. “For your information,” he said, “I am not just another bilagáana. I’ve been a friend of the reservation for twenty-seven years. I’ve known Daisy Benally since 1945. Keith Durochie is an old friend of mine.”
“Fuck Keith Durochie.”
Russ took an anger-managing breath. “What exactly is your grievance?”
“Fuck Keith Durochie. That’s my grievance. Get the fuck out of here—that’s my grievance.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but this is council land, and we have an invitation to be here. We will stay at the school and be gone in a week.”
“You people are polluters. You can pollute Chicago, but this isn’t Chicago. I don’t want to see you here tomorrow.”
“Then you’ll just have to look the other way. We’re not leaving.”
The man spat on the ground, not directly at Russ, but close. “You had your warning.”
“Is that a threat?”
The man turned away and walked toward his companions.
“Hey, hey,” Russ shouted, “are you threatening me?”
Again, over the shoulder, the middle finger.
Russ hadn’t been so angry since he fought with Marion at Christmas. He stalked past the bus, back down to the chapter house, and found Daisy stooped in the light of a lantern, her expression unreadable. As the truck screamed past them, he asked her who the young man was.
“Clyde,” she said. “He has an angry spirit.”
“Do you know what his problem with Keith is?”
“He’s angry at Keith.”
“I can see that. But why?”
Daisy smiled at the ground. “It’s not our business.”
“Do you think it’s safe for us to be here?”
“Stay close to the school.”
“But do you think we’ll be safe?”
“Stay close to the school. We’ll have breakfast for you in the morning.”
The sensible thing to do was to concede defeat and retreat to Many Farms, but Russ’s blood was raging with testosterone. He felt wronged and misunderstood, and the progress he’d made with Frances had elevated his hormone levels. When he returned to the bus and saw the worry and the admiration in her face, the hormones urged him to stand his ground.
The following day, Palm Sunday, passed without a sign of Clyde. Russ established a perimeter comprising the table of land on which the school was set, a lower yard with a netless basketball hoop, and the arroyo behind it. Sunday was a rest day, and it was hard on the kids to be surrounded by interesting country and not be allowed to explore it, but they had their relationships and their suntans to work on, their books and their playing cards, their guitars. Russ was grateful to see Carolyn Polley, who was going to be a fine Christian minister, introducing Frances to the various girls. He was struck, as he’d been when he first took Frances to Theo Crenshaw’s church, by her hesitancy in an unfamiliar setting, and again it moved him.