To Paradise
- Автор: Yanagihara Hanya
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «To Paradise». Краткое содержание книги:
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him--and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling and...
But of course I couldn’t say that. “He was tall,” I began. “And skinny. His skin was darker than mine. He had gray hair, short, and—” And here I faltered, because I really didn’t know what else I could say.
“Did he wear fancy clothes?” David asked. “My maternal grandfather liked to wear fancy clothes.”
“No,” I said, though as I did, I remembered a ring that Grandfather had worn when I was little. It was very old, and gold, and on one side it had a pearl, and if you pressed the little latches on the sides of the setting, the pearl hinged open and there was a tiny compartment. Grandfather had worn it on his left pinkie, and had always turned the pearl inward, toward his palm. Then, one day, he had stopped wearing it, and when I had asked him why, he had praised me for being so observant. “But where is it?” I had demanded, and he had smiled. “I had to give it to the fairy as payment,” he said. “What fairy?” I had asked. “Why, the fairy who looked over you while you were sick,” he said. “I told her I would give her anything she wanted if she took care of you, and she said she would, but I needed to give her my ring in exchange.” By this point, I had been well for several years, and I also knew that fairies didn’t exist, but whenever I asked Grandfather about it, he had only smiled and repeated the same story, and eventually, I stopped asking.
But, again, this wasn’t the kind of story I could tell David, and anyway, he had begun talking about his other grandfather, who had been a farmer in Prefecture Five before it was called Prefecture Five. He had raised pigs and cows and goats, and had had a hundred peach trees, and David told me about being young and visiting his grandfather and eating as many peaches as he wanted. “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I hated peaches when I was a kid,” he said. “There were just so many of them: My grandmother baked them into pies, and cakes, and bread, and she made them into jam, and leather—oh, that’s when you dry slices of them in the sun until they become tough, like jerky—and ice cream. And this is after she’d canned as many as we and our neighbors needed to get us through the rest of the year.” But then the farm had become state property, and his grandfather had gone from owning it to working on it, and the peach trees were cut down to make room for soybean fields, which were more nutritious than peaches and therefore a more efficient crop. It was unwise to talk as freely about the past as David did, much less about governmental claims, but he did so in the same light, easy, matter-of-fact tone that he had used to discuss the peaches. Grandfather had once told me that discussing the past was discouraged because it made many people angry or sad, but David sounded neither angry nor sad. It was as if what he was describing had happened not to him but to someone else, someone he barely knew.
“Now, of course, I’d kill for a peach,” he said, cheerily, as we neared the north of the Square, where we met and parted every Saturday. “I’ll see you next week, Charlie,” he said as he left. “Think about what you might like to do at the center.”
Once I was back at home, I took out the box in the closet and looked at the pictures I had of Grandfather. The first one was taken when he was in medical school. He was laughing, and his hair was long and curly and black. In the second, he was standing with my father, who was a toddler, and my other grandfather, the one to whom I’m genetically related. In my mind, my father resembles Grandfather, but in this picture, you can see that he actually looked like my other grandfather: They were both lighter skinned than Grandfather, with straight dark hair, like I used to have. In the third picture, my favorite, Grandfather looks as I remember him. He’s smiling, a big smile, and in his arms he is holding a small, thin baby, and that baby is me. “Charles and Charlie,” someone wrote on the back of this photo, “September 12, 2064.”
I found myself thinking about Grandfather both more and less since I had met David. I didn’t need to talk to him in my head as much as I used to, but I also wanted to talk to him more, mostly about David, and about what it was like to have a friend. I wondered what he would have thought of him. I wondered whether he would have agreed with my husband.
I wondered as well what David would have thought of Grandfather. It was strange to think that he didn’t know who Grandfather was, that to him, he was simply a relative of mine, whom I had loved and who had died. As I have said, everyone I worked with knew who Grandfather was. There was a greenhouse on top of a building at RU that was named for him, and there was even a law named for him, the Griffith Act, which established the legality of the relocation centers, which had once been called quarantine camps.
But it was not so long ago that many people hated Grandfather. I suppose there are people who still hate him, but you never hear about those people anymore. I first became aware of this hatred when I was eleven, in civics class. We were learning about how, in the aftermath of the illness of ’50, a new government began to take form, so by the time the illness of ’56 arose, they were more properly prepared, and by ’62, the new state had been established. One of the inventions that had helped contain the illness of ’70—which, as bad as it was, could have been much worse—was the relocation centers, which were originally located only in the west and midwest but by ’69 were in every municipality. “These camps became very important to our scientists and doctors,” my teacher had said. “Does anyone know the names of the early, original camps?”
People started shouting out answers: Heart Mountain. Rohwer. Minidoka. Jerome. Poston. Gila River.
“Yes, yes,” my teacher said after each name. “Yes, that’s right. And does anyone know who founded those camps?”
No one knew. And then Miss Bethesda looked at me. “It was Charlie’s grandfather,” she said. “Dr. Charles Griffith. He was one of the architects of the camps.”
Everyone turned to look at me, and I felt myself grow hot with embarrassment. I liked my teacher—she had always been kind to me. When the other children ran away from me on the playground, laughing as they did, she would always come over and ask if I might like to come back into the classroom and help her distribute the art supplies for the afternoon lesson. Now I looked up, and my teacher was looking back at me, the same as always, and yet something was wrong. I felt as if she were angry with me, but I hadn’t known why.
That night, at dinner, I asked Grandfather if he was the person who had invented the centers. He had looked at me then, and had waved his hand, and the servant who was pouring my milk had set down the pitcher and left the room. “Why do you ask that, little cat?” he asked, after the man shut the door behind him.
“We learned about it in civics class,” I said. “My teacher said you were one of the people who invented them.”
“Did she,” Grandfather said, and although his voice sounded the same as it always did, I could see that he was holding his left hand in a fist, so tightly that it trembled. Then he noticed me looking, and he opened his hand and laid his palm flat on the table. “What else did she say?”
I explained to Grandfather how Miss Bethesda had said that the centers had prevented more deaths, and he nodded, slowly. For a while he was silent, and I listened to the ticking of the clock, which sat on the mantel above the fireplace.
Finally, Grandfather spoke. “Years ago,” he said, “there were people who opposed the camps, who didn’t want them built, who thought I was a bad person because I supported them.” I must have looked surprised, because he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They didn’t understand that the camps were created to keep us—all of us—healthy and safe. Eventually, people came to see that they were necessary, and that we had to build them. Do you understand why?”