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...
I owe you an apology in turn for saying hateful things when you couldn’t go to Vietnam. It was wrong, and I apologize, but there was something weird about the way we used to be together and maybe we needed to grow apart and become our own people with separate identities. I used to love talking to you about everything under the sun, and I do sometimes miss having a brother to look up to and tell things to. If you ever come home, maybe we can give it a try again. The second you meet Gracie, you’ll understand why I’m so crazy about her, and I want you to get to know Tanner as he really is. You never gave him a chance, but if you care about me you should care about the person in my life who’s best to me, best for me, best everything. I don’t mean to make rules, but if you want to be in my life again I guess there are some rules. Number one is respect my feelings about M & D. That one is nonnegotiable. But also, when you see the situation with Perry and what the two of them are like these days, you might understand better why I feel the way I do. I’m sorry they’re unhappy, but I can’t make it better, even if I wanted to, because I don’t matter to them enough. They made their choices, you made yours, I made mine. At least one of us is happy with her choices.
Love, Becky
The letter was like a match struck in the dark. In the light of it, he saw his old bedroom at the parsonage. It was there that Becky had come to him late at night, offered up stories, and, more than once, in her straightforwardness, fallen asleep on his bed. Why hadn’t he woken her up? Told her to sleep in her own room? It was because she’d meant too much to him. To know that she preferred his room, preferred him to anyone else in the family, was worth the discomfort of sleeping on the floor. And if she’d been embarrassed to wake up and see him on the rug, had apologized for appropriating his bed, or if it had happened only once, it wouldn’t have been weird. But when she’d done it again, and again—let him sleep on the floor without embarrassment or apology—the terms of their arrangement had been clear: he would do anything for her, and she would let him. To anyone else, it might have looked like she was being selfish. Only he understood the love in her consenting to be so loved.
Then he’d gone to college and met Sharon, who’d wanted nothing more than to be so loved, and in his wretched honesty he’d admitted that he didn’t love her to the degree he knew his heart was capable of. In the light of the match the letter had struck, he saw that his heart had still belonged to Becky; that this was the real reason he hadn’t stayed with Sharon. But while he’d been sleeping with Sharon the terms had changed, Becky no longer needed him, and in trying to hold on to her, trying to recall her to their arrangement, trying to interfere with her decisions, he’d lost her love entirely. She’d been so angry with him, her hatred so unbearable, that he’d boarded a bus for Mexico without a plan. In the light of the match, he saw that he’d tried to displace one pain with another, the pain of losing her with the pain of hard labor, and this was the terrible thing about her letter: nothing had changed.
Striding along the track to the hamlet, the incendiary letter in his pocket, he overtook Felipe Cuéllar, who was carrying a stout-handled hoe on his shoulder. Felipe was slight of build and a head shorter than Clem, but there was no physical task he couldn’t perform with less effort. Following him up the track, keeping clear of the hoe, Clem asked him when the potatoes would be harvested.
When they’re ready, Felipe said.
Yes, Clem said, but how soon?
Always in May. It’s very hard work.
Not harder than planting in the rain.
Yes, harder. You’ll see.
They walked in silence for a while. Clouds were building behind the mountain at the upper end of the valley, Amazonian moisture, but lately the rains hadn’t come down as far west as the hamlet. The track through the puna was drying out.
I have a question, Clem said. If I had to leave now—soon—could I come here again? I meant to stay through the harvest, but I think I need to see my family.
Felipe stopped on the path and swung around with the hoe. He was frowning.
Did you get bad news? Is someone sick?
Yes. Well—yes.
Then go right away, Felipe said. Nothing is more important than family.
His last ride, from Bloomington to Aurora, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, was a twice-divorced fertilizer salesman, named Morton, who drove a sleek Buick Riviera and wanted to talk about God. Morton had pulled over on a ramp outside the truck stop where Clem had casually lifted and eaten the leavings from a table in the restaurant, taken a shower, and caught a few hours of sleep behind the parking lot. The money his mother had sent had got him by plane to Panama City and by bus to Mexico, but from there he’d had to hitchhike, mostly with long-haul truckers. When Morton learned that he hadn’t had a proper meal in five days, he took an exit for a Stuckey’s and bought him a stack of pancakes with fried eggs and bacon. Morton had the sunken face, the stained skin, the reassembled-looking body, of a man with hard drinking in his past. It seemed to give him pleasure to watch Clem eat.
“You know why I stopped for you?” he said. “When I saw you with your thumb out—the reason I stopped was I thought you might be an angel.”
Clem had wondered about that. He was the antithesis of a hippie, but in his hooded Peruvian sweater, his beard and long hair, he looked like one. He’d been surprised when the Riviera pulled over.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Morton said, “but they exist. Angels. They look like ordinary people, but after they’re gone you realize they were angels of the Lord.”
Clem was still getting used to speaking English, the remarkable fact that he could do it. “I’m pretty sure I’m not an angel.”
“But that’s the way God works. That’s how He takes care of us—by having us care for each other. When you refuse a stranger in need, you might be refusing an angel. You know the day I got the message? It was the twenty-seventh of June, four years ago. I was a mess, my second wife had just left me, I’d lost my job at the high school, and my car broke down in a thunderstorm. Not far from here, actually. It was a county road, rain coming down in sheets, and the alternator shorted out. I was as low as I ever was in my life. I sat there in the car feeling sorry for myself, soaking wet, and right behind me, in the mirror, I see this figure walking towards me. You’ll think I’m making this up, but he’s a young man about your age, dressed in white. I roll down the window, and he asks me what the problem is. He’s as wet as I am, but he looks under the hood and tells me to try the ignition. And damned if the car doesn’t start right up. I let it run for a second and then I get out to thank him, maybe give him some money, and he’s gone. We’re in the middle of the cornfields, flat as can be, and, poof—he’s nowhere. Gone. And just like that, the rain stops, and you’ll think I’m making this up, but there’s writing all across the sky, and I can see that it’s numbers. Numbers horizon to horizon. I realize there’s a number for every day of my life—the angel is showing me my entire life, past and future. And then, for a split second, the numbers line up in perfect formation, and I see it. I see eternal life in Jesus Christ. I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, but I got down on my knees, right there on the road, and poured out my heart to Jesus. That was the day my new life started.”