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...
Last evening, though, there was no one, just the Square with its vendors and people shopping its stalls. This meant that the floods had given the state a reason to conduct a roundup of the protestors, and for a moment, I dawdled in the street despite the heat, watching regular people doing regular things, before going into the house and up to the apartment.
That night, I dreamed of when I was a teenager at my grandparents’ farm in Lā‘ie. It was the year of the first tsunami, and although we had been (just) far enough inland to not be directly hit, they had always said that they wish we had been, for then we could have collected the insurance money and begun anew, or not at all. As it was, the farm was too intact to be forsaken, but also too damaged ever to be productive again. The hill that had provided shade for my grandmother’s herb garden had been destroyed, and the irrigation channels were filled with seawater—you would pump it away and then it would return, for months. Salt had affixed itself to every surface: The trees, the animals, the vegetables, the sides of the house were all streaky with white. The salt made the air sticky, and when the trees fruited that spring, the mangoes, the lychees, the papayas all tasted of salt.
They had never been happy people, my grandparents: They had bought the farm in a rare romantic moment, but romance is ephemeral. Yet they kept working at it long past the point when it ceased to be enjoyable, partly because they were too proud to admit they’d failed, and partly because they had limited imaginations, and couldn’t think of what else they might want to do. They had wanted to live as their own grandparents had dreamed of living, before Restoration, and yet doing anything because your ancestors wanted to do it—fulfilling someone else’s ambition—is a poor motivation. They had berated my mother for not being Hawaiian enough, and then she left, and they had had to raise me. They had berated me for not being Hawaiian enough, too, while at the same time assuring me I never would be, and yet when I left as well—for why would I stay someplace I had been told I would never belong?—they resented that just as much.
But the dream was not so much about them as it was a story my grandmother had told me when I was a child, about a hungry lizard. All day, the lizard would stalk across the land, grazing. He ate fruit and grass, insects and fish. When the moon rose, the lizard would go to sleep and dream of eating. Then the moon would set and the lizard would wake and begin eating again. The lizard’s curse was that he would never be full, although the lizard didn’t know this was a curse: He wasn’t that intelligent.
One day, after many thousands of years had passed, the lizard woke, as usual, and began looking for food, as usual. But something was wrong. Then the lizard realized: There was nothing left for him to eat. There were no more plants, no more birds, no more grasses or flowers or flies. He had eaten everything; he had eaten the stones, the mountains, the sand, and the soil. (Here my grandmother would sing a lyric from an old Hawaiian protest song: Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku / I ka ʻai kamahaʻo o ka ‘āina.) All that was left was a thin layer of ash, and beneath that ash—the lizard knew—was the core of the earth, which was fire, and although the lizard could eat many things, he could not eat that.
So the lizard did the only thing he could. He lay in the sun and waited, dozing and saving his strength. And that night, as the moon was rising, he drew himself up on his tail and swallowed the moon.
For a moment, he felt wonderful. He’d had no water all day, and the moon was so cool and smooth in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed an enormous egg. But as he was relishing the feeling, something changed: The moon was rising still, trying to escape him so it could continue its path in the sky.
This must not happen, the lizard thought, and he quickly dug a hole, narrow but deep, or as deep as he could before he reached the fire at the earth’s center, and stuck his entire snout inside of it. This will keep the moon from going anywhere, he thought.
But he was wrong. For just as it was the lizard’s nature to eat, it was the moon’s nature to rise, and no matter how tightly the lizard clamped its mouth, the moon rose still. But so tight was the hole in the earth where the lizard had stuck its snout that the moon was unable to exit his mouth.
And so the lizard exploded, and the moon burst forth from the earth and continued its path.
For many thousands of years after that, nothing happened. Well, I say nothing happened, but in those years, everything that the lizard had eaten returned. Back came the stones and the soil. Back came the grasses and the flowers and the plants and the trees; back came the birds and the insects and the fish and the lakes. Overseeing it all was the moon, which rose and sank each night.
That was the end of the story. I had always assumed it was a Hawaiian folktale, but it wasn’t, and when I asked her who had told her that fable, she would say, “My grandmother.” When I was in college, and taking an ethnography class, I asked her to write it down for me. She scoffed. “Why?” she asked. “You already know it.” Yes, I told her, but it was important for me to hear it as she would tell it, not as I remembered it. But she never did, and I was too proud to ask her again, and then the class ended.
Then, several years later—we were barely communicating by then, pulled apart by mutual lack of interest and disappointment—she sent me an email, and in the email was the story. This was during my Wanderjahr, and I remember getting it while I was at a café in Kamakura with friends, although it wasn’t until the next week, when I was on Jeju, that I read it. There it was, the familiar old inexplicable story, just as I’d remembered it. The lizard died, as he always did; the earth restored itself, as it always did; the moon glowed in the sky, as it always would. But this time, there was a difference: After everything had grown back, my grandmother wrote, the lizard returned, although this time he was not a lizard, but he mea helekū—a thing that goes upright. And this creature behaved in exactly the same way as his long-deceased ancestor had: He ate and ate and ate, until one day he looked about him and realized there was nothing left, and he too was forced to swallow the moon.
You know of course what I’m thinking. For a long time, I assumed that it would be a virus that would destroy us all in the end, that humans would be felled by something both greater and much smaller than ourselves. Now I realize that that is not the case. We are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.
Love, Charles
Dear P, April 2, 2085
Thanks for your note, and for the information. Let’s hope it’s true. I have everything ready just in case. Thinking about it makes me squirrelly, and so I won’t discuss it here. I know you said not to say thank you, but I’m saying it just the same. But I really do need it to happen, more than before, which I’ll explain.
Charlie’s been fine, or at least as fine as can be expected. I explained the Enemies Act to her, and while I know she understands it, I don’t know that she fully comprehends the effect it will have on her life. She just knows that it’s the reason she’s been expelled from college, three months before she was to have graduated, and why we had to visit the zone registrar to have her identity document stamped. But she doesn’t seem particularly troubled or shaken or depressed, for which I’m relieved. “I’m sorry, little cat, I’m sorry,” I kept telling her, and she shook her head. “It isn’t your fault, Grandfather,” she said, and I wanted to cry. She’s being punished for parents she never knew—isn’t that punishment enough? How much more must she endure? It’s also ludicrous—this act won’t stop the insurgents. Nothing will. In the meantime, there are Charlie and her new tribe of the extralegaclass="underline" the children and brothers and sisters of enemies of the state, most of them long since dead or disappeared. In the last Committee meeting, we were told that if the insurgents can’t be quelled, or at least controlled, then “more severe restrictions” will have to be implemented. No one clarified what that meant.