Caribou Island
- Автор: Vann David
- Год: 2011
- Язык: испанский
- Год: Harper
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Caribou Island». Краткое содержание книги:
But this island is not right for Irene. They are building without plans or advice, and when winter comes early, the overwhelming isolation of the prehistoric wilderness threatens their bond to the core. Caught in the emotional maelstrom is their adult daughter, Rhoda, who is wrestling with the hopes and disappointments of her own life. Devoted to her parents, she watches helplessly as they drift further apart.
Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest, Caribou Island captures the drama and pathos of a husband and wife whose bitter love, failed dreams, and tragic past push them to the edge of destruction. A portrait of desolation, violence, and the darkness of the soul, it is an explosive and unforgettable novel from a writer of limitless possibility.
Irene could imagine herself continuing on over the thin crust, holding the bow in her left hand, letting the other hand warm in her pocket. Continuing over light dunes of snow, pausing in an area of large flakes. The size of fingernails, individual snowflakes, their branches visible, lying at angles, razor-thin. They looked ornamental, contrived, too large and individual to be real. She squatted down for a closer look, touched a flake, then wiped her hand across the surface revealing the black of the lake, the color of ice over the depths. A vacuum of light. And no way to peer into it, the surface clear but so dark as to be essentially opaque.
The cold would press in. Not dressed for this, not prepared. Her legs and back cold. She’d be shivering soon. The sun so bright and without any warmth.
Gary, she said. And she stopped. This big lake, so flat, only the small drifts of snow. She looked at the far shorelines, turned a slow circle, tried to see it all at once, the immensity of it.
And then she would walk toward the nearest shoreline, wanting the cover of trees. The distances deceiving, elongating. At the edge of the lake, ruptures and monuments of ice, their peaks covered in snow, mountains of another scale. She stepped over a ridge, a giantess, slick ice beneath her boots and then rock, large pebbles, the beach. Into the trees quickly, home of winter birds: spruce grouse and willow ptarmigan, white-tailed ptarmigan. She’d seen small flocks of redpoll feed in temperatures colder than this.
No trail here. She stepped over deadfall, pushed through bare patches of alder, grown thick, food for ptarmigan, into the taller white trunks of birch, the evergreen Sitka spruce, tall and thin with branches bent at odd angles.
Irene looked for signs of life, saw and heard nothing. Her footsteps cracking. The forest nonconcealing, open to the sky, too bare, too stunted to cover. Wallow and swale, the flats and hollows, pushing again through denser growth right into a devil’s club, spiny knob rising out of the forest as high as her shoulder. She cried out, her left hand impaled with spines. Twisted cane with its knobby head, thick with spines. And now she saw there were many more here. A thicket, so she had to backtrack, go around the wallow, find higher ground again.
She would find a stand of white birch, easier going, more space between trunks, make good progress, the snow not too deep. A rise, finally, the flank of the mountain, dragging the bow behind her. The cold air heavy in her lungs. As she came over a small hill, she could see the mountain above, white above the treeline, rumpled and old. She’d climb until she reached the top. Many miles, and she’d never done this in winter, but it didn’t seem difficult now. It seemed almost as if she could be carried upward, as if she could float above the ground. Only the bow was holding her back, weighing her down, so she let it drop from her hand, didn’t watch it fall, didn’t look back, climbed faster, a new urgency, pulling at small branches with her hands.
Irene felt dizzy, lightheaded, the climbing a kind of trance, watching the snow in front of her, always perfect, small hollows around every trunk, everything contoured, the world traced and made softer.
Nothing more after that. Irene lost the vision. Could no longer see herself, could no longer see the winter. She was back in the tent, alone, thinking the world wasn’t possible as it was. Too flat, too empty.
Irene curled on her side in her sleeping bag, waited for sleep, which never came. The night an expanse. Hours of focusing on her breath, counting her exhales, trying to slip away. Then turning onto her stomach, her knees sore from the sideways positions.
Early morning, the wind coming up. Still dark out. She lay on her back, no longer trying for sleep. Just let the pain pulse through her head, drifted around in it, felt tears leaking from her eyes but couldn’t find any emotion attached. A general sense of grief, or despair, something empty, but not what you’d call a feeling. Too tired for that. Waiting for light, for the day to start so at least she could get up and there would be activity. Something to pass the time.
She closed her eyes again, and when she opened her eyes sleepless hours later, the blue nylon of the tent was just visible, and so this was the beginning of the day. Another half hour of waiting and it was light enough to rise and dress.
Cold and overcast as Irene emerged from the tent. She walked over to the cabin, looked out the open space for the front window, shivering in the wind. She needed to get working to warm up.
So she stepped over to Gary’s tent. Get up, she called out. Gary. It’s time to work. I’m cold. I need to start working.
Okay, he answered finally. She envied him his sleep. Waking into a new day separated from the last. For Irene, her entire life was becoming one long day. She wondered how long she could survive. At some point, if you never sleep, do you die? Or does just lying there for hours, resting with your eyes closed, count somehow as partial sleep, something you can do for years on end?
Gary came out of the tent with his boots unlaced, jacket unzipped, head bare. Mostly gray now. Stumbled off a few feet and took a piss, faced away from her. Which reminded her of the outhouse. They still had an outhouse to build. No more squatting behind bushes in the snow.
Gary shook and zipped, stepped away, laced his boots, grabbed his hat from the tent. Cold, he said. Wind coming up.
Yeah, she said. I get to saw the ends of the joists. I need to get moving to warm up.
Okay, he said. What about breakfast?
We can have that later.
Okay.
They walked to the pile of two-by-eights and brought one into the cabin through the back door, stood on stepstools. Gary along the high back wall, holding the joist over his head, marked a pencil line for the cut.
Then Irene worked at the saw, feeling her upper body warm. Under different circumstances, she might enjoy building a cabin. A good distraction, a sense of accomplishment. The angled piece came off and they walked back to test the fit.
Pretty good, Gary said finally. Good enough. We can cut the others at the same angle.
Irene tried to just work and not think about anything else. The ripping of the saw through wood, the way the wood grabbed at it, clenched it, stops and starts, and she was thinking of winter again, wondering at what she had seen. Did it mean anything? Saying his name, standing there on the ice looking all around. Or brushing away the snow, seeing the black of the ice, or running into devil’s club, all the spines. It hadn’t been a dream. It was a waking vision, and yet she’d felt the sting of the spines, seen the twisted club heads all around her. Carrying her bow. And had she been out hunting? How can we not know our own visions, our own daydreams?
Gary saying something. Irene tried to come back, focus. What? she asked.
I said we won’t be able to fit both ends. Or maybe we can. Let me think.
Irene stopped sawing. Waited. Looked down at sawdust in the snow. Her toes cold, her knees cold against the ground. She got up in a squat, but that felt unstable for sawing, so she kneeled again.
I’m not thinking well, he said. I need some breakfast. We should have breakfast before we start.
Irene at fault for his inability to think. Nothing new there. She went to the Coleman stove and put the teakettle on a burner. Hot water for oatmeal and chocolate or tea. Neither of them drank coffee. In many ways, their strange lifestyle had been good. No TV. No Internet. No phone. Just the lake, the woods, their home, their kids, going into town to work and buy supplies. It hadn’t been a bad life, on the surface. Something elemental about it. Something that could have been true if it hadn’t all been just a distraction for Gary, a kind of lie. If he had been true, their lives could have been true.