Love, Dad

Автор: Хантер Эван
Год: 1981
Язык: английский
Год: Crown
ISBN: 978-0-517-54411-2
Жанр: Роман, новелла

Электронная книга - «Love, Dad». Краткое содержание книги:

The Crofts live with their blond, teenage daughter, Lissie, in a converted sawmill in Rutledge, Connecticut, an exclusive community of achievers. Lissie’s mother, Connie, is a Vassar graduate; her father, Jamie, a successful photographer. But these were the sixties — the time of Nixon and moon walks, prosperity and war, Woodstock and Chappaquiddick — and the Crofts are caught in a time slot that not only caused alienation but in fact encouraged it. Lissie, in her rush to independence and self-identity, along with others of her generation, goes her own way. She leaves school, skips to London and begins a journey across Europe to India. Breaking all the rules, flouting her parents’ values, she causes in Jamie a deep concern that frequently turns to impotent rage. When Lissie returns, she is surprised and angry to find that things are not the same. While she was out living her own life, her dad was falling in love with the woman he would eventually marry. Hurt and confused over her parents’ divorce, Lissie is not ready to accept for them what she sees as clear-cut rights for herself. And try as he will, her father cannot comprehend the new Lissie. More than a novel about the dissolution of a family in a turbulent decade, Love, Dad is an incredibly perceptive story of father and daughter and their special love — a love that endures even though understanding has been swept away in the whirlwind of change.

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He is using the border incident as a means of clarifying for Jean-François the indignities young people everywhere are forced to suffer at the hands of ignorant, uncaring adults who consider today’s youth a menace to the smug, self-satisfied, fat existences they enjoy at the expense of the poor, downtrodden masses who bear the brunt of taxation without true representation. On and on, he goes. The jails are full of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and draft dodgers, he says, all of them hippies in their own right, all of them fighting in their own way for a dignity denied them by the fucking Establishment, all of them chasing the fake American promise of freedom and equality for all regardless of race, creed, color, sex—

She doubts that Jean-François understands a fifth of what Paul is saying. As he keeps up his rambling monologue, she remembers the scorn with which the boy in the Princeton sweatshirt denounced America on that Cape Cod beach last year; remembers Judd at Woodstock, and the way he called grownups “the enemy”; remembers the atrocity stories the two Carnegie Tech dropouts told in San Francisco, and Barbara Duggan’s later speculation about the envy young people aroused by their mere existence. Half-listening to Paul, she wonders for the first time in months whether young people are as full of shit as adults are.

August 10, 1970

Dear Mom and Dad,

We arrived here in Teheran yesterday afternoon about three, and we’ll be leaving here in just a little while, as soon as we’ve had some breakfast. I thought I’d write this and mail it before we start off again. We had a terrible experience at the border coming in, and when we start hitching again today we don’t plan to stop till we reach Delhi.

It’s not as noisy here as it was in Istanbul, but the city seems more confusing somehow, I don’t know why, with all these automobiles and taxi cabs (they’re orange here, not yellow like New York or black like London) and buses they must have bought in London, actually, because they’re the same red double-decker ones I saw when I was there, and squares and streets all intersecting and crazy. It all looks very modern here, and not at all Asian, which is surprising after what you see on the road. I mean, that’s where the real Asia is, not in cities like Teheran with its big apartment houses and office buildings and movie theaters and fancy shops and supermarkets and signs like on Broadway and music blaring out of speakers everywhere, you’d think you were in an American city, not New York or San Francisco, but someplace like, I don’t know, some shitty little city someplace in America.

The only thing that seems remotely Asian about this place is these drains they have running in the gutters that the citizens use for washing food in, or throwing garbage in, or peeing in, or spitting in, and then they wash their hands and faces in this mucky water, can you believe it? Well, maybe that isn’t Asian, but it’s certainly filthy, and it sums up the way I feel about Iran in general, I guess. Here in Teheran, the Shah’s done a lot of modernization, but most of the cities and towns we passed on the way here looked uniformly drab and dull — gray will do it every time, Mom, and gray seems to be the favorite color for the buildings here. The favorite food is (surprise!) lamb. Also rice. And cheese. And this flat bread they bake in charcoal pits.

The men are all wearing white shirts and baggy black pants, with here and there one or two who are dressed like sheiks, with the turbans and robes, you know, but for the most part the clothing, in the cities anyway, is westernized. Except for the women. A lot of them are still wearing the chador, which is this long piece of cloth, usually black but sometimes brightly colored, that they wrap around their body and drape across the shoulders and over the head. It used to be against the law here to run around without a veil over your face, but the Shah changed all that. Paul says the Shah’s government is as corrupt as our own back home. Paul’s beard looks marvelous now, and by the time we get to Delhi I’m sure he’ll be mistaken for a guru or something. No address yet, because we’re still on the move. But I’ll keep in touch. Please know that I love you and respect you both very much.

All my love,

Lissie

P.S. Ooodles and ooodles of kisses to both of you.

P.S.S. Scads and scads of hugs, too. I love you both. I love you.

Hugs and kisses. Love. Bye for now.

The road outside Teheran angles sharply northward at Asalak where they catch a ride in another truck, this one carrying fertilizer from a plant in Germany. The driver speaks only German. Hunched over the wheel, he carefully watches the asphalt ribbon that winds through the pass to Babol and the sea. They drive eastward along the Caspian for the better part of the day, coming at last to the town of Gorgãn, where the driver indicates to them in sign language that he will be spending the night here. It is only late afternoon, but a look at their map tells them that the nearest town of any size is Meshed, which they estimate to be some five hundred kilometers away — at least a ten-hour journey over twisting mountain roads. They eat mutton and boiled rice in a roadside teahouse, and then rent a small room there for the night. The room costs them twenty cents, and is furnished with a straw mat and a small silk prayer rug that would cost $600 back in the States. As Paul rolls over toward her, Lissie — for the first time in her life — claims she has a headache.

In the morning, and quite by chance since they had made no previous arrangement with him, they are picked up by the same German driver who seems happy to see them again, and who chatters on in German as though they understand him completely. They are in the mountains now, and traveling eastward along the Russian border, never more than seventy kilometers from it, and at one point — near Shirvan — less than fifty, the equivalent of thirty miles.

The road is tortuous and difficult. The German driver stops talking and concentrates on steering. They do not reach the bustling city of Meshed until long after dark. The German driver says his farewells, and they begin hitching again at once, catching first a small Iranian van carrying a mysterious cargo that rattles and clanks in the back, and then a larger truck en route from Istanbul and driven by a man who speaks only Greek. At midnight, they pass through the Iranian town of Taybad, cross the border without incident, and come into Islam Qala on the Afghan side. It is 12:20 on the morning of August 12. They are at this moment eighteen hours away from their rendezvous with the dogs of Shahnur.

Where earlier the truck route ran through the Elburz Mountains hugging the Caspian Sea and the Russian border, here in Afghanistan it avoids the loftier impassable peaks of the Hindu Kush range, and swings far to the south to enter the pass at Herat. Their Greek driver is following the route traveled by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.; he will emerge from the pass at Qala Adras, and then continue on south in a wide loop that will take them to Kandahar and then through Jaldak and Shahnur (where they will meet the wild dogs) and finally through Ghazni and Kabul and eastward through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan.

The roads are narrow; the posted speed limit is fifty kilometers, and everywhere the headlights pick out the small triangular, red-bordered signs that stand in warning on the rock-strewn edge of the road: S-curve ahead. And ahead. And ahead. And ahead. The mountain range lies upon the land like a giant twisted paw, its curved talons digging into the sandy wastes to the southwest. Lulled by the motion of the truck, Lissie dozes most of the night and awakens sometime after dawn to discover a sandswept vastness on her right, just outside the open window.

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