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...
Neither of us worked. Unlike me, Edward had not finished his degree; he had, he eventually explained, dropped out at the beginning of his senior year and had spent the rest of the fall hitchhiking through the West. When he needed money, he returned to California and picked grapes or garlic or strawberries or walnuts, whatever was being harvested—he would never eat another strawberry in his life, he said. Now, back in Honolulu, he found short-term jobs. He helped a friend paint houses, or joined a moving crew for a few days. The little house he’d shared with his mother was a rental, the landlord an old Chinese man who’d fancied Mrs. Bishop, and he’d have to move out of it eventually, but he didn’t seem concerned about this, or his future. He seemed concerned about very little, and it reminded me of his childhood self-assurance, his complete lack of insecurity.
But it was toward the end of that year that I realized how truly different a person he had become. “We’re going to an event,” he said as he picked me up at the foot of the hill one evening, “to meet some friends of mine.” He didn’t offer any further information, and I, as usual, didn’t ask. But I could tell he was excited, even nervous—as he drove, he beat out a twitchy rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger.
We drove deep into Nu‘uanu, down a narrow, private road so shrouded by trees and so ill-lit that even with the headlights I had to hold up a flashlight to guide our way. We passed a series of gates, and at the fourth, Edward stopped and got out of the car; there was a key attached to a long piece of wire on the gatepost, and he unlocked the gate and we drove through, stopping again to close the gate behind us. Ahead of us was a long dirt driveway, and as we bumped along, I could see and smell that it was lined with clumps of white ginger, their flowers ghostly in the dusk.
At the end of the driveway was a large white wooden house, once grand, once well-maintained, that resembled my own, except parked in front of it were at least twenty cars, and even from outside, we could hear people talking, their voices echoey in the valley’s quiet.
“Come on,” Edward said.
There were perhaps fifty people inside, and after I had recovered from my initial shock, I was able to observe them more closely. Most of them were our age, and all of them were local, and some of them were clearly hippies, and many of them were standing around a very tall black man, whose back was toward me, so that all I could see was his Afro, which was large and thick and glistening. As he shifted, the top of his hair brushed against the bottom of the ceiling pendant light, making it sway, the light rocking about the room.
“Come on,” Edward said, again, and this time, I could hear the excitement in his voice.
The crowd began to stir as a single organism, and we found ourselves being moved from the entryway and into a large open space. Here, as in the first room, there was no furniture, and some of the floorboards had cracked and split from the moisture. In this room, above the chatter, I heard a roaring, like an airplane passing overhead, but then I looked out the window and realized the sound was coming from a waterfall at the bottom of the property.
After we had all settled ourselves on the floor, there was a nervous silence, one that seemed to lengthen and deepen. “The fuck’s happening?” someone, a guy, asked, and was shushed; someone else giggled. On and on the silence went, and finally, the shuffling and whispering quieted, and for at least a minute, we sat there, together, mute and immobile.
It was then that the tall black man picked himself up from where he’d been sitting in the middle of the crowd and loped to the front of the room. The combination of his height and our position on the ground, staring up at him, made him seem towering, an edifice rather than a man. He was not so black—I was darker than he was—nor was he exactly handsome: His skin was shiny, and he had a patchy beard and a smattering of pimples across his left cheek that made him look more childlike than I think he’d have preferred. But there was something indisputable about him; he had a wide, gap-toothed smile that he could make look either goofy or fierce, and long, liquid arms and legs that he bent and twisted into shapes as he moved, so that you were forced to not only listen to him but to watch him as well. But it was his voice that really captivated: what he said, but also how he said it, gentle and low and furred; his was a voice you’d like to hear telling you how much he loved you, and why, and how.
He began with a smile. “Brothers and sisters,” he said. “Aloha.” The crowd clapped then, and his smile widened, sleepy and seductive. “Aloha and mahalo for bringing me to this beautiful land of yours.
“It seems particularly right to me that we should be at this house tonight, for do you know what I was told the name of this house is? Yes, that’s right, it has a name, that’s something all fancy houses do, I guess, all over the world—it’s Hale Kealoha, the House of Aloha: the House of Love, the House of the Beloved.
“And that’s particularly interesting to me, because I too am named after a house: Bethesda. Who of you here remember your Bible, your New Testament? Ah, I see a hand in the back; there’s another. You, sister in the back, tell me what it means. That’s right, the Pools of Bethesda, Bethesda meaning the house of mercy, the pools being the place where Christ healed a crippled man. So here I am: the House of Mercy in the House of Love.
“I was asked to come, not just here, tonight, but to your islands, your home, by my good friend, the brother sitting all the way to the right, Brother Louis. Thank you, Brother Louis.
“I’m ashamed to say this now, but when I was invited to come here, I thought I knew everything about what this place was. I thought: pineapples. I thought: rainbows. I thought: hula girls, swaying their hips back and forth, all nice and sweet. I know, I know! But that’s what I thought. But within a few days, even before I left California, I realized I was wrong.
“I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t even want to come here, not at first. You know, what you have here, I thought, is not reality. It’s not part of the world. I live near Oakland—that is part of the world. You see what’s happening there, what we’re struggling against there, what we’re fighting against there: the oppression of the black man and woman, the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new. Because there is no fixing what America is—there is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored. No, brothers and sisters, that’s not how justice works. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide in what they used to call the Houston Negro Hospital, and she would tell me stories of the men and women who came in with heart attacks, about how they’d be gasping for breath, about how their nails would turn blue because they weren’t getting enough oxygen. My mother would be told by the senior nurses to massage her patients’ hands, to get the blood flowing through the extremities, and as she did, she’d watch their nails turn pink again, and feel their hands warm up with her touch. But one day she realized that this wasn’t solving anything—she was making their hands prettier, maybe even work better, but their hearts were still sick. Nothing had really changed after all.
“And in the same way, nothing has really changed here. America is a country with sin at its heart. You know what I’m talking about. One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land. We replaced you, and yet we never wanted to replace you—we wanted to be left where we were. None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought: Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples. No way, no how. That is not how normal people, decent people, think—that is how the devil thinks. But that sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we are all infected by it.