The Atlas полностью

That evening the wind was full of vowels, and it said: ai ee eh uh oh eh ee oh. He listened and listened again. Then he understood that the wind was saying: why we never know where we go. Everywhere nowhere up down around.

He set out for the Barren Lands, always following the coast of Hudson Bay. One of his more reliable and harmless pleasures was to return to his tent after a stroll sufficient to make the cold seem warm, look around one last time at the midnight sun, breathe another breath of that good subarctic air, undo his boots, crawl into the tent, pull the boots off, zip the doorway shut against mosquitoes and rain, and then drink to his heart's content of pure and chilly river water, the bottle having been filled that day by him or one of his Inuk friends from the place where some children swam and others sat with their parkas on. Then he walked to the place where there were no more Inuk friends, nobody nowhere forever, and his walking was completed.

He listened to voices. He loved them. They were always different, although they said the same things; in much the same way that the cries of dogs sometimes resemble those of children, sometimes those of wolves or pulled nails, sometimes those of soccer fans, and sometimes those of dogs.

Then the day came when he realized that he could truly understand some of the words the dogs shouted; and without effort he heard the meaning in the haunting cries of gulls. It was only because he spent so much time alone, eating little; it was nothing special.

He was cold. He shivered and twitched like grass. The skeletons which had been sleeping in the inch-high lichen hills grabbed with rib-claws, vertebral hooks, and tailbone rakes, wanting to pull themselves out of the cold wet place. His lichen-blots were all he owned now, but they were bright enough to keep him counting them in the wind, absorbed like a vampire in wasting all before his dawnless dawn. The grass-columns flashed like skirts.

I know I said I wouldn't write, his first love had written. I lied. The cancer is back. I'm scared to death. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain. I do not care about losing my breast but I do want to live. Do you believe in God?

Once she'd sent him a photograph of herself at the zoo; and when he found it years later in an envelope with a thirteen-cent butterfly stamp she scarcely seemed familiar. But he had always been bad with faces. A giraffe stretched its neck in the background. Her beauty was what they used to call "classical." It was a face that could easily have been haughty or cold but in the photo she had a sweet little smile and she looked so young, so young. She could have been his little sister; in a few more years she could be his daughter. He was ashamed that he had ever caused her inconvenience or pain. He could never be hers now. He had thought that the picture, at least, would always belong to him; but as he'd wandered through the atlas, the photograph and he had diverged. On the envelope she'd written: Inside are pictures! Lions and tigers, monkeys cats and giraffes! and Hey, did you hear Nixon resigned? and If I wrote you in French could you understand it?

Sure, he said. Try me.

He listened to the plants.

Willow Lady grew slowly out of his thoughts, hour by hour in that summer of perpetual chilly light. The wind was her breath and the wind's voice was her voice. The wind rarely spoke anymore. She had a face like a sly brown mask. She had Inuk eyes. She smiled richly, showing her teeth. Her lean skull was cradled in hair whose stubby woody strands meandered across the moss, holding her safely down; willow leaves sprouted from them in dark green clusters and sometimes there were fuzzy buds. She told him to walk to the waterfall. The wind said: go. But he didn't know where the waterfall was. He wanted to find it because he wanted to listen to it and breathe the aerated coolness when he hung his head over the clifFside, watching the white foam softer than moss become brown and then indigo as it rushed away, into the world. He asked Willow Lady how to get there but she wouldn't tell him. There were yellow flecks in the sky, the hue of that stone called tiger's eye.

Skeletons buzzed in the moss.

The tundra became an exploding puzzle. Leaves, flowers, stalks, buds, roots, mosquitoes and bones flew apart, leaving white snow between them.

Long green fibrils crawled across his soul's eye. He saw flowers and leaves glowing happily upon pages of snow.