Andrew D. MillerTransition

Costa Prize winner and Booker finalist Andrew Miller has written an intriguing novel about loneliness and the mystery of the human soul.

Maud is mysterious and aloof, so much so that everyone wants to help her and save her lost soul. Tim, a philologist and musician, also falls for a mysterious girl, a future scientist whose dream is to explore the sea and its inhabitants. Tim and Maud share a passion for the water: they get married, buy a small used yacht, go out to sea, and have a baby.

But for Maud all this - marriage, child, slow life - is like a cover. She does not understand the conditions of the world around her, and the world does not understand her desire to live outside the usual conventions. When the time comes to understand the boundaries of her inner world, Maud will have to decide to transition. But is it possible to overcome loneliness with even more loneliness?

The work belongs to the genre of Contemporary Foreign Literature. It was published in 2015 by Eksmo Publishing House. The book is part of the "Intellectual Bestseller" series. On our website you can download the book "Transition" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper form.

In memory of my mother and stepfather.

Those we love always travel with us.

Copyright © Andrew Miller 2015

© Gryzunova A., translation into Russian, 2017

© Edition in Russian, design. LLC Publishing House E, 2017

One

One possible way is to take it seriously

Only for sex, but the sands hiss as they approach

To the big collapse in what happened.

1

Spring is early, the millennium is new, the girl is backing along the yacht deck. He walks slowly, bending almost double, a ladle in his left hand, a pan of hot resin in his right. From the ladle, she pours resin in a thin stream into the seams, where yesterday she spent the entire day hammering in tow with a chisel and mallet.

At first it’s just work.

The yacht rests on wooden keel blocks, the deck twenty feet above the ground - above a hard plane of broken brick and concrete, from where the spring warmth has lured into the light unexpected blobs of pale flowers that have taken root in the shallow veins of the soil. Around the shipyard, where serious ships were once built - ferries, coal barges, trawlers, and during the war, a wooden minesweeper - but now pleasure boats are serviced and patched: some on keel blocks, others on pontoons. Drills hum, radios hum, and occasionally a hammer knocks.

There is only one girl on deck. Before repairs, the mast was removed, and all the rigging, along with the racks and rails, was put away for storage. Having caulked one seam, the girl immediately starts working on another. The resin in the pan is cooling. As it cools, it thickens. Soon we need to take a break, light the gas burner in the galley, and heat the resin again - but it’s not time yet.

Below, in the shadow of the steel hull, a gloved young man, humming to himself, dips bolts in white lead. He is tall, blue-eyed, aristocratic. The blond hair, which seemed thick from afar, is already thinning. His name is Henley, but everyone calls him Tim - he likes it that way. It is unclear whether he will sleep with the girl on deck.

Taking another bolt, he interrupts his work and calls out:

- Maud! Maud! Oh where are you, Maud? – and, having received no answer, returns to work with a smile. He knows the girl casually, but knows that teasing her won’t work – she doesn’t even understand what that means. It's funny, it's captivating, a harmless gap, a quirk of character, one of those that pleases him, like the directness of her straightforward brown gaze, and curls in which there are only bursts and undercurls, because she cuts her hair short, like a boy, and tattooed letters on the hand (on the underside of the left forearm) - you are surprised when you see it for the first time; I wonder what other surprises she will present. And a hint of a Wiltshire accent, and how she sucks on the cut, but doesn’t mention it in a word, and how her breasts are no bigger than peaches and hard, probably like peaches. Yesterday she pulled off her sweater, and Tim saw for the first time the two-inch strip of bare stomach above the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly a seriousness came over Tim.

They are both members of the university yacht club. Two more came here with them, but have already returned to Bristol - maybe, Tim thinks, so as not to disturb, leave them alone. I wonder if Maud thinks so too? That the mise-en-scene has already been built?

He smells resin. And the scent of sweet river rot, and old piles, silt, amphibious vegetation. Here the valley is flooded, broken under the pressure of the sea, twice a day salt water rolls back and forth along the wooded shores - at high tide it licks tree roots, at low tide it exposes sparkling streams of thigh-deep mud. In some places, higher up the river, old boats were scattered - let them find their way back to nowhere: blackened frames, blackened freeboards, some so ancient and rotten, as if they carried the Vikings, Argonauts, the first men and women on Earth across the seas. Here you can find herring gulls, egrets, cormorants, there is a local seal - for no apparent reason it floats up overboard, and its eyes are like those of a Labrador. The sea is not visible, but it is close. Two bends of the river bank, then a harbor, a town, castles on the rocks. And the open sea.

In front of the boathouse, a man in a red overall and welding goggles stands in a boxing stance under a fountain of blue sparks. Near the administration building, a man in a suit is leaning against an iron pole, smoking. Tim stretches - ahh, amazing - turns back to his bolts, to the yacht, and then something flashes in the air - a wave of a feathery shadow, as if a thorn had slashed his eyes. There was probably a sound too - there are no silent blows - but if so, the sound was lost in the noise of the blood and left no trace.

Tim looks at the ladle that fell near a bush of white flowers - resin is flowing from the ladle. Maud lies a little further away on her back - arms up, head to one side, eyes closed. It’s incredible how difficult it is to look at her - at this girl who just died on a broken brick; one shoe is on the foot, the other has fallen off. Tim is terribly afraid of her. He clasps his head with gloved hands. He's about to throw up. He calls out to Maude in a whisper. And he whispers something else, for example, “your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother”...

And then she opens her eyes and sits up. He looks - if he looks - straight ahead, at the old boathouse. Rising. It seems that it is not difficult for her, it is not painful, although it seems as if she is reassembling herself from bricks and flowers, rising from her own ashes. She walks - bare foot, shoed foot, bare, shoed - and takes twelve or fifteen steps, and then suddenly falls - this time on her face.

The welder observes all this through the blackness of his glasses. He turns the lever on the gas cylinder, lifts his glasses onto his forehead and takes off. The other person, the one who smoked in front of the administration, also runs, but not so deftly, as if he doesn’t really like to run or doesn’t want to come running first. The welder falls to his knees at Maude's head. Brings lips closer to the ground. Maude whispers something and puts two fingers on her throat. A man in a suit squats on the other side, like an Arab in the desert; the trouser legs are tight around the thighs. Somewhere a bell begins to ring, shrill and incessant. Others come running - workers in red overalls, a woman from the marina administration, some man in ski pants - probably just got off the boat onto the pontoon.

- Don't crowd! - says the welder. Someone, out of breath, passes a green box forward. The woman from the administration repeats three or four times that she called the rescuers. She doesn't say "ambulance", but "rescuers".

Then they all notice Tim - he’s standing about fifteen feet away, as if pinned to the air. They notice, frown, and turn their gaze back to Maude.

2

No racks, no rails. Probably the tarry fumes made me dizzy. From a distance you can hear the ambulance approaching. She, among other things, needs to cross the river. The paramedics put a neck brace on Maude and then turn her over like a jewel. archaeological find, a fossil swamp body, an ashen-fragile contemporary of Christ. Having stabilized the victim, one paramedic sat Tim on the back step of the ambulance and explained that Tim was in shock, but there was no need to worry - given the circumstances, his girlfriend’s condition was satisfactory. She will be taken from the valley to the top of the hill, and a helicopter will pick her up from there. A helicopter will take her to Plymouth Hospital. In about half an hour she will already be there.

Tim comes to his senses - he stops trembling, something recognizable is brewing in his head; It turns out that he is sitting in the marina administration, wrapped in a Scottish blanket. Flowers in pots, filing cabinets, river maps. A faded poster of a yacht - an old racing yacht, with excess sail, a dozen sailors dangling their legs on the windward side. The woman who called the ambulance is talking in a low voice with a man in a suit. He brings Tim a mug of tea. The tea is scalding hot and unbearably sweet. Tim takes a sip, then stands and folds the blanket. He does not immediately brush aside the suspicion that he himself was hurt, that he has an injury, he needs to find it and examine it. He thanks the man and woman (how polite - why, these private schools!), goes to the parking lot of his old “Lancia” and drives to Plymouth.

Arrives in deep twilight. Perhaps in my entire life I have never been to an establishment more terrible than this hospital. You won't find a traumatology department. For a while, Tim gets stuck in the doorway of the brightly lit corridor of the urogenital department, but then the attendant asks if everything is okay with Tim, and shows him where to go - along the path between the bushes to the parking lot, where ambulances are huddled near the wide, rubber-lined doors. .

The woman behind the glass register asks who he is to Maud, and after a pause Tim answers that he is a friend. The woman does not want to talk about Maud’s diagnosis or her condition. Maybe she doesn't know. Tim sits in the reception area on a shabby red banquette. There is an elderly couple nearby. They look like they just escaped from a bombing; at least that's how Tim imagines such people. Half an hour passes. He goes to the register again. The woman was replaced by another woman. This one is friendlier.

“Just a minute,” she says. He calls the nurse's station - it's somewhere far behind the swing doors. “Stamp,” she says. – Delivered by helicopter in the afternoon. - Listens, nods. He says: - Yes. I see... Yes... Yes... Friend... yes... I understand... Thank you. - He hangs up. Smiles at Tim.

Maude has been in the hospital for three days. The first night is in intensive care, then she is transferred to a department in the old hospital building. From the window you cannot see the sea, but you can see the light of the sea. There are ten other women in the ward, one behind a screen - with a childish voice and such obesity that she does not show herself to anyone.

Maude's parents arrive from Swindon following a call from a doctor. Both are school teachers and busy people. They bring a bag of chocolate jelly beans and magazines from which some pictures have already been carefully cut out (and, probably, sealed in plastic on a laminator in the kitchen) - images of objects, illustrations of human conditions: usually school teachers teach such things. Her mother calls her Modi, her father wipes his glasses. In the middle of the conversation, Maud falls asleep. Her parents look at her - a waxen face on the pillow, a bandage cap on her head. They look around - looking for some calm doctor, let him be responsible for everything.

Maud leaves the hospital on crutches, with her leg in a cast. Tim is taking her back to Bristol. He spent three nights in a hotel near the docks, where Chinese sailors in their underpants roamed the hot corridors - striding from room to room, all the doors wide open, men lying on the beds, smoking and watching TV.

Tim puts his crutches in the trunk. Maude is very quiet. He asks if he should turn on the radio and she says whatever. He wonders if she is in pain. He asks if she remembers anything. She apologizes, and when she asks why, she says she doesn’t know. But I'm sorry anyway. It's a shame it happened this way.

She has an apartment on Woodland Road, not far from the biology department where she is studying for her master's degree. She has lived there for at least six months, but to Tim, when he follows her up the stairs, the apartment seems uninhabited. Tim has sisters, twins, and some ideas about how girls live - scented candles over the fireplace, hangers with dresses on the doors, bedspreads, blankets, photographs in heart frames. Maud has nothing like that. Two pairs of sneakers and a pair of hiking boots lined up in the cramped hallway. The furniture in the living room is three shades of brown. There is not a single picture on the walls. Street light streams through the large window onto the carpet—the kind of carpet that will withstand any abuse. Everything is very neat. The only thing that smells is the inside of the building.

Maud sits down in a chair and places her crutches on the floor. Tim makes her tea, although there is no milk in the refrigerator. She is pale. Exhausted. He says that it’s probably better for him to spend the night here on the sofa, unless, of course, she has no one else to call.

“You're not supposed to be alone,” he says. – Especially on the first day. The memo says so.

“I’m fine,” she says, and he:

– Well, actually, probably not. Not yet.

It's like a ball in the kitchen cabinets. He runs to the store. In the supermarket, he wonders if he is taking advantage of her weakness - maybe he is not a helpful friend, but, on the contrary, a manipulator and an insidious bastard. This thought does not take root. Tim fills his basket with groceries, pays, walks back, and the city wind hits him in the face.

He is preparing a cheese soufflé. He cooks well, the soufflé is light and appetizing. Maud thanks and eats three forks. He falls asleep sitting in a chair. A little boring, a little vague. When Maude wakes up, they watch TV for an hour, then she goes into the bedroom. Tim washes the dishes, lies awake on the sofa, covered with his coat. It would be nice to find her secret diary, to read her secret thoughts. Her sexual fantasies, her fear of loneliness, her plans. Does she have a diary? His sisters keep diaries, write volumes, mostly in notebooks with locks, but Maud, undoubtedly, does not keep a diary, and if she did, she would not write about sexual fantasies, about the fear of loneliness. The blurry moon is visible through the mesh on the window, and when Tim closes his eyes, Chinese people float before his eyes like cigarette smoke.

He wakes up to Maud vomiting. She made it to the bathroom; the door is open, the light is on - cold light. Tim sees Maud from behind - in a nightgown, bending over a pink sink. There’s really nothing for her to throw up. He hovers in the doorway in case he has to catch her, but she clings to the taps and holds on.

It's a five-minute drive to the Royal Hospital - especially in the middle of the night. Maude is immediately put down and taken away in a wheelchair. Tim doesn't have time to say goodbye or wish him luck.

He arrives the next morning and is told that she is in Elizabeth Fry's room, fifth floor, windows on the facade. Tim climbs the stairs, the wide green steps, there is a window on each landing, Tim ascends, and the city opens up before him, opens up to multiple cities, dozens of cities, it seems, and each one wraps itself around the backbone of the one from which it grew. At first you can't find Maud. Patients in beds, in pajamas - they all look the same, strange. Tim wanders along the footboards and finally finds her in a room with five other patients; Maud's name and date of admission appear on a white board above her head.

Someone had already come to her - a woman, long gray hair loose, large feet, leopard-print shoes with sharp low heels. She gently holds Maude's hand and doesn't let go, turning to Tim.

“She’s sleeping,” says the woman. - Since I arrived.

- But is she okay?

- As far as I understand.

“She probably needs it.”

“Yes,” the woman answers, “of course it’s customary to say.” “Her accent is northern—midlands, north midlands, somewhere in there.” Tim doesn't know much about the midlands.

“I’m Tim,” he introduces himself. – Tim Rathbone.

“Susan Kimber,” the woman says. – I teach at Maud’s university. She called me this morning. She had an educational consultation scheduled for the afternoon.

– Did she call you?

– Ours is conscientious. And they have a phone on wheels here.

“I brought her at night,” says Tim. - She felt bad.

- It's good that you were nearby.

- Yes. Apparently.

-You are her friend.

- At the university?

– I graduated the year before last. Philologist.

– We’ve been reading novels for three years, that means.

– Mostly I read about novels,” Tim replies. “But it’s somehow sluggish compared to what you and she are doing.”

“Not really,” says the professor. – And if so, that’s probably the point.

– I would rather study music. I didn’t bother doing it in vain.

-Are you playing?

- Guitar. On the piano slightly. Mainly guitar.

“Ah,” says the professor, and her face softens slightly. - So you are the guitarist.

- Yes. Was she talking about me?

– I interrogate my students mercilessly, especially about their personal lives. Of course, Maud first had to explain what she had personal life. I mean, something between work and sleep. Something to talk about.

Both turn to the bed, to the sleeping girl.

– Do you know each other closely? - asks the professor.

– We went out on the university yacht a couple of times. Since I was organizing a concert, she came. At lunch at church. At the end of Park Street.

- Do you like her.

- Do you want to help her?

- Help?

- Save her. Here, I'm afraid, you are not alone. People hover around her like moths, although, in my opinion, she does not encourage this. Both boys and girls. It's probably her pheromones.

Tim nods. It’s not clear what to answer here. The professor now resembles his mother, although clearly sober.

“On the phone,” she says, “Maud said she fell off the deck.” Probably not at sea.

– The yacht was at the shipyard. Maude fell on the bricks. About twenty feet.

- And then?

- What then?

- You saw it, right? What happened next?

Tim frowns. For some unknown reason - for a number of reasons - he did not replay the next half a minute in his head. After a pause, there are pictures before his eyes, like a series of portraits in a gallery: a welder under this shower of sparks, a smoking man in a suit, and some white bird, a seagull or even a heron, opening its wings in a symbolic flight over the curls of tree crowns, he says:

- She stood up. And she went.

The professor smiles.

“Yes,” she says. - Yes. I recognize our Maud.

Tim takes Maude out of the hospital again. He was given a new memo. Maude rocks on crutches next to him. There are tufts of small, completely white clouds in the sky.

He goes to the store again, feeds Maude an herb omelet and imported lettuce. She finishes everything and wipes the plate clean with bread.

He says that he will play for her if she wants, and when she agrees or does not refuse, he goes by "lunch" to his apartment in a tall white house over the river - there are several such houses - from where you can see the suspension bridge on one side , and on the other - an old customs warehouse. Tim rents an apartment with a Spaniard who works in a restaurant around the clock - in two restaurants, at least two. Tim's share is paid for from family cash flows, from trust funds - an echo of long-ago labor - that his grandparents set up; Tim’s income is no more than modest, but it’s enough for this – for an apartment in a white house, for the open spaces outside the window.

The Spanish girlfriend of the Spaniard is sleeping on the couch under the window. Her nose is like a shark's fin, and her blue-black hair is so thick that it can only be cut with pruning shears. Tim tiptoes into his room, selects a guitar, puts it in the case, snaps it shut, and returns to Maud.

She took a shower and changed clothes. The hair is still damp. He asks if she is feeling better, she replies that she is feeling better. They drink tea (he bought milk). She spends half an hour reading a volume called “Medical Physiology (2nd Edition),” although her eyes sometimes close and the book threatens to fall out of her hands. Evening is approaching; Tim takes out a guitar and presents it to Maud. Says it's a replica of René Lacôte's guitar, and that Lacôte was a renowned guitar maker of the nineteenth century. It's maple and the back is spruce. It features an abalone rosette, diamonds and crescents on the headstock. He says that he actually has an original Lakota - he bought it at an auction a couple of years ago. Kept by parents. Parents have a clever security system. Tim laughs, turns on the only lamp in the room and sits in the light.

He plays, she listens. One can even imagine that this is how their future together works. She asks me to repeat one short sketch by Fernando Sora. The guitar sounds lighter than modern ones. Clear, gentle - this instrument seems to have been deliberately invented to lull children to sleep.

At ten Maud stands up on her good leg and goes to get ready for bed. He comes out of the bathroom in a nightgown, hanging on crutches. Tim thinks about what to say - he could, for example, quote the hospital memo again - but Maude speaks first:

– You can sleep with me.

“Okay,” he replies. - With you?

“No sex,” she says.

“Of course,” he answers. And then more meaningfully: “Of course, without.”

It's not that the bed in the bedroom is big - not a full double. Maud climbs under the blanket, Tim takes off his clothes, remains in a T-shirt and boxers. Lies down next to him. Maude, despite the shower, smells like a hospital, and when he reaches for the light switch, Tim sees a hospital bracelet on her wrist. She lies with her back to Tim. There is a bald spot shaved around the wound on the back of the head. They don't talk. Tim has an erection that clearly lasts for many hours, and he moves away slightly so Maud doesn't feel it. He listens to how she breathes, and seems to catch the moment when her breathing becomes confused with the rhythm of sleep. He wants to stay awake all night, it seems to him that this will happen, that there is no choice, but her warmth penetrates him like a sleeping pill; he opens his eyes, and the room is already diluted with dawn. Maud is still around - a broken girl, extraordinary. They lay there all night, like two stones on the road. Tim puts his hand on her shoulder. Maud stirs, but continues to sleep. In her sleep, her nightgown has ridden up slightly and his right knee touches her left thigh, skin to skin. From time to time there is a passing car noise outside.

Spring is early, the millennium is new, the girl is backing along the yacht deck. He walks slowly, bending almost double, a ladle in his left hand, a pan of hot resin in his right. From the ladle, she pours resin in a thin stream into the seams, where yesterday she spent the entire day hammering in tow with a chisel and mallet.

At first it’s just work.

The yacht rests on wooden keel blocks, the deck twenty feet above the ground - above a hard plane of broken brick and concrete, from where the spring warmth has lured into the light unexpected blobs of pale flowers that have taken root in the shallow veins of the soil. Around the shipyard, where serious ships were once built - ferries, coal barges, trawlers, and during the war, a wooden minesweeper - but now pleasure boats are serviced and patched: some on keel blocks, others on pontoons. Drills hum, radios hum, and occasionally a hammer knocks.

There is only one girl on deck. Before repairs, the mast was removed, and all the rigging, along with the racks and rails, was put away for storage. Having caulked one seam, the girl immediately starts working on another. The resin in the pan is cooling. As it cools, it thickens. Soon we need to take a break, light the gas burner in the galley, and heat the resin again - but it’s not time yet.

Below, in the shadow of the steel hull, a gloved young man, humming to himself, dips bolts in white lead. He is tall, blue-eyed, aristocratic. The blond hair, which seemed thick from afar, is already thinning. His name is Henley, but everyone calls him Tim - he likes it that way. It is unclear whether he will sleep with the girl on deck.

Taking another bolt, he interrupts his work and calls out:

- Maud! Maud! Oh where are you, Maud? – and, having received no answer, returns to work with a smile. He knows the girl casually, but knows that teasing her won’t work – she doesn’t even understand what that means. It's funny, it's captivating, a harmless gap, a quirk of character, one of those that pleases him, like the directness of her straightforward brown gaze, and curls in which there are only bursts and undercurls, because she cuts her hair short, like a boy, and tattooed letters on the hand (on the underside of the left forearm) - you are surprised when you see it for the first time; I wonder what other surprises she will present. And a hint of a Wiltshire accent, and how she sucks on the cut, but doesn’t mention it in a word, and how her breasts are no bigger than peaches and hard, probably like peaches. Yesterday she pulled off her sweater, and Tim saw for the first time the two-inch strip of bare stomach above the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly a seriousness came over Tim.

They are both members of the university yacht club. Two more came here with them, but have already returned to Bristol - maybe, Tim thinks, so as not to disturb, leave them alone. I wonder if Maud thinks so too? That the mise-en-scene has already been built?

He smells resin. And the scent of sweet river rot, and old piles, silt, amphibious vegetation. Here the valley is flooded, broken under the pressure of the sea, twice a day salt water rolls back and forth along the wooded shores - at high tide it licks tree roots, at low tide it exposes sparkling streams of thigh-deep mud. In some places, higher up the river, old boats were scattered - let them find their way back to nowhere: blackened frames, blackened freeboards, some so ancient and rotten, as if they carried the Vikings, Argonauts, the first men and women on Earth across the seas. Here you can find herring gulls, egrets, cormorants, there is a local seal - for no apparent reason it floats up overboard, and its eyes are like those of a Labrador. The sea is not visible, but it is close. Two bends of the river bank, then a harbor, a town, castles on the rocks. And the open sea.

In front of the boathouse, a man in a red overall and welding goggles stands in a boxing stance under a fountain of blue sparks. Near the administration building, a man in a suit is leaning against an iron pole, smoking. Tim stretches - ahh, amazing - turns back to his bolts, to the yacht, and then something flashes in the air - a wave of a feathery shadow, as if a thorn had slashed his eyes. There was probably a sound too - there are no silent blows - but if so, the sound was lost in the noise of the blood and left no trace.

Tim looks at the ladle that fell near a bush of white flowers - resin is flowing from the ladle. Maud lies a little further away on her back - arms up, head to one side, eyes closed. It’s incredible how difficult it is to look at her - at this girl who just died on a broken brick; one shoe is on the foot, the other has fallen off. Tim is terribly afraid of her. He clasps his head with gloved hands. He's about to throw up. He calls out to Maude in a whisper. And he whispers something else, for example, “your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother”...

And then she opens her eyes and sits up. He looks - if he looks - straight ahead, at the old boathouse. Rising. It seems that it is not difficult for her, it is not painful, although it seems as if she is reassembling herself from bricks and flowers, rising from her own ashes. She walks - bare foot, shoed foot, bare, shoed - and takes twelve or fifteen steps, and then suddenly falls - this time on her face.

The welder observes all this through the blackness of his glasses. He turns the lever on the gas cylinder, lifts his glasses onto his forehead and takes off. The other person, the one who smoked in front of the administration, also runs, but not so deftly, as if he doesn’t really like to run or doesn’t want to come running first. The welder falls to his knees at Maude's head. Brings lips closer to the ground. Maude whispers something and puts two fingers on her throat. A man in a suit squats on the other side, like an Arab in the desert; the trouser legs are tight around the thighs. Somewhere a bell begins to ring, shrill and incessant. Others come running - workers in red overalls, a woman from the marina administration, some man in ski pants - probably just got off the boat onto the pontoon.

- Don't crowd! - says the welder. Someone, out of breath, passes a green box forward. The woman from the administration repeats three or four times that she called the rescuers. She doesn't say "ambulance", but "rescuers".

Then they all notice Tim - he’s standing about fifteen feet away, as if pinned to the air. They notice, frown, and turn their gaze back to Maude.

No racks, no rails. Probably the tarry fumes made me dizzy. From a distance you can hear the ambulance approaching. She, among other things, needs to cross the river. The paramedics put a neck brace on Maude and then turn her over like a precious archaeological find, a swamp fossil, the ashen-fragile contemporary of Christ. Having stabilized the victim, one paramedic sat Tim on the back step of the ambulance and explained that Tim was in shock, but there was no need to worry - given the circumstances, his girlfriend’s condition was satisfactory. She will be taken from the valley to the top of the hill, and a helicopter will pick her up from there. A helicopter will take her to Plymouth Hospital. In about half an hour she will already be there.

Tim comes to his senses - he stops trembling, something recognizable is brewing in his head; It turns out that he is sitting in the marina administration, wrapped in a Scottish blanket. Flowers in pots, filing cabinets, river maps. A faded poster of a yacht - an old racing yacht, with excess sail, a dozen sailors dangling their legs on the windward side. The woman who called the ambulance is talking in a low voice with a man in a suit. He brings Tim a mug of tea. The tea is scalding hot and unbearably sweet. Tim takes a sip, then stands and folds the blanket. He does not immediately brush aside the suspicion that he himself was hurt, that he has an injury, he needs to find it and examine it. He thanks the man and woman (how polite - why, these private schools!), goes to the parking lot of his old “Lancia” and drives to Plymouth.

In memory of my mother and stepfather.

Those we love always travel with us.

Copyright © Andrew Miller 2015

© Gryzunova A., translation into Russian, 2017

© Edition in Russian, design. LLC Publishing House E, 2017

One

1

Spring is early, the millennium is new, the girl is backing along the yacht deck. He walks slowly, bending almost double, a ladle in his left hand, a pan of hot resin in his right. From the ladle, she pours resin in a thin stream into the seams, where yesterday she spent the entire day hammering in tow with a chisel and mallet.

At first it’s just work.

The yacht rests on wooden keel blocks, the deck twenty feet above the ground - above a hard plane of broken brick and concrete, from where the spring warmth has lured into the light unexpected blobs of pale flowers that have taken root in the shallow veins of the soil. Around the shipyard, where serious ships were once built - ferries, coal barges, trawlers, and during the war, a wooden minesweeper - but now pleasure boats are serviced and patched: some on keel blocks, others on pontoons. Drills hum, radios hum, and occasionally a hammer knocks.

There is only one girl on deck. Before repairs, the mast was removed, and all the rigging, along with the racks and rails, was put away for storage. Having caulked one seam, the girl immediately starts working on another. The resin in the pan is cooling. As it cools, it thickens. Soon we need to take a break, light the gas burner in the galley, and heat the resin again - but it’s not time yet.

Below, in the shadow of the steel hull, a gloved young man, humming to himself, dips bolts in white lead. He is tall, blue-eyed, aristocratic. The blond hair, which seemed thick from afar, is already thinning. His name is Henley, but everyone calls him Tim - he likes it that way. It is unclear whether he will sleep with the girl on deck.

Taking another bolt, he interrupts his work and calls out:

- Maud! Maud! Oh where are you, Maud? – and, having received no answer, returns to work with a smile. He knows the girl casually, but knows that teasing her won’t work – she doesn’t even understand what that means. It's funny, it's captivating, a harmless gap, a quirk of character, one of those that pleases him, like the directness of her straightforward brown gaze, and curls in which there are only bursts and undercurls, because she cuts her hair short, like a boy, and tattooed letters on the hand (on the underside of the left forearm) - you are surprised when you see it for the first time; I wonder what other surprises she will present. And a hint of a Wiltshire accent, and how she sucks on the cut, but doesn’t mention it in a word, and how her breasts are no bigger than peaches and hard, probably like peaches. Yesterday she pulled off her sweater, and Tim saw for the first time the two-inch strip of bare stomach above the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly a seriousness came over Tim.

They are both members of the university yacht club. Two more came here with them, but have already returned to Bristol - maybe, Tim thinks, so as not to disturb, leave them alone. I wonder if Maud thinks so too? That the mise-en-scene has already been built?

He smells resin. And the scent of sweet river rot, and old piles, silt, amphibious vegetation. Here the valley is flooded, broken under the pressure of the sea, twice a day salt water rolls back and forth along the wooded shores - at high tide it licks tree roots, at low tide it exposes sparkling streams of thigh-deep mud. In some places, higher up the river, old boats were scattered - let them find their way back to nowhere: blackened frames, blackened freeboards, some so ancient and rotten, as if they carried the Vikings, Argonauts, the first men and women on Earth across the seas. Here you can find herring gulls, egrets, cormorants, there is a local seal - for no apparent reason it floats up overboard, and its eyes are like those of a Labrador. The sea is not visible, but it is close. Two bends of the river bank, then a harbor, a town, castles on the rocks. And the open sea.

In front of the boathouse, a man in a red overall and welding goggles stands in a boxing stance under a fountain of blue sparks. Near the administration building, a man in a suit is leaning against an iron pole, smoking. Tim stretches - ahh, amazing - turns back to his bolts, to the yacht, and then something flashes in the air - a wave of a feathery shadow, as if a thorn had slashed his eyes. There was probably a sound too - there are no silent blows - but if so, the sound was lost in the noise of the blood and left no trace.

Tim looks at the ladle that fell near a bush of white flowers - resin is flowing from the ladle. Maud lies a little further away on her back - arms up, head to one side, eyes closed. It’s incredible how difficult it is to look at her - at this girl who just died on a broken brick; one shoe is on the foot, the other has fallen off. Tim is terribly afraid of her. He clasps his head with gloved hands. He's about to throw up. He calls out to Maude in a whisper. And he whispers something else, for example, “your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother”...

And then she opens her eyes and sits up. He looks - if he looks - straight ahead, at the old boathouse. Rising. It seems that it is not difficult for her, it is not painful, although it seems as if she is reassembling herself from bricks and flowers, rising from her own ashes. She walks - bare foot, shoed foot, bare, shoed - and takes twelve or fifteen steps, and then suddenly falls - this time on her face.

The welder observes all this through the blackness of his glasses. He turns the lever on the gas cylinder, lifts his glasses onto his forehead and takes off. The other person, the one who smoked in front of the administration, also runs, but not so deftly, as if he doesn’t really like to run or doesn’t want to come running first. The welder falls to his knees at Maude's head. Brings lips closer to the ground. Maude whispers something and puts two fingers on her throat. A man in a suit squats on the other side, like an Arab in the desert; the trouser legs are tight around the thighs. Somewhere a bell begins to ring, shrill and incessant. Others come running - workers in red overalls, a woman from the marina administration, some man in ski pants - probably just got off the boat onto the pontoon.

- Don't crowd! - says the welder. Someone, out of breath, passes a green box forward. The woman from the administration repeats three or four times that she called the rescuers. She doesn't say "ambulance", but "rescuers".

Then they all notice Tim - he’s standing about fifteen feet away, as if pinned to the air. They notice, frown, and turn their gaze back to Maude.

Andrew Miller

In memory of my mother and stepfather.

Those we love always travel with us.

One possible way is to take it seriously

Only for sex, but the sands hiss as they approach

To the big collapse in what happened.

John Ashbery [John Lawrence Ashbery (b. 1927) - American postmodernist poet; his poem “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975; translated by J. Probstein) from the collection of the same name, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, is quoted. - Here and further notes. lane (The translator thanks Alexander Bogdanovsky and Sergei Maksimenko for their support.)]

Spring is early, the millennium is new, the girl is backing along the yacht deck. He walks slowly, bending almost double, a ladle in his left hand, a pan of hot resin in his right. From the ladle, she pours resin in a thin stream into the seams, where yesterday she spent the entire day hammering in tow with a chisel and mallet.

At first it's just work.

The yacht rests on wooden keel blocks, the deck twenty feet above the ground - above a hard plane of broken brick and concrete, from where the spring warmth has lured into the light unexpected blotches of pale flowers that have taken root in the shallow veins of the soil. Around the shipyard, where serious ships were once built - ferries, coal barges, trawlers, and during the war, a wooden minesweeper - but now pleasure boats are serviced and patched: some on keel blocks, others on pontoons. Drills hum, radios hum, and occasionally a hammer knocks.

There is only one girl on deck. Before repairs, the mast was removed, and all the rigging, along with the racks and rails, was put away for storage. Having caulked one seam, the girl immediately starts working on another. The resin in the pan is cooling. As it cools, it thickens. Soon we need to take a break, light the gas burner in the galley, and heat the resin again - but it’s not time yet.

Below, in the shadow of the steel hull, a gloved young man, humming to himself, dips bolts in white lead. He is tall, blue-eyed, aristocratic. The blond hair, which seemed thick from afar, is already thinning. His name is Henley, but everyone calls him Tim - he likes it that way. It is unclear whether he will sleep with the girl on deck.

Taking another bolt, he interrupts his work and calls out:

Maud! Maud! Oh where are you, Maud? - and, having received no answer, returns to work with a smile. He knows the girl casually, but knows that teasing her will not work - she doesn’t even understand what that means. It's funny, it's captivating, a harmless gap, a quirk of character, one of those that pleases him, like the directness of her straightforward brown gaze, and curls in which there are only bursts and undercurls, because she cuts her hair short, like a boy, and tattooed letters on the hand (on the underside of the left forearm) - you are surprised when you see it for the first time; I wonder what other surprises she will present. And a hint of a Wiltshire accent, and how she sucks on the cut, but doesn’t mention it in a word, and how her breasts are no bigger than peaches and hard, probably like peaches. Yesterday she pulled off her sweater, and Tim saw for the first time the two-inch strip of bare stomach above the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly a seriousness came over Tim.

They are both members of the university yacht club. Two more came here with them, but have already returned to Bristol - maybe, Tim thinks, so as not to disturb, leave them alone. I wonder if Maud thinks so too? That the mise-en-scene has already been built?

He smells resin. And the scent of sweet river rot, and old piles, silt, amphibious vegetation. Here the valley is flooded, broken under the pressure of the sea, twice a day salt water rolls back and forth along the wooded shores - at high tide it licks tree roots, at low tide it exposes sparkling streams of thigh-deep mud. In some places, higher up the river, old boats were scattered - let them find their own way back to nowhere: blackened frames, blackened freeboards, some so ancient and rotten, as if they carried the Vikings, Argonauts, the first men and women on Earth across the seas. Here you can find herring gulls, egrets, cormorants, there is a local seal - for no apparent reason it floats up overboard, and its eyes are like those of a Labrador. The sea is not visible, but it is close. Two bends of the river bank, then a harbor, a town, castles on the rocks. And the open sea.

In front of the boathouse, a man in a red overall and welding goggles stands in a boxing stance under a fountain of blue sparks. Near the administration building, a man in a suit is leaning against an iron pole, smoking. Tim stretches - ahh, amazing - turns back to his bolts, to the yacht, and then something flashes in the air - a wave of a feathery shadow, as if a thorn had slashed his eyes. There was probably a sound too - there are no silent blows - but if so, the sound was lost in the noise of the blood and left no trace.

Tim looks at the ladle that fell near a bush of white flowers - resin is flowing from the ladle. Maud lies a little further away on her back - arms up, head to one side, eyes closed. It’s incredible how difficult it is to look at her - at this girl who just died on broken bricks; one shoe is on the foot, the other has fallen off. Tim is terribly afraid of her. He clasps his head with gloved hands. He's about to throw up. He calls out to Maude in a whisper. And he whispers something else, for example, “your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother”...

And then she opens her eyes and sits up. He looks - if he looks - straight ahead, at the old boathouse. Rising. It seems that it is not difficult for her, it is not painful, although it seems as if she is reassembling herself from bricks and flowers, rising from her own ashes. She walks - bare foot, shoed foot, bare, shoed - and takes twelve or fifteen steps, and then suddenly falls - this time on her face.

The welder observes all this through the blackness of his glasses. He turns the lever on the gas cylinder, lifts his glasses onto his forehead and takes off. The other person, the one who smoked in front of the administration, also runs, but not so deftly, as if he doesn’t really like to run or doesn’t want to come running first. The welder falls to his knees at Maude's head. Brings lips closer to the ground. Maude whispers something and puts two fingers on her throat. A man in a suit squats on the other side, like an Arab in the desert; the trouser legs are tight around the thighs. Somewhere a bell begins to ring, shrill and incessant. Others come running - workers in red overalls, a woman from the marina administration, some man in ski pants - probably just got off the boat onto the pontoon.

Don't crowd! - says the welder. Someone, out of breath, passes a green box forward. The woman from the administration repeats three or four times that she called the rescuers. She doesn't say "ambulance", but "rescuers".

Then they all notice Tim - he’s standing about fifteen feet away, as if pinned to the air. They notice, frown, and turn their gaze back to Maude.

No racks, no rails. Probably the tarry fumes made me dizzy. From a distance you can hear the ambulance approaching. She, among other things, needs to cross the river. The paramedics put a neck brace on Maude and then turn her over like a precious archaeological find, a swamp fossil, the ashen-fragile contemporary of Christ. Having stabilized the victim, one paramedic sat Tim on the back step of the ambulance and explained that Tim was in shock, but there was no need to worry - given the circumstances, his girlfriend’s condition was satisfactory. She will be taken from the valley to the top of the hill, and a helicopter will pick her up from there. A helicopter will take her to Plymouth Hospital. In about half an hour she will already be there.

Tim comes to his senses - he lets go of the trembling, something recognizable is brewing in his head; It turns out that he is sitting in the marina administration, wrapped in a Scottish blanket. Flowers in pots, filing cabinets, river maps. A faded poster of a yacht - an old racing yacht, with excess sail, a dozen sailors dangling their legs on the windward side. The woman who called the ambulance is talking in a low voice with a man in a suit. He brings Tim a mug of tea. The tea is scalding hot and unbearably sweet. Tim takes a sip, then stands and folds the blanket. He does not immediately brush aside the suspicion that he himself was hurt, that he has an injury, he needs to find it and examine it. He thanks the man and woman (how polite - well, these private schools!), goes to the parking lot of his old “Lancia” and drives to Plymouth.

Arrives in deep twilight. Perhaps in my entire life I have never been to an establishment more terrible than this hospital. You won't find a traumatology department. For a while, Tim gets stuck in the doorway of the brightly lit corridor of the urogenital department, but then the attendant asks if everything is okay with Tim, and shows him where to go - along the path between the bushes to the parking lot, where ambulances are huddled near the wide, rubber-lined doors. .

The woman behind the glass register asks who he is to Maud, and after a pause Tim answers that he is a friend. The woman does not want to talk about Maud’s diagnosis or her condition. Maybe she doesn't know. Tim sits in the reception area on a shabby red banquette. There is an elderly couple nearby. They look like they just escaped from a bombing; at least that's how Tim imagines such people. Half an hour passes. He goes to the register again. The woman was replaced by another woman. This one is friendlier.

Just a minute,” she says. He calls the nurse's station - it's somewhere far behind the swing doors. “Stamp,” she says. - Delivered by helicopter in the afternoon. - Listens, nods. He says: - Yes. I see... Yes... Yes... Friend... yes... I understand... Thank you. - He hangs up. Smiles at Tim.

Maude has been in the hospital for three days. The first night is in intensive care, then she is transferred to a department in the old hospital building. From the window you cannot see the sea, but you can see the light of the sea. There are ten more women in the ward, one behind a screen - a childish voice and such obesity that she does not show herself to anyone.