Цитаты из книги «Лунный свет», страница 4

Воздух в коробе был на вкус как свежие пломбы.

У суки немецкой овчарки, которая припустила через луг к деду, чтобы высказать ему свое мнение, шерсть лоснилась здоровьем. Дед давно не видел такой дерзкой штатской собаки: те, которых он встречал в Германии, были кожа да кости и жались к стене, низко опустив голову, то ли от стыда, то ли из-за каких-то корыстных расчетов. Эта явно напрашивалась на выстрел, но у деда, помимо вальтера и винтовки безголового офицера, имелось и другое оружие: баночка консервированных сосисок. Секундная работа открывашкой из складного ножа, и они с овчаркой заключили перемирие. Дед скармливал ей сосиски по одной в минуту, пока не добился желаемой степени обожания. Собака побежала за ним к дому, но залаяла, предупреждая хозяев, только когда он уже входил в кухонную дверь.

She said that having been born a baby and finding he enjoyed it, he had never bothered to stop.

“Oh, shish kebab,” he said. “I meant to swipe a couple of glasses from the bar.”

Shish kebab. Sugarloaf. Sheboygan. Whenever life called for foul language, Aughenbaugh broke into a reserve of quaint midwestern euphemisms. There seemed to be hundreds, rarely repeated. My grandfather had met few Lutherans. He wondered if they were handed some kind of list to memorize as children.

Он вообще не любил говорить то, что и так ясно. Вопросы, считал он, чаще всего задают, чтобы заполнить зону молчания

то, что любить ее было тяжким трудом, не уменьшало его любви

наши мудрецы спокон веков утверждают, что симпатичных студентов-медиков не надо беспричинно подозревать во всех смертных грехах

“A crazy man,” she said in Yiddish to her male companion, employing the audible whisper relied on by old Jewish ladies for millennia in their generous efforts to ensure that no one, in particular the target of their aspersions, ever be left in the dark about who was the target of their aspersions.

She told my mother that the hospital had a theater because of the opinions of a wealthy man named Adolf Hill, a manufacturer of necktie silk from Paterson. It was Mr. Hill’s belief that the ancient Greeks had been the sanest men who ever lived. This was due, Hill further believed, to the greatness of Greek drama, which allowed audiences and actors alike to face the frightful things inside and outside their skulls. When, in time, Hill’s wife was committed to Greystone, Hill had endowed construction of the Adolf and Millicent Hill Theater. It was not true, Mrs. Outcault said, that Hill deliberately arranged to have his wife committed in order to put his theories about drama therapy to the test, but it was possible that Mr. Hill’s theorizing was the thing that had driven poor Millicent insane. Around 1927 she had hanged herself in her room-not in the theater, thank goodness - by stringing together three neckties made from Empire Silk Company’s finest stock.

His field of expertise before the war had been the mass manufacture of donuts, or what Aughenbaugh called “industrial-grade edible tori.” He spoke German and French, read Russian and Latin. He was two hundred pages into the writing of an analytical biography of August Kekulé done entirely in limericks, entitled A Rolling Autophagous Snake. Apart from one or two professors at Drexel, he was the first intellectual my grandfather had met who was not a pool hustler, a criminal, or a rabbi.