Levisha: переводы

→“Mama! Mama, Mama, Mama!” Over and over I screamed her name because if I were in the darkness and it was death, then she must be able to come to me.

→“Mama!” I shrieked and then suddenly the reality of her death was all around me as thick and choking as the darkness. She was gone and there was no one, no one who could rescue me. Darkness and death became the same thing to me.

→“Being a bastard is something that doesn’t show unless you make it show,” she said. She gestured at herself. “I can’t hide this. Being small and looking younger than I am. Being pale where most folk are dark. Being able to talk as if I am older than I am is something I can hide. But you said I shouldn’t do that.”

→“If I cannot be honest with you, I shall not speak to you at all.” All the force of her will was behind her words. I knew that she was completely capable of resuming her long silence. The thought of being deprived of the only companionship I’d found since Molly’s death struck me so deep a blow that I immediately recognized how close a bond I was forming with my daughter. The second bolt of lightning was how dangerous it would be to both of us if I let my need for her company overcome my duty to be her parent.

→“Other children don’t like me. I make them uncomfortable. They think I’m a tiny child dressed up as a girl, and then, when I can do things, like pare apples with a sharp knife, they think … I don’t know what they think. But when I go into the kitchen, Tavia’s sons would go out. They used to come to work with her every day. They don’t anymore.” She looked away from me. “Elm and Lea, the kitchen girls, hate me.”

→“Oh, Bee, they don’t hate you! They hardly know you. And Tavia’s sons are of an age where they go with their father now, to learn what he does all day. It’s not you, Bee.” I was looking down at my small daughter with a sympathetic smile. She glanced up at me and, for the instant that our eyes met, the blue anger in hers burned me.

→She looked down at the floor, her whole body stiff. “Perhaps I shall stay in out of the rain today,” she said in an icy little voice. “It might be a good day to stay by myself.”

→“Bee,” I said, but before I could go on that fury was flashed at me again.

→“She was gone for a little while. I was in the morning room when I heard the door slam. She was calling for me to come and take some of the cuttings. I stepped out in the hall, and here she came with a great armful of them, dropping twigs and bits of moss as she came. I was going to take them from her when she suddenly stopped where she was. She stared, and her mouth fell open, and her cheeks that were pink with cold went even pinker. Then she shouted, ‘Chivalry! There you are!’ And she flung up her arms, and the branches went everywhere. She opened her arms wide and took two running steps past me. And then she fell.”

→She straightened her spine. “I’m nearly ten. I’m too old to be carried,” she said with great dignity.

→Her walk had slowed to a trudge, and her cheeks were bright red with effort and the chill wind’s kiss.

→Not where I’d wanted the conversation to go, but again it was inevitable. “It would be hard for me to let you have a dog just now.” Not while my heart was so desperately lonely still. Not while I reached out, whether I would or not, to any creature that looked at me with sympathetic eyes. Even if I did not bond, the dog would be drawn to me, not her. No. “Perhaps in the future we can talk about it again. But what I wanted you to see … Are you tired? Shall I carry you?”

→A hesitation before she replied. “She wagged her tail. And she wasn’t afraid of me.” A pause. “May I have a puppy?”

→“How do you know?”

→“No. Of course not! She does like to poke me with her nose. But Daisy’s nice.”

→“The herd dog. Did she scare you?”

→“Daisy?”

→“Were you scared of Daisy?” I asked her.

→Again that sound of disdain.

→“No. Some of your differences you can’t hide. Little by little, you can let people see that you are a lot more intelligent than most children of your age. And that will make you less frightening to them.”