nvs1408: переводы

→They were still busy sorting themselves out when I heard it: the first droning in the distance. Meyerhofer and I turned to gaze into the sky to north-west. There were five of them.

→I saw that the interview was now at an end: Mother Superior moved in to usher the man away, saying, “Please—you must not mind him—he old man, head not so good any more.” After he had left it was only my advanced age which saved me from ten days’ solitary on bread and water.

→“If you really want to know what it was like, to fight in the air in the Great War, then go up to someone you have never met before and who has never done you the slightest harm and pour a two-gallon tin of petrol over them. Then apply a match, and when they are nicely ablaze, push them from a fifteenth-floor window, after first perhaps shooting them a few times in the back with a revolver. And be aware as you are doing these things that ten seconds later someone else will quite probably do them to you. This will exactly reproduce for you and your fellow enthusiasts the substance of First World War aerial combat and will cost your country nothing. It will also avoid the necessity for ten million other people to die in order for you to enjoy it.”

→He had not even been in Vietnam, he said, having wangled a draft exemption (though he did not put it quite as bluntly as that). At last he fixed me with a bovine gaze through his thick spectacles. I sensed that the Big Question was coming. When it came it was of such stark imbecility that it fairly knocked the breath out of me.

→Already the memories were coming back: the smells of acetone and petrol and cordite; the sound of Mizzi Günther and Hubert Marischka as the Carso wind rattled the tent sides; the pock-pock-pock of machine-gun fire and the dreadful crunching as we slithered across the glacier. What could he know of it all?

→This person’s manner was already beginning to irritate me intensely. I usually get on well with Americans—far better than the English in fact— but when I meet one whom I dislike, the aversion usually borders on the homicidal. What right had this fat buffoon to come digging around among the bones of the dead to feed his hobby, collecting our pain like stamps?

→“Really, I have no idea. I was with the Fliegertruppe on the Isonzo Front for about three months, then for a month or so with the Naval Air Service on convoy patrol. I don’t think that we ever thought of them as ‘missions.’ We went up in the air when we got an order from Army Headquarters or from the division, and most of the time it was reconnaissance or artillery-spotting or a little bombing behind the lines. But usually we just sat on the ground because of bad weather or lack of aircraft. As for combats, I don’t really remember. Certainly the Italians shot at us a good deal, and we shot back at them where we could; sometimes with less success, sometimes with more. But ‘combats’ is a grand-sounding name for what took place. Usually it was so quick that it was over before we realised it had happened. You pressed the trigger and shut your eyes, and when you opened them again they had either gone away or you were lying in hospital.”

→He appeared not to have heard this remark; only stuck the microphone impertinently under my nose. “Tell me, how many missions did you fly in all? And how many aerial combats were you involved in? What was your personal score?”

→“It was a privilege that I would gladly have foregone. And what do you mean by ‘privileged few’ anyway? That I was privileged to be able to do it, or that I was privileged to be among the few who came out of it alive? I think that I might disagree with you on the first count at least.”

→“Then I congratulate you on your success. But what is it that you want to know? I am no historian myself and I can only tell you what I happened to see, which was not a great deal really. It was all rather confused and quite frankly I have not given it a great deal of thought in the years since. I was a naval officer you see, and only seconded for a while to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe. And anyway, I flew as an observer in two-seaters, which was usually rather boring.”

→“Hi there. I’m Frank T. Mahan of the Lansing Michigan World War One Air Enthusiasts’ Society. I’m over here in Europe collecting reminiscences from those who flew in that great conflict and you, sir, are the first person I’ve met so far who flew in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force on the Italian Front.”

→But with Mother Superior eyeing me in that sinister way of hers I had to sit still and try to be civil. Without looking at me he introduced himself.

→“Wow! I mean, this is incredible—another First World War aviator in the same afternoon—I can hardly believe this.” Without so much as a by your leave he sat down opposite me and loaded another cassette into his little machine. I was already irritated by his evident belief that we old people have no minds of our own, no independent value except as historical relics and memoir-quarries.

→He proferred me a huge, flabby paw to shake. It was like having a giant toad placed in my hand.

→“Prohaska zere—he also flieger in First Weltkrieg—fly in Austriacki Fliegertruppe gegen Italia—you speak him also, yes-no?” The old rogue had remembered, as people sometimes will when their minds are failing, an interview which I had given to a Berlin paper in 1916 after I had brought down the Italian airship. I got up to leave, but my lines of escape were blocked: the young American had also got up and was advancing to pin me into the corner with his bison-like bulk. I saw Mother Superior simpering in the background. I would have to be polite or there would be trouble for me later on.

→It appeared that the interview was not going well: Kempowski was pretty well gaga by then—he died a few weeks later—and in any case, he regarded the Polish–Soviet war of 1920 as vastly more interesting and important than the earlier conflict in which he had flown for the German Kaiser. At length the old man cackled maliciously and pointed across to me.

→This puzzled me: why German in a Polish old people’s home? Then I remembered: some weeks before, Mother Superior had received a letter from an American air-historian—or “aviation buff” as he styled himself—asking whether he might have an interview with the noted World War One flying ace Gustav Kempowski. I thought “flying ace” was a bit thick: Kempowski had flown briefly as a junior officer in Jasta 2—Richthofen’s old squadron—in the autumn of 1918 and had then transferred to the Polish Air Force.

→The young man was holding the microphone of a tape recorder towards Kempowski and trying to induce him to talk into it by bawling into the old man’s ear. He was evidently not having much joy: Kempowski was near-senile by then and his English had always been minimal, while the young man’s German was ludicrously poor.

→It came from over in Mr Kempowski’s corner. I turned around to look, and saw the old fool sitting in an armchair with a blanket over his legs being interrogated by a large—not to say gross—individual in his early thirties with a great curly mane of hair, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and a drooping moustache in the style of the late Pancho Villa.

→The interview ended and we shook hands as I left, taking with me a feeling—which I still hold to this day—that if the old Emperor had done the decent thing and died about (say) 1906, and if Franz Ferdinand had already died from tuberculosis—as he nearly did in 1893—then perhaps with the earnest young Karl as Emperor and King, succeeded about 1950 by the Emperor Otto, the Austro-Hungarian state might still be with us today, transformed from a rickety, bilious, shambling quasi-autocracy into a rickety, bilious, shambling constitutional monarchy. Perhaps.