Читаем Los Alamos полностью

He was so used to the placid, almost dreamy faces in the room that he noticed instantly Johanna Weber’s look of quiet alarm. He followed her eyes to the musicians. Hans Weber was still staring at the sheet music but was now obviously not reading-perhaps he had never needed to. As he played, he was listening to his own music, a passage of such beautiful sadness that everything else in the room had stopped. Involuntary tears rolled down each of his cheeks, as if the music itself were squeezing him in pain. He never stopped playing. His face was impassive, not scrunched with emotion, so that the tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a sorrow so secret that he was not even aware of revealing it. Connolly couldn’t look away. A few others in the audience had now noticed and looked around in dismay. The music never stopped-it seemed to grow even lovelier-and the tears rolled quietly, unwilled. What did they imagine was wrong? Did Weber, bubbly sentimentalist, frequently get carried away by the music? But no one looked as if this were normal. Something had happened. What was the protocol? Offer assistance? Pretend nothing was the matter? No one moved, and no one, Connolly saw, realized this was a larger mourning, beyond all courtesies. They hadn’t seen the magazine. They didn’t know he was playing for the dead.

The room, cozy and warm, now seemed stifling, and Connolly fought the urge to bolt. He didn’t want to be in Europe, all knickknacks and solid furniture and mistakes past repairing. Soon they would all choke on tears and he would suffocate. Then Weber, sensing their discomfort, paused briefly, wiped his face, and joined in again on the next stanza, right on the beat. To those who had not noticed, he might have been wiping away perspiration. Connolly saw the others relax. Oppenheimer, across the room, stared at Weber in astonishment, frankly curious about something he didn’t understand. Eisler, his hands at his side, bowed his head. Only Johanna Weber, her eyes shining with held-back tears, understood that something remarkable had occurred. Out of either blind loyalty or a shared distress, her face reached out to Weber across the room, ignoring the others, and Connolly saw that he had got her wrong, so eager to notice her manners that he had missed the woman. He thought suddenly that he didn’t understand anyone here, their sorcerers’ jobs and their terrible stories. How many in those camps had the Webers known? And wouldn’t it be the same if they hadn’t known any? The room was too close, and he didn’t belong here. Quietly he slipped through the door, unnoticed, with the music following him out into the night.

He gulped in some raw fresh air, surprised at its chilly bite, and looked up at the sky. The stars were always wonderful in the high air of Los Alamos, but tonight they seemed spectacularly abundant, masses of them, laid out for the music.

She was standing near the end of the building, smoking a cigarette, huddled in a cardigan, her arms folded across her chest to keep in the warmth. The weak yellow light from the window kept her face in shadow. She glanced over quickly when she heard him, then turned back again, unsurprised. For once there seemed to be no movement on the mesa, no truck exhaust and grinding gears, so that the music poured out of the house as if it were being played in the open air. She shivered from the cold and inhaled, making the end of her cigarette burn a flicker of orange.

“It might snow this weekend,” she said, her voice low but distinct, not a whisper.

“Don’t you like the music?”

“I love the music. I just don’t like to watch. They’re so-intense. I can’t bear it.”

“Won’t he notice?”

“No.”

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, her face became clearer, and he saw that she was looking directly at him, the conversation a pretext for this other contact. She dropped her cigarette to the ground.

“Fire hazard,” she said, running it out with her shoe. “Bloody fire hazard. What about you?” She moved her head to indicate the house. “Bored so soon?”

“No. Just restless.”

She looked at him again, interested.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all over my head.”

“You seemed sure of yourself a while ago. That’s a hell of a thing to say to anybody.”

“I didn’t say it to anybody. I said it to you.”

She was quiet, just studied his face until the silence between them became a conversation. Finally she leaned back against the building and let him come closer.

“What are we going to do about this?” she said.

“What do you want to do?” he said, his face close now. He could feel her breath on his cold cheek.

“I don’t know,” she said simply, her honesty a kind of provocation.

He leaned forward and moved her arms down to her side, and when she stood there, unresisting, he kissed her, gently pressing her against the wall, tasting her.

“Don’t,” she said, but not moving away, letting him kiss her again.

“Why not?” he said, his words kisses of breath now as he moved against the hollow of her neck.