Читать «Райский сад (The Garden of Eden)» онлайн - страница 113

"They won't know more.

"Will they come along young and new and fresh with new things and you be tired of me?"

"They won't and I won't be."

"I'll kill them if they do. I'm not going to give you away to anyone the way she did."

"That's good."

"I want you to have men friends and friends from the war and to shoot with and to play cards at the club. But we don't have to have you have women friends, do we? Fresh, new ones who will fall in love and really understand you and all that?"

"I don't run around with women. You know that."

"They are new all the time," Marita said. "There are new ones every day. No one can ever be sufficiently warned. You most of all."

"I love you," David said, "and you're my partner too. But take it easy. Just be with me.

"I'm with you."

"I know it and I love to look at you and know you're here and that we'll sleep together and be happy."

In the dark, Marita lay against him and he felt her breasts against his chest and her arm behind his head and her hand touching him and lips against his.

"I'm your girl," she said in the dark. "Your girl. No matter what I'm always your girl. Your good girl who loves you.

"Yes, my dearest love. Sleep well. Sleep well."

"You go to sleep first," Marita said, "and I'll be back in a minute."

He was asleep when she came back and she got in under the sheet and lay beside him. He was sleeping on his right side and breathing softly and steadily.

Chapter Thirty

DAVID WOKE IN THE MORNING when the first light came in the window. It was still gray outside and there were different pine trunks than the ones he usually woke to see and a longer gap beyond them toward the sea. His right arm was stiff because he had slept on it. Then, awake, he knew he was in a strange bed and he saw Marita lying sleeping by him. He remembered everything and he looked at her lovingly and covered her fresh brown body with the sheet and then kissed her very lightly again and putting on his dressing gown walked out into the dew-wet early morning carrying the image of how she looked with him to his room. He took a cold shower, shaved, put on a shirt and a pair of shorts and walked down to his working room. He stopped at the door of Marita's room and opened it very carefully. He stood and looked at her sleeping, and closed the door softly and went into the room where he worked. He got out his pencils and a new cahier, sharpened five pencils and began to write the story of his father and the raid in the year of the Maji-Maji rebellion that had started with the trek across the bitter lake. He

made the crossing now and completed the dreadful trek of the first day when the sunrise had caught them with the part that had to be done in the dark only half finished and the mirages already making as the heat became unbearable. By the time the morning was well advanced and a strong fresh east breeze was blowing through the pines from the sea he had finished the night at the first camp under the fig trees where the water came down from the escarpment and was moving out of that camp in the early morning and up the long draw that led to the steep cut up onto the escarpment.