Несовременные записки. Том 3 - страница 25

'I am very hot, kittie,' the man said wiping his brow.

'Me too,' the boy responded.

'Let's go to the river then?'

'Of course!'

One can blaze a trail to the river in a million variations here — like any other way in this multidimensional space. The travellers chose a narrow path which soon led them to the river bank — not very high in that place but abrupt. The path wound between the brink of the bluff and a continuous wall of wooden fences behind houses and was intersected here and there by exposed on the ground powerful knotted roots of old spreading poplars. In some places the fences bent to the river side and hung over the path making it rather difficult to follow the way.

'Daddy, I am afraid!' the boy whined when they reached the point where the path entirely broke off for about three yards — there was only a section of a thick poplar root instead of it.

Under this peculiar bridge, at a depth of nearly seven feet, sharp stones were scattered.

'Don't, kiddy,' his father answered. Seizing the boy in his arms and leaning on the trunk of the poplar with his shoulders he carried the boy over the pit. Twisting his neck the boy looked down like spellbound not taking his eyes off the uneven wall of the bluff and seething waters of the river.

After a while the path broadened into a narrow but steadily widening flat sandy slip of the bank. The river here was not so swift as upstreams where they had come from, and looked pleasantly cool.

'May I undress, Daddy?' the boy asked.

'Of course,' the man answered. 'Take off your shorts and shirt and have a swim.'

'And you?'

'It's too shallow for me here. Go without me, boy, and don't be afraid. It's knee-deep here, so you won't drown even if you want.'

The boy, remaining in his pants only, ran into cool water of the river, dabbled there at will and then popped out into his father's embraces. It was repeated many times — the boy splattering in the water and then darting to his father to warm and dry in his hands so as in five minutes to enter the river again. It was wonderful — like baptism in the waters of the holy Jordan. And his wet cool body was holy too.

Then, getting tired of heat, they returned home, but at the end of the day went to the river again. That time they decided not to undertake an anchorage in their fancied pines-confined harbour but go the shortest possible way to the water, and chose another path which appeared to be wide and straight at the beginning but in some fifty feet away from the river turned suddenly aside and reduced into a sinuous and narrow trail winding among jungles of willows and nettle. The man picked up a stick to draw nettle blades and stems apart, but nonetheless, after they had got onto an open space, the boy felt his bare legs and arms stung. He was about to whine already, when his father took him in his arms for a second and said: 'That's all right, kiddy, don't you cry,' — and the boy smiled at him and promised: 'I shan't, Daddy'.

Having bypassed an abrupt meander of the river where it changed its direction from east to south at right angles they stopped before a huge black boulder towering some, seven feet above the stream and jutting out into it like a small peninsula. To be more exact, it consisted of the two adjacent stones — the farther from the land being larger and higher, and both together resembling two humps on a camel's back. Naturally, the boy expressed the desire to climb the boulder as soon as he had seen it.

'I want to get on top, Daddy!' he shouted and made a stir to dash at the stone.

'A moment, kiddy,' the man said grabbing the boy by his hand. 'Don't hurry up if you are not willing to fall into the river and get drowned.'

He jumped onto the smaller hump of the boulder and, taking the boy with his stretched hands, carried him over and got him by his side. 'Now stay here,' he said to him and in the same way repeated their two-stage ascension upon the bigger part of the rocky peninsula; having reached the very top of it he sat on its stone seat and got his son on his lap. The boy held his breath with delight. It was wonderful indeed — they were sitting now right above the dark whirling water, the side of the boulder adjacent to the rapids of the river being so abrupt that the two felt as if they were suspended somewhere in the air with no support beneath them at all.