Fremder (Russell Hoban) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

17

The colour of regret — who has seen it?

I have not.

The colour of regret — what is it?

I don’t know.

Yet I have tasted it.

The colour of regret?

Yes, I have tasted that colour,

the colour of regret.

Rodney Spoor, ‘Colours’

‘Music feeds that which it findeth,’ somebody said. As I write this I’m listening to Ilse Bak’s Chopin Nocturnes and in my mouth is the taste of the colour of regret. One of the memory-pictures that haunts me is Caroline crying that night at the Hubble Bubble because she’d given herself and I hadn’t. She was right about the coupler that’s missing in me; sometimes I don’t even seem to be connected to myself. Stranger is my name and there are times when I’m a stranger to myself.