Английский язык с Крестным Отцом

Франк Илья

bordello but Michael refused. His flight to Sicily had prevented him from getting proper

medical treatment for his smashed jaw and he now carried a memento from Captain

McCluskey on the left side of his face. The bones had knitted badly, throwing his profile

askew (криво, косо), giving him the appearance of depravity (порочность,

развращенность [di'prжviti]) when viewed from that side. He had always been vain

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about his looks and this upset him more than he thought possible. The pain that came

and went he didn't mind at all, Dr. Taza gave him some pills that deadened it. Taza

offered to treat his face but Michael refused. He had been there long enough to learn

that Dr. Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr. Taza read everything but his

medical literature, which he admitted he could not understand. He had passed his

medical exams through the good offices of the most important Mafia chief in Sicily who

had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with Taza's professors about what grades

they should give him. And this too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the

society it inhabited. Merit (заслуга,

достоинство) meant nothing. Talent meant nothing.

Work meant nothing. The Mafia Godfather gave you your profession as a gift.

Michael had plenty of time to think things out. During the day he took walks in the

countryside, always accompanied by two of the shepherds attached to Don

Tommasino's estate. The shepherds of the island were often recruited to act as the

Mafia's hired killers and did their job simply to earn money to live. Michael thought about

his father's organization. If it continued to prosper it would grow into what had happened

here on this island, so cancerous that it would destroy the whole country. Sicily was

already a land of ghosts, its men emigrating to every other country on earth to be able

to earn their bread, or simply to escape being murdered for exercising their political and

economic freedoms.

On his long walks the most striking thing in Michael's eyes was the magnificent beauty

of the country; he walked through the orange orchards that formed shady deep caverns

through the countryside with their ancient conduits (трубопровод; акведук ['kondit])

splashing water out of the fanged (fang – клык) mouths of great snake stones carved

before Christ. Houses built like ancient Roman villas, with huge marble portals and

great vaulted (vault [vo:lt] – свод) rooms, falling into ruins or inhabited by stray

(заблудившееся или отбившееся от стада животное) sheep. On the horizon the

bony hills shone like picked bleached (to bleach – белить, отбеливать;

побелеть)

bones piled high. Gardens and fields, sparkly green, decorated the desert landscape

like bright emerald necklaces. And sometimes he walked as far as the town of Corleone,

its eighteen thousand people strung out (to string out – растягивать вереницей) in

dwellings that pitted the side of the nearest mountain, the mean hovels (лачуга,

хибарка ['hovl]) built out of black rock quarried (to quarry – добывать камень /из

карьера/; quarry – каменоломня) from that mountain. In the last year there had been

over sixty murders in Corleone and it seemed that death shadowed the town. Further on,

the wood of Ficuzza broke the savage monotony of arable (пахотный ['жrbl]) plain.

His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas with them when

accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun was the favorite

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weapon of the Mafia. Indeed the police chief sent by Mussolini to clean the Mafia out of

Sicily had, as one of his first steps, ordered all stone walls in Sicily to be knocked down

to not more than three feet in height so that murderers with their luparas could not use

the walls as ambush points for their assassinations. This didn't help much and the

police minister solved his problem by arresting and deporting to penal colonies any

male suspected of being a mafioso.

When the island of Sicily was liberated by the Allied Armies, the American military

government officials believed that anyone imprisoned by the Fascist regime was a

democrat and many of these mafiosi were appointed as mayors of villages or

interpreters to the military government. This good fortune enabled the Mafia to

reconstitute itself and become more formidable than ever before.

The long walks, a bottle of strong wine at night with a heavy plate of pasta and meat,

enabled Michael to sleep. There were books in Italian in Dr. Taza's library and though

Michael spoke dialect Italian and had taken some college courses in Italian, his reading

of these books took a great deal of effort and time. His speech became almost

accentless and, though he could never pass as a native of the district, it would be

believed that he was one of those strange Italians from the far north of Italy bordering