Английский язык с Крестным Отцом
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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 –
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.
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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
the Swiss and Germans.
The distortion of the left side of his face made him more native. It was the kind of
disfigurement common in Sicily because of the lack of medical care. The little injury that
cannot be patched up simply for lack of money. Many children, many men, bore
disfigurements that in America would have been repaired by minor surgery or
sophisticated medical treatments.
Michael often thought of Kay, of her smile, her body, and always felt a twinge of
conscience at leaving her so brutally without a word of farewell. Oddly enough his
conscience was never troubled by the two men he had murdered; Sollozzo had tried to
kill his father, Captain McCluskey had disfigured him for life.
Dr. Taza always kept after him about getting surgery done for his lopsided face,
especially when Michael asked him for pain-killing drugs, the pain getting worse as time
went on, and more frequent. Taza explained that there was a facial nerve below the eye
from which radiated a whole complex of nerves. Indeed, this was the favorite spot for
Mafia torturers, who searched it out on the cheeks of their victims with the needle-fine
point of an ice pick. That particular nerve in Michael's face had been injured or perhaps
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there was a splinter of bone lanced into it. Simple surgery in a Palermo hospital would
permanently relieve the pain.
Michael refused. When the doctor asked why, Michael grinned and said, "It's
something from home."
And he really didn't mind the pain, which was more an ache, a small throbbing in his
skull, like a motored apparatus running in liquid to purify it.
It was nearly seven months of leisurely rustic (сельский, деревенский; простой,
грубый [‘rstik]) living before Michael felt real boredom. At about this time Don