Ghostheart Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked.
    ‘Read it with me now,’ she said.
    ‘The whole thing?’
    ‘Sure, it’s not that long.’
    Sullivan nodded. ‘Fetch my glasses from the dresser will you?’
    Annie fetched Sullivan’s glasses, took a moment to refill her cup, and then pulled her chair around to sit beside him.
    The room was warm, and beyond the front windows she could hear the wind sneaking its way around the eaves of the building as if it were gently pleading to come in out of the cold.
    She looked down as Sullivan turned to the first page, and they started reading together, page for page, line for linealmost, and there was something special about their closeness that made her feel that this – once upon a time – might have been something she’d have shared with her father:
    A friend of mine once told me something about writing. He said that at first we write for ourselves, then we write for our friends, last of all we write for money. That made sense to me, but only in hindsight, for I wrote these things for someone I believed I would never see, and then I wrote them for money. A great deal of money. And though the story I will tell you has more to do with someone other than myself, and though this thing began long before I met him, I will tell you about it anyway. There is a history here, a history that carries weight and substance and meaning, and I write of this history so you will understand how these things happened, and why. Perhaps you will understand the reasons and motives, perhaps not, but whichever way it comes out I believe that these things are better spoken than left silent. I carried years of silence, and sometimes silence seemed all that I possessed, but once I realized that you existed my life meant something else. So read, read all of this, and make of it what you will. This was my life, and because of who you are it is to some degree your life too. As Whitman once said, ‘My surface is myself, under which to witness youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.’
    These are my roots, diseased and broken though they may be, but they are my roots. Read on, and I trust you will understand.
    This thing begins with a child born of a tryst that could never have survived. His history begins with the peasants and gypsies, once Polish by birth, who occupied the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains beneath Krakow and Wroclaw along the Czechoslovakian border. It was from this lineage, these wild-eyed, dark-haired gypsy wanderers, that this child, Jozef Kolzac, was born, a breach beneath the filthy shrouds of a hand-stitched canvas shelter in the bitter winter of 1901. His mother, an itinerant, illiterate seventeen-year-old,impregnated by a man she neither knew nor remembered, died in childbirth.
    Kolzac, taking his name from the warrior myths that had passed down through age after age, legends that were spoken by the Silesians who camped along the River Oder long before Jagiello and the Saxony accession, grew into a small, weak child, narrow-shouldered and pale-skinned, scrimping for nourishment amongst the scraps and offal that were thrown from the tents and coverings where his people slept and ate and raped and killed one another. He was shunned perhaps, this runt, this stripling child, this half-minded semi-animal who possessed no rights.
    Jozef – surviving through childhood, this in itself a miracle, and astute enough to know that succor and support were not to be found here – left his place of birth and took to the deeper Carpathians. He fell in with a wandering musician, an old man seeking an apprentice, and here Jozef learned his trade, the one skill that would in time serve to sustain his life, to feed him, to bring him some small comfort in a country that was barren and loveless and cold.
    Following the old man he headed west, back towards Krakow. Camping by night, walking by day, they became friends as well as journeymen and compatriots. Jozef learned of music, his fine fingers dextrous and agile across the instrument