Peters, Ellis - Felse Investigations / Питерс, Эллис - Цикл "Расследования Филза" [2015, epub, ENG]

01 Fallen into the Pit 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972790, Head of Zeus 02 Death and the Joyful Woman 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972806, Head of Zeus 03 Flight of a Witch 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972813, Head of Zeus 04 A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (= Who Lies Here?) 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972820, Head of Zeus 05 The Piper on the Mountain 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972837, Head of Zeus 06 Black is the Colour of my True Love's Heart 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972844, Head of Zeus 07 The Grass-Widow's Tale 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972851, Head of Zeus 08 The House of Green Turf 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972868, Head of Zeus 09 Mourning Raga 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972875, Head of Zeus 10 The Knocker on Death's Door 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972882, Head of Zeus 11 Death to the Landlords! 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972899, Head of Zeus 12 City of Gold and Shadows 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972905, Head of Zeus 13 Rainbow's End 2015, epub (retail), ISBN: 9781784972912, Head of Zeus

The war ended, and the young men came home, and tried indignantly to fit themselves into old clothes and old habits which proved, on examination, to be both a little threadbare, and on trial to be both cripplingly small for bodies and minds mysteriously grown in absence. Things changed overnight changed again next day. Nobody knew where he stood. Even the language was different. At the ‘Shock of Hay’ you could hear goodnights flying at closing-time in two or three tongues besides English. Blank-eyed, blond youths with shut faces worked side by side with the hard old men in the beet fields, and the sons of the old men, coming home laboriously with the distorted selves they had salved from the blond youths’ embraces all over the world, wondered where they had been, and to what country they had returned. But they had known for some time, the most acute of them, that if England meant the country they had left, and Comerford the village, this would be neither Comerford nor England. Fortunately the names meant much more than their own phases, and the lie of the land, obscured behind many changes, remained constant even at this pass. Those who came back first had the easiest time. Those who had still to linger a year or more of their time away in the tedium of suddenly purposeless armies, or adjust themselves to the fluid situation of other people’s crumbling countries, limped home with more bitter difficulty, to find the fields full of displaced persons, and the shops of a new lingua franca evolved for their benefit, the encrustations of pits suddenly congealed into the nationalised mining industry, whole hills and valleys turn out by the roots under the gigantic caresses of surface mining machinery, and in the upper air of the mind every boundary shifted and every alignment altered. It was all a bewildered young man could do to find his way around this almost unrecognisable land. The old did not try; they sat in the middle of it in contemplation, waiting for the eyes to adjust their vision, and the legs to acquire the mastery of this new kind of drunkenness. Only the young had so short a time before them that they could not afford to wait. They tried, however, to cram themselves back into the old round holes, and mutilated their unaccountably squared personalities in the process. Time eased the fit for some; for some, who had sent their minds home ahead of their bodies, the adjustment was neither long nor unwelcome, though it could not be without pain; to some the whole of Comerford seemed now only a green round hole, not big enough to hold them. They despised it both for what had changed in it and for what had remained the same, because they had lived too long enclosed in the changes and monotonies of their own natures, and could no longer distinguish great from small. If day-to-day life could halt at such a time, and give all the lost people time to get their bearings, things would be easier; but it went on steadily, or rather unsteadily, all the time, full of all the old snags and spiteful with new ones. Colliers’ sons went back to the pits, and found themselves working side by side with Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Letts, whose wartime alliance was just falling apart into a hundred minor incompatibilities; and soon came even the few screened Germans out of their captivity to fester among their ex-enemies without being able to reunite them. Nice-looking, stolid young men, hard workers, a good type; but they did not always remember to keep the old ‘Heil Hitler!’ off their tongues; and the leftward-inclined youngster with Welsh blood in his veins and a brother dead in some stalag or other was liable to notice these things. Maybe he picked a fight, maybe some older and cooler minds broke it up, maybe he just got his room at the hostel rifled and his books shredded, or maybe some evening in the dark, pepper found its way into his eyes. No one knew how. No connection with the war, of course; the war was over. . . .