Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

64 страница из 92

FOR THE NEXT TWELVE days, the men of the crew lived in a windowless backstreet apartment that had been rented for us by David. This morose concrete grotto was crammed with lurid Moorish furniture: ensembles of leopard skin and red vinyl and purple plush, with big velveteen cushions, and tassels on everything, and poorly dyed carpets. All the trappings of whoredom, right down to the red lightbulb in the front hall. So much attention to tactility but with no actual comforts—not even proper light, or hot water, or even a table to eat off. And of course no art or books. The bathroom, whose encrusted shitter was surely a castoff of Royal Air Maroc, both looked and smelled like a leprosarium. I admired Steve’s response when, together, we laid eyes on the bowl: the double take, the queasy smile, the glance my way as if to say It’s you or me, brother, and the immediate commitment (his) to scouring the thing out.

The kitchen wasn’t much better, and since there was no means of dealing with the trash produced by a perpetually famished rowing crew with little inclination to clean up, it simply accumulated: first in garbage bags, six, seven, eight of them, crowding the kitchen floor, and then in an impassable knee-high heap of loose egg cartons, cereal boxes, orange peels, soup cans, cookie packages; plus the endless plastic bottles and tubs in which Moroccan dairy products are sold and go moldy and die.