"Elizabeth Hand - Calypso in Berlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

Calypso In Berlin

by Elizabeth Hand
Yesterday morning, he left. I had known he would only be here for those seven days. Now, just like that,
they were gone.

It had stormed all night, but by the time I came downstairs to feed the woodstove, the gale had blown out
to sea. It was still dark, chill October air sifting through cracks in the walls. Red and yellow leaves were
flung everywhere outside. I stepped into the yard to gather a handful and pressed my face against them,
cold and wet.

From the other side of the island a coyote yelped. I could hear the Pendletons' rooster and a dog
barking. Finally I went back inside, sat and watched the flames through the stove's isinglass window.
When Philip finally came down, he took one look at me, shook his head, and said, "No! I still have to go,
stop it!"

I laughed and turned to touch his hand. He backed away quickly and said, "None of that."

I saw how he recoiled. I have never kept him here against his will.

When Odysseus left, he was suspicious, accusatory. They say he wept for his wife and son, but he slept
beside me each night for seven years and I saw no tears. We had two sons. His face was imprinted upon
mine, just as Philip's was centuries later: unshaven, warm, my cheeks scraped and my mouth swollen. In
the morning I would wake to see Philip watching me, his hand moving slowly down the curve of my
waist.

"No hips, no ass," he said once. "You're built like a boy."

He liked to hold my wrists in one hand and straddle me. I wondered sometimes about their wives: were
they taller than me? Big hips, big tits? Built like a woman?

Calypso. The name means the concealer. "She of the lovely braids"—that's how Homer describes me.
One morning Philip walked about my cottage, taking photos off the bookshelves and looking at them.

"Your hair," he said, holding up a picture. "It was so long back then."

I shrugged. "I cut it all off a year ago. It's grown back—see?" Shoulder-length now, still blond, no gray.

He glanced at me, then put the picture back. "It looked good that way," he said.



·····
This is what happens to nymphs: they are pursued or they are left. Sometimes, like Echo, they are fled.
We turn to trees, seabirds, seafoam, running water, the sound of wind in the leaves. Men come to stay
with us, they lie beside us in the night, they hold us so hard we can't breathe. They walk in the woods and
glimpse us: a diving kingfisher, an owl caught in the headlights, a cold spring on the hillside. Alcyone,
Nyctimene, Peirene, Echo, Calypso: these are some of our names. We like to live alone, or think we do.
When men find us, they say we are lovelier than anything they have ever seen: wilder, stranger, more
passionate. Elemental. They say they will stay forever. They always leave.