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

"Those could be your Helga paintings," he said once. It was an accusation, not encouragement.

"They would be Calypso's paintings," I said. He didn't understand what I meant.



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Odysseus's wife was a weaver. I was, too. It's right there in Homer. When Hermes came to give me
Zeus's command to free Odysseus, I was in my little house on the island, weaving scenes into tunics for
Odysseus and the boys. They were little then, three and five. We stood on the shore and watched him
go. The boys ran screaming after the boat into the water. I had to grab them and hold them back; I
thought the three of us would drown, they were fighting so to follow him.

It was horrible. Nothing was as bad as that, ever; not even when Philip left.

Penelope. Yes, she had a son, and like me she was a weaver. But we had more in common than that. I
was thinking about her unraveling her loom each night, and it suddenly struck me: this was what I did with
my paintings of Philip. Each night I would draw him for hours as he slept. Each day I would look at my
work, and it was beautiful. They were by far my best paintings. They might even have been great.

And who knows what the critics or the public might have thought? My reputation isn't huge, but it's
respectable. Those paintings could have changed all that.

But I knew that would be it: if I showed them, I would never see him again, never hear from him, never
smell him, never taste him.

Yet even that I could live with. What terrified me was the thought that I would never paint him again. If he
was gone, my magic would die. I would never paint again.

And that would destroy me: to think of eternity without the power to create. Better to draw and paint all
night; better to undo my work each dawn by hiding it in the back room.

I thought I could live like that. For seven years I did.

And then he left. The storm blew out to sea, the leaves were scattered across the lake. The house
smelled of him still, my breath smelled of him, my hair. I stood alone at the sink, scrubbing at the pigments
caked under my fingernails; then suddenly doubled over, vomiting on the dishes I hadn't done yet from
last night's dinner.

I waited until I stopped shaking. Then I cleaned the sink, cleaned the dishes, squeezed lemons down the
drain until the stink was gone. I put everything away. I went into the back room, stood for a long time
and stared at the paintings there.
Seven years is a long time. There were a lot of canvases; a lot of sheets of heavy paper covered with his
body, a lot of black books filled with his eyes, his cock, his hands, his mouth. I looked up at the corner
of the room by the window, saw the web woven by the big yellow spider, gray strands dusted with moth
wings, fly husks, legs. I pursed my lips and whistled silently, watched as the web trembled and the spider
raced to its center, her body glistening like an amber bead. Then I went to my computer and booked a