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

flight to Berlin.



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It was a city that Philip loved, a city he had been to once, decades ago, when he was studying in
Florence. He spent a month there—this was long before the Wall fell—never went back, but we had
spoken, often, of going there together.

I had a passport—I'm a nymph, not an agoraphobe—and so I e-mailed my sister Arethusa, in Sicily. We
are spirits of place; we live where the world exhales in silence. As these places disappear, so do we.

But not all of us. Arethusa and I kept in touch intermittently. Years ago she had lived on the Rhine. She
said she thought she might still know someone in Germany. She'd see what she could do.

It turned out the friend knew someone who had a sublet available. It was in an interesting part of town,
said Arethusa; she'd been there once. I was a little anxious about living in a city—I'm attached to islands,
to northern lakes and trees, and I worried that I wouldn't thrive there, that I might in fact sicken.

But I went. I paid in advance for the flat, then packed my paintings and sketchbooks and had them
shipped over. I carried some supplies and one small sketchbook, half-filled with drawings of Philip, in my
carry-on luggage. I brought my laptop. I closed up the cottage for the winter, told the Pendletons I was
leaving and asked them to watch the place for me. I left them my car as well.

Then I caught the early morning ferry to the mainland, the bus to Boston. There was light fog as the plane
lifted out of Logan, quickly dispersing into an arctic blue sky. I looked down and watched a long,
serpentine cloud writhing above the Cape and thought of Nephele, a cloud nymph whom Zeus had
molded to resemble Hera.

Why do they always have to change us into something else? I wondered, and sat back to watch the
movie.



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Berlin was a shock. We are by nature solitary and obsessive, which has its own dangers—like Narcissus,
we can drown in silence, gazing at a reflection in a still pool.

But in a city, we can become disoriented and exhausted. We can sicken and die. We are long-lived, but
not immortal.
So Arethusa had chosen my flat carefully. It was in Schöneberg, a quiet, residential part of the city. There
were no high-rises. Chestnut trees littered the sidewalks with armored fruit. There were broad streets
where vendors sold sunflowers and baskets of hazelnuts; old bookstores, a little shop that stocked only
socks, several high-end art galleries; green spaces and much open sky.

"Poets lived there," Arethusa told me, her voice breaking up over my cell phone. "Before the last big