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

war."

My flat was in a street of century-old apartment buildings. The foyer was high and dim and smelled of
pipe tobacco and pastry dough. The flat itself had been carved from a much larger suite of rooms. There
was a pocket-sized kitchenette, two small rooms facing each other across a wide hallway, a tiny,
ultramodern bath.

But the rooms all had high ceilings and polished wooden floors glossy as bronze. And the room facing a
courtyard had wonderful northern light.

I set this up as my studio. I purchased paints and sketchpads, a small easel. I set up my laptop, put a
bowl of apples on the windowsill where the cool fall air moved in and out. Then I went to work.



·····


I couldn't paint.

Philip said that would happen. He used to joke about it—you're nothing without me, you only use me,
what will you do if ever I'm gone, hmmmm?

Now he was gone, and it was true. I couldn't work. Hours passed, days; a week.

Nothing.

I flung open the casement windows, stared down at the enclosed courtyard and across to the rows of
windows in other flats just like mine. There were chestnut trees in the yard below, neat rows of bicycles
lined up beneath them. Clouds moved across the sky as storms moved in from the far lands to the north.
The wind tore the last yellow leaves from the trees and sent them whirling up toward where I stood,
shivering in my moth-eaten sweater.

The wind brought with it a smell: the scent of pine trees and the sea, of rock and raw wool. It was the
smell of the north, the scent of my island—my true island, the place that had been my home, once. It filled
me not with nostalgia or longing but with something strange and terrible; the realization that I had no
longer had a home. I had only what I made on the page or canvas. I had bound myself to a vision.

Byblis fell hopelessly in love and became a fountain. Echo wasted into a sound in the night. Hamadryads
die when their trees die.

What would become of me?
 ·····


I decided to go for a walk.

It is a green city. Philip had never told me that. He spoke of the wars, the Nazis, the bombs, the Wall. I
wandered along the Ebersstrasse to the S-Bahn station; then traveled to the eastern part of the city, to
the university, and sat at a cafe beneath an elevated railway, where I ate roasted anchovies and soft white