Fantastic Stories Presents: Fantasy Super Pack #1. Fritz Leiber

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СКАЧАТЬ though I did not know of which of them. She dined with Picasso and he said that she painted as well as he did, and he published that, too. But Pablo has too high an opinion of himself to mean that, and besides, he has sex with every attractive woman he can find. Much like Frida’s Diego, in fact. Kandinsky possibly did not sleep with her, but still admired her work.

      When I saw her next I took her to my apartment near Avenue St. Germaine-du-Pres. The building is old, with high ceilings and plumbing that rattles. She studied the paintings on my wall with attention and finally pointed to one small piece in a corner. “That is yours,” she said. She did not ask, she knew. The she looked more carefully, and I wondered how she, a master of pink and yellow and fevered hues, would find my soft shades and delicate interplay of light. That is what critiques praised most about my work when I had been alive, the light, and the fact that I did not follow the Mannerist style of emotionalism that bordered on sentimentality.

      “What is your real name?” she asked after she examined the miniature.

      “Adam,” I told her, which was the truth. “You would not have heard of me, few of the contemporaries have. Adam Elsheimer.”

      She nodded, never taking her eyes from the painting. “And when were you born?”

      She knew. She knew what kind of thing I was, though I had said nothing. She knew, and yet she had come here with me.

      “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she laughed loudly. “I liked older men. My mother was so angry when I married Diego, he is twenty-five years older than me. And Trotsky.”

      “You married Trotsky?” I knew she hadn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to ask.

      “No,” she replied when she regained her breath. “No, but he was my lover. Breton didn’t tell you?”

      It was my turn to smile. “Breton alluded to it. To lose a woman he desired as much as he desires you was quite a blow for him, but he felt he could not compete with Trotsky.”

      “And you?” she demanded.

      “I would not try to compete with Trotsky,” I agreed. “But Trotsky is not here.”

      “No, Trotsky is not here,” she said, and sighed. Then she drank the tequila I had bought for her, and took my hand and let me to my own bedroom in my own apartment.

      She knew what I was and she invited, teased, dared me. I tasted her in passion, with my fangs deep in her flesh, her blood as brilliant as the flowers in her hair. The nourishment of her blood was rich and heady, more viscerally alive than any I had had in four hundred years. All of Creation was within her, the fruits and vines and birds in her veins, the flowers in her hair, the fragility and the fear, as well, subtle and piquant. I drank the livingness inside her, and the death as well, for the one lives within the other.

      She knew what kind of a thing I was, but she did not truly know what that meant. I did not tell her until weeks later, after she became terribly ill with a kidney infection, and Mary and Marcel were afraid and called me.

      She lay in a hospital bed with tubes and bandages like one of her paintings, her face whiter than mine and pinched with pain. When I tried to hush her and speak she waved her hand and tried to smile bravely.

      “This is terrible,” I said softly. “That you should become so sick while you are here.”

      She laughed, loudly even though she did not have the energy for it. “I have been sick or injured every other place I have ever been. Why not Paris? Perhaps I wouldn’t even know I had been here if I had been healthy all the time.”

      The pain flared through her, and through her paintings. I could see it, taste it, and remember my own and feel ashamed. For I had never been so sick in my few years of life. I had never known the misery she had endured, her near death from polio, and then from the streetcar accident when the doctors said she would never walk again. Her delicately molded body was laced with the scars of operations, and wondered how she had endured. The misery that had undone me was now called depression, but I could not compare that pervasive unhappiness to her suffering. I had languished in a debtor’s prison, but she was forever imprisoned in her own broken body.

      “Frida,” I said, and touched her. Her skin was brittle and paper dry and warm like the fires within her were carefully banked but could not be concealed. “I wish to give you a gift.”

      “Then give me the gift I want,” she replied fiercely. “Remember me. You must always, always remember me. You must always keep my painting on your wall, always, and remember who I was and these times we have had together.”

      “I will do better than that,” I told her. “I will make you immortal.” And then I told her how.

      She listened and said nothing, but her silence was not disbelief. She merely digested and considered, and questioned closely. “So I must finally die, and then will awaken after I am buried?” she asked. “And the pain? Will there always be pain? Because I do not want to exist for all eternity with these injuries, with this broken, useless body.”

      Her body was far from useless, I told her. “If you take a little from me now, you will recover from this infection. And when you wake into our life, there will truly be no pain. All the scars, all the badly mended bone, all of it will be healed. The bodies of our kind are always perfect and stronger than those still living. You will never feel pain again, or the depths of despair. No disease will touch you. And you will see—such things. Our eyes are more sensitive and can see more distinctly. You will be amazed by how you can see.”

      There was no thought to it, nothing planned. She knew, I had told her all and she was aware of what we did, and she had never refused my offer. She did not speak but her eyes flashed and she licked her lips and I was certain of her desires. Who would not become immortal? Who would choose to die?

      I cradled her in my arms, careful of the needles and gauze. I fed her pears and Brie that I had smuggled in under my coat. And when she was full and weary and half insensible, I took the little paring knife and nicked my wrist. I held the well of blood to her lips and, half asleep, she licked gently. I felt the pain pass from her body, and though I knew she was not healed forever until her death, I was fiercely glad to give her even this brief respite.

      The doctors were surprised at her recovery. She was well enough to leave the hospital the next day, and though they wanted her to stay she refused. Mary fetched her home and I came for her with the dark and brought her to me with all her things. For the rest of her time in Paris I wanted her to stay with me.

      In those nights we had left, in the violence of passion, she told me to drink. Ordered me, insisted, and I could taste her curiosity and knew she craved the pleasure of it, she who had done every other thing a woman could do. I was not her only lover, even in Paris there were handsome men, the Communists, and at least two actresses.

      The last few nights before she left she was more subdued than I had ever seen her, even in the hospital. I wondered whether she was ill again, and asked, but Frida said only that she was sad. “I miss Diego,” she said simply. “And I miss Mexico, and the sun. It is so gray here.” And then she laughed and I saw the ghost of the Frida I knew. “And I’m sick of these Surrealist intellectuals. All they can do is argue theory and they don’t have anything to say.”

      It was time for her to go. And though I was sorry that she was leaving, I also knew that France was no longer safe, not for either of us, not for anyone. In Mexico I knew she would be away from the terror that was gathering. Two days after her departure I packed my own things СКАЧАТЬ