"Alexander Jablokov - Fragments Of A Painted Eggshell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

used to every spring, the box would be soaked, leaving its contents to rot and get covered with mildew.
But she had installed a sump pump and a dehumidifier last fall and the damn improvements worked too
well. The basement was now dry enough to create mummies.

And she did remember that postcard in particular. It had been an antique one he bought from some street
kiosk, showing the Palace of the Popes in Avignon in the 1920s. He wrote a note indicating that he had
fallen through some sort of time warp, but was hoping the magical time-delay stamp he bought from the
gypsy would ensure that the card was delivered to her eighty years later...and that he still thought about
her with every new thing he saw.

It was all very sweet, but she had spent that summer sleeping with someone else, a fellow carpenter on a
job, so didn't take any of it too seriously. Still, she had put the card up on her refrigerator, where it had
stayed many months amid the torn-out cartoons and orange-crate-label refrigerator magnets until Mark
came back from Europe and she found herself engaged to be married to him.

"So why do you want it?" she asked. "Just tell me."

"It's Miriam."

"Oh. Miriam." Mark's new wife was named Miriam-Selina. Irritated by the compound name, Paula
privately called her Miracle of Science. She had breasts like a female impersonator's. They couldn't be
real.

"Now, Paula. If you're going to be like that, I don't have to tell you anything." Mark wouldn't have been
human if his ex- wife's jealousy over his new wife hadn't, secretly, pleased him.

"All right, all right. So, Miriam."

"Miriam...well, we haven't been together very long. She wants our relationship to be of longer standing."

"Wait a while," Paula said. "It will be."

"No, no. She wants it to be longer now."

She froze for a moment, shocked at the depths of his betrayal. "And you want to steal my past, weld it
on to hers? Make it seem like you and she have had a real life together? Buy a memory transfer so that
you remember sending that postcard to her, and she remembers getting it. It'll cost you, you know. That
sort of thing's not cheap." The emotion was too sudden, too strong, for her to even identify it as anger or
grief. "So you just call me up, ask me casual-like to give up my past --"

"Paula --"

"Sure we screwed it up, lost it. It still means something. Do you think it doesn't?"

"I'm not doing this to hurt you, Paula."

"Then why?" Anger was easier.

His voice, when he finally spoke, was so quiet she could barely hear it. "Why don't you ask Rue?" And
then he hung up, dropping the heavy receiver from the primitive phone hook once before finally managing