Blood and Chrysanthemums Read Online Free PDF

scrapyard, rows and rows of rusting cars laid out in the bright noon sun. No shadows softened their stack lines, no grass seemed to grow between their corpses.
    Rozokov looked at Ardeth, who was studying the photograph as if it held some desperately sought secret. After a moment, her mouth twisted a little and she looked at him. “What do you think?” she asked.
    “Interesting,” he said and then smiled, remembering retreating to that noncommittal word in a hundred galleries and salons over the last five hundred years.
    “I like it,” Ardeth announced. “I’m sure that I’m missing some important political or aesthetic point but I like it.” They moved on, pausing by the next photograph. The presence of the Banff Centre for the Fine Arts, overlooking the town from the flank of Tunnel Mountain, meant that the town had access to a surprising diversity of cultural activities. They had already been to a chamber music recital here—his choice, Rozokov acknowledged. The photography exhibit was Ardeth’s selection.
    “Now this is more to my taste,” he commented. It was a black-and-white study of female nude, the light and shadow turning the flesh into a sculptural arrangement of smooth shapes.
    “It figures. Philistine.”
    “True enough. I am an old man. I have old-fashioned tastes.”
    She laughed and tucked her arm through his. “Did you know any famous artists?”
    “I met Delacroix in Paris once. One of my lovers, a wealthy Florentine widow, wished to commission Cellini to do a bust of me. I declined.” He kept his voice light and jesting, though none of the gallery’s other guests were standing near them.
    “Are there any pictures of you?”
    “There was a small portrait, by an artist of no particular fame. It was done before I changed. It hung in the library of my old home.” He could barely remember it now, just a faint vision of a thin, serious face over a black scholar’s gown. “I have avoided such temptations. It is not wise to leave so concrete a visual record.”
    “No photographs then? Nothing from the nineteenth century, with a frock coat and mutton chop whiskers?”
    “I was not even certain I could be captured on film until . . . this century,” he finished delicately, having no desire to stir in either of them the memory of the snuff films they had forced him to participate in and her to watch. “And I could hardly grow mutton chop whiskers even if I wished to adopt such a fashion.”
    “For which I’m very grateful,” Ardeth said and they paused at the next photograph. A family posed in front of a large car, parked before a tidy suburban house. The photograph seemed to be old and in black-and-white, but had been coloured in bright hues by the artist. It was set in a gilded frame of handmade roughness. The frame was decorated by strange shapes. Ardeth laughed and Rozokov glanced at her.
    “I made a frame like that when I was in public school.”
    “What are those off shapes?”
    “Elbow macaroni sprayed with gold paint. You see the things you were spared by not attending school here.”
    “And the point of the photograph?”
    “Ironic comment on the suburban dream, I would guess. The photograph itself looks like it’s from the 1950s, which some people persist in believing was the pinnacle of civilization.”
    “The good old days,” he quoted, “I have heard the lament many times. It seems human nature to look back to some lost golden era, whether it be Greece or Rome or the 1950s.”
    “Golden eras that never existed,” Ardeth pointed out.
    “No. I cannot speak for Greece or Rome or even the 1950s, but I can assure you that many times I have had to hold my tongue while some self-proclaimed expert described in glowing terms a time I knew from experience was harsh, plague-ridden and violent.”
    “What about the present time?”
    “It is not the future that was predicted, that is true. But I am not certain that this time’s problems are any worse than those of the