ÀÍÃËÈÉÑÊÈÅ ÑÒÈÕÈ
KATIA KAPOVICH
FROM “GOGOL IN ROME”
(England, Salt Publishing, 2004)
In the Bathhouse
And when at last I used to leave the house
after the lazy Sunday rest,
the sun was high. It saw a town in drowse;
a golden rush of leaves lay to the west.
All northern Russian towns are quite alike:
a river, a long street along the river,
a square with a statue of a leader
stretching his right arm forward like a guide.
The crowd headed where his finger pointed:
to a bathhouse on the river’s bank.
I walked along with the others, a poor student,
a ghost of those blind alleys, nil, a blank.
In the light and shade of my sixteenth October
I carried but a parcel in my hand.
The smell of soap, of public bathhouse timber
is what I call the smell of the motherland.
And I remember skinny women’s shoulders,
curved spines and—with a gasp of awe—
their loose and bulky bellies in the folds
of many motherhoods.
The old stone floor
was warm and smooth under their bare feet,
sunlight fell on it through the upper windows,
rays intermixed with steam and water lit
the hair of the bathing women.
Their faces up, eyes closed, they stood
under the showers, like in an ancient chapel,
and listened to the choirs of migrant birds.
With their necks craned and with their nipples
relaxed under the water, with their palms
caressing chests and falling to their hips,
with bluish veins crisscrossing their slim ankles,
they looked like water nymphs.
Time, hold them still, save them like flies in amber!
I look out of the window across the cobble-stone plaza.
I see the autumn river which like a saw
cuts through the log of the horizon.
The eye finds only what was there before:
the sky, the water, many rivers ago.
Gogol in Rome
Annoyed with the parochialism of the “fantastic city”
of St. Petersburg and close
to the unexpected end of his life,
Gogol escaped to Rome.
He settled in a colony of Russian artists,
sharing lodgings with his bosom friend,
the painter Alexander Ge.
On their long walks they discovered
“the inner meaning of everything.”
Gogol, a perpetual titular councilor,
was almost happy there: he could forget
the petty insults of the civil service
and a failed career at the University. He was secretly
working on Book Two of his magnum opus,
Dead Souls, stealing bits of furniture and parts
of the domestic atmosphere
from paintings of his late-Romantic friends
into the mansions and orchards
of his grotesque characters. His own
descent into madness occurred in strongly marked stages.
He saw that everything was alive in Mother Nature—
trees, stones, sand on the beach, seashells—
and everything called for his empathy.
He stopped eating, stopped drinking wine
(that blood of grapes), turned almost into a Jainist.
His friends were appalled; his mother freaked
whenever she received another of his
strange and ambiguous letters,
full of advice for the improvement of the Fatherland.
His doctors prescribed enemas, hazardous treatment
which seeps potassium out of the body,
causing a deterioration at the heart. He destroyed
his novel, throwing four hundred pages
into the fireplace, and would now spend his days
mostly in bed, covered with three woolen blankets.
“It’s cold in Italy, it’s dark!” he complained to his servant.
The doctors bled him with leeches until he was dead.
The Birth of Anarchy
for Glyn Maxwell
I wish we could drink that oily Arabic coffee
on the open veranda till the end of autumn.
I wish the police declared a curfew
and the waitresses sang their anarchist anthem.
I wish the wind broke into a newsstand
and dragged newspapers to the nearest abyss,
and the lights went out, and all bankrupt street vendors
left their goods at the feet of paupers.
And the wind tore into the booth, and the snow
of print settled slowly, gradually melting,
and the lights died down and glowed low—
and who could wish such a thing but an owl or a cretin?
And paupers got drunk, and policemen threw fits,
stuttering in forked tongues like apostles,
and the day was a night, and acacias’ tips
were coins on fake marble tables.
A Dance without Music
Oleg from Building 4
strips off his clothes
during the morning walk
and dashes among us
with huge kangaroo leaps,
chased by two male nurses.
Say no more. Smoke.
His bluish boxers brave the nippy air.
And, finally, when almost caught,
he grabs my shoulders and holds me like a shield
between himself and them. Together we
stomp our feet on the bald hospital lawn,
while other patients and their relatives, etc.
stare in awe, yet with indifference.
A contradiction? Say no more.
It is a contradiction, if that matters,
unthinkable to Sunday morning visitors,
compatible with the inmates of Building 4.
A Fly on the Faucet
In the train of homes on this map’s slope
I am a passenger in green compartments,
a nut puzzled to the marrow, forever
rummaging the drawers for a missing document.
My foreign passport, my ticket, my hands shake.
Things evaporate, keys play hide and seek,
books rewrite themselves. My favorite characters
rebel against authorial judgment.
Prince Myshkin regains sanity, returns to St. Petersburg,
Levin sells his wheat fields and takes Kitty abroad,
dear Venichka wakes and sees through the window
the unattainable lights of Petushki.
Landscape moves behind curtains,
hills roll out into a plain. Last night I noticed
we were going slower: a bookshelf in a suitcase,
the windmill of a dusty fan, a fly on the faucet.
At the Kishinev School for Deaf and Mute Children
My first autumn after college I worked
at the Kishinev School for the Deaf and Mute,
whose voices were not speech,
yet sounded like a language.
A foreign language, muffled and unknown
to the teachers. Its strange vowels,
born in their windpipes,
burned away in their throats.
I wrote the alphabet on the blackboard,
watched them move their lips as they
tried to articulate the sounds of Russian,
but no one could help them.
Yet there was a children’s god in the classroom
who guided them across quicksand
to where the Tower of Babel stood crumbling
and filled their mouths with the ABCs.
They Called Them “Blue”
They called them “blue” and mentioned them in whispers,
as if they represented a sinister cult.
This couple lived in a bohemian slum,
where most Moldovan gays rented cheap rooms.
I had never been there
until a schoolmate from that neighborhood
took me to check them out. Putting out our cigarettes,
we climbed the stairs to the top floor.
A gray haired man opened the door,
looking like a monk in a monumental bathrobe.
He made us Turkish coffee and scratched his tonsure:
“Where shall I put this?” I realized
that their place had no furniture except for a bookcase.
Sergey and was a book binder and restorer of rare books
at a local history archive. He had learned his trade in jail,
doing time for homosexuality. Books were all he had.
The room’s large square window offered
a majestic view of Kishinev slums. In the kitchen,
a tape recorder played non-stop, a guitar and a violin
vying with each other. Czech jazz, he explained,
anticipating my question.
Then his friend arrived, a young underground artist
with an enormous watermelon in his arms.
“I stood in a line for a damn hour,”
he cursed, “This thing had better be ripe,
or I’ll drop it out the window!”
The watermelon soon revealed his green interiors.
We ate it with spoons, listening to the music,
which I liked. I still remember the watery taste,
the many seeds that were left when the rest was gone.
A Komsomol Act
He was the Komsomol Leader of our class,
and I a troubled girl.
He once paid me a visit when I was home sick
and sat down on my narrow couch.
He said that I should read Lenin’s works
and brush up my physics and math.
I told him to shut up and kissed his mouth
and smelled his chewing gum breath.
His embrace tightened on my shoulder blades,
his Komsomol badge pricked my neck.
I remember the ceiling growing darker above us,
and darker, and darker, and dark.
To the sounds of winter, trolleybus tinkles,
feet trotting across snow,
Lenin smiled shrewdly and closed his eyes
between our slippers on the floor.
Self-Portrait in Pajamas
Who is this sleepy, gloomy scarecrow
in morning knots of her own red hair,
who sits at the kitchen table
without breakfast?
Water shadows dance on the wall
among grape leaves.
Is she the same me
that forgot to shut the faucet off
before going to bed last night?
Water drips into the kitchen sink,
a vine breaks in the wallpaper vineyard,
soy soap melts on zinc.
A Paper Plane to Nowhere
There was one autumn vulnerable light
locked in the transparent and fragile objects
of a mental hospital within my sight.
I took my medicine without progress,
which made me meditative but not bright.
Each day I woke at seven, ate bland food,
drank weak cold tea and walked under the escort
of a physician in an unfriendly mood
to a remote section. Here my imprisonment
became almost inanimate, absurd.
Among some loonies in the corridor
I’d wait in a silent line for the door
to open wide and let me in again.
The male nurse called with a phonetic flaw:
the stress fell either after or before,
but not in the golden mean of my strange name.
I was eighteen, morose, a little blind,
bereft of glasses after that fistfight
with a policeman. Thus I was arrested
and woke up on a rough asylum bed.
Evil regimes must kill, but understand
who has an Achilles’ heel, who an Achilles’ head.
Slow as a turtle after taking pills,
I walked to the “art therapy” ward, where patients
made paper boxes or “developed new skills,”
e.g. cleaning rusty irons, knitting mittens
and socks for patient nurses and impatient docs.
But I would always doze or, playing hooky,
read a forbidden book under the desk
with nurses in the background watching hockey.
Then one good day they brought a bunch of kids,
who limped, and drooled, and smiled with their wry mouths.
They looked at us from behind heavy eyelids
and couldn’t do a thing. After two hours
they were all taken back. Some fellows said:
“Those kids looked really, really sad.”
Another day they came again and stared
at us, the other patients. No one cared.
They were mumbling a dark stifled cry,
sometimes they touched the paper, gave a shy
and happy sound of comprehension. Weird!
They had no difference, but their clothes did.
There were skirts and pants. A female child
came close and bestowed on me a glance
of admiration in her greenish eyes.
I looked in them and saw an abyss of sadness,
the asylum of our mutual madness.
I looked into her eyes and saw my face
and yellow spots of Russian swamps in April,
a chain of golden lights, a lace of days,
while she stood still, a little ugly angel.
I made a box out of gray paper. That
was all that I could give instead
of wisdom to myself and to that orphan.
But she seemed happy with my paper coffin.
Her name was Carmen. Colorless and sloppy,
her flesh was older than her mind.
To stare at nothing seemed to be her hobby,
as well as mine.
That autumn, just to meet her expectations,
I learned to make all kinds of paper things:
planes, boxes, trains and even railway stations,
and white, white ships, and cranes with widespread wings...
They flew and swam across the dirty table,
across the lakes of glue, and seas of paint
toward the window with its yellow maple,
whose autumn brushes always were so wet.
That eighteenth autumn, all those ugly ducklings
taught me to laugh at the slapstick universe.
Forgiveness and forgetfulness, my darling,
oh my Carmen! My life is also scarce
and made of paper.
In the evening, nurses
would take them back to the orphanage and I
would walk across the park which mumbled verses
in the blind alleys for a lullaby.
Anna-Maria and the Others
It was a boring school party.
Two girls, twin sisters and very pretty,
Anna, Maria, danced. The others watched and yawned
and swapped teenager jokes. Some stood alone,
who couldn’t dance at all. But what a pity!
I was a part of that salt pillar party.
Then one by one we gathered in the school yard
and fled to smoke a bitter cigarette.
It was past sunset, and the grass was wet.
We sneaked into an open swimming pool.
Climbing over the fence was not too hard.
The water was as radiant as it was cool.
We sat on dewy benches, had a chat.
The night above us winked, lazily spat
a star or two into the pool; its dome
lay on the bottom like a magic stone,
and linden trees strewed white nightmares.
The moon like a moonwalker went upstairs.
The twins—we simply called them Anna-Maria—
went to the edge of the tiles and touched the water.
“It is all right!”—and they took off their sweaters,
skirts and socks. It was becoming clear
that they were serious about this scary matter.
Yes, they were serious about the matter.
Anna was slimmer and more blonde, and she
splashed us with laughter, water, and Maria
swam to the other side and sat under a tree.
Two years later she would also flee
abroad with a ballet club. From our hemisphere
we watched her step to the edge and disappear.
With one long breath we made up all our minds.
We kicked off our trousers, we threw down
our T-shirts, ribbons, fears. Naked gods
we skinny-dipped in the moonlit water, so at odds
with the dark airs of the provincial town:
may hoary Neptune bless its sparkling spawn!
As years go by, the smell of that chlorine
evaporates from the nostrils, stars get blurry,
the full white moon becomes more clandestine
on the dark bottom of the pool, as does glory
for all those water-shaking cherubim.
A deep long breath, and then I’ll dive again
and almost choke and faint, but then regain
myself and find the moon under my feet,
the twins in its white orbit swim with speed,
the boys keep racing in the upper layers,
and linden trees unfold their linden fairs.
Apartment 75
The obese woman who used to wake up
our whole house by starting her Subaru at 6 a.m.
has committed suicide. Snow
hangs like a set of unlaundered sheets
in the windows. When I walked into
her seventh floor studio, the standard lamp
was still on, but could only light itself,
refusing to interfere with the dull dusk
of the interior the police had already searched.
For the first time, I felt an urge to look at her face
and perhaps to see something more distinctly
than the triviality of neighborhood permits
and the mystery of suicide allows,
but her features were shut down without offense.
I only remember a chair missing its rear legs,
shoved up against the wall for balance.
A Haircut
A three-storied house of limestone and oak wood
hid on the margins of a southern city.
Here they lived. Here her mother stood,
watching her kick a pebble with her foot.
The pebble was an alien on this dusty
road to her school, and it took another route.
Here she stumbled, winced and dropped her bag,
rubbed a hurt toe in a worn summer sandal.
A boy whistled... to her? No, to his dog.
The English spaniel flew past the girl
on flapping ears like a spotty angel.
Blue shades patched up the bald spots among grass.
A pretzel’s “8” broke in her hand into two zeroes.
Here she caught up with a school friend. Here again
they separated on the narrow path, but soon
she caught up with herself in the barber’s mirrors.
Years later she’d recall that shabby shop.
Its open door revealed a tongue of gauze,
the scissors’ silver swallow touched her top
and bare neck with cold hope
that while she sat here, the clock, too, would doze
like the big fly on the big barber’s nose.
Drowned in a big leather armchair, here she sat.
A white starched cloth slipped from a pointed shoulder.
“Cheap haircuts for boys,” promised the ad
to the white walls. And thus no Samson’s dread
tortured her mind or made her older.
Trimmed hair prickling her back, she stepped outdoors.
Good bye, small world behind the looking-glasses!
Good bye, old crippled clock, grey marble floors,
crumpled cocoons of towels with hairy laces!
From flower to flower, from tree to tree
she dashed to school through the dry boiling air.
Just once she stopped, looked back and waved to me,
to nobody, a guest from nowhere.
Orpheus in the Subway
A skeptic, perfect pitch, but the worst student
in our class, he emigrated from Russia to the US
in 79 and studied the violin at the Boston Conservatory.
I’d never seen him since school,
but only heard from others that he’d dropped out
because of a serious psychiatric problem
and turned into a drug addict to boot.
In 92, trying to find out how many angels
would fit on the point of the needle, as they say,
Alex committed suicide.
Not long ago, during a visit to New York,
I saw him in the subway, alive, playing his violin
in a passage connecting two stations.
I recognized his face and yellow skin
(his father was Korean, his mother Jewish);
he was still lanky and stooped as usual.
I waited for him to finish his medley
of Russian pop songs before approaching him.
“What are you doing here?!”—“Just playing, why?”—
“What do you mean ‘just playing’? I was told
you were...” I realized that it would be wrong
to say “dead,” and paused, staring at the familiar mole
over his right eyebrow. “Each blessed day
I die a hundred times,” he quoted Mandelshtam.
A train went by, a crowd came between us,
separating us for a minute, but when it drained,
he was no longer there.
The tunnel’s gray tiled walls and gum-flecked cement
soon filled with a fresh crowd,
and I fled with them, thinking perhaps
he didn’t want to see me. This was, after all,
his labyrinth, and my life
was already complicated enough without this.
Then on the train it suddenly dawned on me.
He wasn’t wearing his glasses!
Near-sighted from an early age,
he must have mistaken me for someone else.
Hurdles
The last time I ran hurdles I showed up
early for the competition. There was still
snow on the Kishinev stadium. Three or four workers
were sweeping it from the tracks.
I took off my coat and dress in a dim locker room
and put on my blue shorts and a white
race jersey with a well-worn number three
printed in red over my chest. Then the other girls
began to arrive, smelling of snow.
Natasha had a strong body and long legs.
When she removed her hair clasp, her blond hair
fell like a mane over her bare shoulder-blades.
Ira, a Tatar girl, was dark and had jet-black eyes.
I knew she was the best in spite of her short stature.
Even Olga, an absent-minded freckled dawdler,
had better chances than I at sixteen.
I left my eyeglasses in the locker and came out
to stretch and warm up before the final race.
Our skin crawling in the cold, white vapor at our nostrils,
ponytails... We looked at each other one last time
at the start, before turning into four racehorses.
The pistol awakened us, startling every nerve.
Each step was taut but light-footed. Our elastic ligaments
and warm muscles hurled us through cold winter air.
Clearing hurdle after hurdle, we knew no gravity.
When it was over I looked around and saw the others.
They were behind me. Strangely enough,
it didn’t matter to me any longer.
We were tired, and our shoulder-bags felt heavy
as we walked to the bus stop, trotting on ice,
making small talk under our umbrellas.
That Moldovan February was drizzly,
but it was getting warmer toward noon.
The next summer I moved to another city
to study literature.
Are they still running through snow behind me?
At the Young Pioneer Camp
That summer day was dim, the yellow dorms
of our Young Pioneer camp winked through the fence
of rain, when the bus stopped by the doors
of the main office building, exhaling us.
Uniform white shirts, blue shorts, scarlet neckerchiefs,
we headed upstairs for our physicals,
were checked for diarrhea, headaches, chickenpox,
bad teeth and humiliating lice.
“Are you a boy or a girl?”—a nurse asked me.
I blushed and whispered that I was a girl.
At thirteen I was as flat as veneer,
wore short haircuts and bit my nails.
I’d been eating unwashed fruits for a week
hoping my tests would reveal parasites
and they’d send me home. I walked heavy-footed
out of the lab and into the night.
The rain had stopped, crickets were trilling,
my roommates were asleep, a lonely lightbulb
under the ceiling lit their faces against
gray flat pillows on ancient standard bunks.
An iron frame, a mattress with bad springs,
a clock above my head without one hand...
I opened my journal and wrote “childhood stinks”
and closed my eyes. They were full of sand.
Veronica’s Secret Life
My beautiful cousin Veronica is
a nightclub singer,
a full time imitation of Edith Piaf.
She loves a man desperately for a half a year,
then hates him passionately for a month
and walks out on him without a note
in the middle of a night
to confirm the reality of the surreal.
Hopelessly young, careless, sensual,
yet a loner.
Her understanding parents keep inviting her back
to their Brooklyn house,
always packed with relatives in transit from Riga;
she isn’t fond of her kin and rejects the invitation.
Unbeknownst to them, she rents
a $1,500 studio in Manhattan,
where she will inexorably retreat
“to clean her feathers.” I sympathize with her escapism. Besides,
I’m in love with her fancy, messy place
where her cosmetics sleep on the sofa
next to a felt hat, silk socks, an emerald tie
and two unmatched concert shoes with broken heels.
Her current lover drives her to Boston
and they stay with me over Thanksgiving.
While shuffling maps of Massachusetts roads
in my dark Cambridge room,
he informs me that they are planning to get married
and to throw a big wedding party.
“Will you propose to her?”—“Inevitably!” he solemnly nods.
Robert wears old-fashioned sideburns and a wedge beard.
He is slim and awfully sweet, but has colorless eyes.
“What do you do for a living?”—“I am a photographer.
That’s how we met, you know.
She came to have her picture taken
for her citizenship papers, you know.”
There is something annoying about this “you know.”
Veronica calls me from New York every time
they quarrel. “Things happen.
We stop loving ourselves
if we start spending too much time together.”
He objects to her habit of bringing home friends
after her concerts. For the first time
in her American emancipated life
Veronica succumbs.
Five months later he calls me crying:
“She ditched without explanation. Why?”—
“I have no idea.” That night she told me,
“No, nothing is wrong. I’ll live by myself.
I like my own life, waking late,
not emptying my ashtray every half an hour.
Today I went into the bathroom
and saw something he would have killed me for:
my panties and bra on an open book
of modern French poetry, and I rejoiced.”
Silhouette
A gray winter sun moves across his workshop
with an inspection of the tools;
it glints on a tin bucket, shuns the broom,
but lingers on the rusty metal
of the mop with its mermaid tail.
A table measuring two square meters
holds a freshly crafted chair.
The old carpenter smokes
while fretsawing out of white veneer
the silhouette of his guest, a girl of four.
Then, polishing the figure
to smooth it out for her palm,
he whistles a Moldavian peasant tune:
ti-tu-ta-ta-ta, ti-tu-ta-ta tam...
Sawdust dances in the room.
She sits down on the floor and draws
in the dust with her finger,
then takes his gift and kisses his bearded
cheek smelling of tobacco and rosin.
It’s late and time for her dinner.
In an hour they will find him dead
in the same chair, his eyes open,
the sand-paper fallen from his hand,
his head on the table, the fresh black void
in the veneer being the last thing he touched.
Privacy
Yellow bamboo shoots stand in a pool of water
like sharpened pencils, ready for winter.
An electric mower leans black against the wall
on a bed of mud.
“No trespassing!” sounds like an invitation
to share a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade
with the spirits of this deserted space.
The old Victorian house wears black curtains
mourning the deceased owner. We open the gate
held together by a rusty bar, and in the driveway
stumble on a heap of old Sunday Times
wrapped in blue plastic.
Death animates the most inanimate objects.
“No trespassing” sounds like “Be my guest!”
We can finally see everything
that was invisible through the dense fence:
a rain-battered rose on a battlefield of weeds
points out toward a star.
The silence seems unbearable,
but as we sit down on the high porch
a telephone rings inside the house
and the answering machine picks up
in an old man’s voice.
Gogol in Jerusalem
for Donald Fanger
It remains unclear whether Gogol really
made a trip to the heart of Christendom
four years before his death. He surely did
borrow a significant sum for this pilgrimage
from his religious mother and disappear
from St. Petersburg for a few
months in 1848. He was severely
depressed after the literary scandal surrounding his
Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends.
Many former admirers were disgusted with him.
Gogol wanted to escape,
hoping that God would “inspire his soul.”
He wrote letters throughout his journey,
whether imaginary or not.
He described the beauty of the Promised Land,
praised the underground sewers built
by Roman architects in Old Jerusalem,
drew a pencil sketch of the Second Temple. Still,
there is something suspicious about these letters.
The witness seems too detached from the evidence.
The style of his Jerusalem travelogue
is more reminiscent of the Jerusalem chapter
of a nineteenth-century travel guide
than of St. Petersburg Tales or Dead Souls.
The letters, addressed mostly to his confessor,
arrived postmarked, but it was easy
to forge such things in those days,
and Gogol the amateur alchemist
would have had no trouble handling sealing-wax.
If he did visit Jerusalem, then why did
the greatest storyteller Russia had ever known
remain forever silent about it afterwards?
But if he did not, where was he?
Diogenes
In lethargic October
worn sneakers hang from a tree,
a plastic bag dances a dervish dance
in the driveway, high pitched
ambulance sirens grow louder every day,
as if trying to shout each other down.
Saturday comes,
and I sit down on the balcony, facing the rain.
A homeless man in the private parking lot
packs his blankets into a black plastic trash can.
He’ll soon go away for the winter
and the trash can, his summer home,
will be chained to the fence.
A Landscape with Laundering Women
for Lisa Nold
Back in the Urals the torches of stars
burn dimly in the frozen swirling air.
People’s long shadows die under cars,
rushing from city darkness to nowhere.
Up here in the Urals, where I serve
the sentence of my youth, a winter comes in fall
and never leaves, like that proverbial guest
just out of a Soviet jail.
My window faces a pier. Near-sighted water
in the lake’s gray eye reflects the wooden bridge.
On Sunday women come to do their laundry.
From where I sit I see them on the edge
of the bank. Their red hands fall like roses
in the narrow ice-holes with linen shirts.
In the deserts of snow this is the last oasis
for travelers and migrating birds,
even for God himself—on one of the days
when a crescent sun sets
early above the mining town, extending its rays
to clutch at naked branches in the forest.
The women rinse and squeeze their bedsheets, shake
their wide-spread wings. It’s done. The light is gone.
The landscape is dead: the bridge, the bank, the lake—
each in itself alone, at last alone.
Christmas 2001
A dry northern wind at Christmas
brings clouds of seagulls to Cambridge,
landing them at 10 A.M.
upon Harvard’s stadium.
I am dishonest,
I steal my way in to run here
once in a while without authorization,
but right now I’m just passing by.
Tall bleachers to my right
across the hollow amphitheater of winter
seem ready to surrender
to snow, but there is none.
A man in a greasy Santa uniform
ambles from the direction of Mt. Auburn Cemetery
with an empty cigar box in his hands.
He sets it down on the curbstone.
“Free. Take anything you need,”
reads the handwritten inscription
in fat purple highlighter.
The Green One over There
My half-brother had dark sad eyes, wheaten hair
and the same gorgeous skin his mother had.
He was cute and smart and innately kind,
unlike me at his age, according to our father.
Five years younger than me,
Tim attracted all the love
my father had frozen in his heart
when I was growing up.
Tim was brought up on my old books.
He did better than I with poetry,
reciting by six some “grownup” verses
which I couldn’t memorize at eleven.
At eight he wrote a poem
at the back of his math exercise book
and forgot about it.
It was a love poem
with an underlined dedication, “To A.”
It so happened that I knew who A was.
The poem read as follows:
“I loved and missed her so much
that I forgot what she looked like,
and when she entered the classroom
in the morning, I did not recognize her.
I did not recognize her long face,
nor her slow neck, nor her skinny hands,
I had completely forgotten her green eyes.”
It was quite a work of art, in my opinion,
but I told him that to sigh about
legs and necks and eyes
was sentimental and girlish.
He listened to me with dry eyes
and then tore out the page and threw it away
into the wastebasket.
He never wrote poetry again, but I did.
At fifteen I wrote a short story
which had some success and was even
published in a teenager literary magazine
called “Asterisks.” It was around that time
that I stopped visiting my dad’s house
after realizing
that everything about this boy
put me down, humiliated me
and filled me with jealousy.
I would meet with dad on one condition:
if he wanted to see me,
he had to come to my place
or to stop by at the artsy cafe,
where my older friend Lena and I
would go after school
to sip strawberry milkshakes.
One day my father
came to my school during class hours
to take me to a hospital: the night before
my half brother had got sick.
We arrived in the middle of the doctor’s rounds.
The waiting area was noisy
and smelled of urine and medication.
Dad had gone inside,
I waited for him to call me in.
Through the door left ajar
I saw a row of iron bunks with striped mattresses.
Tim’s was next to the door.
He lay leaning on a big gray pillow,
a glass of water in his hand.
The doctor wanted him to take a pill,
but he wouldn’t hear of it.
He was willful, obstreperous,
he pushed away the hand of medicine.
“I want that ship, that ship...” he whined.
“What ship?” My father turned pale
and stared at the doctor. “Can’t you see?
The green one, over there!” cried Tim,
inserting his finger in the glass of water
where a green ship, a three-funneled steamer,
was slowly sinking at the time.
Black and White
Twice a year—right before my birthday
and on Christmas Eve—I climb on a chair,
fetch a dusty Adidas shoebox from a shelf
and lay out ancient black-and-white photos
from Russia on the dinner table,
noticing that the glossy paper
has collected some tan in the corners.
One day, in the year, say, 2012,
I’ll be spreading this ritual solitaire
over a bluish tablecloth, and my teenage daughter
will storm out of her room, head in earphones,
look at the collection and ask with lukewarm curiosity
“How do you get them to be black and white like that?”
The Three of Us
First I knew his handwriting. A battlefield
of his scribbles troubled me and appealed
to my eye: letters fought with each other
ferociously, commas flew like war knives
piercing the words they separated. It was a mess,
in other words. Besides, he was left-handed.
It was forbidden to be left-handed
in those days when we still wrote with ink pens
leaking in our pockets, leaving blue stains.
When he went away to study in Leningrad,
he wrote post-cards to his girl-friend Anna,
I read them with her falling in love with him.
She was a Russian beauty with a stubborn phlegmatic face,
the arch of her nose was a bit too high
betraying some arrogance and a logical mind.
She had slow hands, nails covered with French nail polish.
She had three scars from a razor across her right wrist.
And I was only who I was at that time.
We went to Leningrad during the vacation break.
He met us at the airport and brought us to his dorm.
The winter streets were gray, and grayish was the green
of the skies. The three of us hardly talked
to each other. I knew what she was going to say,
that it wasn’t going to work out between them.
They both cried. Next morning she wanted to go back.
The three of us waited in the empty airport
till they announced her flight. The two of us saw her plane
run across the field and take up from the line
punctured with red lights from both sides.
I asked myself why I stayed if she’s gone.
I asked myself what we are in if we are not
in love. The two of us. The following night
I went out and lay on the snow, and my head
got cold. I saw planes, white crosses on the white.
I saw a black pine tree cleave the skies,
letting snow flow on my eyes.
That night we made love silently, his roommates
watching a soccer match on TV in the next room.
Then we lay on our backs under a wall bulb
and talked about our life in Kishinev where we came from,
it was warmer there, more sun and bright colors
even in winter. The south is the south, he said.
Then we moved from his dorm to live with his friends.
We were skinny and could sleep on a narrow couch
in a niche, behind a curtain where their baby slept.
We loved the baby, and the room was like a palace.
We helped his dissident friends write political texts
and to distribute leaflets against the Soviets.
They arrested us very soon, deported me to my town,
where I was treated gently in the asylum
while he was treated badly in Petrozavodsk
and thrown out of the country to the West.
Anna got married, gave birth to a daughter. I doubt
she ever learnt the truth. But could I care less?
Painting a Room
For Irina Kendall
Here on a March day in ’89
I blanch the ceiling and walls with bluish lime.
Drop cloths and old newspapers hide
the hardwood floors. All my furniture has been sold,
or given away to bohemian friends.
There is nothing to eat but bread and wine.
An immigration visa in my pocket, I paint
the small apartment where I’ve lived for ten years.
Taking a break around 4 p.m.,
I sit on the last chair in the empty kitchen,
smoke a cigarette and wipe my tears
with the sleeve of my old pullover.
I am free from regrets but not from pain.
Ten years of fears, unrequited loves, odd jobs,
of night phone calls. Now they’ve disconnected the line.
I drop the ashes in the sink, pour turpentine
into a jar, stirring with a spatula. My heart throbs
in my right palm when I pick up the brush again.
For ten years the window’s turquoise square
has held my eyes in its simple frame.
Now, face to face with the darkening sky,
what more can I say to the glass but thanks
for being transparent, seamless, wide
and stretching perspective across the size
of the visible.
Then I wash the brushes and turn off the light.
This is my last night before moving abroad.
I lie down on the floor, a rolled-up coat
under my head. This is the last night.
Freedom smells of a freshly painted room,
of wooden floors swept with a willow broom.
and of stale raisin bread.
Stanzas to the Stairwell
Here is the stairwell where my shadow lives,
where I smoke inexpensive cigarettes,
where a plastic lion will never catch a kangaroo
in the sand-filled ashtray on the landing.
The stairs in a fresh makeup of blue paint.
The sixth step wears a brown birth mark.
The cement remembers legions of rubber soles—
thank God no one goes barefoot nowadays.
This whole space explodes like an alarm clock
when guests are being buzzed through the front door.
The ramshackle walls can barely hold the ceiling,
but support my back reliably enough.
Come and sit with me here on the stone floor,
like the Biblical Joseph in his dry well,
in this vessel of smoke, where splitting echoes
cascade along Euclidean railings.
Be a guest of honor in my stairwell.
Sit down, unfurl this atlas of emptiness.
Loneliness is a mysterious disease.
Nothing cures it better than a blank wall.
Rendezvous on Sand
Stiff wind rips remnant chimney smoke to shreds,
invades the dark porch, fumbles with the door-bolt,
lets itself in, ruffles up your empty bed,
announcing how you are loved far beyond
these walls, in a new world where now your soul
concludes the concept "wind" cannot be found
in the vernacular, nor in the sagging sails
still at full mast on vessels run aground.
Your breathing quarters no longer limited
by sand, but by the edges of the sky,
this fresh ebb steals the sea from under your toes
and pauses as millennia go by,
while memory, as swift in backward race,
trips on the very spot where once the sand
bore the clear imprint of your shoulder-blade
and yet recovers no such sunlit place.
Things in the Morning
For Ellen Barry
Somebody from the past, as in Chinese predictions,
calls after New Year’s Eve.
The year is still so young in the Victorian mansion.
Then you squeak up the stairs.
A bright red drifting float, the sun disc bobs forever
there, in the winter sky.
And you pick up the phone. Gosh... Not at all... I promise...
Will see you soon. Good bye...
No past is real at 8 after a drinking party.
Things sleep like guests:
in armchairs, on the couch and even in the bathroom,
survivors of the feast.
Old friendship, do not call! Do not invade the garden
of stones and bleeding glass!
Befriend somebody else, my solemn winter Eden,
I want “to miss my chance”.
I shunned you and escaped in swift peregrination
your rigorous fine grind.
I’m a trashy gene of a stone generation.
And I don’t mind.
Cut, Occam’s blade, cut off clockwise in all three windows,
a bird—from its gray flock,
a single flake of snow—from all the winters
when I was missed.
My Sense of Time
The three conditions of classical drama
are fulfilled. There is a season for sowing
seeds, stones, drachmas and words
in a little yard with a bamboo backdrop
where it’s my turn to do the weeding now
in this unity of place, time and action.
This is my second life after all.
I have inclined the hourglass toward the fall,
turning the furry sky upside down,
and now see a fresh moon at my feet
confined to a puddle.
Let this be my new old house
with wet paint on the walls of the world.
Wait till rain cleanses
the ground of its latest signs and imprints.
For she lives best who doesn’t know
where she is from or where to go,
but makes ends meet in the end.
I’m a woman of thirty. I look older.
Mirror rain puddle, I take no offense!
There is a season for a woman’s face
to turn to a different sort of landscape.
There is a time to settle down,
because everyone settles.
Rain. The bamboo whistles about
a woman in a rustic prickly sweater
who sat on a porch, ate a peach, felt better
at the end of the 20th century, watched a cloud,
planted the peach stone
and was gone.
The Tale of Clear Pond
Once again we’ve settled down in the center of Moscow.
Leaving the house, we slip the key under the rug.
We buy our food at the little street market—
grapes, tomatoes, white cheese. Wine is cheap. Bread is dark.
The level of local life is low,
the ruble falls every day, and the same
can be said about the sourdough
of the clouds with the yeast of a long Russian rain.
Grapes! Tomatoes! White cheese!—salesmen yell. A door yawns.
Clear Pond, when it frowns, distorts our faces.
Clear Pond, where are your brown ducks and white swans?
Now we look from the bank at a crow that chases
its white shadow below in the wrinkled copper mirror.
Something is rotten in this city. But look,
the only one crying over the past is the weeping willow
bent over a muddy brook.
We once were a flock on these wet wooden benches,
but we left our nests and drifted astray.
Yet since the earth is round, the meridian trenches
have come a full circle in this rainy May.
The city has called us home for a season. And while the rain lingers
at the doors, we rustle our notebooks, call old friends,
shuffle days as trees shuffle leaves in their crooked fingers,
looking forward to other lands.
A Gentle Hibernation of Lovers
We no longer talk to each other.
When a continental October wind chases leaves,
plastic bags and bluish feathers of smoke,
we tell no fables and share no family stories.
My mother knits in a dull rocking chair,
my husband prepares tomorrow’s lecture,
I mind my late vegetarian dinner.
My mother can ask me only domestic questions
and is always generous with advice.
The current topic is Greek salad:
“Did you add olive oil, apple vinegar, basil?”
This kind of discourse, based on
existential trifles, violates no privacy, but
sometimes I feel like dropping the genre
in favor of something more confidential.
I no longer speak to our neighbor next door,
who studies anthroposophy and law.
All he cares about is whether
I really love Soloviev, that Russian Aquinas,
and what he really thinks of the concept of freedom.
I answer, freedom as an evolutionist myth—
“we originated from apes, so let us all love each other”—
is not freedom. I find no common language with the scholar.
I’d like to talk to my daughter, who seems to be
straightforward and light in her motivations,
but she has just turned eleven months old,
and our conversation falls short of a cognitive point.
“Pumpkin, where’s your orange ball?” I ask.
She listens diligently, grabs my shoe, bites it
and says: “Bunny, my bunny. Papa.”
We have eternity ahead of us to talk.
I talk in my sleep, my husband says.
Last night I caught the tail of a long sentence.
I had dreamed of a locked iron case,
a willow tree and a black starling’s nest.
“These are the three main symptoms of emptiness,”
I heard myself say and was
immediately awakened by my own voice.
I didn’t risk going to bed again and stayed in the kitchen
until the night evaporated.
It’s a pity that we no longer talk till dawn,
that we indulge in gentle hibernation,
betraying the feasts of conversation. It’s
a pity that we open a book and yawn,
and from then on
the only exchange we can count on
is a good-night kiss.
A silly sky falls on the wooden house
like a piece of cloth on a cage with birds.
What did I mean to say? I keep forgetting words,
I grow silent and thirsty, I seal my mouth
with a cup of sweet Lipton tea
with a moonlike lemon slice.
Good night, my love, sleep tight, good night.
Gogol in New York
for Philip
Afraid of the chthonic dragons of his dreams,
he takes a two-horse carriage in Central Park
to go to Brooklyn to a gourmet store
recommended by a friend in St. Petersburg.
After two hours of circling around the Park,
the carriage returns to where it started.
Surprised and angry, Gogol shuffles a deck of dollars.
He appreciates the New Yorkers though. Young men
still looking like men, and young women
also looking like men. He likes
Buddhist monks for their saffron silks,
Catholic clergymen for their white collars
and black cassocks. Naval officers
in their white uniforms and blue service caps
make him amorous and happy.
He sympathizes with the local population
while elbowing his way through Harlem,
still hoping to reach that famous deli.
He stops to buy a Coke at Seven Eleven,
quenching his thirst for bitter Russian lemonade.
He dulls his nostalgia, his pricks of conscience.
He is still hungry, listens to the music
in his intestines and turns most decisive
about making it to Brooklyn.
At 11 p.m. Gogol folds his black umbrella.
Manhattan is still around him.
He devours clams at an Italian restaurant
and washes them down with white wine.
It’s getting dark and cold outside,
but the darker the street, the lighter the skies above it.
Alas, everybody speaks English here.
He knew that people spoke English in New York,
but not to this extent. He is mesmerized by the fact.
He needs someone to talk to at this hour,
he needs a Russian at this point in life.
Perhaps he’ll find one or two in Brooklyn,
if only he could find his way there somehow.
The Rat
Leaving the house for an appointment with the dentist,
the first thing I saw was a dying rat.
It lay on the curb near the hydrant,
going through the shakes. People walked by,
nobody paid attention to it, only I stared.
Because, you see, as much as I’m afraid of
these animals, I suddenly felt sorry for the damn thing,
it wasn’t even an adult rat,
just a baby one: its silver fur was almost transparent,
and the pink skin could be seen through it.
Exterminators had done something in the building
several days ago; they had probably put some
poison in the basement. Its friends and relatives gone,
the thing was dying alone in the freezing light.
My heart pounded and my feet
grew heavy as I dragged them from the porch.
I said to myself: “You didn’t get any sleep last night,
because of the toothache, and now it’s just nerves.”
I looked back several times,
hoping the rat would come to its senses and crawl away,
and when it didn’t, I decided to examine the road
on my left and check whether drivers could see
the rat crouching on the edge of the sidewalk.
At first, the road was empty, but soon a rattling blue Honda,
appeared in the distance. As it approached us, me
and the dying rat, I recognized my ex-husband
behind the wheel. He also saw me, frowned and roared on
down Harvard Street. I hadn’t seen him for almost
two years and knew immediately
that he was still sore from our divorce. That made me
walk faster without turning my head. A dying rat
and an ex-husband in pain—more than enough
for the first three minutes of a walk.
In the dental clinic they told me I had missed
my appointment. “But I’m only ten minutes late!”—
“Ten minutes and two days, to be precise,” said the girl.
She was sorry she couldn’t help. I had misheard the date
on the telephone, mistaken the seventeenth
for the nineteenth. I made another
appointment and left the clinic, but instead
of going straight home decided to visit a coffee place.
I walked to the coffee place and couldn’t
stop thinking of the rat and of my ex-husband.
Why did it have to be so? It was his fault
that he was bitter and stubborn. But it was I
who had left him, after all.
I sat at an outside table, a paper cup in my hand,
trying to write something. (“Perhaps this will cure me...”)
My tooth started bothering me again,
but this time I almost welcomed the pain—it was so real
compared to my access of love and guilt.
I realized that I was freezing,
that my bare hands and my feet in my new summer shoes
were freezing. According to the clock on the arch,
I had sat at the table for two hours. A big
gray cloud had swallowed the sun and hung
heavily over the street. Others had gone inside
to find warmth and refills,
but I remained outdoors. The lights came on.
“Is anyone using this chair?” I heard a voice
and turned my head expecting to see
a blind person with a stick and perhaps a guide dog,
or else why would anyone ask such a question?
But I saw a young couple
not bothered by the imminence of rain. Their lit cigarettes
reminded me of us in our twenties:
withdrawn from everything,
almost saddened by the burden of love,
rendered helpless by its power.
“No, no one is using this chair.”
Generation K
There is one lucid dream with open eyes:
I lie down on the floor, the ceiling a stage,
and see us gently floating, white on white,
or hanging still like bats in Plato’s cave.
We all adore loud colors, drink on the stairs,
smoke too much and speak too loudly,
drive ramshackle cars with broken gears
from hill to valley.
We mumble in English with a heavy accent,
dropping the articles like cigarette ashes,
and suddenly forget at the end of a sentence
its initial station.
We don’t really care what clothes we wear
and still enjoy French movies for their smack
of sexuality. We raise the collars
of our raincoats, turning our backs
on a stray foreigner finding a hotel
in the dark capital where we stay as guests
until we transit to a better world
as painlessly as moving to the West.
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