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THE RIVER Yo soy el río que canta al mediodía y a los hombres, que canta ante sus tumbas, el que vuelve su rostro ante los cauces sagrados. from El Río, Javier Heraud, for 15th May 1963 Vsevolod
THE RIVER
am white – lying on white sheets staring
at the ice-white ceiling. Outside there must be snow – it comes back through
the window to me. There’s a spray of waxy red flowers, like sparks of lantern:
apple-wax on the floors that I can’t see. I remember those broad rivers in the
taiga, the banks pale as egg-yolks with mimosa, here and there smudged with
frost like rust-blood specks of dead fertility. Out into the slow waters,
staring into the pale sunset, pale as egg-yolk. And the frost would come,
freeze the current, freeze the fishermen in the floe – float them down in the
morning spate, dead, white. Only a few freckles dim through the hoar-frost –
lantern-shapes, sickle-shapes: the moon pale as a yolk, and the pale lantern of
morning sun, ornament between the white sheets of snow and the Chinese-white of
the sky. The fishermen lying like husked almonds under a bowl with two pale
symbols – or pale, pale cigars – a corpse wrapped in pale cigar-leaves launched
into the morning spate, waking, as the colours deepen, to the jaguar and the
mimosa. The jaguar pale as a cigar leaf and dark as almond husk. The jaguar,
heavy with its own story, thinks, and slowly dips its dark tail towards the
Chinese-white – inscribes a character upon that other river. Heavy with my story, under the branch, I
smell the rasp of cat-smell: ‘the third river is always that of death’.
How slowly and grudgingly I came into the life of mankind, how
grudgingly had I lingered over the taste of my marrow – a spoonful at a time –
first the red caviar, then the black. Like a swimmer lowering himself from a
branch, like a jaguar lying over the cooling current, or a fisherman settling
into his boat, easing it into the stream, running the lines over his lined
palm. People like me – who approach the new with diffidence and mistrust,
resenting the old for its legacy of effeteness: who know that their sensibility
was licked off other people’s lives, like the sugar off a sugar-plum, replaced
craftily in granny’s box. Later, the family watching as my guilt was
discovered, and I had to eat it, dark and fluffed-out with dust. My God! We even knew the taste of guilt!
How long before I could pull a fish from my river, look it in the eye and not
see sugar-plums? Plump little boy – as the fashion was – gaseous, troubled with
athlete’s foot – though not performance. ‘I want to join the
Bolsheviks’ – how could I come to say that, at least without examinations and
tests to steel me? My aunt had her voluntary work, Gleb the coachman had a
wooden leg and the promise of another if the cold split it as he drove aunt to
her committees ... What was wrong with
being a liberal, trusting the peasant soul as one trusts a mattress of
goosedown? Why not wait for Herr Hartmann’s locomotive to take me (‘service
before everything’) to a provincial school – turning the merchant’s son away
from commerce, towards languor ... I had been in uniform since I was old
enough to know that after all there were other beings like me ... I remember Anatol saying to me, ‘It’s fine
for you Russians – you’ll be free when the Tsar’s dead – we will have to wait
till we’re not Jews any more ... ’ FAMILY HAPPINESS My aunt talked of morphology, though the colours never
deepened in her room – a brown cat playing with its tail, a samovar of white
metal, the unread French novels yellowing like mimosa – and I, little Vsevolod,
whom she called the ‘idiot of the family’, butt of her boredom, watching the
mimosa-yellow globes bubbling under the dead-white cornices of the
drawing-room, the brown cat playing with little globes that fringed aunt’s
shawl – dreaming of jaguars... SHOOTING They look like partridges themselves, down-soft English jackets
the colour of bracken, peaked caps blindly scanning for mother’s return. Bang,
bang – passing along the line, a cruel spoof, like grandmother’s picture of
dead hunters buried by their prey – the boars grinning. I am standing there,
dressed as a little boy, holding Miss Bookinyum’s hand – I remember only her
hand, her name softened and rounded as I liked it ... How often she thrust those steely English syllables into my jaws,
like a curb, pressing down my tongue when it was sugar-plums I wanted. I am
standing in my biography, remembering the snails curled like tabbies in the
ferns. The smell of cordite, pigeon’s blood: blood on the breast feathers
reminds me of my uncle’s purple greatcoat. His shiny boots carried him back to
us – killed, they told me, at the Front. Where else should a soldier die, I
thought, but smashed in at the chest, or with a single pellet-hole through
which his memory leaked out, blood spilling like celluloid falling away from
the spool? When these hunters went to war, I thought of their bodies, soft and
warm in piles: a pleasant accumulation, counted and marvelled over by Yuri the
loader ... ‘Come along now – little boys shouldn’t spend too long with dead
animals.’ This, my earliest memory, is the last tableau I’ve contrived. I hid
the snails, the pink cardboard of the cartridges, little clots of authenticity
like chocolate-flakes, quartzes in a load of gravel ... Yes, here I am, I recognise myself: my
Norfolk jacket – ‘Norfolk is a province by the sea’, – like Lapland, Miss
Bookinyum milking reindeer. I hid these fossils for myself to find: standing
solemn in the sepia light, played hide-and-seek to guarantee my future. My past
is buried like a city, ordered, persistent as syntax. Below the lowest level –
clay. EDUCATION The sun struggling in the evening haze, like a golden fish
slowly wrestled to the shoreline, reminded me of my childhood, of the muddy
deaths of winter, of the ominous coming of spring, of the new knowledge already
stored in the heads and the sticks of my teachers – some of it sharp, pointed,
rigorous, like the knuckle-rapper of Shterner, the mathematician – some of it
ill-formed, ungainly, like the lath still covered with plaster which Volkov
used to chalk our backs ... How I grew
to hate those overstuffed categories of the bourgeoisie – they were like my
aunt’s Chesterfields, tufted with hair that could be human, spotted with ink
and bound in bookman’s calf. How to escape from what the adults already knew –
how, when one was small and could not run fast, could I escape those
intellectual sticks? I longed for books with blank pages, but my family, to
economise, made me use textbooks whose margins were cluttered with the fumbling
errors of my predecessors – commentaries on commentaries – every printed
paragraph eagerly appended with sycophantic manuscript agreement, some young
mind anxious to suggest still more examples to the pedant who’d managed to steal
my time long after he’d entombed his own in these foxy pages. GREAT MUDHOLE Marx and Engels looking for new science in the bosom of the old
society – so I too, tiring of the bosoms of old society, wandered down the
avenues of constituted reality, watching the old soldiers, their greatcoats
grey as dust, shuffle past the new subalterns – their coats with a tinge of
purple showing through, like plum flesh under the bloom. Natasha’s pink tongue
lic7king reality like ice-cream: keep at it, little girl, it will soon all be
gone. ... it was odd to have
made a revolution, and to be hated. Even people who should have flocked to
Robespierre and cheered the tumbrils thought us the most disagreeable and disgraceful
fellows. Some hated us because we’d changed the names of things. I saw people
who knew the city from childhood standing puzzled on street corners – ‘Why now
– this used to be Ekaterinskaia: who’s this fellow they’ve put up in its place?
Who’s crazy here? Did I take the wrong turn? ... ’ How everything hurt in those days.
Overnight, everyone in Russia had forgotten how to make boots: all they could
make was blisters. You’d have thought policemen had never been seen in the
empire before, there was such a fuss ...
And in the midst of it, we Bolsheviks strode – huge strides – freeing
the slaves, emancipating this, stopping that, organising the people of regions
so huge and so distant they didn’t even know where they lived ... and all the while, more and more people clinging
to our coat-tails, slowing us down. I myself was quite exhausted when they sent
me to the fishermen. On the cart that took me there, I designed a canning
factory, a big fishing collective, and a station for marine biology. You could
tell where the village began: the ruts in the road became the channels of an
estuary. The rich peasants kept dogs in their boats to bark at the poor
peasants who ate the fish scraps the others dropped to their animals. Most of
the villagers never went out into the current in their boats – which were too
rotten to be trusted: they threw lines from their houses into the mud: the
stranded eels were glad enough for a snap at the after-life. The dogs barked to
each other all day – they were the intellectuals of the place ...
bow-wow about summed up the place anyway. Sometimes the fishermen would swap fish
for vegetables if someone with a cartload happened to be passing, but neither
side was excited enough by the transaction to maintain it on a regular basis.
Across the bay, there were fine sites for houses – but the men had sold their
axes to buy hooks when they first built the village. Upstream the mimosa hung
in the fog, like drops of congealed sunlight. Where the river was narrower,
they could have set fish traps, or lines across the river. But their life in the
mud was living witness to their religion, its message of submission to the
worst that nature could devise. Sometimes they would gather together and sing
what must have been versions of hymns – sylvan modes predominated. Perhaps
they’d been forest dwellers, so feckless they burned down their home. At times,
the men would try to carve the supports of their houses into crude totems, but
the wood was rotted through, and the whole structure was endangered. Why had these people let nature defeat
them so decisively? ‘We would rather be victims of nature than of other men,’
they said. ‘We prefer to escape the slavery of men by being enslaved to
nature,’ they said. ‘We have our pride ... ’ SPRING IN GREAT
MUDHOLE … and yet, I remember another people – sacrificing themselves
like polyps so that their reef would rise above the sea, support higher forms
of life, and themselves becoming higher with the sacrifice. In order to die as
a human being, you have to have lived as one. The villagers were reassured that the
mud would liquefy: would wrinkle, harden and crack like parched elephants’
skin, would turn again to liquid and then freeze. The mud wasn’t going anywhere
and neither were they. The mud was an admirable, even a philosophical,
presentation of their own condition. But at least they had the good grace to
be miserable without the services of intellectuals – unless, as I’ve said, you
count the dogs. They had legends, but did not much enjoy them. They apologised
for telling them. But no one felt it necessary to have poets, astronomers,
playwrights, printers’ devils, soubrettes, promoters, society prize-fighters –
to express their desires. If anyone had a desire, he expressed it immediately –
by drifting on the current out of sight of Great Mudhole – perhaps to freeze to
death, who knew? The village existed before desire and outside hypocrisy. At the end of three months, I had
imported only one significant expression of man’s profoundest need – a red flag
which I flew from the ridge-pole of my hut. For a time it seemed to be
bleaching pink, but then some reaction in the dye took hold. I feared the
village would soon be sailing under the black flag of anarchy, where it
belonged ... But I myself was at fault: I did not
know these people. They could have been pine-trees for all I knew of them. They
nicknamed me ‘The Detonator’ – but when mud is aroused, it just falls back into
place – only the detonator is no more. And yet – I had to get this place moving
... THE
CAT
Her tail floats like a feather in the ruined garden:
loosestrife, mallow, hollyhock, survive before the denser dwarf-wood takes
over. Her feather – one of exploration – intuitive, empirical, but unassuming.
Writing from the nose – a prose that will not take in this wetness, sliding
from hillock to puddle, a watery ink – characters blurred and swollen, like
black twigs, newts or turds dropped in water ... ALEKSANDRA Aleksandra – how she disembodied me: sleeping with me, she said,
was like sleeping with the future; I was like a bill which became due only long
after she would have worn out the merchandise. Nature asserted itself in the ruins: the
river mist washed out our horses’ bodies like a film of silver on a photograph.
Green weeds, stuffed with red berries like a salmon’s roe, stood sharp in the
tumbled thatch. The copper plates on the dome of the church had burst away from
their frame, clanging Roman armour with every languid motion of the mist.
Everywhere water – the horses breathed out spume, the reins were heavy as the
strings on a fishing net: we came slowly down the main street, like drowning
sailors struggling their way down into Atlantis ... The grass was silver, the walls of the
biggest house blue, grey, purple, the skin of a man scorched with gunpowder.
The fire had swept through the lilac and syringa in front of the house,
flattened their colours on the plaster ... How frightened Aleksandra was to see us,
wet and hairy as otters, coming to take a bite of her soft flank! ‘Hey, little
salmon,’ someone shouted, ‘swim to shore with me!’ Strange, how that first
gesture, that movement between flight and question, should have summarised our
time together, the mist cutting us off. Like the jaguar I remember on that other
river, sitting on its invisible bough above the mist, floating in one dimension
while I floated past him in two. What a trick she had of looking past me – she
thought all the Reds were common fellows, mechanics, shoemakers, drunken
peasants: she never understood why the Whites would burn the town – it just
made us seem the worse. How delicate to introduce myself to this strangeness,
who could be my cousin ... CHORDS The piano repeated six bars over and over through the hazy
afternoon fields, the notes intense, distorted by the columns of hot dust
rising tall as poplars. It was early summer, and we peered through the heat
like half-blind artisans looking at life through their mica windows ... Soldiers were drilling: you could see the
distant ranks incline, turn from grey to plum to purple as the light caught the
planes. Then, the orders – coming slowly and indistinctly, as falsetto comment
on the movements already executed. The piano caught a phrase in proper time –
repeated it, wrongly. It was early summer: only the mice had hopes for the
harvest – the wheat was green and sour. I oiled our typewriter and wrote
‘Lontano’ ... the sound of the typing
startled us, it was so even and synchronous. ‘Praise God,’ said someone, ‘here
come tomorrow’s orders. No sooner has he oiled the typewriter than he write
orders with it. No sooner cleaned his gun, he shoots it at some poor idiot.’ Far away the little wedges of infantry
anticipated the feeble voices of their officers and started to march towards
the village. The piano stopped – a cicada numbed to silence by the first chill
of the night. We all knew the front would be breached at dawn, and we looked at
the wheat-fields, thinking of our bodies ripening there all summer: war, land,
bread. So long as there was someone left to make the harvest ... Mary-Lou SPRING
IN CANADA
It’s spring again. The cat – Mike calls her ‘Butch’ – grabs the
doorposts, scampers. I approach Mike through the cat – she licks herself down
after each exertion, paws and shoulders, hunts the paper, more assiduous than
any archivist. Those old communists, grandfather’s friends – they pride
themselves so on living. They have it all straightened out: you agree with
someone else’s life. Or rather: my own existence doesn’t convince me: it is to
them I shall come back. The cat sits, ears short, cropped almost. Mike gets in
between us, a good man, fallen amongst the obdurate. How he hates a verbal
subtlety, even when it conceals a compromise. He hates principle – it means the
end of us both. It’s spring: the trees that haven’t made
it still carry last year’s berries through. It’s too early yet for leaves –
this white room, where each day I’m left, engraved with spider lines, victories
over each day – l’art d’ennuyer ... And the movement from the novel,
from the frozen to the real. Is it really through the thaw that one makes the
crossing, mud held together with grassroots? One ear ginger and
one white, a grey, wrinkled forehead – and every night Mike returns, silent
about his triumphs, defeated there, and here at the point of reproduction. The
cat stands at the window, dreaming of Isfahan. That grey forehead, wrinkled
with doubts; and every night Mike stands at the window watching nothing,
impatient with the darkness ... How he
longs to paint this room – as though he sees conclusions engraved, extended
beyond the lines of the plasterer’s trowel – to paint away my dead knowledge,
the paintbrush loaded against the orgy ...
Mike buries himself; he enjoys the exertion, the finality – even the
dutiful tear. My white room, tracked with winter: the
cat purrs snottily under my chair, and outside a pump, or a cicada, re-opens
the beetle tracks to mud and dissolution. It is the thaw – and Mike and I cling
to snow and ice. GRANDFATHER ... and upstairs lies my sly grandfather. Did he
run or did he slide? What stories he has to fill those twenty years, those
years when the hoofbeats swept him downstream. It’s right that he educates me
by making me a fiction – a Nadezhda, a Mary-Lou: if I follow his story I arrive
only at his artifice, his wink. He’s a great pedagogue – he leads one only to
questions. Those twenty years – the years of the
shades, he calls them: but still, the shades had a fine big army. For him, it
was like reincarnation – he to the lower, the shades to concreteness. Too old
to start again, and by dying: he is empty, a prisoner of the stream. What did
he do for twenty years, forgetting if he left in defeat or in success? How
easily they must have passed, those years beyond loyalty, beyond effort, beyond
the dogs of Mudhole. Haven’t you seen them – the kulaks and commissars in carpet
slippers, secure in the truce of Joe’s Diner? And we – what, basmachi? Speaking
to each other the language slaves use to their masters, that bitterness that
becomes inflection, frustration a grammar, we in this city where we have no
language to express our hatred... Vsevolod THE
FUNCTIONARY
Sticks of the teasel – a fine tool – and two lambs’ heads,
dusty brown curls unpatched from the simple bone, fragments of my old
indolence. Here I lie under the bridge, boots aloft, the leather responsive to
the curious toe, and round me lie the shavings from the factory floor, the
nervous teasels and the lambs whose dried tongues seek the missing gums
... So many histories I lived through,
to have seen it all, caught it all in the religious egotism of the word ... But, loving myself too much, I have become
the narcissus of the pebble beach, admiring multiplicity as myself, and I
transcend each stone by my similarity to its brother. My double – don’t be
reassured by our resemblance: a pebble beach is not like rock or clay – it
can’t be worked upon by water. Either it’s clay that has decided to take itself
in hand, or boulders in second childhood. Above me is a crack, and the arch will
let the frost in and in the spring the bridge will fall. The workers are coming
home across the fields: they call me ‘mister’, and some ‘mister-comrade’. Here
lie the stolen lambs’ bones, here the illicit flax – and here I lie, not in
complicity, but indolence. I have come through, I have succeeded and become –
too little. With discipline I ended pliant as a pickled rod: I fear the
judgment of the hard ones who must take things on – hard as I once was, but
just. Yes, I have lost justice – I cannot decide the conditions of my life. WAR Our seminarists were not spoiled, but terminated: they talk often of
the hand of God, but seldom of the foot. I have a chronology, but not a
biography – or rather, Mary-Lou, I was dying when you first met me, and so
minute by minute I live again. But guilt for Mary-Lou-Nadezhda, outweighed by
Aleksandra, is just a convenience: she’s so far only a course of events, kicks
and squeals, that needs no pity and no reason outside herself and those who
love her. Of course, we had great intellectuals,
who were profoundly reactionary: we discussed this endlessly, and we were big
men, you understand. My choice was prison, death, desertion: but really all of
these at once or none. We knew our time was up when they sent noodles. Pavel
said, ‘They always send the noodles when a town’s about to fall.’ So while the
lads die about us we’ll slip through the lines, to that desolation over the
river ... It’s always our great men who want to
finish the last century: I agree we must be tidy. What, after all, is your
suffering worth when you’re dead? But even in Great Mudhole we weren’t stupid:
nothing fooled us, except the fish, swimming up-river. I always had this snout
for life, like pussy sniffing in the garden – and I was lucky, I knew them
across the desk and in the office, and when they threatened me I knew the thing
to say. Well, well: sorrow for all that’s left. Unless it’s to be done again,
but facing faceless nothing a thousand times means I didn’t want it all
again... Winter dips its crusts in the river, and
day by day is greedier. Our general is having trouble, used to retreats on four
legs. All this lumber to pick up and take back, it worries him. Our workers are
dying there while he stands embarrassed at the telephone: ‘What does it mean,
no contact on the flank – no telephone or no Germans?’ I’ve talked to those who will resist:
some friends of Aleksandra, women who can live rough and be trained meanwhile.
The men are all too soft: I don’t like ascetics, but the others have no
discipline. Some of the best are missing: some are coming from the camps, but
not enough. I’ve seen men come straight from interrogation to the front – but
the soldiers are troubled, and the commissars don’t know what to say. They’re
worried by the workers, and the peasants: with party men and office workers –
there they can say their piece and score their points. Noodles: for the emperor, before the
fascists come, and we shall cross the river, into the after-death, a land sour
with mortality, into the land of vulgar materialism, tree-stumps and my
comrades’ blood. It is the land of the plague-dream, the silence of the
incubus. They lie outside the cottages: and some still sit, disciplined, in the
trucks. But this too is a battlefield, and we see them where the camera
stopped, already the fierce brows greyed-in with crusts of snow ... Mary-Lou DREAM
A radio that gives out obolonga fruit and tenderloin and lets
you talk to astronauts – but can’t be turned off. ‘Why would you want to turn
off a radio that gives out obolonga fruit?’ ‘Magic garden:
entrance $5’. Formalists discussing the length of
sentences in prison. What to do, in this city of Mount-Royal,
a city in which we have not yet begun to live, in which our suffering is cold
and repetitious, ice-chips on the glacier. What expenses, what deserts, what
ice-fields of time before us! Our crises, our tempers, our strikes, our
manifestoes – forgettable as melodramas, slave-acting in the lower depths of
this city ... A city where we drive to
labour, our cars like shuttles in a huge loom making continents of grey cloth.
How can I say I live, member of a class which does not live – or lives as an
arm lives, as a horse lives, as an officer of the court lives. To marry Michael is to step into the
abstract – an intelligence which refuses to use itself. ‘To be as
self-sufficient as you are is a crime against humanity,’ he tells me. And I
agree. It’s a hard thing. When I talked to him of the city where we do not yet
begin to live, I made a mistake and called it a city where we do not begin to
think, and he laughed and said one lived first, then thought. But he doesn’t
think. Mary-Lou and Mike The sailor crushed
the crab’s claw with his boot, showing us it was still alive. ‘I can eat any
one but that one’ – and Mike, thinking in any case that it might be spoiled,
agreed. But it was brought – ‘from another country’ – and tasted good. ‘While the crab lived it kept the space
between the shell and flesh lined with tears,’ I thought, and said, ‘We put to
sea in a boat made of cardboard, and dare each wave to sink us.’ ‘That’s OK then; cardboard doesn’t sink.’ ‘But the box disintegrates—’ ‘Christ, enjoy the sun and the pleasure
the crab gives you: Mrs. Jellyfish – that’s the name I’ll call you!’ Outside, the sun draws up crude slabs of
glass, bushes of faience: full midday, when no one can see the sun, the heat
comes, from below – that rocky forest underfoot, of sedimented gasoline and
french-fries, walking perilously on liquid sand along the beach we go, claw in
claw. Vsevolod ALEKSANDRA
And what a mistake was Aleksandra! The ‘endless repetition of
pettiness’ which defined the best marriage, my friend Valerii said, became in
our liaison a veritable glut of sour crabs from a virgin apple tree. Seeing
pussy die made her convinced of immortality, and she pronounced on the death of
fieldmice, Bolsheviks, bootmenders – all for the same suspended fee. In those years, I had a friend, a train
driver, who one day drove his ‘iron steed’ – he called it – unwittingly head-on
into another. The boiler tapped him like a hammer. We lost so many at that
time: they’d so few engines, to increase their output they raised the speed
limits – enterprising in this case, ran two trains on a single track ... And poor Aleksandra, saved from the pathos
of apostasy, wheeled her barrow, honourably, through the factory yard, until
one day came to a sudden stop. Perhaps it was the wind perhaps the
shock-workers didn’t dig enough: the wall came, as you might say, like a ton of
bricks. Poor Aleksandra: ‘you tread but once the bridge that falls’ – maybe,
but Aleksandra passed by that wall a thousand times. The dust rose, puffy,
arched: a nest of fieldfare’s eggs lay unbroken. ‘Send this to the cook at
once! No, not to eat, to live!’ She was remembered by her socks (the bricks had
not begun to break up when they hit, and she was simply crushed, unmarked) – so
thick they were, her fragile legs seemed equipped with charcoal claws, the
boots burst, socks unravelling. ‘So, the fine one goes.’ ‘Shhh, she was the director’s bird!’ ‘Some job he gave her, then – she could
have cooked his fieldfare’s eggs!’ ‘But he’s a strong one – and her boots,
we’ve all got better. Now, about this wall, what did it do?’ ‘It stopped the smoke: it used to blow
across the road. Comrade director, shall we start to build?’ I was grateful when Andrei said,
‘Comrades, there will come a day when the death of any worker will be the cause
of recriminations; a complaint that will stir the fears of labourers, not the
overseer. Store up. your regrets by all means – but let’s not make urgency turn
us callous; nor calculate the loss of a comrade as less than that of personal
friends. Aleksandra laboured humble: not, perhaps, as a socialist, but
self-effaced, with no desire for privilege – no longing for the past, nor
malice for the future.’ Well, any malice served her poorly and
my excuses. But Andrei said to me, ‘Now we can rely on you to do to generations
what you tried with Aleksandra.’ ‘Really, is, that all you want?
Something so little, and so cloying? Madame, il fait grand vent et j’ai tué
six loups ... ? You have every trust in me, in my incompetence, in my
ability to succeed only in the simplest things, to make another vigorous, and
without hating me? You are too kind. Aleksandra dies of war wounds, drawn up to
heaven in a question-mark of cordite ...
What you ask is a thousand times heavier than my charity to her, a
friendship, in the end, smoothed out by calculation ...’ Andrei hears only my talk of cordite,
investigates for sabotage. We have so much of it, here in the country, here we
feel hemmed in. Perhaps the wall was weakened in the night – thin watchmen
whore, the fat ones sleep: and who last spoke of politics? Those old dry-bones
in the engine-shed: they call me lackey, laugh when I turn away. So much the
worse for them: Andrei gives the new pay-scales tomorrow, and they don’t do
well. Re-classified as common labourers. I agree: even to talk to them – they
use their oil-cans as forefingers, their clothes are like the prologue’s,
covered with greasy tongues, the points of exclamation. Aleksandra framed on my desk: what can I
get from her? A new issue of socks all round, more lime for the cement. But no
more. And no more even that friendship – she, waving from the mixer, and I
winking as the local dealers (now we call them ‘comrade’) sell me their stuff –
flanged noses flattened by the dealing finger, breath warm enough to warm the
ministry stamp, carried, I now see, by the ‘assistant’. One fox to hold the
door and one to eat the chickens: those first lean foxes frighten me. Making love in the photograph: the
powder flash lights up the silver birches – a flight of ponies’ legs, the
silver so bright it makes the leather, leaves, seem purple. The cat, eager for
her breakfast (‘watch where you step, pussy’) – grey and silver, makes the
frame – and beyond the grove, where cockerels cluck like officer-cadets, the
morning shells splash silver in the river. Preparations for breakfast: ten
years later I, an honest though a lazy man, deal blindly with my thieving
colleagues. The history’s already written – the rogues are gone: only we honest
ones are left. But as I sit here, my mistress’s body, notched like a pike’s
with reeds, gills bloody, reproaches me. And not for larceny, but compromise:
that ‘mistress’ comes so easily – and that at least she hated; that was ‘the
old way’. Preparations for war: the brick dust off
the desk. When am I saying this? Five years have passed, my bobbing cork eludes
the stones, while thieves of thieves survive. Where are the visionaries, the
Babel-looters? Not in the engine-shed. But, would you do it all again, if it
happened all again? Wink solemnly. The historic present is a tidal soil – even
acorns smell it out! But yes, I am a communist, and knowing what I know I
fight. Preparations for war: Aleksandra was lucky. In Moscow there aren’t
enough desks for each body in the first day of war. In the army I used to say a
man’s worst friend is his mind, his best enemy the rifle. The mind always hopes
you’re still alive – the rifle is quick to give you up for dead ... VILLAGE CONTACTS Some languages fit one’s needs like the skin on a tongue, like the
saddle on a horse that has saved your life so often that it ‘drinks a drop of
your soul’, as the cossacks said. When I talked to the girl, it seemed to me I
had this universal language: when I spoke to her of the river, she could point
to the inverted waves on the ceiling, silver on the white: ‘That is our river,
so close you could see it from the window.’ Which language does not have its
river, its terms for our common struggle? And yet – I was so full of history, of
knowledge – I am like the animal who curls up after a meal, snug in a warm
cave, full of other animals, and ‘tells’ of its need for warmth, of a gentle
death – in a million years – to the young archaeologists. Ah, to see that
consciousness in their eyes, to see them struggling so desperately in the few
years – the few years won from the cavalry, from my aunt’s errands, from
aesthetics – they have to appropriate all that knowledge. Even from the little
shards of dog-existence on the cave floor. I asked, ‘And your people – do they
struggle as mine did, as they will?’ What language am I speaking – not a
language of the state, surely, not a language of oppression – for it comes so
easily to me. But geography – well, I know they have a river, but I can’t see
it. A language of production – well, no: I produce nothing. Say only, a
language of fraternity? But there are only the two of us. And yet, how different from when
I began, hesitating between the red and the white like a card-player over a
discard. Behind her voice I can hear others: people are working – reaping,
making a raft, making defences for the village ... And perhaps behind my voice
she hears the voices of those millions whose despair and whose strength shaped
my sentences like chessmen. Before the battles we played chess ... ALEKSANDRA So, fighting each other, we passed the seasons. How impressed we
were, Aleksandra and I, by the magnificent chestnut trees which dropped their
three-toed leaves into the furrows in the road made by last spring’s carriages.
A wind from the east put the leaves and branches in mandarin conference: the
white spires burnt out like fireworks. ‘How distant I am from your comrades,’
she said, ‘and you – you who think so little of being a bourgeois ...’ ‘I shed my leaves to last the winter –
who knows what flowers will come next spring? This year there’s no fruit on the
chestnuts – perhaps it’s true, that these trees had some affinity with
Antigone: they bear no fruit every seventh year, and the next – red spires. A
child’s tale, but one that concerns children, eh? – their games, such fierce
loyalties, habits ...’ I teased her. ‘So much effort for so little meaning –
why, any fool with a bottle of vodka puts more content in his stories than
there is in any myth hawked around for a thousand years. A painter will work
for a year to give you a picture of a man on a horse – why he’s probably passed
you a dozen times himself on horseback! We need stuff that will wake you up,
not waste time in truisms and nursery anxieties.’ Aleksandra! I didn’t realise you were in
the full roar of the current, numbed by the cold, sweeping way under – I
thought you were aloof, that we sparred as intellectuals. But no, you were half
dead and half asleep. How poignant – that my words of encouragement to you were
heard as funeral rites, your beauty – just flesh ... Your eyes, filling with water not their own – quickly, let go, or
be dragged down with you ... Will you
break the hold, or shall I? It’s a problem solved in a second ... SEASONS Aleksandra and I travelled into the country. The farms stood with
their backs to the forest, their mica windows facing the fields and sun. The
heat seemed to gather in the grey barnsides, scorch the red and brown halms.
But it was winter still, peasants reclined on their wooden trucks and their
horses ran swiftly over the frozen ruts of the backtracks. The trees were
ice-coated, a little frail, trembling and unsteady like old aunts in new paste. Before long, we saw ourselves, our
friends, attacked in the newspapers. To have done so much that was wrong, but
not venally, and to find suddenly that no accounting would be made of our real
deficiencies ... As my assistant said,
‘A real discussion follows – but you have to be there in person, or send a
return envelope.’ That
evening, there was a circus – ‘We are all here, watching nonsense, but one we
like’ – people who do, and fail to do, what we might like to try. ‘Being what I
ain’t,’ I overhear someone say, ‘a poet, and don’t want to be neither ...’ The
animals lumber around the ring. Their straight lines and pauses painfully
erased. How hard to learn a simple nonsense: round and round without pausing.
We applaud them as they botch our simplest tricks, fall off the seesaw, fail to
bite off the trainer’s head. What fine fellows we are – the beasts stand in for
our base slaves – before us, the ancient mode turns like a mill-wheel, and high
in the roof the youths in white and purple tumble weightlessly. THE SECOND WAR And so it’s war again – how far have we come? I see them
struggling with the oak roots. How deep do they run, these tendrils that resist
the axe? Men sleep criss-crossed with roots, the trenches – should they try to
take us here – fall back and deep like mine-shafts. We practise dying every
day: but fighting against our enemies within, or designate, we lack the realism
which we long have lacked ... Not that
I enjoy that convention, that unfailing syntax: our activity will affect you
all – even that which, as old Herzen said, ‘we cannot put in novels’ – or was
it that he said, rather, ‘laughter – is not always a sign of gaiety, or irony
of disillusion’? Now we shall show, foreign comrades, if your fascism was
tough, your bourgeoisie complacent. So – you’ve got us into it: did you think
capitulation would give us the best chance? Did you give all you could, while
every paper told you we were having difficulties? Too late now: not at the best
time, but here we are – mattocks and axes digging our first ten million graves
... Comrades – if only you’d understood
politics! In thirty years will the Yanks still
hunt their ‘migrants’ across the deserts? Success with these axes will tell
whether in hundreds or in thousands. ‘Comrades – you’re digging tombs there –
the back-up trench must not slope back or one grenade will do for all! And what
will we do back there at all? Perhaps the second wave waits for the next war?
We need lines and lines – stretching far back – the survivors ...’ More
opportunism. He who fights and runs away objectively opposes mortality. Materialists
fight once, then it’s back in the mineshaft. I hear the Americans have a secret
weapon: one says it is the stick, another that it is the carrot. As I passed
the village, the hares were being taken out to execution: ominous, that. We’d
no papers for a week, but the economy of private rabbits runs from Danzig to
the Urals; radio, that finger aerial laid on those electric hearts ... ‘So long-ears finds the price to pay – a
broken neck on armistice-day ... ’ Long-ears myself: so long they waited,
and they got it wrong. We could have taken them in ’21: but now, it takes steel
to grind them down. I did my best: let the back-trench slope forward, and
instead of Aleksandra’s wall, a mound of earth – and on the top, some salty
lupins where a hare may sit and watch the steel. Here at the crossroads stand
the skinny wives, four ears in each hand. Our trucks go by: facing each other,
clean hair, tall packs – who wants a rabbit in the front line? The women smile
at me, superior: all war is the peasant war, except in England, and everywhere
but there the victims kill their livestock and themselves wait, heads bowed,
the brain ready for the killer’s bolt. Look at them all! Moscow must be empty!
Even to cut their hair, press those uniforms ... CROSSING THE RIVER I am in the dream again. We cross a raft of dead dogs, all
pointing, frozen with their noses to the south. An army in retreat suffers like
a pie before a seated glutton: a sudden movement in the gut and men die four
deep in the ditches. At other times – the bigger the pie, the more the very
sight inspires nausea. Before we are beaten, we cross the
lines. We can smoke, on this raft. There is so much play with the current, we
can pole upstream and still land in our new country, our inverse land. The
fascists have never known what it is to kill so many – their puritanism bites
back: thank God for the enlightenment. They don’t shell the dead dogs, or us,
but dream instead of the parish – wife, dog, three kids, Mercedes, drunk on
Saturday, sex and a sermon Sunday – and all in their favourite language. Not
this brute we have – Masha at the bow, incomprehensible, with her fag, as she
noses us back to the other shore. Poor Herzen – must be confused by now ... On this side, frogs still yarp, Moscow
accents – Masha smiles and, lugging explosives on the flats, thinks herself
closer to home. The frogs are funny till we try to hop, hop, hop along this
deep beach. The lines are slack here – and we crossed the other side when it
was tired of hunting. They’ve killed so many of us ... through liking it, for most, and for the
others, mathematics. Like their economics, they practise murder
indiscriminately: the totality they like to squish – the family. Up, over the bank with our big guns and
what we hope is food. To live in exile, to live in this barren land. To know
what we have lost, to have crossed the river, to have gone back – alas, as
double agents, since the old man’s so suspicious – to have crossed our ocean,
starting again, knowing all we know. With the Party men they killed, they
played sexy tricks: the Party women they were afraid of. Already we fill these
woods with comradeship: I remember how those people across from Mudhole were –
forest workers, threading through the trees like shuttles. Now, they are dead:
and we who seek them become friends. WOUNDED To live and betray, or die and be forgotten ... How easily one forgets the point at which
one left the battlefield. What last image did I trap before I plunged into the
concrete, the world of others’ experience – that tiny insentient instance, the
break in the circle never again to revolve through consciousness ... ? What did
I see before I became a fact for someone else – not a moral one, but a
caponised bundle in the flux of someone’s defeat? Two old women licking up the
goose-grease – grease for the sled’s runners. I am lying here dead in the snow
– give me an easy trundle, east or west. ‘To read our greatest novel you must
first acquire an understanding of French,’ I said. They went on licking. Was
this a year of victory or defeat? I can’t remember. I feel lazy, wrapped in
ice, my throat filled with cold blood. They are tugging me down a track as
smooth as glass, smooth as a crystal catching the starshells, resounding with
artillery like a crystal bowl booming to the connoisseur’s finger. I am dead,
and my journey is aesthetic, formal. The old women pant like horses. And I
died, not knowing if in victory or in defeat, travelling on roads of frozen
bodies – the glass so thick you could hardly see the fine uniforms. In that
war, all the women became old. Between victory and defeat – only a few months,
but between my youth and my old age a generation among the shades. I can’t
return, whether I betrayed the victory or the defeat. We are out in the current
now – stamping and grunting down the frozen river, their hooves wrapped in
rags. The runners whistle, breathless, as a woodsman whistles for the tree to
fall, half cut through, its spring tense as a mile of ice. Crick, crack – you
shouldn’t have eaten the goosegrease. THE CROSSING Crossing the river – like crossing into another year, another
country: on the flats I can see seven birds, each of a different species, sniff
out twice as many lichens ... Stuffed
with noodles, I drop a word against the regional commander. Out here they’ve
even killed the dogs – it’s like Eden, only snakes and naked corpses – here we
stand like colonists, no need to kill the Indians, some plague has done for
them. How will we work here, where there is nothing? We crossed the river, fighting its down-currents,
like dark clouds across the stream, dark clouds across the moon, or where the
moon should be ... Back we go to the
future – safely to kill any man that moves: they wanted a desert and to rule it
– so much the worse for them. Mary-Lou THE
MASSACRE
Grandfather’s troop, tiny under the pines, moving through wood
engravings like the critical spirit ...
First the bluebells, then the lupins – the salty blue swashes under the
blue smoke –oatmeal smells of late autumn. A smattering of small animals –from
the breakfast-table they’re named, renamed. They – we – stand awkwardly, watch
the valleys where the breakfast smoke shortly changes to black, productive.
From the smoke, you can tell the seasons, and last year’s weather. Only the
dogs tell us we’re at war – packed in but silent still, they run silent through
these woods. The undergrowth is full of food. It is the moment before the fugue
begins. The sea once seen lives and lives relentlessly. The oatmeal, catching
at the edges, pricks behind the forehead ... They climbed around the hill,
spiralling, bent under their heavy guns, sweating above, their eyes on the
mould, the nursery toadstools. An excursion always involuntary. I see them now,
filing through the trees, at first on the path, padded feet denting, the holes
filling with water. In the wood, the dead, the fallen trees: a smother of arms,
distraught, a tree’s gone down. They walk on, picking the husks of breakfast,
tongues busy about the back teeth, familiar as the smell of boiling water – a
pleasure. Politics, to them – like hygiene, a condition of the muscles. My
sextant, grandfather, holds them sighted – trudges along. The brambles are so pale here, the
leaves yellow and spotted, here in the dark. Upward through the darkening
forest they move, towards its broken edge, its deep chalk cliff. They saw where
the massacre had been. It takes so many men to kill so many, and such concern
about straight lines, counting, and standing still. A continuous process, not a
final one at all – the last breath of the hunt; still there is movement. So
much, too much, activity – this hollow where they kill us all, unfed, tires us
with repetition, and if we live we can only snap, snap back at those lines of
dogs. Snap, snap – but they have us in the guts. The sky is blue above their
snouts, their jaws – and grandfather, powerless, looks from the edge, thinking
of the boisterous play the dogs have with the dying hare, the hare that screams
– seeing only the blue sky, saliva, flapping tongues. Below is the pain, and
straight ahead that blue and penetrated sky. Vsevolod THE
RIVER
Dragonfly. A lacquer ship, snagged in a sea of lacquer. By the
other shore, beating against a contrary breeze, a second dragonfly. It slips
and wavers, as though it finds folds, varying densities in its path, obstacle,
a magnetic resistance invisible, not daunting. The pools suck down blackness,
and I’m with the dragonflies. I smell orange-blossom, my bank is heavy with it,
and over there – weak brown sheep, little bigger than cats: the water runs too
fast for their thin tongues. Here – I lie on hyacinths, the stems squeak like
wicker: their life is cold, the horses push through these flowers, creaking, as
if they’re wearing new boots. And the dragonflies: flick, flick. One held, and
holding: the other struggling up the current, a gymnast; the first patterns,
intuitions, run through ...
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