NECESSARY POET

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     Once upon a time a Russian poet was exiled to Siberia. He died in transit, never reaching a labor camp. A record of time and place of his death has been produced. Many prisoners in the labor camps saw and talked with him. This is his story and their story.    

                   

                         THE NECESSARY POET

 

     I had a benefactor in the Ministry of Culture who deflected the axe blow and spared me for banishment to Vorst, a village only a few hundred kilometers from my home in St. Petersburg.

     On leaving Petersburg, before it enters the forests, the train toils up a small upgrade, and you can see the whole city in its delta below.  On my first passage to Vorst I remember the low winter sun swept a pale gold spoke across its rivers and towers, and at the touch of the wand, they diffused in glimmer and then reappeared, cast in the spell of a reflection. 

     I remember this because such melancholy lingering in my new circumstances was plush madness.  Under the anesthetic of domestic banishment my life had been excised with near civility. The persistence of self was the pathology. 

     Vorst was a comedy, a circus, and I played the buffoon perfectly only realizing after a year or more that I had retrieved tatters from a wardrobe in my sleep. My poetry was banned. Did I think its echoes had reached Vorst? What a pantomime to launch my career as a cultural windfall, what empty wind blew the scarecrow’s sleeves.

     The Russian voice like an iron bell first cast in clay had once possessed me. I threw back my head and our iron age of souls shoveled into judgment had peeled from my throat. Small creatures scuttle in the empty chambers the bell once engorged: Deafness reaching the stars and the collapse unheard.

     My face changed in Vorst.  Even its substance.  It mired in mirrors like a boot in mud, or melted like suet in a pan.  Only my eyes remained, illiterate. My features seemed coincidental.  If I could fix them at all before they slipped into anonymity, I saw the blank had been wrung by Vorst’s inbred anxiety.

     I could no longer distinguish the palimpsest of generations and self. I had been troubled by this face's asymmetry. Errors or haphazard boded faulty tuning. My ears were stuck on at a ridiculously low meridian and there was a droop to my eyelids repeated at the corners of my mouth which verged on sullen vapidity, these presented risks to my craft. Still, I had found ripeness for tenderness and gallantry: The large liquid eyes and the pale brow over which roiled a fleece of black curl, and its living question seeking me from the mirror.  And it had repudiated Stalin’s portraits stoning our brains like Egyptian gods.

     They repeatedly jarred me. His face showed its origins in Georgia, a face unlike mine in any particular, but sharing the Asian racial slur.  We would always be clumsy and overexerted, subject to the maudlin and flattery. There would always be prurience and fatal sincerity. I felt parodied and sympathetic. I believed I could read a mortified flirtation in all his actions, a gruff, squeamish distaste hiding a full bladder of tears, and I wrote the insulting poem that earned me banishment from that dank affinity.

     I was in Vorst for a little more than three years-that vestibule of exile-and could not have afforded more than a few furtive trips to Petersburg, but they were enough for me to see my existence being re-interpreted posthumously.

     I remember Igor parodying me.  A few friends had gathered at his apartment.  I had walked into it, an unpleasant surprise. 

     Coffee was served.  I never had coffee by then, too expensive.  Anointed by caffeine, I had been rattling on. I had adopted a sneering tone, or it had adopted me.  It was a tone I could not smother.  I had lost the privilege of wit. It had been part and parcel with exemption, and what wit hides, what a voice stripped of wit reveals, at least in me, was a wheedling note famished for sympathy that I tried to cover with that sneer.  And with it came curses and intentional sexual gaffes, anything to fake energy and purge the taste of impotence from my tongue.

     Igor captured it perfectly:

     "Soon you'll have the chance to miss me.  I'm being sent to the Crimea.  This rage for the ethnic. I'll be hunting any woman whose eyebrows connect over her nose.  I think I can fake the whole thing from a hotel room in Odessa.  One with a porch. The boredom.  At least it'll pay for quite a few oranges.  Pity.  These wages of sin.  Citrus gives me diarrhea."

     My friendships and loves had happened in a hierarchy of apt expressiveness. The problem with poverty judged by our standards is its monotony and scab-scratching pettiness.

     Finally I went missing from memories.  I became a zero, which is the strange creature that used to exist only in the mind, but which in my time leaped from our brains and gobbled up whole populations.  The less than one about which it is said, "that night we were drinking, it was Gregor and Boris, Anna, and...for the life of me I can't remember, anyway, they don't really matter to the story."  The fifth glass drains mysteriously, an invisible foot kicks you beneath the table, there is even a flirtation, a stain of emotion in thin air, like the clean space left on the wall by a removed picture.

     It came down to Gregor.  Everyone else had already closed the door in my face.  I could not go to Boris, not again. He would never refuse me but I could not watch the organic suffering that forced his kindness.  During my visits he could not keep down a meal and did without.  He was the last person left I could still protect in any way.  All I had to do was stay away.

     Gregor: Delicate praise acknowledged him as the worst poet among us.  I would use his need to prove himself to our circle to crow-bar his door.

     Gregor. Hellenic. Angelic and crude.  Thick blond, wavy hair that held the pleats his fingers made when he raked it off his smooth forehead, cloudless blue eyes, rosy mouth with the slightly vitriolic mold of royal antiquity.  Before speaking, he purloined the same charged silence as a resting harp; that same shimmering refutation of happenstance. I depended on his gullibility and his heart’s plain geometry.

     One night we rammed our way into a swift spring wind, staking off each step.  He was keeping faithfully abreast.  We reached the Bridge of Red Flag Bearers. Below the Niva was whipped into frothy curdles.  Lights still on in the city were buffed sharply clean.  Wild and headstrong, the just freed winds were stampeding through the city, warm-flanked and round-bellied.  They were arriving from the south with news from the Mediterranean. Dark clouds were whipping along like dust balls harried by a broom, a day before they had sat on us like boulders. 

     I looked at Gregor.  The wind had brought tears to his eyes.  His fists were jammed into his coat pockets. His eyelids fluttered at the slapping. I believe it was because of his drudging obedience, his stone deaf ear to the sirens of mischief and his rote laboring through this moment while behind him Petersburg went mute in him-Petersburg this night, stone fulminating in alluvial shadows, a sky of shredding shrouds and founts of moonlight-Petersburg, ringing temple whose names I knew-that I pissed into the wind and kissed him for pity and vocation.

    

     I tap at Gregor's door.

     He did not hear me.  My actions had become doubtful and apologetic, and he was talking in his deep voice on the other side of the door. I tapped again louder and his heavy footsteps approached.  He flung the door open and straddled the threshold, an operatic scowl stamped on his lips.

     He did not recognize me.  More than a year had passed since he had seen me, a year of accelerating deterioration for me, but that was not the whole reason.  The figure in the hallway did not merit enough attention to separate him from other envoys from the conscience. And these must no longer dare trespass.  

     "Gregor, it’s Emmanuel."

     His square jaw dropped.  Gregor had a truncated vocabulary of gestures, all mechanical, and arriving after an eerie delay, as if he were mouthing phonetically whatever muddle of fortune and heredity quickens the rest of us. 

     He recovered quickly having little stamina for confusion.  He had changed too.  All my friends in Petersburg looked Dionysian compared to me; banishment had similarities to freezing, the blood seemed to retreat to a few organs, leaving only bile circulating and the complexion generally pale and jaundiced.

     "This can't be coincidence.  The cat doesn't just happen to shit in the boot.  At your service, Emmanuel. Eternally."

     He looked coarser and more powerful, eager to butt heads.  His earnest, acolyte doggedness had ripened into full bull-headedness.  The herd was being culled.  I was not the only one to have been banished or worse.  The old, mild bull, Boris, could no longer protect his flock.  The empty field was left to Gregor.

     Anna poked her head around him. He had been talking to her behind the closed door.  She was an aficionado of scenes. With a sting, she could precipitate a blood bath which would make her gleeful.  She might clap her hands like an excited child, just the once, carried away, or her long hands would caress her neck or cheek in erotic transport.  She had fits of laughter.  She bragged that she had wet her pants.  Her arms fell limp, her head tipped back, swan neck spilling out flagrant brays.  Her face was gaunt and haughty, not a face that seemed sowed for laughter, and so it came as less of a surprise that it carried a tincture of cruelty.

     She pushed past him in a nimbus of perfume, and linking her arm in mine, escorted me into the room.

     "Forgive him, darling, he has discovered sarcasm lately and simply revels in it.  We're both delighted to see you, but we are caught in a stampede to get ready.  Gregor is reading tonight.  Landscapes of Change.  His Grand Stalin Dam is going to be the keystone, some what in the spirit of the Great Gate of Kiev", and she flashed me a moue, the paste of such bombastic triumphs did not escape her.  She must have caught the first full whiff off me about then, she blanched, giving her face a saintly pallor.

     She ferried me to a large easy chair with a foot stool in front and an Afghan folded across the back like a shawl, Gregor's chair, and deposited me with a festive push. She had her gender's sexualized misanthropy: my old tobacco stink titillated her.

     Behind us Gregor reluctantly closed the door sealing me in rather than out, and talked in a stage aside:  "Sarcasm?  Ah well, no harm done. Count to ten, breathe deeply, suffer fools. A test of character.  Yes, a lucky chance, a blessing, a fable. Under the circumstances thunderous, an overture. Tonight in the Hall of Concrete Achievement, swelling."   

     "Don't make such a mountain out of this," Anna said. ”The night is still yours.  You are invincible."

     "You are perfect. I'll have to hurry to catch up with you.  Why don't you get our visitor some tea?"

     "Anna, two hours.  I mean, 'The archaic waters of the Volga', soon.  A teapot?  'The massif rises like the brow of Atlas.'  Atlas. Atlas. A teapot?"

     "My champion, he will be sitting here alone."

     That seemed to appease him. 

     "The least we can do" giving me a look of sour pity.

     Anna passed into the bedroom.  I could see her through the doorway.  She stopped in front of a large open trunk and allowed her gown to slide off her shoulders and pile around her ankles on the floor.  The treacly, holy sloth, the honeyed lethargy in an ongoing affair; the work‑a‑day presence of a lover's nakedness.  I was mesmerized. The sight was perfected, like a glimpse through a lit window.  I looked in from shadow.

     Perched on Gregor's throne I sweated nervously and was suddenly besieged by itching. I began with academic distraction but was soon going at it with a dog’s avid abandon.

     "Elizabethan.  Did I forget to celebrate the Elizabethan prerequisites in Vorst?  A lumpen rat population ripe for a crusade of plague. And lice.  Culture's germ plasm.  The people belch pentameter."

     I doubt she heard me.  This was the way I often talked to myself.

     So, she was storing clothes at Gregor's.  We had never become that established.  I had fetishized the few objects she left behind.  They were exotic, and talismans of femininity.  A perfume atomizer, opulently overweight for its small size, with its piquant thumb bladder and tiny, shining brass nozzle.  Toilette waters in their enchanted apothecary bottles, a puppyish powder‑puff, and a tortoise shell comb and hair clips with long skeins of her actual hair caught in them, spectrally lyric to me as the silent strings of a viola.  But, they all seemed unessential to her, a surplus from her husband's gifts.  They spoke only her taste for luxury.  Or, they existed, like me, in a play‑acted, ornamental world outside of her natural heart.  I would have traded them all for one item forgotten in a rush out the door, one mark of careless emotion, a sign that our times together had spilled over the hour, and balanced against her other life.

     "Make that a glass of tea, Gregor" I called out to him in the small kitchen, too loudly for the short distance, but defiantly, to break the clutching in my throat.  "Russian style, and a cube of sugar to hold between my teeth.  A poor man's smooch."

     Gregor returned and handed me a scalding glass of tea in a napkin and several cubes of sugar. Intercepting my gaze through the doorway, his face softened in complacent ownership.   He glided towards the door, and though he made as if to close it, in every motion, as if a film were being played backward or his actions were a palindrome, was balletic presentation.

     Anna padded out in her bare feet, wearing nearly clerical or student garb, a black skirt and crisp, white blouse.  There is always something fatal in beauty, maybe its autonomy, its ruthless advent, but I knew then I preferred loveliness, its serenity, and loveliness was a woman walking on bare feet, a solid event simply beyond the filmy craft of my imagination.

     The blouse accentuated her throat; she had left the collar open revealing the lunar hollow above her breast‑bone.  It was a man's shirt, the wide collar made her throat seem more delicate, and she more daughterly. Her black hair, her eyes, against that perfectly vanishing white field they shone. Is it the lowering threshold at which color could enter‑she seemed to be blushing?

     "Gregor, you can't hide a thing.  Too plain, too plain, your face is shouting, but my husband will be there and I have to intimidate the philistines. They believe in the witchcraft of poetry.  If I dress like the Whore of Babylon as I know you'd love, it makes poetry look like an excuse for self‑indulgence.  Emmanuel, don't you think this conveys vocation, even sacrifice?  I've thought of cutting my hair, a Joan of Arc look.  Wait, don't answer". She gathered her hair behind her head to show what it would look like lopped off. 

     Slowly, in a trance, Anna let her hair fall back through her fingers. I can only imagine how lightening struck I looked in her presence, how I might provoke regret for gifts squandered and slandered.    

     "I think we fall short in Emmanuel's eyes. We must seem fatuous, and if we're not so lucky, then venal.  Stranded in the miniature.  Fussing over a blouse, really there are more important things.  But I like it even so.  White linen smells so clean and vestal.  I love the way when its fresh‑pressed, it perches with cold fingers on the points of my shoulders, like I have attached swan's wings.  It's my favorite of all yours, Gregor.  A mother's gift, maybe?  It was folded neatly as a flag. She doesn't quite trust you to mind yourself, you're over‑loved, my dear.  I'll have to write her and say you are in good hands."

     "Better hands, Anna. Not a mother's to be sure, but affection's labors really make a ghastly mess of them anyway.  The more gallantly the boy is arrayed, the scabbier they become.  Lye, you know, how mothers do dote. While yours, Church tapirs.  Naught but incense to chap them.”

     “Emmanuel, don’t we suffer true pain? Love gone sour by our own hand, joy stolen from our own child. The world failing our purpose, haven’t we our innocence by fire, all of us that are justly flung from the garden time and again? And aren’t remaining pleasures won?    

     "Brave blouse, Anna. Few are left with the courage to tempt. The mealy-mouthed will be dressed in Nor-westers.  If the Great Stalin Dam should burst, bravo-but so little subtlety in the situation, much as we try squirreling in some sedition. KA-BOOM.  Flames are easy, but to be martyred in ordure, even Joan D'Arc might have been lost sans trace."

     "You haven't heard one word of it.  That's cheek.  That's cheek and jowl, and it is enough." 

     "Gregor, of course he hasn't heard it. Don't be so thin-skinned. Emmanuel, I have imagined lucidities for you, even though I thought it must be wicked. Because I couldn't know.  I felt guilty about the tyranny of imagining for you. Awful of me, but all the veils we're wrapped in. Haven't we just gained the world?"

     "Sarcasm, Anna, it's too much of an honor.  I really must take everything seriously-or else. I appreciate your nostalgia, I really must. Whatever comes I must appreciate the windfall. Forgive me certain privacies best left to me, I have the mortal sins of an insect, vain as a fly, we won’t be put off. Privacy too awful to share or steal that I can blame on my self, the gluttony of an ant with a crumb."

     “Only them, Emmanuel, those privacies or less. Sweet silence, I write to that end, word less word towards unforgivable faith.”

     "Have you forgotten? I'm delivering my poem in less than two hours. What can we possibly be thinking?  You haven't seen the Hall of Concrete Achievement. You have no idea. It took a thousand workers.  There must be a hundred entombed in the walls.  It's heavier than Cheops. The sound system is powerful enough to concuss birds out of the sky, they have to have a physician monitoring it at all times or your ears will bleed.  'The Volga chafes against the massif.'  'Massif'. 'Massif'.  You hear that.  The plosive.  That'll make the chandeliers rattle.  They're bigger than any in Versailles.  If one of them should fall, it would reduce a whole section of the audience to sticky syrup.  And we're talking about..cobwebs.  Dust motes.  We don't have the time." 

     During Gregor's tirade, Anna moved over to stand behind me in the chair. She put her hands into my hair tousling the waxy plates. Good-bye. How is that done?  A fond farewell, that is; it is absolutely over-you sense complete pre-occupation in the hands. It is elegiac. Kind.  Detached. Like washing a corpse.

     "Stop.  I'd give anything-my kingdom for a pure tear. Empty purse, not a pearl left. Just skillet grease.  They burn. It's the soot. Dressed in sackcloth and ashes.  Bride of a sort, decked out and then jilted. Eyes like French mimes, irritated conjunctiva.   If only someone might offer the coins to seal them."

     Gregor pointed an accusing finger at me. “You will not make me regret my memories of you.  Not that too.  Anna."

     Tears brimmed his eyes. He dabbed at them daintily.  He yoked an arm across Anna's square shoulders. As always, she pulled back.  Sex completely evacuated any need or tolerance for affection.

     "Anna, I loved him more.  I can't forget.  Mornings. Drunk as lords.  Sleep in your clothes, you feel you know too much about the world.  Mercy all around.  I remember details. What were we doing out?  No idea.  Hungry?  Last thing on your mind after a binge, but there you have it, the smell of bread baking.  We must have slept in a doorway.  I remember a cat with white paws.  A mystery, what lasts.  Is there a message in it?  The parable of the cat."

     He released her and thrust his hands into his pocket and came up with some neatly folded rubles.

     "You have to be vigilant.  Who else will protect ice flowers on a window pane twenty years ago?  The leaf falling, the petal kissed by dew."

     He peeled off a few notes.

     "My sister wore braids at six with red ribbons. Take this.  Take it.  I ransom Emmanuel. Out, imposter. Out.  Clouds.  Wind before a rain.  Out."

     He grabbed my shoulder, there was some confusion with the glass of tea, a little spilled. He relieved me of it, and marched me to the door. 

     "I do not know you.  Shame on you.  There was an Emmanuel, I knew him.  I will protect him.  He is safe here" indicating the vault of his chest, an impressive fortress indeed. "Leave him alone."

     He opened the door.

     "Not enough."

     "What?"

     "Are you going to stint on the flowers?  My god, man, pay the ransom. Your poor sister.  Open up."

    "Out", but though he had shepherded me easily to the door getting me out took a bit of juggling. 

     "What's it worth?  Look, The Grand Stalin Dam, we are not talking dust motes.  Truckloads of corpses, boatloads of rubles.  All for a good purpose, at last. To rescue him.  More. You shared a cup and a kiss.  He wrote poetry.  Ate bread with butter.  The sanctity of it.  Another ten or I'll show you his ass and he's gone into gassy dew."

     The booklet of rubles hit me in the chest. 

     "Over indulgence, but what are we otherwise?" he lamented.

     I felt blindly through the pile, kneeling on the floor.   My hands were trembling.  I took a few notes, aligning their edges and folding them.  I patted the two piles, struggled my way to my feet. 

     "Break a leg.  I say that as the old Emmanuel, from the heart.  Bust a gut. Bite your tongue. Knock them dead. Farewell."

          Maybe I spent no more than a week in Petersburg that last time.  I lived as ghosts do in literature.  Experience has proved we must beware of two different ghosts.  One has the character of mist, melancholy and rueful, promoting nostalgia, and shyly hints at its existence by amassing the spindrift of dreams and collecting the fabric from shadows. But there is another kind that drags his brine‑cured body from the sea and trailing kelp ropes slogs his way to doorsteps or castle battlement.  He has travelled through the ether.  Dipped like a taper in the eternal, he returns on his rounds with his eyes blazing in a face blackened by the astral pitch.

     Night was only a faded patch squeezed between the rotund summer days.  The streets were always crowded.  Everyone had been expelled from their actual lives by clairvoyance, or was it allergy?  Their skin is presciently irritated, anticipating a touch. They are both agitated and torpid.  They wander outside the structures of the abandoned city.  Every one has become a migrant, nerves strummed by astrology.   At mid‑night the sky is the color of sour milk, close to starlight, as if the stars had been pulped into absinthe.

     Lovers are everywhere.  I pass by a row of them on the Bridge of Slaughtered Martyrs, the entire length of the bridge is lined with them as if it was only built to be a ladder into the feverish sky.  While the women lean their cheeks against the men's chests, their lovers look over their shoulders into the Niva, their eyes solemn and mournful.  They are inside their core of masculine beauty.  It makes them heavy, over‑ripe, drugged on their own honey. Lotus eaters, I think, with an old man’s ulcerous wisdom.

     I slept in those left over spaces that worm‑hole a city, small enclaves the sum of urban enjambments leaves empty.  I socked my over‑coat into a pillow.  It was too warm to wear, but I wore it from shame.  Petersburg was a city of rejections.  Really, it was just a city.  But a city seems unified in cold disregard when you are outside its fold. 

     An unbroken skein of dreams unspooled in me.  Part of it was the saturating light.  Sometimes they were not dreams at all, but memories, completely in tact, that now appeared in the stage lighting of dreams.  Sometimes a dream would just be of a samovar on a table, a memory from childhood.  Other times I woke speaking.  I would continue talking until I fell back to sleep.  Unused words spilled out more persistent than the moldering store of unused kisses and hugs that occasionally found me embracing my coat when I awoke.  The words had independent strength and vehemence. It had become a type of parasitism.  Even thinking about them this way seemed to tempt the shadow that lay behind daftness. It was worse than in Vorst.  Petersburg was conjured from a swamp by itself a solution of nether and stone dissolving into vapors.

      One morning I awoke on a fisherman's net.  I had drifted along the Neva towards a quorum of mists hanging over the Bay of Finland, and had lain down on a seine waiting to be mended.  The mound was dry, the indelible fish and brine smell flattened to musk.  It was like sleeping on a huge wad of hashish.  The sea sounds around the wharf came intimately, eerily near through the fluorescent fog, the cinching and winch of the halyards of eternity working against the pilings. From the fishing boats lashed invisibly together side by side at a distant dock, came drunken insults, laughter, and even the notes of a balalaika.  I was among the flotsam of amnesias, in a limbo for lost memories.

     I happened on a shoemaker.  I sniffed his shop out by the smell of the leather and potions. A bell sat on a wood counter worn to feathery softness. The icy clarity of the ring when I tapped it startled me. I rang it again and yet again, braced by the clean, heartless note.

     The shoemaker entered in apron and carrying a shoe.

     "I am missing the excitement?"

     "Business is afoot."

     He had a Yiddish accent about which we used to say "he eats with a wooden spoon".  His eyes seemed ripe with tears as a sweating fruit. There was something of the duck's bill to his weak mouth, his lips smacked slightly when he spoke, a contemplative, private soul.

     "The shoemaker, yours is an ancient guild.  How long have you been at it?"

     He shrugged.

     "Not less than twenty years, thank you for asking. Nobody has reason to complain about the work."

     "I should say not.  Let them go barefoot. It's so easy to disparage.  And where are the thanks? You have had to announce the hopeless case? To say to someone, `there is nothing I can do'."

     "This cannot always be avoided."

     "There is a wailing and grinding of teeth?"

     "I have heard of such cases.   So far, I have not seen one.  You have some shoes?  I do not mean to rush you, but other customers may not be so considerate if I get nothing done today."    

     I showed him the rubles from my pocket.

     "Fate doesn't always have to be an excuse.  It can be a real mystery.  Looking just at the shoes you may think, `these are shoes I have no trouble knowing.”  I knelt down and unlaced a shoe and put it on the counter. 

     "Any other shoe looking like this would have been thrown out." I showed him the rubles again. "The story is more complicated."

     He picked up the shoe and turned it around in his hands.  What is the difference between the way a man who works on shoes holds them and the man who wears them every day?  I did not recognize my shoe, or else I re-recognized it. The shoe looked smaller in his hands.  Lighter, but denser too.  It looked like a shoe again, just a shoe. 

     "Spare no expense.  I am not without some experience in these things myself. Those lesions at the joint of the small toe, they are a common thing.  That is where the foot bends and the shoe wears out.  You must see this every day.  The leather has some water damage.  Can it hold a stitch?  Of course it can, I have envisioned it.  And the heels must be oak and clear stained so they shine blond. Let us give these shoes respect. You of all people should know.  Because all shoes should be, they DESERVE it."                             

     "I am sure this shoe counts itself lucky to have such a fond owner, but maybe luckier if you had shared your affection with another pair as well.  The leather here has witnessed many marvelous things, I believe you, but unfortunately, it has been aged by the sights.  The leather is too brittle to hold a stitch for long.  You see dry leather like this on old books.  Gogol, Tolstoy, at least, but for all that, if you open them, the spine flakes off like dandruff.  You need new shoes.  Keep these, but for walking buy another pair."

     "Nobody has ever been in a better position to own a new pair of shoes, but I want these shoes to be saved. I have come to a shoemaker.  You can do this. My own father..  There is available a leather sole, smooth and fair which has yet to be pocked by gravel.  A maiden's cheek.  Light gleams in it.  We have discussed the heels already in an indisputably rational way. Stand up, shoemaker. This is a shoe. There has been deterioration.  Over use, abuse-what is the technical term: Fatigue?  Fatigue Everywhere.  So, we must begin here."

     I began to sing a lullaby my mother had sung, and started conducting the tempo with impatient little pokes, very pedantic, like someone stitching a buttonhole.

     "Bottom up. We begin again. Build arks for my feet. It has been done before.  I am the son of a ..."

     I grabbed the shoe and jammed my foot into it. 

     "You are perfectly right.  You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear."  And I fled from the shop    

     Coincidence is like being asked to dance by the demi‑god of luck.  But from the outside luck seems as sober as the operations of estate laws.  The entitled receive the benefits. My deeds were voided. And then, in one day, I was caught on the sprockets of two coincidences and processed quickly out of Petersburg.

     I was on the Boulevard of Collective Endeavor when my eye caught on a hallucination: A happy family.  The street was flooded with pedestrians out for a summer's night promenade, and I was swept along by the current.  From the advantage of an incline I could see an unbroken river composed by the pointillist dots of hundreds of heads. 

     This family stood out.  Few could celebrate the changing seasons with a fresh wardrobe.  Women had one summer dress, a faded cotton printed with flowers that would make the transport through autumn with the addition of sweaters and scarves, and might even serve in winter, flashing its muted glow from under the carapace of an overcoat.  This human flood was mostly doused in rusted, sepia hues. This family was in bloom while the rest were mulch.

     Leading this family was the third tier bureaucrat who had personally issued me my banishment orders at the Ministry of Demographics and Appointments. And he was wearing my clothes. There was the teal coat from a French Impressionist painting, white linen pants from Canterbury or Stratford, and blond shoes from Tuscany, lovely pastels that for all their having been loomed by light and lyre and meant for me were better suited to his complexion than mine.

     His entire family shared a delicate infirmity of humors, an anaerobic pigmentation that could be mistaken, even envied, as blue blood, with  fine, fleecy hair, tinged only slightly with blond, like the transparent film left on a glass by say, a Sauterne. 

     I knew his name, Vladimir. He had insisted on introducing himself.  His face had a jejune prettiness: watery blue eyes with long lashes, a small turned up nose and a rose bud for a mouth with the plump lower lip inlaid-there it was, no mistaking him as I got closer-inlaid with ruby blisters from anxious nibbling. 

     He had squired me into his small office with its common issue of dead objects, offering me a chair with waxy graciousness.  On his wall hung the stony portraits of Lenin and Stalin and the government clock with its large, remedial numbers and the thick, black hands that snapped implacably between the minutes chaining time to labor.  The radiator hissed.  In a bold flourish, he had placed a statuette of Michelangelo's David on a file cabinet.  He sat behind his metal desk with his fingers locked across his nape, at imperial ease.

     "I have read your poetry. I'm a university graduate.  I am an aesthete, do you understand?  Those last poems make me wonder if you do. I savor the feel of the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. That is, ah, delightful.  I have two cases of premier cru Bordeaux at home, and I can pick out a little Chopin, "Les nocturnes", savoir-faire?  on a baby grand I...that I inherited.  I have a view and a humidor with cheroots.  I write poems myself."   At this he laughed a high‑pitched keen that was filled with sexual hysteria. "I know what you're thinking: Now comes the part where he makes me read them.  Don't worry, they're just poems and I doubt I have saved any, maybe a couple of bon mots in my head."

     "If it were up to me you would not be banished. It simply would not occur to me to do it."  He said this as if his opinions descended from a higher canon.  "The arts either please me or they do not, and that's as far as it goes.  How dreary to inflate them.  Life is to be enjoyed, if one must."

     He stood up and faced towards the steamed over window.  With swash-buckling wistfulness, he sponged out a clear circle with his fingertips, and then holding his hand as if it had been wounded, he wiped them with a handkerchief. Beneath the aesthete, he babied tender hypochondria.  His pink of health was the chapping from choleric over‑washing. 

     "I was hoping it would snow.  If we're to get the cold, we might as well have a bit of the magic.  Since I was a boy I always liked snow, and I've not changed just because it's so damned inconvenient."

     He picked up my papers from his desk and lazily passed them to me, letting me know he was already absorbed in the next batch.

     "No useful purpose was served by my seeing you.  This could have been handled by one of my officers.  But I am a student of the human visage. Many famous faces have passed through here.  Speaking as a connoisseur, I must say I am disappointed in you.  You have the face of a folk artist. Myself, I am prejudiced towards the classic in all things.  I think your talent has certainly petered out; a talent that I should venture was never more than mimicry. Your last poems are more representative of the organism. Ironically, exile may spare you ethnicity."

     That was where the miscarriage must have occurred. It was the only time our paths crossed, the package with my numinous clothes arriving moments after I left and signed for by Vladimir.  Diligent but exhausted messenger, running after me here and there with my childhood fantasy of metamorphosis by poetry-never admitted to anyone, but I had expected equal parts beauty to truth. He finally trusts it to Vladimir, whose school of pencil pushing is proved more blessed than my quill scratching. 

      I followed his family.  I had reason to hope for redress.  His mother and sister seemed uncomfortably caparisoned in high fashion.  They were short women, bulbous as snowmen, and his sister had a wincing smile quivering on her lips, and walked on her toes, dragooned into this semblance of grace.

     They moved slower than the crowds. Vladimir's father, a stark, gallows of a man, paler still than his family by virtue of a weak heart, I guessed, had arthritis and moved as if each step might shatter him.  Vladimir paraded with a failed thespian’s pomp, and at one point along the way stopped to buy a bouquet of wildflowers from a vendor.

     A person might cringe before the necromancy involved in the occurrence of a wild flower in Petersburg during those years. He might quail at the stone-eyed brotherhood that traffics sentiment in the underworld.  They surely are the last ones to haggle with, but Vladimir bargained for ten minutes with a hawk-faced crone in a babushka, actually lecturing her on the inappropriateness of her disagreeing with him, who was what he was, which she should be wary of while squatting on the borders of legality.  

     He left with two bouquets that he carried at stiff arms length lest their purses of pollen spill their gold on his breast; his, summer’s scepter.

     They turned a corner down a narrow, cobble-stoned street lined with large trees whose roots buckled the sidewalks.  Planter boxes rested on window sills.  In some of the windows I saw the weak glow cast by electric lamps, unnecessary at this hour-most windows were opened to the lemony infusion of evening-but beacons of home.     

     Lives sheltered from the tempest; the luxury of linden branches scuffing against a second floor window, rain gurgling in drain pipes, padding on paws upon outdoor masonry.

     The family was walking up a short stairway: This was their building. The town houses here had been divided into apartments.  The women toiled up the steps, resting a hand on the banister and hoisting their plumb bodies up one step at a time, pausing briefly on each. Now was the time to act.

     "Vladimir. Yes, you. Hello."  At this the whole family turned to me except for the father who froze and grimaced in disgust; he had had enough of his son's spun‑gold fame being forced down his throat. 

     I began speaking in a theatrical manner. I was dueling with Vladimir for the legitimate claim to airs. 

     "Please excuse this intrusion, madam et mademoiselle.  It is a beautiful summer evening, and when you have retreated indoors, it will be diminished irrevocably.  I still suggest you do so, for I have some unpleasant business to conduct with Vladimir.  Monsieur", I continued, addressing myself directly to Vladimir, "Will you accompany me a few paces so we are out of ear‑shot of the ladies?"

     "Would you listen to this little pot‑chock. A smattering of French yet.  There must be a lycee for bums. I'd probably miss them if they all disappeared.  They try your patience but they're true characters"

     “Pot‑choks” benefitted from Stalin's promise of full employment.  During the winter they swept freshly fallen snow from the sidewalks and streets using straw brooms the government issued that glowed sardonically in the gloom.  Sometimes, they would seem to be painting the streets with snow, gnomes sent by the north wind.  They were also known as Pravdas for the newspapers they stuffed in their shabby boots to keep their feet from freezing. 

     "Oh, Vladie, give him a few kopeks, what harm is there in it?" said his sister, now confirmed as the kindest.

      "These canards", he said.  "Sink holes.  He'll just spend it on alcohol.  But if it makes you happy", and in order to reach into his lovely white pants, he tried to pass her the kidnapped flowers, but I intercepted them, and for a moment we tussled until the effluvia of pollen and god knows what nits raining from the shaking flowers made him consider his coat, and he released them and I rocked back on my heels. 

     "Canei", I said, "He meant Canei. These surely belong with you", pushing the flowers at his sister so she could not refuse them, "and I rarely drink. If I'm guilty of anything in that department it is being too deliberate a drinker.  There is a school of thought that says a calculated drinker is ungenerous", struggling for a toe‑hold in her attention.  With a stab at easy intimacy, I added, "Over‑eating was really closer to my heart, but the strict ideological diet I've been put on has eased the danger." 

     She reminded me of one of my lovers, Katya. She, too, had had that aura of blessed innocence and vulnerability. Her pastel coloring and body type were the same.  We had seemed destined to play symbolic roles in each other's lives.  I accused her by nothing more than my body’s grave symmetry, by its pre‑disposition towards suffering. I tested her faith in charity.  She blamed herself for me.  She looked too innocent, for that to arouse me did me spiritual harm. She was bathed in tears and milk, exorbitantly fertile with a pre‑moral injunction to hope.  She seemed to herself contrary to religion, beneath or before it, and being secretly devout, was always guilty about it. 

     I thought Vladimir’s sister would have an inbred weakness for me. 

     I continued:  "A lovely evening.  Me?  A blight. Please, don't forgive me.  It's in your nature to do it. I'm the kind who would take advantage.  An evening like this could not still be possible if  I had more than myself to blame for going against the natural order that allows the humble the simple delight of loving the world which sits on their throat.  I prove nothing against this night unfolding from the sweet will of creation and pressing cleanly into your heart while it's reaching down to fill your brother's pockets as it is obligated to do.  Duties only a cynic might think were outside the concern of a universe others must squint at to discern the answers to hoarse prayers puked out during an hour's blessed stupor."

     "I told you, Lydmulla.  He thinks we've bought a sermon.  Preach to the birds," and he made to shepherd his flock up the stairs, holding his arms stiffly away from his sides and quivering his fingers as is done to drive geese, but his father was grinning as blithely as his skull‑like face would allow. 

     "Wait a minute, Vladimir, this fellow knows you.  This is no way to treat a friend. Go on, we're always glad to meet Vladie's cultured friends".

     "A friend?, I don't have the largesse, But you, Lydmulla, please love your brother.  He's no friend, but I know him, and if you can, it consecrates you by saintly patience.  And more, because you are part of his family and I know what families are.  I was once a son and a bother in the way families probably deserve."

      "Lydmulla, You're not really going to stand here listening until he's finished.  He's a bum.  Where does your timidity stop?   Just look at this family, I got to laugh.  And you just shut up, you skinny dirt ball, don't think you can take advantage of our good manners.  We're not mamby‑pamby, we've taken our lumps"

     "Mother I only meant I am a son myself and my family..."

     "The hell you did.  There, I've said it straight out for all of us, and we won't waste any more time.  Lydmulla, you don't have the horse sense to know when you're being insulted."

     Except for Vladimir's father, who glanced angrily at his wife and stood his ground, they resumed their progress towards the front door.

     "A family", I sputtered to their backs, "Built as carefully and appropriately‑I'm saying as afflicted with hope and narcissism and generosity as your own", shrilly now, aiming my voice at Lydmulla.

     From the landing his mother called over her shoulder, "Nickolai, you'd listen to anyone who had a bad word to say about your son.  If it weren't for him you'd be living in the street with that bum."

     The father, spent from the walk, leaned against the railing and dredged a silver cigarette case from the pink coat spilling off his shrunken shoulders.  For a moment he struggled with the clasp with his gnarled fingers, then he beckoned me over and I opened the case for him.

     "Take a few, there are matches in my pocket." 

     From above, Vladimir's mother called down from an open window. 

     "Nickolai, now I've seen it all. If you stay out there any longer I'll lock the door on you.  Maybe someone will give you a bone, you old dog."

     "Mother", I called up to her, leaning my head back, "Be fair, mother.  If you love Vladimir, I'm easy.  What you see, he created, your deft child." 

     I saw him peek his head out the window beside his mother. She was leaning over the planter box, her heavy bosoms slung forward, her face flushed, but before she could throw another happy insult, Vladimir pulled her back from the window. The phrase "We're not fish mongers" escaping the house. 

     "A small thing this job of his, easily forgiven, you must have done it without a thought, but you have also forgiven, you have embraced his real monstrosities-you are a family. His exquisiteness at table that disparages your taste from gut to womb. He will remain silent until you stifle your slurping, won’t he, your gifted child erroneously born?"  At this the window slammed shut, but I continued, "Forget the cheroots and the baby grand, inherited from, from whom?  Of course, his pianist uncle,od rest his soul". 

     Vladimir shot through the doorway blushing furiously, pulled the cigarette from his father's mouth and dragging him to his feet started pushing him towards the door.

     "Leave me alone. Take your hands off."

     "The neighbors. Come along, dear father. Will you move?"  Forcing him up the stairs.

     "Forgiven this clerk who is famous throughout the Ministry for holding his urine until he turns yellow as a canary so he will not have to share the urinal with anyone else, who daubs the corners of his mouth and flutters his lashes when he eats a strawberry, strip him of those extraneous things, a clunky Chopin Nocturne, a French tie, a set of China from, wherever,  and left naked like that, lucky Vladimir, bore, pedant, incidental killer, promiscuous heir, is dearly beloved.  But Mother, with half the effort you can love me.  I'm his soul's work and all I do is stink."

     Once again Vladimir popped out the door this time grabbing his ears.  Tufts of his hair stuck out.  Could I hope he had actually been pulling out his hair, that the slander of cheap comedy was contagious?  He breathed rapid, rasping breaths.  His face curdling with rage and prissy disgust, glancing quickly around to see we were alone and pressing his tongue into the corner of his lips to reveal its pink tip in a trance of obsessed industry, he gave me a quick punch in the chest, sending me immediately to the ground.  For a moment, he stood over me transported by the intoxicating juices of physical victory for probably the first time in his life. His face flushed red and then bleached white.  His eyes were fierce and amorous. Biting his lip to contain an outburst of joy, he began kicking me in the thigh with his lovely Italian shoe, and at each blow, as if he were marking meter, he stamped me with a single word. "Edit. That's. The. Ticket." And then fairly skipped up the stairs, his fingers trembling with electric energy.

     I lay my cheek against the cobble‑stones feeling the balm of their cool, clammy touch which seemed able to confer invisibility on me, smelling their vesper musk of urine, diesel and moss.  Several pedestrians glanced at me with the deferential curiosity reserved for the vanquished, a mix of science and visceral sympathy, but the decorum for someone in my decayed state lying on the ground gave them license to pass on without offering a hand, for which I was thankful. 

     I looked up at the sky and eaves.  There were empty birds' nests tucked among the rafters.  A sweet vertigo lifted me upward, a child’s premonition of death.  

     I had not been struck since childhood and I had had the soothing delusion I was being tested for timbre and in a childish way‑within that split second falling and comprehension are suspended‑abjectly eager to please. 

      On the cobblestones the surprising pain caught up. Where Vladimir had hit me was a oak‑solid emptiness.  

     At last, I pulled myself up using the banister and began to hobble away.  The cramp from the blows would stay with me for days, and where he had struck me, bruises blossomed in the moribund colors of lichens.

     I walked and walked.  The pain frightened me.  I thought it might spread if I stopped, like freezing to death.  The numbness was over my heart.

     "Comrade.  Over here."

     A church where drunks lay passed out in a drunken pile on its steps.  The voice came from this kindred litter of ham colored, clown-opera, bruised faces. 

     "Listen, czarich, this plaza used to be Angel's Harp. Pilgrims came here to be cleansed.  They’d climb these steps on their knees.  The power is still hidden here. My companions and me have enjoyed the miracle ourselves. Up from stomach turners to heart renders, no?  A few kopeks, pilgrim, to support the miracle.”

      "No kopeks?  Then here, welcome to our circle of handsome devils mistakenly condemned.”  He extended a bottle to me.

     "No, thank you."

     "No, thank you. Wherefore are my manners?

     He rubbed the mouth of the bottle with his filthy sleeve, a rheumy eye crinkling with sly wit.

     "No tax on piss of this quality, it's practically manna from heaven.  Only our prayers let us get drunk on it."

     "No, I’m on my way”, I answered.   

     "Not from here. No more appeals from here, Emmanuel."

     "Did you say Emmanuel?"

     "You must have mis‑heard, denizen Frank."     

     "You know me?"

     "Don't flatter yourself. On looks alone I could never have done it. Your maidenly reserve gave you away.  You were always stand-offish."

     "I don't know you."

     "You know me all right. You've just forgotten me. To be fair, we were only friends. Those are the ones we forget quickest. I should have injured you, but I didn't know then what I know now.  Joseph Lypenko, a specter haunting Europe."

     We had met in Paris when we were both students. He was studying with a French sculptor.  I must have looked horrified.   In a second a young student had decomposed.

     "Damn you too, Emmanuel. We are all cannibals.  Look closely.  The blue eyes.  I couldn’t quite pop them down my gullet. You know how it was, we looked for signs of divine promise.  These were mine.  But there must always have been a rotten spot in them. You think it a spark, but now it's ripened you see it was meanness, at the least. It’s easier that way to face the festering. And isn't that guile spotting your gifts, to name it tactfully?"

     "It's been years, Joseph, but there's no mistaking you.  The purse is battered, but the coins still shine.  I was not expecting you, that’s all. You've put on some weight; to be honest you were a bit thin back then.  A sculptor should look more like a blacksmith.  You do not look bad and never mean-spirited, what do you say?  We’ve suffered, but our humanity remains. We can still, only we, those of us...can still pity.  It's written on us.  What do you say?"

     I had knelt down beside him while I spoke.

     He grabbed me by the coat. 

     "Bullshit. This isn’t Paris."

      His face was up against mine.  I stared at his mouth with the same sickening, venereal fascination I would have a wound. His face had the power of the ill or destroyed to seem angelic, stricken in the way I imagine an angel would be by life, scored by every blow because too innocent to dodge. He blinked rapidly.  He was unused to being seen.    

      He released me. 

     "Begging your forgiveness.  I always loved you.  Quite beautiful you were, and so serious.  You could have taken advantage, been a real son‑of‑a‑bitch.  You were the best of them.  A gentleman.  So many tried one pose or another and failed, wrecked by the ambition.  You had the right, in the blood.    

     "So, you see, I missed you for years now.  Your special talent. I feel much better already.  Maybe I can be cured.  I feel it, you understand, vitality.  If you'd just help me along.  Tell me about Freda Blinski.  Go on.  I'm all ears."

       And he patted me with the absurd deference you might an idiot you had to entrust with a message for help.

     "I don't know any Freda Blinski." 

     "You bastard. Make it up. How much do you think I need?  Just her name said by someone else.  Her name."

     "Freda? A rose by another name, of course, but I think it's a name better forgotten.  Let's try another one, something you wouldn't name a locomotive."

     "Be nice, Emmanuel. Just tell me a little story. These bastards are too stupid to put words together, you hear, poet?"  

     And he cuffed one of his comrades in the head, eliciting a soft, reflex moan before the fellow settled down again smacking his lips.

     "Those locomotives are pretty much all the same.  As a boy I liked them, but you're asking a lot for me to rhapsodize over them now."

     I got back to my feet, a fresh lance of pain reminding me of my kicked leg. Joseph held the bottle limply over his companions head. 

     "I'll smash him.  Nobody will give a shit. The head bleeds like a melon. He might lose an eye, he seems the unlucky kind.  You haven't been down here long, you've got a clean slate.  You want that spilled on it forever? Spare him. I'll help you along, just get you started.  

     He reached a hand down his pants.  He looked puzzled, and concentrated and dreamy as if he had found a boil on his neck.  He began to forget me.

      "A freak.  Bend over, dear. Any woman. Any time.  Ass like a horse, she's almost bent over as she stands, must be inconvenient for her, but open to it. Stand her up facing away from me, under the sky light, bring her in early, get the morning light, she's as perfect as marble in it."

     He gritted his teeth.  I had begun backing away.

     He yelled out after me:

     "It's not working.  Come back, Emmanuel. Please.  Emmanuel, Emmanuel.  So beautiful. Paris. Emmanuel, Paris. I can remember, oh it's cruel, it hasn't changed.  Sacre Coeur. You have the name, christened in Paris.  Come back.  Just say these words. 'She bends down and her enormous buttocks spread, a man could not span them with his arms stretched wide as the savior on the cross'.  Just repeat them."  He flourished the bottle.

     "Don't you care about us?  Think of your superiority, some” responsibility comes with that.  You can't just leave this guy.  He needs your love.”

     "Your love, Emmanuel", he called, and I looked back to see him wrestling his comatose companion into a sitting position accompanied by groans and growls of strain, and an occasional hysterical shriek of frustration.  He got him propped up and swayed dizzily, panting.  When he saw he had my attention he stuck his tongue out at me, hitched his pants up, rolled his shoulders, and spat into his hands, rubbing them together, miming a man about to do hard labor.  He winked salaciously at me, picked up the bottle, and began windmilling it, dancing heavily from foot to foot.  Each time it passed near his companion’s head, I flinched.

     Vomit dribbled from the sleeping man's lips, like baby's milk puke.  He had been trundled around too much.

     "Joseph. What are you doing?  I'm going to leave.  You're too strong. You're armed. I can't stop you.  I'm walking away."

     "Cruel Emmanuel.  You can't love him.  He disgusts you."

     He bent down and kissed him on the lips.  My stomach churned.

     "Hit my dear friend, never.  But you've abandoned him.  Your love has its pride, after all." 

     He walked towards me, bottle still in hand, and I retreated, trying to face him and watch where I was stepping at the same time.  He made a quick move and I jerked up my arms to cover my head.  He laughed.

     "A virgin.  I should be ashamed.  Out of your pure heart, only a noble love.  It takes a pervert to be generous, sweet knight."

     He placed the bottle on the cobblestones, no longer pursuing me.

     "Freda Blinski, was my model. Don't I have your support, a fellow Parisian?   

     "Alas, sweet Knight, t'was the ass. I was not exposed as an artist, monticules de merde, but as a man. 

     "I'd survived true love, more do than will admit it. All dolled up with pride and destiny.  No terror there.  But to love to obliteration the silly, silly flesh.  All of it. So sad. The catastrophe of living. Ending in dew and shit."      

     He lowered himself unsteadily to his knees, spread his arms and looked up at the sky.

     "God, do you hear me? Emmanuel, can you?  It's the godly prayer, moaned through my meat and suet, in the humblest manner. I swear I am in abject pain, purified as a saint. Praying the word as it makes me:  Buttocks."

     And with that he fell forward on the cobblestones. I suddenly had deep regrets and approached him gingerly.   

     An eyelid flickered.  One bloodshot eye opened. 

     "The holy ones won't tell you this, but useful advice for the dark journey. Don't laugh on your back.  You may finish aspirating your own vomit."  He turned onto his side, propping his head on his elbow.   "I have you to thank for this.  I know who my enemies are.   I'll confess for us both. Lord, we never dreamed our friends in the Golden Age.  They didn't fare too well with us, poor bastards. Thrashed and boiled. And speaking for myself, it's more often now than before I'll dream the sweet fuck under the sun, a gentle girl with me in the center of all nature, trees and water balanced around.  Mostly, I've copulated with monsters and the carnage was something to behold. Anyway, Lord, we are here to acknowledge the visitation of justice."

 

     I spent my last night in Petersburg on the steps of the church.

     I cried like an icon, an unconscious flow of tears from a spring in the country I visited while blacked‑out. 

     I had come to this church many years ago.  I had put my palms against the walls so I could feel the cold force inside, the clarion running through stone.  The cold leeching through my palm was the hum and surge given off by the power in that word as it still ascended, the rocks compelling the church on us so by our labor they could vault towards heaven.   

     This time the cold stones sounded deep into nothing. Here gargoyles roused from their perches had assembled to supplicate the grave for silence. Some rehearsed the lines that spellbound stone into ghoul, rasped curses the spade might purge. Others beat themselves or rolled blindly in drugged fights, biting each other with toothless gums.  From others moans and keening spilled from their dreams. Take these that mud might again be deaf.  

       

    

     I know the routine Boris will follow today as he will everyday this summer and through fall into winter, when slogging through snow and slush, the iron will in maintaining his civilized habits is made clear.

       He will rise early.  A man of conscience. There is no hope in the new day, but like a good father he must be gullible and a bit block‑headed, immune to panic.  He will once again refuse his wife's offer of breakfast with a touch of pompous gallantry, and leave her still pointedly in bed.

     Outside his apartment building he will pause to bathe his face in the sunlight.  He has succeeded in adopting the literal man’s tritely lyric pleasures. 

     He will turn left and trudge off at his heavy, plow-horse gait.  Others will always force appeals on him and he pulls the burden. He is nearly a head taller than me, and bows with a perpetual apology for his majesty and its suggestion of indifference. 

     He will buy the paper at a kiosk. At the out door cafe the waiter will bring him a pot of tea without him having to order, and he will don his owlish reading glasses with a sniffling crinkle of his nose, affecting the incompetence that comes with virtue.  He will read Pravda carefully because several of his former students are on its staff and he is waiting for their prior promise to leak through the boiler‑plate. While he reads he will eat six biscuits that are arranged like a clock face on a dish, each having a cashmere coat of marmalade‑his leg crossed, a hiked up cuff revealing a crumpled sock.

     I have gotten there first, while the waiter is still taking the chairs off the table tops and give him a letter I have written to Boris. After reading the paper, Boris will stay to write notes, maybe even his celebrated verses, and the waiter would protect his privacy. I slip him a ruble and he accepts the letter.

     "Dear Boris", I have written while sitting on a park bench.  At the foot of the bench is a small pile of tumbled together objects I discover in my pocket while searching for crumbled paper and pencil.  I do not remember putting them there. 

      Here are the keys from my apartment in Petersburg.  I never returned them.  I left nearly everything in place. I took a last tour through its few rooms as I evaporated into transparency, the ethereal body of the moment gelling outside me until I could barely swim through the elements alchemized into the past:  My chair by my desk, mired in the grooves it had plowed in the floor with a grating complaint that now hung in the silence as corporally as an odor, the actual odor of floor wax become thick as a brush stroke of varnish on the pane of still air in the room, while dust motes floating in the onion skin of wane, wintry light inherited the august eternity of starry constellations.    

     And stones.  This is a shard from a levee along the Neva.  What is this one?  A jagged chip of brick.  And here pebbles from a stream, round and smooth as shelled eggs, light glowing inside.  Walls?  Foundations?  Ballast?  Some pieces of Petersburg that will not turn to glimmer?  A patch of blue fabric, and pigeon feathers.  They fall through my fingers, the feathers spin. I am like a scarecrow pulling out his straw.  Worth nothing, it is still all he is.

     They make a tiny altar on the ground.

     "Dear Boris, do you remember the blue vase filled with blue irises that Sonya picked when she could not linger with us that summer? Like a jar of water‑color brushes.  Remember? How relieved we all were to be rid of her.  A talent, no a genius, for killing joy.  How many flowers she picked.  I ground my teeth as she tore them up. Just appreciate them.  Typical Sonya, always flaunting her irreverence, and even worse, homely but carrying herself with the airs of a siren.  Outrageous satire. Complete delusion, she made beauty out to be an affliction of the weak-minded.  But Sonya walking back to the house with her arms brimming with flowers, barely able to lace her fingers around them, I can't forget her. Indelible spite.  Just try to enjoy your holy summer without me.   

     Was it the color she married herself to, something about blue that would not have worked with red, a distilling of distance?  I am talking technique here, Boris, the most wicked pre‑meditation.  Art.  

     It took almost the full two weeks for the circle of flowers to shrink to one flower, and they were never noticed disappearing, but instead each one remaining seemed to be mysteriously appearing, the heart compensated for the event that way, until the last flower was startling as an arrow dropped from the sky.  And chained to them, the memory of Sonya, so that she had never left for good and done but was always suddenly disappearing once again, right there just the second before, time and again, her vanishing each time fresh and printing her image where she no longer was, abominable woman, like witnessing the creation of a flower from nothing.       

     So, Boris, dear friend, let me leave my stain, a sticky drop of marmalade on every page.  And please, buy me off with work as Asians appease their ancestors."

 

     I arrive at the station.  Solemn grandeur and foreshadowing of death.  Voices in the great chamber rise to form a haunting spirit world overhead.  In the gothic hangar where the trains dock, in the web of steel girders up in the vault, a worker is replacing light bulbs, startling pigeons into wheeling flight as he moves along a cat‑walk.  Maybe once he would have worked among church bells.  Heavy work, those throats of judgment or apocalypse. There is a great silence where the bells used to clang.  The trains move through it along the orbits of the stars which have been staked to the ground.

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