POET PART II

---

 

                             PART TWO               

    

     From Vorst, I was removed to Podunki, out on the steppes, beside the Don. 

     Collectivization fell on the steppe like a natural disaster. 

     Amnesia was endemic, solid and agonizing as boils or corns.  It had no spiritual aspect, it was a handicap.  You had to be patient.  It was like living in a colony for the senile.  Because we all needed prodding from time to time, we bit our tongues when someone drifted off, or bumped into us, or spilled our barely off the scale. 

     Not a week passed when these aphasias did not result in death or injury at the mills.  Wispy trumpet notes wafted into town from the graveyard where they played the Internationale over the new burial.  The ragged little band, a French horn, a clarinet, a drum, a piccolo, was the cultural life in Podunki.  They dressed in threadbare formality, in mourner's black, with a red cummerbund that represented the state.  Afterwards, they smoked cigarettes with the grave‑diggers who had a sympathetic aspect about them, as well as a flask of vodka. 

     Two railroad lines converged at Podunki, and the trains arrived day and night, moving in like threats of Apocalypse, miles long, ferrying in coal and ore, the ground rumbling beneath these kingdoms of iron.  Everything and everyone was coated with grit and oily ash, the workers especially, they looked like children of Ham.  Their eyes glowed like zealots' through their black faces.  For thirty miles around the town no plants grew and every tree stood blasted by noxious gasses from the mills. The snow fell black.

     My dreams were untranslatable:  Scalding whirlpools of light and color I struggled through in my sleep, awaking sweating and gasping, tangled in my blanket.  Instincts that had once been lodged at the joints of wings and had seemed keyed to the world's will now thrashed limbless. 

     The hospital was known as the saw‑mill.  Amputees thumped about town on wooden legs or crutches, lay drunk in the streets with a sleeve pinned up.  Skin ailments, asthma, emphysema were considered decadent, psychosomatic, sublimations of the old religion and superstitions.  The doctors did not treat them. 

     Boris shunted some translating work my way, mostly technical journals.  After a while the boredom caused snow‑blindness, and I would rock back in my chair at the Worker's Library, putting my fingers over my eyes to cool them. I did receive one whimsy: A short journal in French on the art of espalier. It could almost have been an encoded message to exiled poets.     

     The library was one room.  Pine shelves ran along the walls and in several rows.  There was room for a table.  Most of the shelves were empty, the rest filled with journals and political tracts.  The librarian had lost an arm in the steel mill.  I rolled cigarettes for us.  He had lost his cunning arm and though he could still roll a cigarette with the other it was enough trouble to nearly spoil the smoke.  Usually he smoked a pipe, but wasn't it nice to have a cigarette on occasion, just the change itself let you savor the smoke outside of your habit.  

     He wore thick, horn rimmed glasses.  Not from reading too much, he confided in me at the appalling volume of the hard of hearing.  He wasn't really a librarian, this job was compensation for his lost arm.  He supposed it was the grit in the air that had cost him so much of his sight, or maybe the glare from off the steel. His idleness left him a bit daft.  His favorite reading was the lists of censored titles and authors.  The books never made it as far as Podunki, but the words whispered especially the authors’ names. He supposed many dead. He was becoming a poet listening to the dead. Podunki infected for inspiration. Shades bloated. The emptied stops whistled the wind.  

     The authorities had a museum in Moscow, it was rumored.  It was not for the public.  From time to time you would see their collectors around town.  Fishy little fucks, they looked like violinists or morticians.  Beardless, not even the shadow of shaved whiskers.  They came to pick up the strange flotsam that slipped into Podunki under cover of fog or snow.  Some years ago, steel workers up drinking had tripped over a body frozen stiff and perfectly preserved.  Dressed in ancient Egyptian garb and black as an African; One of the three wise men from the Bible. An old widow had practically died of shock herself when she encountered Czar Nicholas and his family, including Anastasia, standing frozen in tableau, dressed lovely, as if posed for a family portrait, their blue eyes open and startled, and no wonder, with a bullet hole smack in the forehead of each. 

     Podunki was not unfamiliar to my soul. Orphaned pieces of it had already arrived here.  They were my first imaginings of death.  

     I noticed I was biting my lower lip, a thing I remembered my father doing.  As a kid I had thought that at those moments he was alerted to something, now as I caught myself doing it I considered a probable hereditary weakness.  My shoulders were not wide enough to carry the heroic cargo of martyrdom.  Long before the last revelatory addition was made, the golden feathers reserved for Job, I would have buckled under from dross bitterness and fatigue.

     Pages from the journal:

     What essence is the core of substance?  Thought?  Feeling?  Love?  Ash? Not sure I can bear hearing my hope. 

     Meditate on shape, may prove tolerable. Shape: A funnel. Top up. Top down. From one to many, from many to one.

     Can not make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

     Can this oblivion be the agar of conception?  The little death, merci les Francais. Involuntary servitude joyfully surrendered to. There is evidence, to wit: Rats.  Their multitudes. I have spotted no human couples floating in the dark. Is that reason to hope? Have they been unanswered? The vertigo when looking at the sky. A reflection on water: Heaven?  More than the sky itself. 

     We feel our deprivation sharply, we know what we miss.  We feel the absence of God specifically.  We need a slice of bread.  Each of us.  New shoes, right one especially.  

     Evolution of the soul: 

     Bats: Puzzling that I ever identified the spirit with birds.  There are no birds here.  There are no bats either, but falling ash reminds me of them. Words squeak in the dark. Birds wings are impossible here.  Daedalus was right in his formula for them.  Honey.  And their bones are filled with air, miraculous alchemy, metaphor for joy.  Herky‑jerk, the only flight possible here.  Far from the blithe angels.  Wings for subterranean flight, like bats, made from things that time can not heal. From discarded rinds.  Dry, picked‑over things, bleached griefless.

       Bats at all the train stations in Russia.  Their pinched, demonic faces, completely human. Birds merciless, fearless, beautiful faces, celestial eyes. Ugliness is kinder than beauty and forgives us. The bats fingers extended through anxiety, by horror, clutch their overcoats around themselves. They are hung upside down, the moon is their sun.  Love lost.  Longing.

     Words that fall to the ground like stones tossed into the grave. Words that I pick off from scabs. Lice and bedbugs edit the sermons engraved in my flesh. The candle is flensed of tallow leaving burnt wick. 

     Tree of life.  Roots in death.  Branches like spokes tangled in the stars.

     Horses of Podunki:  Nobles.  Slaves.  Their nobility has made them slaves.  Carnivores are more clever. Poor bastards. Like seeing the gods harnessed to psychology.

     Dogs:  The salon. Fangs are the organizing principle of society. 

      It is crowded in the underworld.  I live in the labyrinthine basement of a workers' block.  The janitor has rented to dozens.  All under the table, of course.  Families.  Children: I have told some of them fairy tales. The children make me uncomfortable. Naked souls. I blabber on.  The cruelest tales bubble out. Stories of cannibalism, infanticide, curses. I've known the tales since childhood. They travel well.  I have not met the insane child yet, though there is a little girl down here with blond hair and a doll.  But not one Cassandra raving of a world of sun.  Dolls are severely punished.  But I have never overheard a child wheedling a doll with stories of meadows.   From dust to dust.

     Things to bury with the dead. What you would pack for a miner.  A light, a shovel, strong pair of shoes. Do not veer into metaphor. They are for flight and useless. The Old Testament and Dante’s Inferno: Texts on mineral psychology.  

     Cicadas: Years underground, a day or two of flight and copulating.  Two days of confusion, of splendor?  Ferocious drive to copulate.  Why think it is the two day blast of light they celebrate?  Why not the dreamless peace?

     My sight has become salt.  Obedience. Love. Heart. Sap. Core. Vein of ore. Shaft of light. Return to nothing.  Devout. Devout. 

     Yesterday, I walked through the old town. Dusty alleys rutted by wagon wheels.  Wooden cabins without windows.  I heard a kid bleating.  I now understand the language of animals. "Me" they say.  They discover their soul in pain or joy, then forget. The ewe answered. Through the slats in the fence I saw her tied to a stake. Her udder was full. Her kid was being slaughtered.  The butcher held him and he struggled and called.  He had never been away from his mother.  Then the butcher put the kid's front leg behind its neck.  The kid knew everything then. It stopped calling or struggling. It waited the knife. 

     Hunger is the soul’s embryology. Why not the dreamless peace? 

     Transubstantiation.  Our ghosts become fables.

                    

     Podunki's plumbing was pipe dreams.  There was indoor plumbing, but no water system to connect it to.  Instead there were outhouses and common wells.  People brought bottles, cans and buckets to these spigots and carried the water back to their apartments.  The water ran continuously so it would not freeze in winter, soaking the ground around the cement stanchions supporting the pipes.   

     She had taken off her shoes to walk barefoot through the mud.  To drink from the spigot she turned her head sideways and let the water run through her mouth.  Water sparkled on her calves and her blond hair was waxed bronze by the stream.  A breathlessly hot day.  My throat was rusted with dust, my tongue stuck to my palate. 

     She stood back from the flow, combing her fingers through her wet hair, her lifting arms pushing her breasts against the wet blouse. 

     "Come and share, comrade." She kicked water at me from the puddle at her feet. "Costs nothing to look, eh comrade?"   She wrung the water from her hair and then threw her head back and tossed the lank tresses about. "You look pop‑eyed as a crushed frog." 

     She had two buckets and she set them one after the other under the rope of falling water where they ran up a tin scale from bass to alto.  When they were full, the cords in her neck taught with strain, she set them apart a meter or so where she could hook them to a pole she meant to yolk across her shoulders.  She stooped to raise them, but then stopped and letting the pole rest on the pails, stood to look at me again.    

     "You're a peculiar looking guy, a wisp. I doubt you'd last a day in the mills.  But it's rare to see someone still has some gentleness in them by the time they've been whipped as much as you. I've seen plenty who were softened up, but you got a bit of something else.  Come over here. Come on now", speaking in a maternal voice and with vacant preoccupation, her sentence like a smooth stone rolled on her tongue.  She cupped her hand and dipped it into the bucket, and offered it to me to drink. 

     "Won't simple gratitude move us when the time comes? How thirsty we are for it. Naturally grateful creatures if given the chance."

     Bowing my head, I drink from her hand, my lips scraping her calloused palm. The body lives a stark melodrama. My mind chided with falsetto sarcasm, but she played to the speechless heart.      

     Nearby, two naked toddlers wallowed contentedly in the mud.          "Kids, meet Uncle?"

     "Emmanuel"

     The children regarded me skeptically.

     "Get under the spigot and wash off, kids. Uncle Emmanuel is going to take you by the hands and walk you home. We'll break you in slowly to the buckets, Uncle, don't want to lose you as soon as we've found you." 

     And that is how I came to enter the widow Vilma’s household during the last few months of my exile in Podunki before I was re‑arrested and shipped to Eastern Siberia.

     Her husband had been killed at the mills leaving her with three children, an apartment in one of the workers' blocks, and a meager pension. 

     "You're a quiet one" she decided, and I found silence easier.  Enrolled in her passion play it was best to be stupefied. She might fed me from her hand. It was our mass: Solemn, and pitiable, as she found religion itself. It could not answer for her dead husband. She offered an alternative faith to frail man. Hers found no agnostics.

     The drugging and subterfuge of normalcy drove her to hysteria. She would fussily remark on the weather.  "A steady drizzle.  Not much to it, but it can soak through to the bone, given the time."  Alerted by her syrupy, gently introspective tone, her eldest, a nine year old who monitored her erratic moods with a stony stare, would try to slip away.  "Why a drizzle like this can turn even a cheerful lad into a moper" and suddenly outrage would galvanize her face, and she would turn to him. "How can a nine year old be unhappy, nobody but himself to blame" and chase after him and swat him to the floor. You had to remain alert to the angel.  

     Nursing her youngest son who was nearly three and who preferred submitting to this ceremony in spite of its alienating him from his older siblings rather than graduating into ingratitude or doubt or whatever the others were guilty of, she would offer this wisdom. "Childhood is a time of simple pleasures and we should never rush to end it."  

     Her five‑year old daughter had long blond hair that caused her endless misery. Vilma insisted on curling it into long corn‑curls using heated irons, terrorizing the girl.  "No one will ever take you for an orphan now." 

     Through the windows and under the doors the sooty grit seeped in. After a fanatic house‑cleaning, she would cast herself onto a chair, completely spent, but enjoying a bleak satisfaction having passed beyond moral illusion. "Some say Anastasia is still alive.  Well, that is a lie. She's dead and all her palaces and silver aren't doing her any good, and we have life, and she'd trade all she had for this day.” 

     "You don't know anything.  I've got to watch out for you. There's not many who'd bother with a weakling.  I've got the strength for it, I’m a Russian woman. I'll keep you as long as I stay curious as to how you've lived so long counting on the pity of the world. 

     "No need for you to worry.  I need you for my own comfort now. First time I saw you, my milk dropped like I'd heard a baby wailing. I'm nobody's fool.  Bad luck to those would judge me by these tities, look up and check my eye before you go thinking I'm such a soft touch. I know what I know and nobody will catch me napping, and then along you come and pull the milk down of it's own and I have to wonder I've been sitting over the well‑of human kindness after all and have little say in it, when I used to think, `let these spin their heads and confuse the bastards'."

     From the dingy apartment her children's struggled breathing as they slept, drunken braying from the street, quarrels in other apartments, slamming doors, and under these the cosmology of train noises, Johovian gravities tugging at my bones.   She tapped her temple and nodded her head sagely.

     "A woman must depend on the violence in men. There's the knife point their love turns on. I brought out the pain in my husband’s heart. Thought he could rid himself of it with a fuck, surprised himself time and again flopping down on me at the end with a gasp like a child gets when it's going to choke on sobbing.  He would turn me about and grab me so he could have at me from behind so he could ram at me and not see my face, but I feel each time his hand melt from its grip towards the last, and him forced into tenderness against his will. Never a crime wasn't done for love." 

      I became physically enmeshed in her, sometimes drifting into slumber at the library or when sitting on a rock at the apogee of my caged pacing about Podunki.  I nodded off like a lover luxuriously doped by sleep deprivation, but from an excess of sleep, like a drunkard's wallow.

     The Volga was a dead river near Podunki.  I walked out of town to avoid the reeking sludge, a quixotic journey, the banks were devastated for more miles than I could ever walk, but the riverside in town was piled with rusted machinery and garbage, and discards that in that setting were props for nightmares: A broken crib, a doll, dead cats. 

     I walked several miles to a coven of slick rocks I had found.  The Volga flowed in opaque colors that matched those in the hallways and offices of bureaucracies, lime green and sulfur yellows, and the rust red that reached four feet up the walls of schools like a flood line.  The river was wide and the current powerful but hidden in the breadth, awful, subversive, like the motion of a huge bowel.  The view of the far shore didn’t promise paradise.  It was the closest horizon imaginable, a hazy brown line blending into an ocher sky, a dirty floor abutting a dirty wall. It previewed the coffin.  The difference between boxes would be slight.       

          "The dark is a favor to my face.  And nothing there I haven't earned.  Craftiness in it and spite and no sweet beauty.  How could you have imagined when you got such a clear picture of just what it would look like or left it to a mystery you wouldn't spoil, that love would happen where there is no love but just the same crap of our miserable lives. And especially me, who can not be fooled and is not offering you any lie or any love if it’s a lying promise that it will save us. And I give this to you and when I give it to you will have to do as salvation for me, that I am giving you all I can even if it costs me nothing or I wouldn't give it, never forgetting who I am but still giving like they said it would be with love but we'll never know. Give you what's less than peace or anything else was supposed to be possible in the world, give you the dumb miracle."  

     She was raised as a Christian. Then Jesus was purged. She realized the miracle. By his leaving the world we could at last follow his commandment to love one another as we would Him. We shone sufficient. As it was, our loveless love was sufficient and divine. Jesus had been the necessary creation of his absence. He had risen from nothing, less than mud, and here in Podunki she got her revelation:  Pull the bung and this asshole became a fount. 

     She was in the kitchen. The kids were in their room playing their favorite game, "monsters", or "beasts" a game they could keep up for hours and which involved intense, cryptic plotting, and nearly suspended motion as if they were linked in a seance.  "He can eat stones."  "How can he do that?"  "Steel teeth, like a steam shovel."  "Not again. That one gets you nowhere."  "He can eat whatever he wants. He could eat this building."  "It's got to be harder than that."  "He can be eating all the time."  "But then he's never hungry.  He's got to have a special taste.  It's not even good enough if he eats people, it's got to be blood or brains."   Until once again they had summoned up a chimera that pursued a particular gross nectar in the citizens of Podunki.

     Overhearing her kids she told me about Jesus. Her kids were reaching Him in their own way. They’d have to. They wouldn’t listen to her.   

          “My oldest..his father and me..he saw too much. My sins.

          Sometimes this happens:

     You look directly into someone's eye.  There is no time.   You see each other with nothing in between.

     I knew I was her sanctuary.

     She could not get up; she had heard their game once too often. I helped her from the chair. When she was on her feet she clung to me. 

     I felt her whole body open. She relinquished her tragedy or simple fate to me-her incarceration inside her own body-at this moment concentrated on balancing and not falling apart while the burden is shared: A splendid, comedic grace.   

     We wobbled towards the bed, already a double-backed creature. The sufficient monster that could love sufficiently and divine in Podunki. The stakes were absolute and but daily chaff and she had taken heroic and idiotic risks to preserve it, risking her sanity and chances of survival to secure it a place against cagier wit. Podunki, where each thing is mute inside itself and the lyric silenced from the arc of the sky, this chimera who like the beast in her children's games feeds on the rarest quality of the heart. A beast exhumed from mud and graves, and finally no less beautiful in his form of gathered pity and renunciation and defeat than the finest bullock that ever walked in blind grandeur to his slaughter, a rack of cuckolded horn upon his dense obedient brow, over gentle eyes of permanent forbearance.  

      The bleating miracle: From nothing, sympathy made of pitch and tar. Body arisen and returning from mud into mud--awakened, and free from the tight‑leashed flight of dreams, mining through the dark matter between the stars.   

          We found the heart of hearts which is not love, but out of which love is exuded like a fragrance.  Where love ends, this heart of hearts begins. Where all fondness or happiness ceases, just there, love is only sinew without sweetness or tears.  Still it is only the fragrance from an impenetrable center: nothing save having been, never to have not been.

     She asked me to talk to her boy. He expects nothing from me, she said.

     He looked beautiful as every child does.  Innocence could exist in such a face, because it did not seem that it could be created by compromise. 

     What did I have that did not pick-pocket him?  If he actually listened, he would only be poorer for it, I was afraid.  I tried geese, how much harm could I do to them?  I could barely touch them.  They are as stark as horror. I could only report them.  How could that be a lie? 

     Twice a year they flew over Podunki, though none landed on the poisoned Don.  Powerful flyers, I told him.  They go as far south as Africa and the minarets of Arabia.  They float in ponds that tigers drink from. He looked at a corner of the ceiling above my head.  His dad had once said he hoped one would fly through the smoke and fall out of the sky like a baked apple. 

     I had wavered.  Remember a brave act and stay along the knife's edge. This radiance is wordless save for echoing tone.      

     "So you don't feel any pull when you hear geese. There are some who feel wings in their throat when they hear that order passing through them. That doesn't mean you're quit of it yet. Some day you will still be claimed.  You don't know what your father may turn out to be when he comes for you, but people who hear the geese but are still wise to kids like you and to me, too, because maybe their call has become so perfected for me it no longer matters, have conjured relentless fathers to fetch us by hook or by crook. Creatures that drag themselves out of the sea on their elbows because they have no hands left to finger flutes after trying to stop the world for just a second. You and I don't know what dreams, but we know something about the mud these nightmares are made of. We know anger won't protect us. And not even being buried will help. These grave robbers know that being buried just polishes the stone, at last to be called to sea by the moon."  

     “You want to talk monsters with us sometime?”

     News was out about the poet. Dreams were brought to me for interpretation, many that people could not wake from and were not their own. I heard one a dozen times from as many drunks. They were propped against a wall with a half empty bottle when the giantess arrived. She adopted them or simply appropriated them.  They questioned me like Joseph in Egypt: What did the giantess mean?  

     She treated them kindly, at least she was unfazed by their miniature defects.  Their boldest outrages and their smell she could barely discern, like fly specks.  And her cruelties were merely the consequence of her robust scale.  With her they lived an opulent life, their genderless piques of sexual announcement, smothered in avalanches of female flesh administered as an aside, but during the millenniums of her self‑absorption they had to dodge being reduced to a smudge while she barn‑raised her toilette in the mirror.  She permitted them the run of the entire landscape of her sleeping body whose pale drifts they tobogganed down, until her patience worn out, she would pin them beneath a breast and go to sleep.  They could feel her heart rolling through them. 

     They had come to confess.  I was careful.  Alcohol had made them impotent, or made it possible for them to bear it.  You had to be on the streets of Podunki late at night to understand.  Legions of drunks wandered about despondently.  A man with half an idea where he was going became a messiah.  Disconsolate voices would follow in his wake, "What's up" or with anorexic brio, "Wait for me" or touchingly hopeful, "Where's the fire?" 

     They were anticipating punishment; they had their pride. 

     I told them she was Mother Russia.  I believed it. They could not simply dismiss it. The winter nights when some just wandered off.  The rumor about the luxury of death by freezing. How bare exile was in other seasons, the skinned earth, death by evaporation.  But the snow drifted into voluptuous forms.  She might put you under her breast where you could feel a great heart recovering you from the very spot where your love had fallen to a vulgar end.  

     I heard many sad stories about first loves. Most thought they were in Podunki because they had betrayed them. They wanted a poet to find the untouched name that might free them.

     I never refused the request to write a letter home or to officials in Moscow.  Most were not illiterate, and for those who were, professional letter writers were available, but I worked differently.  

     Several times I was accosted on the streets by groups of men waving letters they had received from the state; they had all leached through the postal system over periods of years and comical on their own for that reason; notices of worker housing now available or access to a public bath in a town as out of reach as Atlantis.  "Laureate, help this one. I don't think the poor devil stands a chance", and the letter was pushed into my hands, and the group circled around me already laughing.

      "This one is particularly shy" I intoned.

     "Exceedingly so", they echoed.

     "The passion buried here, mercy, it does not even dare approach itself for fear of exploding. Diphtheria, from the Latin, a religious language, what is this love daring to suggest?  Inoculation, it does not take a poet to figure this one.  It makes me tremble.  A tryst no less, what else could it mean? Away, this night to her, she waits sighing in the Ministry of Health. Hurry, it's been three years. Some pity, man."

     These were my last poems-subtracting meaning to the plea in each spoken word and casting it out to the empty clairvoyance the letter had betrayed. My throat opened again.

     "Poet of the nation, they can not afford to be without you", they howled, and from out their mouths, re-encrypted, to some ear armed with a pen of ash. 

     We were sleeping in the kitchen between lines of drying laundry. We were woken by clumping and tromping boots in the hall and loud voices panting out complaints.  "Sixth floor, damn it. No more.”     

     Bang. Bang. Bang.  They knocked at one door after another. "Citizen Vilma Solokov", they shouted.  We looked at each other in the soft semi‑darkness.  The commotion reached our threshold, the light of a lantern chiseled under the door.

     "Open it up, Citizen Solokov, no more hide and seek."

     Vilma squeezed my arm, digging her fingernails in and wrapping herself in the bed sheet, tripped her way to the door, the sheet rustling. 

     The lock unlatched, the door popped open. Framed in the doorway was a herd of bulky security police. 

     "Citizen, the sixth floor, you are a pain in the ass."   They rolled in, steaming and gasping from the trek upstairs, jostling numbly against each other in the drunken way of sleepy people, laundry falling down around their ears and draping across their shoulders.

          After the security police came some local cops who I recognized from my visits to the police station for desultory harassments, and along with them, a few soldiers in their slovenly uniforms and uncomfortable, over‑sized boots.  The last toted rifles.  The guns smelled of oil‑the pleasant, new rain, mossy smell of machinery‑and the leather of their slings was saddle‑soaped and ruddy.  They must have been issued only for tonight's mission.  

     "And this is Emmanuel Frank at long last? said the security man in charge.   

     He put his face close to mine and studied me wryly.  I nodded. I was sitting naked on the bed with a pillow planted on my lap.  He stroked his chin. He had my journal taken from my basement stall sticking from a coat pocket. He knew bagging this mouse was not worth the effort.  

     "You're under arrest.  You two, grab him before we lose him again." He pointed with his chin at the two soldiers who were staring at Vilma’s bare shoulders.  They missed his cue.  "Anytime, clod‑hoppers."   They looked at him blankly and he motioned grandly towards me with his hand and raised his thick black eyebrows, shaking his head.  "This is a shit‑hole."  Did he always work nights?  He had broad round shoulders, but rather than brutish he looked sympathetic. He had an insomniac’s look of forlorn wisdom.

     The soldiers shuffled over, boot heels rasping on the floor, but hesitated, confused by the prospect of taking me naked and parading me out.  They looked at Vilma beseechingly to turn away.  Their heads were close cropped and their ears stuck out.  The rest of the party shifted about inside their drying sweat, feeling superfluous.   The children were crowded together in the other room, staring out, the oldest brother holding his little brother and sister to keep them from going to their mother.  There was nothing to recommend this assignment.  The local police ran their tongues around their mouths and flashed sheepish smiles at the kids. 

     The head of the operation let out a resounding belch.  "How rude.  We've forgotten his clothes.  Why don't you throw him his rags so we can tip‑toe out of here?  As he's doing his toilette, we shall gently search his second home for seditious literature, if that's not too inconvenient."   

     I was unable to move. I had no will. Vilma pushed my clothes into my lap. "Sorry" I said. I must have been a bed-wetter as a child. This was just another night waking up in a mess. I was re-living it.  I stood up, the clothes dropping to the floor, and started taking the sheet off the bed.  I had it bunched up in my arms and was going to walk it to the sink when Vilma yanked it from my hands. 

     "I won't do it again" I promised. 

     Her apartment was being noisily overturned; these were ex‑working men and they tried to make a job out of it. Their shadows spun on the walls and ceiling. The electricity in these buildings was too erratic to depend on and they had brought lanterns. Things went tumbling, rattling, crashing.  Some glass broke.  They were not looking for anything, they were relieved to be busy.   

     "I am a Soviet Mother."   Vilma took the samovar to the table.  “Would you like to break for tea?"   The racket stopped. She continued in a cozy drone:  "The best thing for late at night.  What a time to be working. But if the river is going to flood, it's not going to wait for sunrise. There you are slipping around on the mud and bobbing down the river come the drowned swept away while sleeping. Must have thought they were having a nightmare.  But back home the wife is keeping the fire going. 

     “Place to take off your boots and warm your feet by the stove, and the window opened a crack with the rain pattering against it and the clean white curtains with the flowers embroidered in them stirring just a tad."

     "He's come back to his Soviet mother; she can be trusted with him."

     "Let's go.  Isn't he dressed yet?"

     My clothes were still on the floor. I was the age when you need prompting; the axiomatic need for clothes and the prescribed order to their assembly is not yet established.  When you are innocent of them and the crimes of office. Vilma handed them to me once again, but held the pants out putting their waist directly in my hands.  That was enough; I got them on. 

     Vilma picked up a broken tea cup from the floor.

     "How unlucky.  I've been very careful. Not a chip on them.  I could never be faulted for the way I wash a tea cup.  These were once my mother’s. And you couldn't tell it now, but she never put a chip in them either. I've kept a neat house.  And now look, the carefulness of a lifetime broken in a moment."   She let it drop to the floor, and flew at me, slapping me on the face where I was pinned between two soldiers.  The head secret policeman grabbed her hands.  She panted, but she became instantly subdued.

     "Come again.  I would do much better with you. The first one was boiled in steel, and now this one drowned in ink. But, a policeman, you will last.  Get this one out of my sight. This is how my kindness is repaid. Don’t be a stranger, officer.” 

     I was marched out and deposited in the back seat of a car between the head security eman and one of his officers while a third drove.  A sack was put over my head. I could have been decapitated.  I could feel my body decomposing, dissolving into cold mush. Bones were always a skeleton and the skull always grinned. Humor was always a snout crinkling over cooling porridge.  

     The axe had fallen.

     "This is a favor for you. I'll tell you how it goes.  We need the names of everybody you have ever known.  They are all guilty of knowing you. Remember, at least one of them denounced you.  You are going to get the shit kicked out of you.  Not because it is required or because it is routine.  I say this because you are an intellectual and you twist your brain trying to figure why we do it or why men do it.  Workers and peasants never ask why.  It's just the way things are everywhere. Nobody can stand pain.  You can't win, but you are a weakling.  The boys may kill you by mistake but they will kill you for sure if they think you're better than them or you think you are.  Grovel, but don't do it so fast they smash you like a bug.  Give them a little victory.  But don't hold out so long they think you're trying to be noble.  You will shit your pants. When they point this out, your life hangs in the balance.  Let them know you think life is shit. Most shit‑eaters survive. My boys are killing too many weaklings; it’s bad for moral. They're losing their sense of purpose here in Podunki.  So, another favor:  If you live through the next few days we're putting you on a train to Schtup.  That's Siberia.  That's your future, if you're lucky.  Life for you is shit.  Hold on to that. Give my boys a chance to do good.  Let the truth shine out of you."

     My first confession:

In 1900 I stood with my family at the iron gates of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.  Across the snow‑covered grounds we could see the Palace lit up already in the early evening dark, spilling its light onto the snow like a honey‑comb. 

     Nearby, just through the fence, men were breaking up the ice on a small pond with iron bars.  The revealed water was black.  When they were done they took flasks from their pockets and nursed at the vodka like kids at the udder, their lips bloody red inside their frosted beards. 

     Suddenly, what I had taken for statues of swans with their necks chastely  curved back to lay their heads into the feathers on their backs, rose up and spread their wings  and the snow smoked off in a fine powder.  Real swans.  And they relinquished themselves to the black water.

      I thought I was the son of the Tsar.  I could make him happy.   His own son had hemophilia, I would make him the perfect brother.  My sick twin drew me to that family.  He approached the ideal.  His life was a waking dream.  The sickly boy who was barely there and must never pinch himself to see if he were dreaming.  I could trespass as gently in their lives, the palace was already prepared for a sleep‑walker, even the trees outside padded so he would never be woken.

     My father was a cobbler.  He wore magnifying glasses way down at the end of his nose so he could see the stitches.  He wore them even at the dinner table and looked at us over the half‑lenses when he spoke, which he would do endlessly, or so it seemed to me, as if he were reading aloud from a tome, and he spoke with agonizing deliberateness and self‑satisfaction so that it was impossible to last to the end of a sentence and know what he was talking about.  He aspired to recognition as an intellectual and imitated the pompous style of grammar school teachers, as far as his education had gone.  Throughout the long‑winded speeches he could barely contain his contempt for his pupils, us, and his anger at himself for his own futility. 

     I loved his shop.  The smell of the leather and the soaps and oils.  The feel of the leather and the hammers, their smooth handles and real, not‑toy weight.  He was a craftsman and was goaded by the possibility of perfection, serving this ideal by an orthodox neatness. 

     I inherited all this.  I never forgave him for this chemical imprint in me.  I am guilty of it and for never forgiving him.  And of not loving him for even less.  He had the habit of sucking the marrow from soup bones, he would lose himself in the pleasure.  Imagine how much has been lost when that is the only pleasure a man can abandon himself to.  I should have loved him.  But, we all felt abused by the grossness, by this remnant of male appetite and the hypocrisy in his studied affectations. 

     Surely, there must have been greater crimes to hate him for a lifetime.  For this alone I am guilty.  I condemned him for less, mine are diseases of the soul.

     And the man who does not love his own mother?  What monstrous ingratitude.  Who can hardly stand visiting her and facing his grand passion in ashes.  Aging is her crime.  She has become an old woman, nobody forgives a woman for that.  Does it make any difference that there are specific details between us?  She had black hair, brown eyes underlaid by gold, as if sometimes a coin gleamed up from the pool of her iris, so what?  She is just an old woman now.  Blood is thicker than water.  She held me, nursed me through the measles and mumps, fed me, clothed me, buttoning my shirts and tying my shoes.  These are mistakes.  The flesh can never forgive that, it gives its heart too purely for those gifts to ever love dispassionately again. 

     Her moods, the music of her voice, she was my Cassandra of erotic love.  Now she rails against the price of groceries or wears at my father like a rusty hinge. 

     Friends and lovers?  I preserved myself at their expense. 

     I am a product of the old world.  I wanted nothing but uninhibited privacy.  I know better now.  I hope you will give me the chance to enter the new world.  The old world was governed by psychology and mythology, a paper mache globe in a heaven made of stars daubed on cardboard.  We shared laughter and music because they could survive a sardonic realm.  Jealousy was an aesthetic.  I am ashamed of this now. 

     The new world is beyond my imagination.  I can only peek at it through a keyhole.  But I believe it is free of the personality.  All is clear for the stars to reach steel arms into the hearts of men.

    

     The lead interrogator scanned it with blinding speed, picked me up by the scruff of my neck and threw me into the wall, careful to lift me slightly so I would not slam head first into it and be killed.  When I awoke I stumbled back to the table to try again.

     My second confession:

Beauty is power.  The same.  The same glory.  The same punishment.  The same awe. I have not survived. Thank you. I might otherwise have been lost.  I had figured a way to include myself in beauty.  Awe leaves no room for the self.  I had become jaded and decadent. It was a method for remaining. It has nothing to do with beauty.  It is self‑preservation.  You have saved me.  My life now is immediately in the presence of beauty.  I quake and worship. Thank you.

      This time when I awoke, waiting for me was a typed confession that read like this: 

     I, Emmanuel Frank, did try to subvert the Grand Soviet State and to dishonor and slander its wonderful, benevolent leader, the wise and kind Stalin.  I recruited the following to my nefarious scheme. 

     There were three blank pages.  I listed everyone I could remember.  At the end there was a paragraph of abject apology.  I signed.

 

     We were penned at the rail yard while we waited for shipment to Schtup. The pen was little more than outlined by barbed wire, but there was no more chance for a mutiny from the prisoners than from livestock.  At least twenty were already in the pen by the time I was led there, stretched out in the dirt like sunbathers.  Podunki's prison had only one overcrowded cell, interrogations were conducted down the hall in a room called the   "skillet", not because it was hot, it was hotter in the windowless cell and the walls were slick with humidity, but because prisoners returning from their sessions looked cooked. The rail yard under the hammer of the sun came as a relief.

      From time to time a guard would mope around the perimeter on duty, obviously suffering punishment or made the butt of a joke, but for the most part the small platoon had found themselves a shady spot under the overhang of an unused loading dock, and played cards, teasing and flirting with each other in the nihilism of boredom.  They looked like morons, the common answer to taking orders. Either they erased all expression from their face, or else sly strategies twitched at the corners of their mouths. By mid-morning they had sweated through their uniforms: dark patches materialized on their shirts, already grainy with salt from the day before and spread until they had dissolved the stenciled sweat patterns and the shirts hung limply on their torsos.

     Guarding us accelerated the general corruption in soldering.  Mercy had failed to appear to them, they felt despised by it and loathsome. Our human similarity disgusted them. Actual guilt corroded them, not conscience, but actual guilt, that covenant with evil, and like a trick of light, young boys' faces spoiled, the demonic shading each feature. 

     We would have tested the pity of saints or dogs, let alone boys still enthralled with themselves. We could not stand the test ourselves. Each of us had been interrogated and shared split, gouty lips. Our eyes were swollen half-closed and egg-sized burls knotted our foreheads. We had all named family, friends and lovers and each had used the caustic balm of rationalization: I have suffered enough.  They know it all already. I was always misused.  She never loved me.  It is all shit and sentimentality.  They would do no better.

     Nothing is hoped for in such faces.  We deserved ourselves.

     And we could live with ourselves.  Those who could not were missing. Pulped. When dying they had released a bouquet from their hearts, like the incense from a snuffed candle.

     We looked away from each other. Outside the wire, in the miserable rail yard, workers at rest struck classical poses. One drank and then passed the bottle to his companions. They lay prone, one leg bent easily at the knee. They might stay there forever, nearly godly in their continuing lives.   A line of empty flat cars drifted into view, coasting almost silently, a shunter striding along on top with lengthened, insouciant stride, in a glissade like an ice-skater. The wind would be slapping him, stinging his eyes and cuffing his ears with reified distance, the jinn of freedom.  I marveled at his balance and the spirit it radiated from, a defiant boldness that opened naturally into his human form.

         "What are you looking at, you old faggot?" a guard at the wire was yelling at me. He had stopped to pee and his epiphany-like privacy had been disturbed by my vacant gaze.     "You want some of this?  Come on over, I'll give you a drink."

     At night some bare bulbs strung on the barb wire were illuminated and a little generator gasped and choked asthmatically.  The guards drank and might come to the wire to rouse us for a bogus roll call, but once we had lurched to our feet, they would laugh and walk away.

     In my second afternoon in the rail yard, I saw Vilma bumbling near-sightedly along the perimeter wire.  We had not been allowed visitors in prison. How long had I been in jail?  My beard was tangled atrands. How long would that take? The other changes?  A calendar was not their measure.

     She was accompanied by a guard. She had costumed herself for a summer promenade. A broad, village skirt and a blouse with short, puffy sleeves through which she could barely squeeze her arms, and a flowery scarf tied over her hair.  She had rouged her cheeks.  Her belly bulged under the thin cotton. She looked like a jade playing a compromised country girl. I was responsible for her debasement. 

     After some things have happened only futility is left. Things are still done, but futility debauches them all. The more carefully you attend each action, the more absurd it becomes.  Vilma had known this for years.  I had once mistaken her concentration for bitterness. She was devoted, this was her concentration.  It was devotion where devotion must be sacrilege to compete with despair.  Where it must lacerate to keep the heart painful, to keep it from settling into cruelty or sloth.  The heart must be any thing but defeated. She could still fail love because she had refused the balm in bitterness.   

     And she stuck out here like a sore thumb, as the living Dante did to the ferryman at the Styx.

     I walked over to them.  I could spare her the exhaustion of pity or the dismay at its dilution to cheap wisdom when spread over numbers, but I could not spare her seeing me. 

     Vilma snarled.  She had seen my eyes.  As if the black-silver bad been stripped from a mirror, and the force that used to carry her to the heart passed through to nothing.

     Dropping the bundle she carried she grabbed my hands and clamped her teeth in the meat below my thumbs until I finally yelped.  She put them against her cheeks.  She closed her eyes and rocked her head in the cradle of my palms. 

     "Forgive me.  I only thought of myself.  Can you imagine, at such a time?  For what?  A kiss?  And it was never on your mind.   What did I take?  A touch.  No more. I am sure you will manage it very well. You could have given a thousand more, I promise, a thousand and you would do fine.  Don't worry.  Oh, I could have used a thousand, that would have been a drop in the bucket, I have no excuse, it was all for so little.  Sorry to bother you for next to nothing, nothing, nothing..."

     She released my hands and retrieved the bundle. It would be stripped from me, she knew. She stuffed some cigarettes into my pocket.

      "They took you from me. That was enough. They left us nothing. They thought they had to do more.  They have wasted their time. They wasted our time. All we have left is always.  They can take it.  It's what they deserve.  I know what it will be. I am tasting it now. I will not remember you.  Let them.  I have no space big enough."

     My shoe was being persistently tapped.

     "Down here.  Knock, knock, on your toe.  Sit down.  You can't just stand there forever.  A little way off the guard is standing looking right at you.  He doesn't know what to do either.  Soldiers get killed all the time. Who cares? Like us. Don't just stand there like a thorn in his ass.  His homesickness can't last.

     He was sitting cross-legged and barefoot in the dirt, massaging his big toe.

     "You wouldn't think you'd notice a bunion anymore; that would be a benefit from disaster, but it turns out they're prophesy.  They're what kill you in the end."

     I sat down.

     "A cigarette, please?"

     He plucked a cigarette from my pocket with an extraordinarily long arm.

     "Thank you.  I act in your own self-interest.  Anyone can see you are kind when you're more yourself. Look what you've done, I feel much more reasonable now, no mean feat, and the guard would have had it with no kindness." As he spoke he waved the cigarette, pinched between two fingers, as if it were a baton.

     "Do you have a match?  No. It was a sweet delusion. I’m over two meters tall. I've had my head in the clouds for years. I can testify that the clouds are not all goose feathers. I've been struck by lightening more times than I can count."              

     Even with the wrinkle stenciling grime, his high forehead remained placid and unlined, and his brown eyes serene. His face was symmetrical to quietude, the face of idealized pregnancy.

     Seeing me trying to glean something from his face, he said

     "Insane.  That's the answer to the riddle."

     "I've got watercolor brushes. No paint, no paper, no matches. Can I join you?  Who better?"

     He daubed the air with two brand new brushes.

     "Just wants the signature. Petre. This is as much as they've ever done. Never was an artist. Guards don't even want them. Just imagine the life where they make sense."     

     He would once have had a virgin’s beauty; there was still some color left in his cheeks and his eyes were spaced far apart, the brows limned with a clean, even stroke.  A transparent face where not too long ago emotions would have blossomed without censor, straight from the chambers of his heart. Captivity had obscured him.

     "I've got. Three. We get three separate smokes if we light them off each other, or just share the one.  What do you say?"  A prisoner with a bushy beard he must have been growing for years before incarceration made the offer.

     So suddenly that we all jerked back, the tall prisoner yelled "HAPPINESS."  He had joined us into a cabal, because there is nothing as seditious as happiness, or just declaring its reign.  

     Cattle cars arrived through the day.  Podunki was a major station for consolidating the flow of prisoners through the continent, and the cars were shunted into long trains.  This was veteran cargo.  We could hear rusty voices calling out the shrinking distance between their cars and the ones already resting in front of us. 

     "Twenty meters, get ready, hold on, here it comes", their hands grasping through the slats. Then the shocking crash.  The cars had been sailed down the tracks by a distant locomotive, sometimes we had heard its panting speed-up before it abruptly braked, loosing the cars for their separate roll down the tracks, and their floating speed was deceptive. Upon colliding, they leaped into the air and anyone not holding on would have been tossed against the timbers.  With every crash, the cars slipped further down the siding, until there may have been about thirty  coupled together when finally the coda was added, two cattle cars just like the others, but ornamented with a shunter winding sportively on the brake wheel so the cars kissed on meeting.  He hopped off nimbly, flashed us the uninfected smile of athletic living, and strutted away with a crisp stride.

     They herded us on to these cars. I was about to throw my belongings up when I was struck in the kidney and collapsed on the ground. The guards were taking their share from the bundle Vilma had given me. They left some for guards farther down the line. That’s how it was organized.

     Leon, the tall prisoner gathered the scattered remnants of my possessions and lifted me and to my feet and up into the car. 

     Petre ushered me inside leaning heavily against him; other prisoners were being driven in behind. The prisoners already inside had pressed themselves along the sides. When the door slid shut we were standing bunched together panting in panicky exhilaration. 

          "Look through the slats." a chorus of weary voices chanted, but our addition made the car too crowded to navigate.

     "You'll get used to it. It helps when the train is moving". He had the face of a faun. 

     "I thought I'd broken the fever in prison", Petre replied.

     "You can't just break it. You'll still wake up half the time digging out from drowning. We weren't made to be moles."

     "Can it be this simple?" Leon asked.     

     The trip to Schtup took days and some died and rode along with the rest.

     The first death became a celebrity. The living had long ago been struck utterly passive like bees smoked by their keeper, but he discovered himself to us by our comparative frenzy. It was as if a tome had been deposited among us.

     It appeared that during the night he had collected his will and come to a resolution. I was surprised he could be moved, he had so completely settled on a spot, chosen and designated it as his own. Here was a man not at rest in the usual way, but cocked and ready to announce his name and knew that alone would stagger the wise who heard it.

     When we moved him his complete departure left this body an uncanny weight so dense it was without heft, as if even weight by         deigning to emanate into the world would make too much of a concession.         

     Each time death came to one of our cob-webbed number, in spite of our moldering which should have made the transition almost unnoticeable, the effect was of a huge clamor missed, as if a cannon shot had flung you out of sleep and into the vacuum of its discharged bolt, as it would be if a star went out, its light rewinding from your eye into its heavenly adit.

      Much of the trip was spent trying to obtain sleep, the only drug for heat and cold and cracking bones and hunger. Conversation only flared for a moment and then guttered out. You had to yell directly into someone's ear to penetrate the clatter of the wheels, and what inspiration was worth disturbing the blessed cocoon of stupor the conscripted listener had woven?

     Communication transpired without words. A face told everything. Was there any light left?  For a reason that approached mystery, some faces seem to hold a natural commiseration for certain others. From these faces we drank some kindness in a glance. And when we were stopped at stations to load in more prisoners or to receive more slop to eat or for no other obvious reason than just to be left rotting in the claustrophobia that immediately descends on an unmoving train, conversation had become superfluous when juxtaposed to the truths we had fished from this mute communal agar.

     When we reached the empty steppes, into the night, the engineer would loose the whistle for long, long seconds. We were the cargo you have always suspected inside that keening.

     Even if the engineer has made this passage a hundred times, he is not immune to infinity gripping the train.

     He feels the gradual seeping of mass from the train as it leaves the last towns behind and begins to free fall through the nights, reaching its inertia-less speed for the thousand mile haul, the headlight auguring out a ladder that climbs forever. All the weight of the train had been its ordination in grief and now like the weightless wing all tools become at the center of their purpose, the train at its task floats while it opens all graves to the sky. Then his hand reaches for the whistle cord and into the excavated throat he frees the note: keening the seventy-two letter unpronounceable name of God across the universe.

     The train rolled to a stop allowing us to hear the nearly august tromp of the guard's blocky boots on the roof.  A guard slid back the cattle car's door. The wind, the gold, the blue surged in and knocked us senseless. Our eyes streamed painfully and our nostrils burned.  We were on a trestle over a river. 

     "Throw 'im down", he sang, and we knew instantly, as if we had been given one walk-on part to memorize for days and here was the cue, that he meant the corpses. What else did we have to give, piles of shit?

     The guard hung cheerfully by the handle of the door, invigorated by his daring perch in the aerie. “Ones you toss, give me the card pinned on them.” Each of us had this card. The first number indicated whether you were a common criminal or an enemy of the state-a political one. Jettisoning the corpses would save burial on arrival. No town along the way would receive them.

     It seemed likely that the door would close before any of us did anything, and this moved me to act.  I did not want the door to chop off the light and air.  And we might win some modesty; regale ourselves in fraternity.

     Four others stood with me, unfolding themselves stiffly: Leon, Petre, Fyodor, who had contributed matches for our smoke, and the Asian.  

     We moved like people made of sticks and mud, like effigies or Petroushkas irritably stung into life. We wrestled the bodies up, often making the work more difficult for each other having no practice working as a team.

     The engineer had chosen this trestle for a good reason. There were hundreds of prisoners and probably no more than a dozen soldiers to guard us. When we halted at towns they could be joined by troops already stationed there. In the state we were in there was no chance of a rebellion, but even mud can amalgamate into an avalanche, and in the unlikely event of that happening we would have simply been crowded off the tracks to our death.

     At each launch from the giddy threshold, we risked plunging after it in a drunken comedy.    Imagine our eroded balance, the treacherous slide of our centers of gravity in our empty bellies like a load suddenly shifting and slamming us about, this near dizziness with the strange topsy-turvy altitude it gives the soles of your feet-add to this the blast of light pouring in at us with all the force of a sheer drop from the sun,  tipping us upward, and the ancient mad-saint faces of the corpses, their aptitude for the swirl and rush of cloud, blue and gold, their testimony of welcome waiting in oblivion, and figure in the moment that their weight converted and began to pull your arm to join the flight. See sky already in their windy skulls that the breeze is fetching by wispy strands of hair-and you will see it was only a thread that kept us joined to the train and its trip to Schtup.

     "All together" said Leon, anchoring our team like a tree.

     "On three" said Fyodor, who had burls at his temples from grinding away at thoughts like a dog at a bone.

     "I'm Pol" said the Asian.

     “Emmanuel”

     "Yes", said Leon. We stood in a chain across the door with no more vertigo than birds. "We're the ones to say it. Emmanuel. Fyodor. Petre. Le-e-on. Fly beauties. We've lifted souls into the sky."

     Each of us in that sun-soaked moment had felt the same. The weight of the body in our arms, its persistent though not recalcitrant weight, and those faces etched by asceticism, felt that what occurred was indelible-an action that weaves the elements together towards their ends, and not one of those bodies could ever be lost. We had cast a name onto the mercies of mystery, this body’s last utterance, if not in actual name, because we did not know their names, then by brief, earth- mired and air-born tug-a ballast stone that is the fiber of a name, a supple adaptation and duration in the void that is its syllables and echoed through our arms. Gold, turquoise spill upon our unburied eyes and mouths, and our names intently joined to theirs, we restored the dome.      

     A few days later we were tossed from one side of the car to the other, and left piled against each other, moaning. The car was tipped sharply to the side.  Slowly we began untangling ourselves.

     "What a mess", we heard from outside the car. "If it's going to happen, it's always going to be right here. That's why I slowed down. A straight-a-way and I'm doing ten kilometers an hour. It's not my fault. They laid the rails too close and when they heat in the summer they push up the stakes."

     "What are we going to do?"

     "It's only three cars. We're less than forty kilometers from Schtup. We'll do what we always do. Unload the prisoners and have them push the cars off the rails. Pack them in with the others and off we go."

     We poured out along with our belongings.  The two last cattle cars and the caboose were zig-zaged across the tracks and off into the soft ground.  As the crowd of other prisoners was driven towards us, Petre said, "Let's make a dash for it. You especially, Leon, look at those long legs, you're made for it.   There's nothing here. Russia's done with. She's been bleached out of the elements.  No bones broken?  That's not an invitation, it's an order."   It did seem that with the train stopped the will of the state had evaporated into the balmy blue. Silence expanded out into the sky. The other prisoners were awaiting orders to fill the void. Leon was looking at me. I understood. Do not look for reason in it.  He was a powerful man even weakened as he was. He might survive the camps, but I never would.  That was the certain course of logic. He laughed.  We were outside the confines of reason. 

     When the throng of prisoners arrived, we found our small packets of belongings in the general pile, and walked around the caboose and into the steppe, all five of us together. The guards turned a blind eye, two or three reverted to farm boys, sprawled out together in the meadow, a stalk of yellow straw in each soft-lipped mouth, their rifles forgotten in the tussocks.  The air was thinning in early fall, and though it held no warmth in shadow, sunlight fell through it with the unalloyed intensity it does at high altitude. They nodded toward us, inebriated by warmth, their iron stove boots removed and their toes poking through their socks.

          We walked a mile, we walked two miles, who knows?  We stumbled and rocked.  We tested different strides for the free body, but it was difficult to balance once the claustrophobia of captivity was lifted.  The circles about us were too large. We were always stepping into a broader cycle. What choice for this disc, and no choice was tuned yet to the natural or original; they wobbled away from the primal gait.  We would swing an arm too much, it felt right and bold and then it would feel like a military parade.  Surely, there must be freedom without challenge or fear.  A deeper freedom which would be taken for granted where the body is a sense organ not locked in by bones but melts into the day. 

     And there was too much blue sky with its trompe l'oeil infinities, the mirage ocean overhead with its fathomless fathoms. We had trouble hanging upside down over that vault.

     Finally, we could not move through this one recovered day. 

     Every step the grass and flower stalks brushed us, and though they only glanced our legs, in their populations the green resiliency slowed us, and finally in accumulation we felt a gelling mortar, the sun rays tugging through the reeds; and our tattered pants glazed with pollen, and bees heavy with surfeit hitching rides on our oaring legs, we fell on the ground.

     I lay on my back surrounded by grass and flowers.  Maybe only prisoners who must not over eat at first would have seen just one flower in a summer, prisoners who struggle inside the metaphysics of crumbs, but length of vision sagged like a branch over laden with fruit, and I regarded one nearby flower. The dauntless cup perched on its skinny stalk was opened to receive a star. Eye and optic nerve trusted to craft the inner whorl in blunt stone, to crack open that passionate heart that in silence has always dreamed color. We were sent from the abyss-as close to it as infants-stuck together by spit and moans with the injunction to collect again things lost one by one like bubbles out of a drowning body, orbs of blue atmosphere and rosy scent slipping away.     We have left notes to ourselves.    

     We were sitting naked beside a creek, each in a small circle of crushed flowers; the rivulet cut into the steppe without banks.  We had bathed like birds, splashing water on ourselves.  The water was shallow and warm and dyed a coppery tinge by minerals; when we dipped our hands in to drink they turned a golden hue.  It was a rejuvenation we were now working on our feet, sliding them back and forth over the smooth stones in the river bed.

     Leon stood up, feet in the creek, and spread his arms.  

     "Leon the tree, lads.  I'm just a stick in the mud, this is where my madness comes to ground. I'm not sure I have a word left over." 

     Leon, over two meters tall who had been subject to lightning bolts like a church steeple, and out of whom molten words had spouted.  Arrested by the state as an eyesore, the throw-back native Russian religious type, a testimony to the intractable atavistic in the human, to a more primary hand.  And who finally could not be ignored, loosing words on their own and not neutered by consensus that by virtue of their natural momentum or runic metabolisms could spellbind, cavorting and gamboling in parody of lock-step rhetoric or bombast. Or one word, yelled or coddled in all the surprise of its spontaneous creation out of soul need, arriving like manna to free an unbearable loneliness, "beauty" "beast" "bastard" "angel" living on indispensably in the air and shredding silence.  Left, at least for the time being, with words no longer having a compulsion to leap the vessel. 

     He had been turned right side out, like a pocket stuffed back into its pants leg.  It must have taken the train shoving its fist to the bottom to find snagged in the lining beneath where beauty and monsters and angels had been this  moment's peace, and he was ready to be planted where it had happened.

     We stayed by the creek that first night.  The warmth slipped away but without the added speed from the train we would not have suffered.  We had blankets and some sweaters or a coat. Prisoners were always left something after being fleeced of cash or jewelry or a second pair of pants for the camp administrators to loot when they arrive.  How these arrangements are reached is impossible to know, but chaff of chaff that they are, something is left for the east.

     The night brought mosquitoes.

     By morning they had blistered our faces and necks, and under these circumstances, Fyodor took on stewardship of our party because he was best prepared.

     He believed in fate, which even if just, is always dire.  The rest of us did not have the tenacity to hold on to this idea. If we did not have the steel for it, he was generous and included us as bit players in his fate, and took responsibility for our troubles. 

     He had not been fooled by the flowers. He was a farmer's son.  Nature might be a mother, she was still a woman, as likely to slap as coddle. 

     He had us search the creek for crayfish. 

     "Slip your hands gently under the rocks and let them bite you. Then grab them. Mean little bastards."

     None bit us in their stone nests though we would have welcomed such hospitality. 

     Fyodor, the only one among us with a philosophy left, standing with a flabbergasted expression crumbling the battlements of his brow. He has stumbled across a berry patch. A sweet, refuting cosmology.  

     After savoring the first berries we stuffed our mouths with bleeding bunches. We were scratched by the thorns. The world had reached a sum in the equation of ordure that funneled down to a berry oozing off the last reach of a crusty vine, and that left our flesh the piercing green pain of lingering trust. I heard a fawn sigh. Speckled coat, wisely first weaned to gentle gifts. 

     Impossible to be a child again, and thankfully, but what we can not have from it becomes the clearest view of paradise carried with us through a lifetime. A world where we are not included in our memory, where our hand does not pass our eyes to touch the flower, where we are not interposed anywhere, but the world pours in without portals and we who are not yet, who are still dispersed, are joy.

     Pol led us to the salmon. It began with his androgynous looks. He kept a liquid grace through exile.

     The flat boulder by the pool pulled him like a cat.  Stones join in quorums, we know this in winter when denuded vegetation exposes them huddling. Then we eavesdrop on their clairvoyance, hearing the lode stones called to prayer. Only Pole could sleep on a stone, dreaming with cats the sexual metamorphosis. 

     Below the boulder, a deep green pool where salmon gathered before breasting the flood.  In its quiet reaches they were stacked together in convalescence-floating in green, shadowy, schools aligned upstream, hot ember wounds glowing-their powerful stillness final, an implacable coupling between life and death, as if I were seeing the notes in a Gregorian chant amassed in a breast before disgorging. 

     When they drilled through the cataract, the grain of the river was so dense their motion was suspended, stretched into base notes, and what would have been a flashing thrust and glimmer was opened to sight and more than sight, opened into a chord strumming through the spine and plunged in to the bowels, the incalculable moment of sensual ecstasy driven back to its roots, its vows with grief and tragedy.

     By waiting at the top where the cataract was drawn off thin as silk from the bolt, Pol was able to snag a salmon as it pushed through. The fish was as long and thick as a thigh, and it flopped, making him stagger and fall, but he had driven his arm trough a gill and it could not wrestle free. 

     We ate them raw.

     The moral was not lost on Fyodor.  He tried to build a machine to make a fire. It was a pointed stick twirled into a depression in a branch stuffed with dry moss for tinder. We never brought it off.

     The critical moment would be when the flame stepped from the creche prepared for it. Our failure concentrated us on that moment when smoke was animated by light.  Fyodor tried to build an irresistible dowry for our bright winged fairy. To this end he set up a gourmet tobacconist's selection of moss blends. He culled the moss from small glens where the green light seemed to be working sea-changes.

     We ate the golden fish and fed our imaginations and grew porous on this fairy tale.  Deer returned to rise from their cuneiform tracks we had seen on the banks, standing splay-legged at the lip of the pool kissing the water which rippled in dreamy arcs from their snouts.

     The deer more than we foragers of moss and leaves and dappled pool were a scant glimpse, just gleam and shadow.  Always nearly vanished and hard to believe as having more to their substance than belief. A spell composed of a witch's inventory, shin bones, four, knobby knees, four, one bag of rags hanging from sharpened spine, add eye, to compose this feint of a thing never more than half-furled alit on the ground.

     Did we share their halo of pitched tentativeness, our eyes enlarged through malnourishment and the fire in them turned to a low suffusion, and further improved by deportation, lathed to nearly bare bones?  Now our poverty-stricken shanks more clearly visible, a bindle packed for the vagabond until only pilgrimage is left.

      And share the intent given to deer by their secrecy that draws a vigilant eye? As if tracing the edge of their every movement while gazing on them reflecting from a pool? Their timidity an expectation so precise is the withdrawal of this gentle concern they must once have known that balanced them on the edge of sweet feeling and loss. And saw its heart reflected in them.

     Pol brought out a wooden flute. He pulled a tune from it in the short evenings and into the night. He followed it. Though I had never heard it before, I recognized it without surprise.  I seemed to wait for it to come abreast and settle with me, though until it happened I had not remembered with what trepidation and envy I had once heard it leaving and become more completely dissolved in time. A reflection lifted from a river at night.  

     There is one perfect dream we have always just missed. When we know it, we are already outside the note and can hear it gain its one body and retreat from us as all the world assembles into the places it has left.  It's too fullness expels us and we are pushed regretfully through pane after pane towards waking, spilled onto the bed with the edge of the absent song brushing our ear. 

     Has it spilled from our lungs and huge pounding heart as we raced to catch the golden ribbon where light joins matter and Adam had only those first words He spoke? That awakening dream, singing entrance of light, the actual head of the beam arriving only now as it has never been possible for light to do but which you have lived for.  For the time the darkness will be bridged, when the actual span, the girder will push its way to you so that finally you can see the element in its core, the heart-wood of light.

     The air was rapidly thinning. The sun seemed to be dissolving into fleece.

     At night the stars sharpened and the cold dropped from space.  Frost appeared on our blankets. The salmon run stopped and we followed the river to find where they spawned.  Where were we going?  Fyodor said, "Last night I could see through my eyelids like they were glass. I saw a caravan come into our camp.  Camels and the people dressed like in the Bible. Emmanuel, they took you with them. I'm surprised to see you here. The women had gold bracelets on their ankles. Camels, there must be an oasis out there that nobody except the chosen can get to. Don’t leave us behind, Emmanuel"

     Constant rain.  The forest looks burned.  Bare black trunks.  The evergreens drip. We will sicken soon. Fyodor is right. We need a spellbinder to lead us. I follow the salmon. In the ocean they find their natal crèche and close the circle. An architecture within the trackless water-of what? They feel a will in the void, a path given by constellations that harbor in the seas. I did work a little magic. As we sat shivering I recited some poetry I had written in Petersburg. With the combined force of our imaginations, we made a short excursion.

      There was little we could carry to Petersburg. Even jettisoning everything, we did not reach the city of stone. But Petersburg on its islands has always been as much mirage. Only the city inside the river is perfect. First, the mood to look, a blend of melancholy and narcissism, but those who were drawn to look through those portals could have seen us. Those who are subject to intuitions and premonitions, haunted equally by dread and hope; the sad ones who sip hemlock from a puddle that has cupped a dandelion and a teaspoonful of sky.

     For the most part we joined into intimations from the nation of ghosts, mementoes that are not specific and though hackneyed by now are the best we can do, working as if through fathoms on the threads of light stitched into a memory, imparting some text to the elf craft of sunlight on a girl's downy arm, secreting a drop of lemon into those moments when time dripped honey into the palpable.

     Rafts of leaves floated down the river where the golden fish had been swallowed up.

     Wind in the naked branches, the branches rubbing against one another, wind shredding on their talons. The sound is a moan.   Soul, you are a ghost, a stain from residues.  You are nothing save perishing alone. 

  

     Following the river, we walked right into Schtup. 

          

     Cadaver toe tag:

     Labor Camp: Schtup.  Camp #7.

     Prisoner: 12476205

     Name: Frank, Emmanuel

     Nationality: Jewish.

     Profession: Poet. Ditch digger.

     Birth: 5‑9‑1891

     Death: __‑12,1935

    

     Schtup:  A logging camp.  There are ten here.  The dead are not buried; it is not worth the labor.  They are burned once a month. Sometimes it seems they are burning them early.  But it is the enormous flocks of crows wheeling over the body dump, not smoke.  At first I was sad that eagles joined the crows.  We have put so much hope on eagles, as much as for Seraphim.  They slide down the blue into the dump.  There is no refraction, no break in elements between the blue and the ash black dump.

     One morning I saw an armada of falcons.  It was in the hour before sunrise, the sky was a pale blue, almost grey.  As if the horizon had spread across the sky.  The falcons' breasts were dyed in this pale blue and seemed transparent, dissolving into distance, as if their hearts were melting them.

     But the eagles have forgotten to leave.  If I die early in the month, I may be eaten by eagles before I can be burned.  A prayer in Schtup, my third since I fell here. I never prayed before, now I can since prayer has proved itself to be an instinct as forced and guttural as song. Stripped I know it has always been a joint or hinge, an earth‑bound refusal against which each action had to be propped. I ask a sphincter’s cinch for enough solid bowel to check my flow to extinction long enough to utter the rasp of myself, the friction of self‑conscious bristle, wakefulness and carriage. Saying and being as long as I remained a quarrel aboard this body, a ballast unrevoked, saying or being this screech or the song of a bird evicted outward:  Don't let death be a greater mercy than life.

     The tag is put on your toe before you are dead, but when you are too weak to protest it and have had the luck to collapse at the barrack, not on a work detail, when they leave you to freeze and collect you the next day for the dump. If you miss a work detail the tag is put on, and from then on you are not allowed to eat and must die soon or are taken to the dump anyway. There is black humor in it and some sadism.  By the time they put the tag on you, you are practically out of their reach, but not quite, they remind you, not until you are actually dead. And death can only be used by the living. In Schtup where things have been made meaningless, the remnant of a nod left to redundant death is a stupid joke.  A joke that is re‑told each time the tag is put on for the sole purpose of bleeding humor even from it.  "This package will arrive in time" they say, and twist the wires around the big toe. 

     It does not take long to die here.  I have been here less than three months and have already been tagged, but I am a little precocious at this last skill.  Even so, most have despaired over ever receiving mail.  It takes longer.

     A hundred men per barracks.  Twenty barracks per camp.  Ten camps.  Authoritarian arithmetic. 

     But it is not the only math here.  The nights are longer in winter, we work fewer hours, but the cold itself kills many because we do not get enough to eat to keep warm.  If there is too much snow falling we do not work that day but we do not eat that day either.

     Hours of darkness is another math.  The sounds of a hundred men asleep.  Moans, crying, screams.  Now we know our dreams.  And so I have chosen to be what is insane here: To not know our dreams, or to find other dreams below them that we have refused. 

     Once a month the guard motions me from my work detail where I dig ditches and roadways.  We harvest rocks.

     "Go ahead poet" he says and I leave my spade with another worker. 

     They are pouring gasoline on the pyre.  It is an extravagance in fuel and drama to burn the corpses when they could be left to rot where they toppled.  But the commandant ordered it and it is popular.  It is his dream come true and off duty guards gather around.

     I am welcomed at the fire by the guards who like all mass killers are prey to suicidal boredom.  They would try anything to simulate a conscience in themselves, but the nothing reaches out from the pit and not even torture can stimulate them any more. 

     They stand back in the fire's glow and pass bottles of vodka to each other. Crows have settled again on the bodies. When the gasoline is poured they are reluctantly dislodged, waiting until they are kicked off or the gasoline starts falling on them before they hop to another corpse, mocking the guards as they go.

     The flames start as a blue halo around the bodies and the logs, an eerie angelic radiance, but soon amasses into long yellow tongues and billows of black smoke, the trees cracking apart and fat spitting inside the conflagration. 

     "Poet. Poet.  Over here.  Poet" the guards call to me, as they circle the flames to keep out of the smoke.  "A few words poet" and the crazy poet comes over in his rags carrying the Bible they gave him to add to the joke. 

     "I was born in Riga.  I was born in Kiev.  I was born in Moscow.  I was born in Perm.  I was born in Minsk. I was born.

     I was born.

     I was given first memories.  I remember my mother and father.  I remember a cat and a squirrel.  I remember a flower and a stone, the room I slept in, and a tree.  Rain.  My eyes were mouths. I packed these things into my stomach.  They hold me to the ground.  Each one is perfect.  They cinch me into one, they gather me from the air into one. 

     I came to the edge of the small world.  Outside was nothing going on forever.  I imagined angels there and monsters.

     I held.  I did not dissolve.

     I was burned at Schtup on December 2, 1935. 

     The memories do not burn with me. They return. Stone.  Flower.  Rain that I have planted.

     The world fills with love left behind.

     I held so tight, only death could tear me away.

     When I was rent, a song blossomed.  It passed up with the smoke. You will always be able to hear it.

     It is whatever womb your lungs surround compelling its birth.  It is inside the cellos hips.

     Hear it. 

     Silence singing.

    

      

     

.