A Blaze in a Desert Read online

  29 Rimbaud’s influence is apparent in Serge’s novel Men in Prison, in which a chapter titled “Drunken Boat” narrates the prisoner’s descent into the endless, dark time of incarceration (Richard Greeman, trans. [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014]). Likewise, passages in some of Serge’s poems (e.g., “The rats are leaving …,” “Caribbean Sea,” and “Our Children”) seem to respond directly to Rimbaud’s poem “The Drunken Boat.”

  30 See Abidor, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Serge, Anarchists Never Surrender, 12–14.

  31 Serge, “La Terre tremble,” 22 février 1943, Carnets, 276–280. The story is expanded on in Serge, “Le Séisme.”

  32 Notwithstanding his objections to Surrealism, Serge swims in the same waters here, with his interest in psychoanalysis and his abiding need to reconcile the contraries of his existence.

  33 Moreover, the words Serge uses to describe the birth of the Paricutín volcano are very similar to the words he uses in The Case of Comrade Tulayev to describe the birth of “another idea”—one that replaces the idea of justice—that comes to Romachkin during a sordid sexual encounter with a prostitute: “At that instant, another idea was born in him. Feeble, faraway, hesitant, not wanting to live, it yet was born. Thus from volcanic soil rises a tiny flame, which, small though it may be, yet reveals that the earth will quake and crack and burst with flowing lava” (7).

  34 See the following entries in Serge, Carnets: “Paricutín,” 22 août 1943, 385–388; “Dr Atl” [undated], 388–393; and “Paricutín,” 20–27 février 1944, 477–479. Dr. Atl was the pseudonym of the painter Gerardo Murillo, a veteran of the Mexican Revolution who was obsessed with volcanoes.

  35 Serge notes that their church was “a symbol of submission before it became a symbol of faith” (“Le Séisme,” 33).

  36 Writing near the end of his life, Serge laments “our time of cessation of war without peace, that is to say, without reconciliation of the victims, without a reconstruction of the world, without renewal of our confidence in man” (“The Writer’s Conscience,” 435).

  37 For Vlady’s note on the circumstances of Serge’s death, see Greeman, “Afterword.”

  I. Resistance

  Note

  With the exception of four pieces in the same spirit that were written in Petrograd in 1920–1928 or recently in Paris, I have here collected the poems I wrote in Russia in 1935–1936 during the period of deportation that I spent in Orenburg: I had to recreate them later, since the Soviet censorship did not allow me to take any of my manuscripts with me.

  To my companions in captivity in 1933–1936,

  Boris Eltsin, Pevzner, Chernykh, Belenky, Byk,

  Lakovitsky, Santalov, Lydia Svalova, Fayna Upstein,

  Left Communists,

  Nesterov and Yegorich, Right Communists,

  without knowing whether my thoughts find them alive or dead,

  but with the certainty that alive or dead,

  whether resisters or victims of torture,

  these men and women remain,

  in the shipwrecked revolution,

  examples of complete and lucid fidelity

  to the true revolution.

  Another will smash the prison register.

  Another will smash the doors of the jail.

  Another will wipe from our thin shoulders

  The dust and blood fallen from our necks.

  —Péguy

  Frontier

  Banks of the Ural,

  The woods are turning silver, the river dozes on the sands,

  the kite bird soars—

  yet not so high as the pursuit plane

  that jauntily loops the loop of death at the edge of the golden fringes of a white cloud

  and, at times, at the very edge

  of a terrestrial abyss deeper than the stellar abyss.

  Here ends Europe, frontier of a world

  for which the Atlantic is only an inland sea and Atlantis a vague recollection.

  7 a.m., it’s 8 p.m. at the other end of Greater Europe,

  in Frisco, San Francisco, at the edge of the Pacific, on the frontier of the next, Greater War,

  Frisco where the IWWs live.

  What eyes straining toward Asia peer at the Ocean over there,

  eyes sad like mine from sounding this tangible void where continents begin and end,

  through the silence of the other human face?

  The steppe begins with innocent plains,

  with the purity of plains, the fertility, the immensity of plains

  and this contact of bare earth offered to the clouds.

  Free attraction of spheres, space,

  red colts galloping toward the spring of springs.

  The vanquished wheat fields come to an end, the sand dunes rise,

  a scarlet sun brutally consumes them,

  oh thirst, eternity, conflagration, bones,

  vanity of vanities!

  The Kirghiz camel driver has stopped singing—

  immobile, blazing madness of the sand,

  mirages—when will the stars come out, but do they even exist?

  Will the mildness of just one evening ever come again,

  the cool of just one night,

  the unbelievable kindness of a stagnant pond for the camel driver’s throat,

  for the dog’s rough tongue,

  for the camel’s tortured mouth?

  Silence absorbs the expanse.

  The primordial clay is coral red,

  the sun drives home its dreadful red nails,

  and this is where people saw a strange crimson beast running,

  spurred on by all the earth’s suffering.

  Its enormous flanks blocked out the entire horizon.

  (And you know, the earth suffers more than hell,

  hell was never more than a delirious mirage

  of the children of the earth.)

  When the Uzbek hunter, the flock’s good avenger,

  takes a wolf alive, he ties it up and, singing to himself,

  slowly flays it, taking good care

  to avoid the arteries;

  he flays it and then he hurls it across the steppe.

  People claim

  that an expertly flayed wolf can run for quite some time

  across the bloody desert,

  running and running toward a miraculous stream in the Kara-Kum Desert,

  a Milky Way,

  a place to quench its unimaginable thirst.

  The mirage magnifies its looming image

  wobbling

  above the still-smoking lava of chaos.

  Shepherd’s eyes enclose this image in legend forever,

  a legend I am drafting on the frontier of Asia,

  on the frontier of Europe,

  I who feel like a torn man of Eurasia.

  People of the Ural

  In winter the people of this land keep warm by burning the kiziak

  they make from cow pats gathered on the steppe and dried in the sun,

  and it’s an ancient task for woman and beast.

  Elsewhere, beautiful laughing women stomp ripe grapes

  and the wine fumes make them a little drunk, but they do not know they have sisters here.

  Vast, vast horizons, pure distant weightless,

  soft grass whence rises a shimmering heat,

  vast, vast forgotten sky, a blinding sky one no longer sees,

  a slender, bare-legged Tatiana stands there, slowly turning in the warm manure

  and the cow also turns at the end of its tether, woman and animal together, sweating,

  strangers to the horizon.

  Blue-black flies buzz around them in the stench,

  the breathing of the animal is weary like a plaint.

  The young woman stops now and then and sings softly to herself from the depths of her misery

  that when the man came back from a distant prison

  and found the woman he loved in bed with another man he killed them both with a blow of his
ax—

  now her voice turns gently heartrending:

  Othello!

  and it is only the complaint of Bogdan the Convict,

  last spring the story took place in a neighboring village,

  the spring before that in another,

  this is a story for all seasons,

  “for in this world all men kill the thing they love …”

  Dust, dust lies on Desdemona,

  yet a naked breast makes life bloom …

  Then there’s the fisherman in the pond,

  a bony old man in this sparkling water

  who is poorer than the poor man in Puvis’s gray landscape.

  Naked save for his short jacket and shepherd’s felt hat,

  he waded in to draw the net: “Hey! Hey! Damn it, Kolka, you too—pull harder, damn it!”

  The slender naked child was struggling on the far bank.

  Live silvery commas suddenly quivered about their feet in the mud.

  “Get them, get them, boy!”

  Lord, there is nothing miraculous about this draft of fishes, the miracle, Lord, is that anyone can live on it!

  Red granite shows through the red clay,

  the world’s first days show through the sorrow of life,

  the street sets off, squeezed between its tottering, tumbledown houses like old women squatting in the sun,

  it claims scant space between sky and endless steppe,

  a ragged Kirghiz man walks alone, glumly pursued by the barking of dogs,

  nothing to steal, nothing to eat, filthy beggar! and even the dogs know you are hungry …

  I met his black look from the depths of time,

  he has gone past, he is the past.

  Here I am at my table, with a few pages begun,

  tense pages

  that would like to live and already feel lost, alone before these

  stifled pages

  with this ton of lead on the back of my neck and my worries.

  Ah, what is happening in Asturias?

  Let’s get to work. The naked fisherman dragging his net in the pond did not see the patches of sky I saw there.

  Let’s get to work so that one day a passerby might see

  in the lines taking form at this moment, as I too draw my net in the pond of useless days,

  patches of a clearing sky I cannot see in them …

  (O[renburg], Summer [19]35.)

  Old Woman

  This old woman walking under a yoke

  loaded with unspeakable things

  casts a shadow like the caricature of a horse,

  a poor old nag

  whose head hangs only by a wire.

  The ancients disputed whether such beings had a soul,

  immortal or not.

  Barely equipped with one themselves, scholars

  gravely pondered the question.

  Today, plaster saints and others

  would in lyrical terms call you sister.

  Old woman,

  you do not even suspect their comfortable lie,

  it is a thousand million leagues away

  from your heavy, dull steps stamped on the black earth.

  The truth spatters beneath your steps

  in your wet shadow

  reeking of manure.

  You can no longer be saved.

  Just think! Seventy years old,

  it is too late.

  And perhaps six hundred and seventy years of servitude

  or more.

  It is too early.

  Somewhere else …

  Midnight, and I am smoking under the shed whose roof is corroded by snow.

  The Milky Way shines through the cracks.

  Around this squatting woman move giant shadows of old servants,

  serfs who were whipped, who were sold …

  She has powerful, tenacious hands that in the darkness work the desolate whiteness,

  that have worked hard, stubbornly,

  since the beginning of time,

  crushing with light taps the chalk she will knead into shape near dawn.

  The granite vibrates slightly under the muffled blows,

  isn’t this the beating of the exhausted old heart of this land?

  I speak aloud, between long intervals of silence, words almost devoid of sense

  to fill the void between us, old woman,

  the void of appearances,

  because under my breath I tell you things that surprise me, things you could not understand.

  If Orion’s Belt suddenly fell to earth in a shower of burning stars,

  wouldn’t you think the end of the world had come?

  “Lord, have mercy on our fields!

  All these falling stars will only bring people more bad luck!”

  Somewhere else, grandmother,

  there are women who are gracious, perfumed, pampered, loved, loving,

  they will never know anything of your pain, your hunger, these shadows where you toil—

  there are elegant men with eloquent gestures who speak to them

  of the Oedipus complex, the aesthetic sense, conscience, and even of the proletariat;

  somewhere tonight there is a happy Angelita—

  “Querida Angelita, amiga mía, tanto querida!”

  Sweet Angelita, my darling, my beloved!

  Somewhere else …

  This grandmother answers me in her rough voice, worn out by swamp fevers,

  that you can’t get the good crumbly chalk you used to,

  that the waters of the Sakmara are going to overflow and fields will get flooded,

  that life is hard, always hard—no, you have no idea how long life goes on!

  And her hands

  work, work, work

  for all eternity.

  Just Four Girls

  Four girls wade gaily into the water to ford the Ural,

  the sparkling, shimmering, life-giving water.

  The water grasps the firm calves of these walkers from the edge of the steppes,

  an invisible caressing hand discreetly

  takes their knees, then a brisk coolness

  weds their legs and rises to brush their secret flesh,

  making short shrill laughter tremble on their lips,

  a laughter

  whose taste is like that of a bitter fruit

  in the mouth of a thirsty man.

  Under her little red calico dress the first one stretches her young body, a sketch

  of an Athenian Victory with her slightly pointed breasts.

  She has hair cut short on the nape, a high forehead, one arm outstretched,

  the hand horizontal, and that already strong hand of a hardworking virgin

  seems to point toward a summit,

  an island,

  a city

  on the other side of the world, where all is but “order,

  beauty,

  luxury, calm, and voluptuousness”

  —but she is only pointing the way to a linden rustling with nests

  on the other bank.

  Will she, a serf barely freed, poorly freed, ever know

  how to put a name to beauty,

  she who so clearly sees the calm landscape of which she is

  at this moment

  the youthful living heart?

  Another girl, thickset, has the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old,

  making one think of the graceful ungainliness of animals,

  of colorful shawls, furs under a tent of animal hides.

  She must have very dark little eyes, without lids, almost without brows,

  the white close-set teeth of a carnivore,

  her flat face looks firm, hard, with round cheekbones.

  In the thirteenth century Hulagu Khan’s archers had the same cheekbones,

  teeth, dark eyes, guarded smile as this child

  when they forded the river, coming the other way,

  in triumph.

  The last two girls laugh as they stumble aga
inst each other,

  sisters, friends, pals, I cannot see their faces.

  They arch their backs amid the green reflections of the foliage.

  What festival, what love, what desire, what pleasure are they talking about to inspire that tinkling laughter?

  Probably none; in them it’s

  just the laughter of a fine day.

  I will not see them again except in other girls, I will not recognize them

  if I see them dancing one evening to a brass band.

  They probably are not beautiful, they probably have no special charm,

  no more genius than a blossoming flower,

  no more pride,

  no more kindness.

  (But is any more needed?)

  They are just four girls among all the others, like all the others, four human figurines

  molded by the moment,

  released from the common fate and returning to it

  as if to a lover.

  I know they will not have their promised joy,

  happiness is not on the other side of the river,

  the other face of the world will stay closed to them,

  their future has the dull color of the plains.

  Far away now, almost gone, where are they,

  the four laughing girls of a moment ago?

  They are on the other bank, four real girls

  from my village of exile,

  and in me their image has not faded.

  The Asphyxiated Man

  The green shrubs are bursting, there are these giant flowers,

  in the doorway of the little gray-board surgical hospital

  there are these dormant flowers

  that smack of chloroform.

  A young nurse in white sits on the steps,

  she is a brunette with the wide eyes of the plains,

  she is crunching sunflower seeds between her teeth.

  The patient, squatting on the ground, in an oversize shirt,

  where his unsung martyr’s body wobbles,

  cranes his bony neck; his face is a strange gray color,

  he looks like a man badly drowned, badly fished out, badly dispatched,

  it is the face of asphyxiation, the face of the terror

  of the last days,

  pierced by eyes prior to any resurrection.

  His hoarse breathing disturbs the buzzing flies,