A Blaze in a Desert Read online

  I see the veins throb in his neck.

  His otherworldly eyes cry out to me that there is no more air,

  “Citizen! What have they done with all the air of the earth?”

  Two high-breasted girls stop before this asphyxiated man.

  The one who wears a sailor’s jacket, with an anchor and a lover’s name tattooed on her bare arm,

  and who has close-cropped hair and sensual pink nostrils,

  says to her friend:

  “Oh my, he’s had it, girl, death is written all over his face!”

  She puts an arm around her friend’s thin shoulders and says: “Let’s go, Charlotte!”

  The flier who parachuted at dawn from seventh heaven

  and who knows there is air you can drown in, air you can smash up in, air, air you can fall through,

  kilometers of air and terror to traverse with a cool head

  either to die or to get your certificate, first-class rations, and a knowledge of the sky that is only fresh ignorance of the heavens—

  the flier’s eyes follow the young women,

  “No one can do anything for the poor old guy now, no point even looking at him, let’s go, my lovelies.”

  He would like to dance tonight in Linden Gardens

  with the tattooed girl whose nostrils are sensual and pink,

  he would suddenly clutch her breasts in his hands

  “Ah, you’re a great kid, I can buy you silk stockings, you know,

  we’re the happy youth of the birth of socialism.”

  —Believers say that a Christ died on the cross for you

  that is not so clear.

  The Savior botched your salvation.

  The speakers at the Atheists Club say revolutions were made to save you and people like you

  —that is even less clear,

  and yet all those important people, all those healthy people

  are quite positive.

  Your papers prove that you fought to save yourself

  with Chapayev, with Furmanov, with my friend Mitia the deported wino,

  along the Ural River stripped bare by the dawn—

  but even that did you little good.

  And your blood burning from the civil wars, the rage in your partisan hearts,

  all that would be lost, poor people, if there were not good authors,

  servile glory hounds, astute moneymakers

  to crank out memorable books and screenplays about it.

  The nurse has finished crunching her seeds, she has gone away.

  The asphyxiated man remains alone amid the green shrubs

  in the dazzling light and colors and pain,

  alone in the whole universe,

  alone in the pure inaccessible unbreathable azure,

  where his black mouth begs in vain for air.

  Luminous disks descend, ascend, explode there

  and I am here, dressed in white, eyes framed in gold, useless,

  I the solitary consciousness of his suffering and his death,

  I the last, powerless human face this man will ever see,

  I who have nothing to offer him but an absurd remorse.

  O[renburg], Summer [19]35.

  Tiflis

  Kurdish women in red dresses, a little donkey ambling down the back street of the Maidan,

  chance colors, their capricious fits of sleep, their waking amid the bazaar’s shifting arabesques,

  copper necklaces around the necks of little barbarian girls, little Tartars

  who sell ripe grapes and fiery peppers,

  the steam from the scalding water surging from underground lava flows

  for the Orbeliani baths, pay three rubles and be pure.

  Two short-legged oxen, stocky and stubborn, part the crowd, their gray horns thrust forward,

  they patiently draw the old two-wheeled cart from the time of Tamerlane.

  A man dressed in homespun drives them, he is stocky like them, stubborn like them, this man from Mingrelia,

  the only difference is that he can sing Rustaveli’s verses.

  In the Blue Mosque of Shah Abbas, covered in radiant faience,

  an anonymous captive walked briskly between unsheathed sabers,

  preceded by an invisible hope.

  His sandals trod the dust, and so they might have trodden the foamy crests of the sea.

  From the square windows of the Metekh prison, the faces of the earth nearest heaven

  apparently

  could see him go,

  go and come back.

  The Georgian tombs of the Monastery of Saint David lie on the border between presence and the void,

  these paving stones of flesh-toned alabaster endlessly release

  so much carnal coolness that they truly bear witness to eternal life,

  where the name, the face, the suffering, and even the memory of a person fade away.

  From the heights of Mount David I saw the glaciers of Elbrus, Kazbek, and farther off, icier, more limpid,

  Ararat, Pamir, Everest, the Andes, and farther off, icier, more limpid,

  above the gently oscillating green fields the dazzling summits of the truest mountains:

  these are the nameless mountains of the only necessary continents

  —oh absolute deserts, oh fertile continents of consent and refusal!

  O[renburg], 1935.

  Crime in Tiflis

  Ah, why was he drinking Imeritia wine,

  that man with the bag of silver who came from Kutaisi,

  with his old heart trodden on like a Kurdish carpet

  on which people have haggled so much, suffered, danced,

  trampled on promises, and stabbed someone

  so poorly loved, on which people have so soundly slept?

  Why did he fancy the girl whose heartrending song

  lied like all of life, tempted like all of night?

  He would rather have fallen into rivers of stars,

  oh cool Milky Way, Andromeda, Pleiades, Cassiopeia!

  fallen toward you, to be no more than falling, bursting, flowing, calm,

  but he fell with the weight of flesh, pain, and the grave,

  through the narrow window, just thirty meters, his aorta lightly pierced.

  The phosphorescent waters foamed in the depths of the drowned firmament,

  they washed his wounds, they swept along his body so treacherously crushed.

  But in the morning

  the Tamaras were rinsing their laundry on the banks of the Kura,

  these lovers with childlike eyes had supple arms that the waters caressed more than love ever did,

  it was into the depths of their eyes that the murdered man fell, for they believed they recognized him without knowing him,

  they mourned him without loving him, laid him in the ground, then smiled at the living and soon forgot him.

  O[renburg], 1935.

  Russian History

  I. Alexis Mikhaylovich

  Czar Alexis Mikhaylovich, the very silent,

  the very gentle,

  the very pious,

  would wash his hand after a foreigner had kissed it.

  The chronicle reports that like a good Christian he fasted

  three days out of seven.

  All the same, he died obese after ordering a fair amount of torture

  like a gentle czar.

  He is depicted with a tawny beard, a healthy complexion, a smooth brow,

  a fleeting reddish glint in his cunning eyes,

  under a pointed hat with a white fur trim.

  He loved pearls, brocade, Isfahan silks,

  gold, silver, precious stones;

  once a year he threw a banquet for the poor.

  Poor folk, may your wounds redeem his sins

  of evil thoughts, lust, gluttony,

  and a few superfluous massacres.

  God knows most of them are justified and that I am a merciful czar.

  Poor folk, even if you know he is lying,
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  eat and drink your fill, if your wounds

  did not serve to redeem the powerful, what else would they be good for?

  He chose a wife from among the loveliest girls in the land. Intrigue dumped before this fearsome fiancé a pale Ophelia half-strangled by her braids.

  Her father was deported because of the hope, fear, and mortal anguish

  the virgin had suffered.

  Intrigue brought him pure-hearted Natalya

  whose belly would carry hard-hearted little Peter

  —father unknown.

  He was a better husband and a better father than the great czar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible

  and his own nominal son Peter Alekseyevich the Great

  because none of his children died by his own hand

  and he had none of his wives put to the torture.

  If he exiled his favorites, was that not the custom?

  If he exiled the incorruptible patriarch and the steadfast heresiarch,

  was that done without love?

  If he had heretics burned in the northern forests,

  was that not out of love?

  Let us respect in him the wise politician

  educated by riot,

  the perspicacious monarch who, in his secret tête-à-tête with fright,

  had long discovered the surest resources of power:

  fear, denunciation, betrayal, espionage,

  the moderate torture of strappado,

  exile and deportation

  to the polar regions, to the ends of the earth,

  and he knew how to build in the dark mire of the human heart

  his Chancellery of Secret Affairs,

  an exemplary institution, all in all, oh Holy Office!

  Perhaps his financial deals,

  adroitly clinched with hangings,

  were unfortunate

  and slightly redolent of counterfeiting,

  inflation, bankruptcy et cetera,

  —but were not all great kings, the Lord’s Anointed,

  great counterfeiters?

  In short, all he needed to go down as a monarch of the first order

  was to have been a little more intelligent,

  a little better served,

  a little more wicked,

  and to have had a little less need of cash.

  II. Stenka Razin

  In those days there lived, made powerful through sword, fire, blood,

  Another czar, the one they called the czar of the brigands.

  All along the Volga, our mother, he lighted

  The signal fires of a wild deliverance, bristling with scythes,

  Gallows, and severed heads.

  Liberty, equality, fraternity,

  Name the fruits of the most bitter hope,

  Wash, wash away from the knives, from the swords

  The blood shed since the beginning of time.

  Stenka the Just knew to treat the masters

  As masters treat the slaves

  And he never imagined that a better man might emerge.

  In the evenings the Cossack girls in this village still sing

  The complaint of Stenka Razin

  To the accompaniment of a guitar; but what their fathers

  And their uncles did, right here, a mere sixteen years ago,

  They have forgotten, let’s forget it, guitar,

  Sing for their hearts,

  Enchant oblivion, make the choirs

  Harmonized by oblivion sing.

  A silver sickle rises in the July sky

  Above the little red minaret of Orenpossad.

  I listen to these thin voices and the guitar

  And the toads croaking in the pond.

  Alone before the steppe, I think obscurely

  Of all those the world over from whom I am nowise separated,

  Of the unemployed in Amsterdam, of Tom Mooney in his California prison

  For fifteen or eighteen years now, what do we know about that?

  And who knows the true toll of such years?

  Of the astonishing victory of the Saragossa general strike yesterday,

  In June 1934,

  Of the next Congress of the United Federation of Teachers,

  Of the fresh grave—but are there flowers on it, are there flowers on it?—

  Of the fresh grave of Koloman Wallisch,

  Of the barred window—but are there flowers on it, are there flowers on it?—

  Of his wife Paula in an Austrian prison.

  The young voices rise, knowing neither of what they sing

  Nor of the living and the dead for whom they sing,

  United, united through time, chains, space.

  And when they announce the landing on distant riverbanks

  Of the bright boats of Stepan the Brigand,

  The liberator,

  The hero, the executioner, the executioner of executioners,

  The herald,

  I see, growing upon the shimmering ripples of the water,

  The invigorating specter

  Of a barbarous freedom drunk on its own sobs.

  Stenka was broken alive on the wheel on the sixth of June, sixteen seventy,

  Opposite the Kremlin,

  In front of the church of Saint Basil the Blessed

  And the Tower of the Savior.

  As they break his bones, Stenka yells at his cowardly brother, who is lamenting his fate:

  Shut up, dog!

  These are his last words, his proud words, his only words under the ax,

  They burst through the searing pain of his hacked-off limbs,

  His right arm, his left leg,

  They flow from his lips, mixed with bloody saliva,

  A crowd collects them amid the disgusting stench

  Stagnating below the scaffold.

  History will preserve them like the words of Christ.

  But dogs are not cowardly animals,

  Dogs maintain their canine dignity very well

  In this bitch of a life

  And yet for centuries we have trained them in our own image.

  My cowardly brother, shut up!

  Before the torment of one who, stronger than you, better than you,

  Dying for you, dies more than you.

  Orenburg, July [19]34.

  III. Confessions

  We were never what we are,

  these faces of our lives are not our own,

  these voices you hear, these voices that spoke so loudly through the storm,

  these voices are not our own,

  nothing you saw is true,

  nothing we did is true,

  we are wholly other.

  We never thought our thoughts,

  believed our faith,

  willed our will,

  today our only truth is despair,

  this confession of an insane degeneration,

  this fall into darkness

  where faith is denied and regained one last time.

  We have neither faces nor names, neither strength nor past

  —for everything is obsolete.

  We should never have existed

  —for everything is devastated.

  And it is we who are the guilty, we the unforgivable, we the most wretched, we the most damaged, we are the ones, we are the ones, take heed

  —and be redeemed!

  Believe our confessions, join in our vow

  of complete obedience; scorn our disavowals.

  Once extinguished, the old revolt is mere obedience.

  Let others less devoted be proud,

  let others who have forgiven themselves be proud,

  let others more devoted be proud,

  let others who have not given in be proud.

  If we roused the peoples and made the earth of continents shake,

  shot the powerful, destroyed the old armies, the old cities, the old ideas,

  began to redo everything with these defiled old stones, these tired hands, and what little soul we ha
d left,

  it is not in order to haggle with you now,

  sad revolution, our mother, our child, our flesh,

  our decapitated dawn, our night with its stars askew,

  with its inexplicable Milky Way torn asunder.

  If you betray yourself, how can we not betray ourselves with you?

  After lives like these what death is possible if not, in this betrayal, a death for you?

  What else could we have done than kneel before you

  in this shame and this anguish,

  if in serving you we called down on you such darkness?

  If others find in your heart stabbed a thousand times over

  something to live on and resist you in order to save you in twenty years,

  a hundred years,

  we who never believed in benediction bless them,

  we who can do no more bless them

  in our heart of hearts.

  We belong no more to the future, we belong entirely to this age:

  it is bloody and vile in its love of mankind,

  we are bloody and vile like the people of this age.

  Trample on us, insult us, shower us in spittle,

  loathe us,

  massacre us,

  our love is greater than this humiliation,

  this suffering,

  this massacre,

  your iniquitous mouths are just, your mouths are our mouths,

  we are in you,

  your bullets are our bullets, our mortal agony, our death, our infamy are yours,

  and your vast life on these fields tilled for centuries is forever ours!

  Paris, 12 October [19]38.

  Boat on the Ural

  Five men, plus one woman—

  six in one boat.

  Guess which is the deaf one, which the blind one,

  the lost one, the frantic one,

  the one who is mad for silence,

  and the one whose soul dances

  more lightly than suffering,

  presences and absences,

  smiles in the depths of the water,

  prison bars on the pale sky …

  Men sing to beguile their darkness

  when they are drunk.

  We are assuredly men

  and more lucid than even the drunkest.

  Let us sing, too. Volga, Volga,

  here they come,

  the tall bright boats of Stenka …

  The riverbank slowly oscillates

  —red rocks, the steppe, the woods—

  what is weeping in our voices,

  what is groaning,

  what is singing in our hearts?

  Arise, proletarians of the world!

  Heave! Ho!

  the boatmen pull the rope,