Once upon a time, when the sails all blew away, Akhmatova, or the young braided girl who might have been her, sat naked on a flat rock-island. She’d interred her yellow dress back on the beach so that it would not get wet and no one would steal it. And I’d dry my salty hair on that flat rock far from land. That was what she used to do every day, before she and Russia both changed. She played with the green fish and the white bird. She experienced feelings of one kind and another, not knowing them to be happiness; and as I watched and listened through the ceiling, I wondered whether happiness is invisible until it’s been lost, at which point Fate (since like any decent Communist I reject God) hurls it down into a pit (for instance, the mine-shaft into which we tumbled the Romanovs), where it shines in the darkness like a supernatural jewel. “At the Seashore” is actually this sort of jewel; that our Muse of Weeping, who loved winter, could write such a poem remains inexplicable to me; parts of it deserve widespread publication.
Once upon a time, the braided girl rested on a wave as dark and hot as blood; she let herself be carried far away; then she swam back to her flat rock and dried her salty hair. Not knowing that she was happy, she sang to the white bird; she swam around the rock, and the green fish kept her company. The rock was so far out to sea that by the time she swam home it was always dusk and the lighthouse had begun to wink.
She wanted to become a Tsarina who’d defend her bay with six battleships and six gunships. So she rejected the grey-eyed fisher-boy who brought her roses, and waited for the Tsarevich to come. When he came he was dead, drowned; he’d had green eyes like the green fish. Her paralyzed sister-double wept; the church glowed like an island; the bells rang for the Tsarevich’s soul.
That was only the beginning and the end of it. (The end, by the way, betrays her attitude of religious submission, which I’ve already alluded to. We’ll need to rewrite that.) I’ve left out the middle, so that this report won’t get too long. And now the braided girl, long widowed of her Tsarevich, lived in a torn dressing-gown and had no sugar for her tea. For a moment—such is the dangerous power of poetry—I even felt sorry for her. But it’s important to remember that a personal feeling is merely a personal feeling. I’ve shot any number of enticing women.
I admit that I was overpowered; it was my Russian blood. For her part, Chukovskaya knelt and kissed what Gumilyev, in one of his saddest poems, memorialized as your cold, slender hands.
Then what? Then bare trees in the snow on the Moika Embankment.
And that night when I went home, I don’t mind confessing that my head was filled with all kinds of ridiculous word-rubbish, such as the moon and six candles, and a kiss upon her eyelashes. What was I to do? Finally I picked up The Foundations of Leninism and read two pages at random. That cured me. I still felt melancholy, and it’s possible that I might have been sharp with my wife. But, as Akhmatova bitterly laughs in one of her earliest love lyrics, I don’t cure anybody of happiness! ‣
CASE WHITE
…with the mysterious lens in your eye, you will be master of the thoughts of people… If you move freely in the world, your blood will flow more easily, all gloomy brooding will cease, and, what is best of all, brightly colored ideas and thoughts will rise in your brain…
In the sleepwalker’s time, there were processions of tanks,
-troops and pleading diplomats from England and France while we prepared to push death aside forever and ever. The men who used to leap up in beerhalls and shout about destiny now had regiments at their command. And so the orders for Case White got unsealed, and the regiments learned that they would be going to Warsaw, city of squat, honey-colored churches and blue-grimed cobbles, so that they could look up the pink sweaty legs of Polish women.
Our Russian friends put on “Die Walküre” at the Bolshoi (the production Jew-free, to keep us satisfied). They were looking forward to Case White; we’d agreed to let them eat half of Poland. What would they do then? I seem to see an officer’s white glove, discolored by cadaveric fluid, a rusty set of keys, a brass Polish eagle, matted muddy scraps of green canvas; multiplied three thousandfold or maybe twelve thousandfold (for no one ever agrees on numbers) in Katyń Forest. What butchers those Slavs are!
The Austrians were happy about Case White, too. They wanted to show their new Reich what they were capable of. (Take your kinsmen’s advice; make good your old losses. That was what we told them.) The Czechs and Romanians had their own hopes. In fact, who wasn’t caught up by Case White? It opened the most spectacular scenario ever written: Germany can no longer be a passive onlooker! Every political possibility has been exhausted; we’ve decided on a solution by force!—Have you ever read the supernatural stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann? He’s the one who drafted Case White; he dreamed up treasures, magic lenses, monsters! If you want to remind me that Hoffmann died in the nineteenth century, all I have to say to you is: That just makes it better! Our regiments were going to march, with the almost maddeningly monotonous perfection of Hoffmann’s handwriting, each line perfectly level and perfectly spaced between the one above it and the one below it, each letter canted at the same angle, the same courtly bow. The sea-waves of Rilke’s handwriting, the gentle asymmetries of Mozart’s script, the ornate crowdedness of Schiller’s penmanship, all these had had their day; now it was Hoffmann’s turn again, with musical accompaniment in Beethoven’s grandiose scrawl and troop dispositions drawn up in Wagner’s surprisingly elegant cursive, stylized and sloped, his d’s curled. And all summer, in spite of the diplomats who scuttered across her face, Europe lay as miserably passive as one of Dostoyevsky’s women. In the beerhall, a man said to me that of course every woman wants it; every woman craves to be raped by the blond beast. He’d just been accepted into Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland. He bought me a draft and showed off a photograph of his wife, whom he’d married this very year, on Uncle Wolf’s birthday, and when I asked him whether he’d ever raped her, he replied that some women don’t need to be raped because they’re candles; you light them and they burn all by themselves; they melt and they burn. He asked me if I understood him; he wanted to know if I’d ever been with a woman, and I said that I no longer dreamed of women anymore; when I closed my eyes at night I saw a pyramid of flame. Dismissing women, he announced that Poland would not be enough; one had to consider our people’s future. (In Europe everything is a performance; everything gets announced.)
Three years later, the next act would stage itself above the pale faces and frozen hands of the Muscovites who heard on street-loudspeakers that the German Fascists were coming. In Poland, people were going up the chimney by then. But before that, yes, before that, summer made its loving leafy promises. I remember Warsaw quite well; I remember the soft yellow pillars and figures of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. One of those statues, a prophet by the look of him, reached up to caress the pillar which was comprised of the same powdery yellow substance as he; everything was a candle ready to be set alight. ‣
OPERATION BARBAROSSA
Therefore this young god always dies early, nailed to the tree… the maternal principle which gave birth to him swallows him back in the negative form, and he is reached by ugliness and death… Many at that moment prefer to die either by an accident or in war, rather than become old.