Was there a way to do that in one broad stroke? And where to begin? If for comprehensive purposes (and they were nothing if not comprehensive men) it was necessary to begin at the beginning, they’d be there for days or more likely weeks; he’d bore Brodsky to a second death. Pasha felt discouraged. He found a seat on a metal bleacher. A skinny woman with tense shoulders took a measured bite of her sandwich, the tinfoil like a cracked alien eggshell on her lap. He blocked the sun with his hand. In the distance the whitish shuttle bus was riding off and Sveta was entering the campgrounds. Not far behind, Bozhko was slinking along.
The fact of the matter, for one thing, was that the other night Pasha hadn’t intended to shoot himself in the foot. No offense had been meant. He’d simply been stating the obvious. They were happy to be hosted by Georgia, to be treated like VIPs, and they were all enjoying themselves immensely — though perhaps he should speak for himself. He was happy, he was enjoying. And from the exponentially growing numbers of participants, it was clear that the festival mission was a stupendous success, as he’d said. Russian-language poets from across the globe were meeting and getting acquainted with one another’s work, forging friendships and international partnerships, and so on. But did anybody really think it was possible that some hundred-plus Russian-language poets existed at any one time? A poet was born, not bred. The entire twentieth century had about a dozen (you among them, needless to say). And let’s be honest: Since when did poetry benefit from a breakfast-is-included mentality? A luxury bus picked up the poets outside the hotel lobby at eight, and there was a shuttle every half hour afterward for those who didn’t make it, transporting them with bathroom access to the campgrounds, where refreshments were served throughout the day. The poets had needed to know: Was the shuttle free of charge? Almost free, the Tbilisi representative had said, not quite. Be precise! There was a very minuscule fare, to be determined by each individual shuttle driver. This did not strike the poets as right. And eight A.M. was, by consensus, too early for the bus — how about nine-thirty? But events began at nine, and it was a half-hour drive on clear roads, which weren’t at all guaranteed. Pity the poet whose reading was scheduled for nine! Though perhaps, if things really got rolling, many would be awake not already but still.
The bus schedule wasn’t an issue for Pasha, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to sleep past dawn. The complimentary breakfast was a nuisance — he helplessly found himself filling a large plate, a small plate, and a bowl and then methodically emptying them into himself, adding layers of food onto the undigested layers from the previous night. But the campgrounds, littered with makeshift stages, sunburned faces, crammed tents, appealed to Pasha in that they resembled a flea market — everything drab, plentiful, on display yet camouflaged, visible and utterly overlookable. Pasha had patience, the key with both flea markets and poetry festivals (and baseball games, so he’d heard). Oftentimes the most awaited readings proved the dullest and the most captivating had an audience that could be counted on one hand, or so it was nice to think. But who was Pasha kidding? And if Brodsky wasn’t around to listen as Pasha made fumbling attempts to explain himself — and by the looks of it he definitely wasn’t — Pasha would proceed to do so to whoever was listening, because as he returned to roaming the labyrinthine campgrounds in what would appear to be avoidance of Sveta and Bozhko, he realized just how overdue such an explanation was.
He wasn’t at the festival for what he could take away from the experience (a new poet to read, concept to mull, international collaboration to initiate), but for the experience itself — for the chance to roam patchy, bleached grasses in his Georgian vest, perhaps an occasional pipe between his hot, sandpapery lips, for good food and spontaneous conversation, often or always initiated by the other party. If he stood around for long enough, he was invariably approached by other poets, often female, who’d read his work and admired or even adored it, who weren’t shy or reticent with their opinions and seemed to believe that just having them was a source of pride. They wanted to let Pasha know that they considered him a poet of genius not getting his due, no, it’s true, he deserved far better treatment, a wider readership, international renown, and to be translated into every language imaginable, even Swahili. A scattered redhead claimed that his collection Ancestral Belt had been on her nightstand since 1995; a dark boy with emerald eyes, who might’ve been twelve, said that he’d been assigning Pasha’s Bestiary Cycle in both his Mythology of Poetics and Poetics of Mythology courses for a decade; a woman in her fifties with one arm in a giant cast (or a giant arm in a fitted cast) said that she’d recently read his poem “Black Arch” in one of her classes and rather liked it, though she found the wordplay at the beginning rather tiring and it could’ve easily been half as long, but even so it was memorable, which was more than could be said for the other poems assigned in that class. Pasha relished these encounters more than he let on, his regular life in Odessa devoid of them, but he usually quickly lost the actual content of the compliment, retaining only warmth, like having been awoken from a pleasant dream. He carried around this wonderfully incommunicable warmth for as long as the heat held, potentially an entire afternoon providing he didn’t happen to stumble into another encounter or a bit of news that froze him to the core, turning the saliva on his tongue to ice. But even when people weren’t approaching Pasha to tell him of the influence his poetry had on them, that influence was alive in the air. It was real. No one had to be reading his poetry, and he didn’t have to be writing it, and no mention of it had to be made, and still the influence was inarguably present, as present as the electromagnetic waves that miraculously allowed for cell-phone reception at the campgrounds in rural Georgia.
But currently there was a malfunction. Though people approached Pasha throughout the afternoon, not only did the heat not hold, it failed to appear. Real time had resumed — Sveta and Bozhko found Pasha, took him by the underarms, and led the way to the tent not where the conundrum of translation was once and for all being resolved but to the one with the red cross on the front, where a fat village beauty in a white uniform pinched his cheeks, called him Pumpkin Stew (for that was what he looked like), slammed a bag of ice on his forehead, and said heatstroke at least a dozen times, which was odd, as heat was the one sensation Pasha lacked. Equipped with a water bottle, a cap, and a few warnings, he was released. A few hours later, he read aloud to a packed auditorium; in terms of attendance, enemies were far more devoted than friends. The auditorium was large and had walls, and it couldn’t have been on the campgrounds, but then where was it? This was bound to remain a mystery.
After the reading Pasha proceeded to let loose at the Mongolian barbecue and the ensuing festivities, staying late into the evening, refilling his glass with punch, letting himself be drawn into a conversation with three women and one homosexual ballad-composer that proved not entirely as frivolous as he would’ve imagined it had he excused himself instantly in his regular fashion, or maybe it was just as frivolous but livelier and more nuanced, occasioned with moments worth having if you were in it for the experience itself. Ten days out of the year, he could make such an allowance. Despite all the genuine fun and enjoyment, of which he would’ve told the reporter from Znamya if she hadn’t lost her face, something was wrong. When the elevator took Pasha up to the forty-ninth floor, which he never realized was the top floor, thinking that there had to be another floor above, and after he managed to swipe the card so that the light turned green and let him into his room, where Sveta was already sleeping, the poor thing only able to take so much (though since when?), the oppressive mass again rolled over Pasha. First it crushed his toes, then it rolled off, and he thought with unspeakable relief that he’d been spared, but of course he was not.