Chosen by Ilya Kaminsky
Marina Tsvetaeva
In each line’s strange syllable: she awakes
as a gull, torn
between heaven and earth.
I accept her, stand with her face to face.
—in this dream: she wears her dress
like a sail, runs behind me, stopping
when I stop. She laughs
as a child speaking to herself:
“soul = pain + everything else.”
I bend clumsily at the knees
and I quarrel no more,
all I want is a human window
in a house whose roof is my life
Excerpt from My First Tsvetaeva
It is August 19, 1991, and Gorbachev is imprisoned in Crimea and tanks again roll into Moscow: I am fourteen years old. Now, thirty years later, recalling that time, I see not the TV images of a defiant Yeltsin on the top of the tank, his officially glorified, drunk protest.
Instead, thinking of August 19, 1991, Communist takeover, I see my mother’s frightened phone calls from Odessa to her relatives in Moscow, and the lines not working. She is calling again. And the lines don’t work. I am a deaf boy who can’t hear but sees his parents’ fear. Middle of the night. Relatives call. On my mother’s lips: strange news of the hun-dreds of sandwiches my mother’s aunt makes, she is taking them to frightened boys in uniforms, in tanks, sent to take over the city. My mother’s aunt is hugging them, those boys who were sent to shoot her and others in the crowd. She is pouring them tea from her thermos. She is saying: I am your mother’s age, don’t shoot me.
1991 Communist takeover: my mother and father, five thousand miles from Moscow, in our tiny Odessa room, click the channels on TV. Father’s hand twitches. On every TV channel: Swan Lake ballet. Mother’s dry laugh: there are tanks in Moscow and all we see is swirl-ing ballerinas.
August 1991: in Odessa there are no protests. Stepping into the tram I see a different quality to the silence as the tram shakes through streets: a crowd of people huddled inside watches one another. In a crowded silence, I notice how history takes up residence in our bodies.
