ROBERTA. ROSENSTONE
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stone palaces with bright, painted columns on the coast of Crete. At
Malia a party of maidens with elaborate coiffures, tightwaisted full
skirts and naked breasts dip perfect, heartbreaking white feet into
warm swells. From the stony hills of Malta, Saracen knights, impris–
oned in armor, banners flapping overhead, glare down at whirlpools
while their impatient horses cry aloud. Vague shapes and figures of
man and woman and beast swarm down from clouds, rise up from
waves, move like shadows, like ghosts, like legends among the mists
and antic shapes of long-sunken vessels. The swimmer is beyond
myth, beyond history. Swimming is all as he shoots between the Pil–
lars of Hercules and swings left down the Atlantic, while hurricanes
create a world of tumbling mountains that shatter wooden and iron
ships alike. In a flash on the left, African kingdoms, lions grazing on
tropical beaches, and on the right a world of pyramids stained by sci–
ence and blood, precise astronomical observatories where the learned
rip hearts from living flesh to make sure the sun will rise. Then choppy
straits into a vaster ocean, calm, timeless, with natives in outriggers
paddling among whales, coconuts, pineapples and smiles. There are
shadows with European names here, standing on islands where blank,
stone faces wait forever, climbing jungle trails to the lips of smoulder–
ing volcanos, chasing elusive native girls along corridors of frangi–
pani and orchids . Now we must imagine the swimmer sadly begin–
ning to lose his powers , the body growing coarse, awkward, the fins
atrophying, and time closing slowly as one perfect, cone-shaped
mountain rises sacredly, solemnly from a calming summer sea.
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There is another way to cross the Pruth, from south to
north, from Romania to Russia. This has never been a popular
route, but in the summer of 1915 an American journalist named
John Reed did go that way. Just at sunset he stepped from a flat–
bottomed boat onto Russian soil. The world glowed a magic red,
and when he saw an encampment of slit-eyed, Turcoman horseback
warriors, their faces warm as mahogany in the dull light of a camp–
fire, Reed dreamed of following them into some battle five hundred
years ago. He was looking for the Russian army, then scattering in a
vast retreat on the Galician front. It was a task he shared with a goodly
number of Russian generals, and unfortunately Reed accomplished
it before they did. The result was a month spent as a prisoner in the
steamy top floor of a hotel room in the ghetto section of Cholm. Reed
was guarded by half a dozen Cossacks who sharpened their fingernails
