Marina Tsvetaeva
YOUR DEATH (TO RILKE)
Every death, even the most out of the extraordinary, I
mean yours, Rainer, inevitably falls in line with other deaths, be–
tween the last prior to it and the first after.
No one has ever stood at a graveside without the thought:
"Whom did I stand by last? Whom will I stand by next?" In this
way a certain link is established between
your
dead, your own
personal
dead, a bond which exists only in a given consciousness and is dif–
ferent in each one. Thus, in my consciousness you appeared before
the Unknown between
A
and
B;
for someone else who lost you, be–
tween C and
D,
and so on. And the sum of our recognitions is your
surroundings .
Now, as to the nature of this bond . In the worst case, most fre–
quently, the link is superficial, local, ordinal, to say it all-quotid–
ian, to put it more
all-ry-cemeterial,
dependent upon the location of
numbers and graves. A meaningless link and thus not a bond.
An example. In life there was no link between
X
and
Y.
Neither
is there in death, unless you count death itself, in which case-life
too is a bond. Too little to establish their kinship . That sort of grave
falls out of our sepulchral line, the line closes to two graves that have
meaning for us. By this process of selection the line of our deaths and
our death is created. When I speak of a bond, I have in mind only
these deaths, which compose our own death.
Each death returns us into every other death. Each of the dead
returns to us all who went before him, and returns us-to them.
If
others were not to die, we would sooner or later forget those who
died before. Thus, from grave to grave-a round-robin warrant of
our faithfulness to the dead. A sort of posthumous coexistence in the
memory : in the line of one's own graves . For all of our dead,
whether they lie in Novodeviche cemetery in Moscow, or in Tunis,
or somewhere else, for us, for each of us, they lie in one
cemetery-inside us-with time, they all lie in one fraternal grave.
Ours . Many in one, and one buried in many . There, where your
first grave and your last meet-on your own gravestone-the line
closes to a circle. Not only the earth (life), but death too, is round.
Editor 's Note: English translation copyright
©
1987 J amey Gambrell
