MARINA TSVETAEVA
523
"And now, Seriozha, there will be such and such.... Re–
member."
And softly, carefully, almost rejoicing, he shows us picture
after picture. Like a kind magician revealing his secrets to children,
he relates the entire Russian Revolution five years in advance: the
terror, the Civil War, the executions, the military outposts, La
Vendee, the atrocities, the loss of godliness, the unloosed spirits of
the elements, blood, blood, blood.
* * *
With G-tsev to get bread.
A cafe in the Otuzy. Bolshevik appeals on the walls. Long–
bearded Tatars at the tables. How slowly they drink, how sparingly
they speak, how importantly they move. Time has stopped for them.
The 17th century-the 20th century. Even the cups are the same,
dark blue, with cabalistic signs, no handles. Bolshevism? Marxism?
Scream your lungs out posters! What do we have to do with
your machines, your Lenins, Trotskys, your new-born proletariats,
your decaying bourgeoisie ... We have Uraza, mulla, grapes, a
dim memory of a great queen . . . This is the boiling sediment at
the depths of these gilded cups. We-are outside, we-are above,
we-are along time ago. It's for you -to be, we- have passed. We–
are once and forever. We - are not.
* * *
Moonlit twilight. A mosque. The herds of goats return. A girl
in a raspberry skirt down to the floor. Tobacco pouches. An old
woman, gnawed like a bone.
The sculpturesqueness of ancient races.
* * *
In the train compartment
(the return trip to Moscow, Nov. 25.)
"Breshko-Breshkovskaia's3 a bastard too! She said-you have
to fight!"
* * *
"To destroy the poor cla(gs even more, and indulge their own
blisses again!"
* *
*
"Poor Mother Moscow, clothing the entire front! We can't
complain about Moscow! The papers cause all the trouble. The
Bolsheviks are right when they say they don't want to spill blood,
they're keeping an eye on things."
3. Catherine Breshkovsky, 1844-1934, one of the founders of the Socialist Revolu–
tionary Party, known as the "grandmother of the Russian Revolution."
