DANlLOKIS
99
somewhere on the far side of the Milky Way. That was the first stim–
ulus. Our meeting was the second. The two events merged into a
single image . And since poets speak as prophets, the poem about
cannibal stars became prophetic: our lives, sir, commingled canni–
balistically.
I had of course heard of Mendel Osipovich before I met him:
all Yiddish speakers in Russia at the time - and not only Yiddish
speakers-had heard of Mendel Osipovich. Like every powerful,
original personality, he was beset by rumors: he was merely a cheap
imitator of Ansky, he had an illegitimate child, he corresponded with
a famous German actress, he had had false teeth since the age of
eighteen (when a jealous husband, a well-known Russian poet, had
bashed in his jaw), he wrote his poems in Russian first and then
translated them with his father's help, he was preparing to move to
Palestine, and so on. Once I saw a portrait of him by Pyotr Rotov in
the newspapers. I immediately cut it out and pasted it in my diary
thinking, Dear God, that's what the man of my life must look like!
(Ah, the pathos of our youth .)
And suddenly-dear God! -there he was standing opposite me
in the offices of
Russkie Zapiski,
staring at me. I put my hands under
the desk to keep him from seeing them tremble .
The next day he took me to dinner at a Russian restaurant in
Montparnasse. Since, according to a story circulating at the time,
Mendel Osipovich, like Byron, felt utter contempt for women who
ate in public, I ordered nothing, hungry though I was , but a cup of
unsweetened tea. Later, of course, I told him of the consequences of
the Byronic anecdote. The result was the famous "anatomical
poem," as Bezimensky calls it, in which "after a celebration of the
flesh, there appears, like a kid glove turned inside out, the idealized
quintessence of the internal organs , not only the heart but also the
lilac of the lungs and windings of the gut ."
It
is therefore a love poem
par excellence, not "a series of fantasies about the maternal uterus"!
In a word, our love became "inexorable and inescapable"; we
realized that, in spite of all impediments, we had to join our lives . I
shall not go into the obstacles standing in our way: families, clans,
relatives, friends, the Writers' Organization. And of course that
poor, sickly little girl, who was always held up as a last argument.
At his request I returned to Russia and found work in the
Moscow offices of
Der Shtem .
We could see each other every day. I
was always close by, if not to say in his shadow. The poem "Sun
