DANlLOKlS
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his, and, instead of launching into his prepared speech, bury his
head in the lap of his wedded wife. "God gave me this child along
with my gift to keep me from growing proud," he would repeat, sob–
bing.
Crushed, he fled back to literature, to "The Promised Land."
(When I think of the misunderstandings and betrayals that poem
caused him!) Then he would make up his mind to leave me. Like a
sickly child or holy fool, I sensed his intentions by the ring of the
doorbell, the tum of the key in the lock. "There is no point in hurting
anybody," he would say. "I have no right to love." We parted many
times "for good," snapping our bonds like a silver thread, "the pearls
rolling over yellowed, much scrubbed boards" (in my Merzlyakov
Street walk-up apartment in Moscow), then falling immediately–
"inexorably" - back into each other's arms. (The poem "Limbo" is
nothing if not a response to those rifts.)
In the end - I say "in the end," for it took several years of suffer–
ing, of ruptures and separations - we realized that our lives were
bound forever and that our feeble human powers were of no avail
against our love or the obstacles in its path. "Such a love is born once
every three hundred years," M .O. would say . "It is the fruit oflife,
and life its only judge. Life and death." That, then, is the meaning of
"Limbo," a poem which, incidentally, Miss Nina Roth-Swanson's
commentary reduces to utter nonsense. ("The image of the stream,
the river, in the context of poetic speech, particularly when omitted,
suppressed,
derives from the dreamwork of the unconscious, and in
dreams, by association, a flowing river, though invisible and merely
sensed - a 'resonant abyss' - suggests both the murmur of words and
the splash of urine." Now what is that gibberish supposed to mean?)
No, Mendel Osipovich never was my husband, but he was the
meaning of my life, just as I was the "cure for his grief" (see the twin
poems "The Prodigal Son" and "Gaea and Aphrodite," Vol. III,
pp.
348-50).
Ours was a love that needed none of the "gluttonous joy
of mortals," that needed no proof; it nourished itself, consumed
itself, but with a mutual flame.
And once the "time of fiery ruptures" was past, we became cap–
tives, hostages to each other, and the temperature curve of our
"beautiful disease" grew steadier. I lost all "dignity," the last vestige
of my upbringing. I no longer expected him to
be
anything but
there, constant and solid as rock. I learned shorthand, the Guerin
method, with a few additions of my own legible only to me. M .O.
