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PARTISAN REVIEW
The next poem, in the same vein, is about the return of a singer, the
famous Russian singer Chaliapin. His apartment in Moscow was turned into
a so-called communal flat by the Soviets. Whoever has read Joseph
Brodsky's essay "A Room and a Half" knows about those communal
flats-a bathroom and kitchen shared by up to seventeen families. I spent
some time in my early youth in Chaliapin's former flat. My fi'iends and I
arranged some unofficial exhibitions of abstract paintings there, since
abstract paintings were strictly banned in the Soviet Union. Of course, there
were also some strictly private memories related to that flat. Now it has
been turned into a museum and, instead of those rather naive abstract paint–
ings, it has quite good paintings formerly belonging
to
Chaliapin. I am
rather happy that the singer finally got his rooms back, but at the same time
it feels somewhat less authentic than it used to. "The Return of the Singer."
In this dark state, the snow is white as before.
Under wheels, the asphalt squeaks, icc-crusted and clear.
If the pupil, cornea, ruins of the retina survive,
soon we'll see a new millenium outside.
The river leaps on the threshhold, waves knock on the door,
and the bygone century returns to its home of yore.
Its confused space has undergone several remodelings,
while the faded pictures have found a silk drawing room
where the holes in the plaster were patched up wi th other textures
matchmakers, confidants, unifYing and forbidden treasure).
Already you and I see only what really was there:
collapsing stoves, a room that many came to share.
Squinting slightly, you perceive a costume of the stage,
a billiard, shelves, the sum of another age;
in the curtain's creases, pockets of old air are hidden,
but for them, as for me, your body is now forgotten.
There are no roads into the senseless terrains,
where dilapidated posters once extolled the czardolll of mines
and missiles, where candles used to drip sweat on the table,
where equal affection, as always, was not possible.
