Pasternak

Khrushchev’s sevenfold retinue

were falling over themselves,
doing all they could
to disgrace the man.
But their idea of disgrace
brought him glory.
He refused to leave Russia.
So they demanded
he leave Moscow
during Macmillan’s visit
in 1959.
It’s not that Pasternak took fright
or lost his head,
tormented as he was.
I saw him
in those troubled days.
No. Like a forest or a garden
before a storm,
he was prepared to take the hit
not out of meekness,
but out of faith
in life,
which he had, after all, called his sister.
Saying farewell, he looked at me
in such a way, and smiled so brightly,
that I flinched.
It scared me.
Pasternak left for Tbilisi.
With his wife.
Ten days of February,
six of March.
In Georgia, he warmed up
among his old, faithful friends—
in Tabidze’s home,
now a museum.
The worries, grief, and bitterness
of the preceding days and weeks—
the racket, scandals, quarrels—
wore off. At the sight of Tbilisi
and its surroundings,
they fell away,
like turbid mountain torrents.
Tbilisi brought him back to younger days.
Through distant smoke, through dove-gray haze
he saw the light of heaven,
the color blue,
which he had always loved.
Would he have the chance
to spend time here
at least once again?
On the eve of his departure,
he set off early
to say farewell to Svetitskhoveli.
He removed his cap and entered the cathedral.
He felt the breath of the eleventh century.
Can anyone not love this place,
the grandeur of this space,
stretching eastward,
inspiring thoughts of eternity,
of the eternal life of the soul?
This place doesn’t make you feel small—
it brings you peace.
Pasternak needed this,
like air,
in a world where he was suffocating.
These four free-standing pillars,
holding the dome up like the sky!
These reliefs, these carvings!
Stone, coolness, calm.
He stepped out, his soul uplifted.
He looked at the cathedral, then the sky—
the sky, then the cathedral.
Saying farewell
proved difficult.
But he was glad that he’d spent time here.
When he turned his attention to the earth,
he noticed people
looking closely at him.
Let them look—that’s their business.
But one of them, loud-voiced and young,
approached and asked,
‘You’re Pasternak, aren’t you?’
‘No, no, I’m not Pasternak,’
he answered, horrified,
and took off in a hurry—
yes, almost at a run
like Pushkin’s Eugene
from the Bronze Horseman.
‘You Pasternak?’
someone was shouting after him.
‘No, no, you’re wrong,’
he answered, without looking back.
Platonov

Platonov is reading ‘Fro’

in the apartment of Kornely
Lyutsianovich Zelinsky,
just by the Moscow Arts Theatre.
‘A grand little hut!’
he said afterwards,
without a trace of envy.
Platonov reads with animation.
I have not heard of Platonov.
I know nothing of his ways,
of his way in life.
‘That’s splendid!’ I blurt out,
unable to contain myself,
when he finishes.
Piercing eyes,
kindness and irony on his lips,
irony and kindness.
Platonov says nothing, mistrustful.
‘Yes, but hardly relevant
to the needs of the day,’
Zelinsky concludes softly,
meditatively.
His head is slightly tilted
to one shoulder.
Soft, compliant,
insulated once and for all,
all sweetness
and heartfelt tenderness.
We talk a little more, drink tea
with sugar, with small bagels.
And we sit there for a while,
eyes sliding over the bindings
of the books in the rich,
well-cared-for library
that looks like its owner.
Platonov gets to his feet.
I do the same.
We run—fly—hurtle
down the stairs
and wander for a long time
about Moscow.
There are a lot of cars.
Which of them are Black Marias,
we don’t know. We don’t
talk about it, but we know
we are both thinking about it
and we think about
how we both know this.
‘And you? Can you
make out
what’s relevant
to the needs of the day
and what isn’t?’
Platonov asks, boldly,
on Bolshaya Ordynka.
I’m twenty years old. Wet
behind the ears. ‘No,’
I reply guiltily.
I feel ashamed,
but it’s the truth.
‘Good—that’s
what really matters!’
A pause. A look. A pause.
‘Stay like that. Don’t change.’
Platonov falls silent,
withdraws into himself,
then says, ‘In fifty years time,
who knows,
it may be clear
what era you and I live in
and what it should be called.
Now, though…
There’ll be any number of names,
all without rhyme or reason,
chosen by the grandchildren
of whoever’s
around the powers that be—
of whoever’s around, I mean,
for the time being.
He was walking fast,
not looking around him,
holding his head up high,
with his high cheekbones
and flinty chin.
An Oar

An oar is lying now on the sand.

It tells me more of space and motion
than all the vast and violent ocean
that brought it to dry land.
The Dead

The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.
From camps. From isolation cells.
From buildings as they blaze.
The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.
Diaries. Exercise books from school.
On rough pages of uneven brick—
the cursive of a hurrying hand.
With slivers of tin on a bed-board,
with shards of glass on a wall
or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,
life signed off as best it could.
Silence

The world’s too big; it can’t be scanned in verse.

We two. And silence. And the universe.
Two can be company enough. And silence—
a silence we can share is more than silence.