What, then, compels me to compose poems about my childhood if in spite of everything, my words go wide of the mark, or else slay both the pard and the hart with the exploding bullet of an “accurate” epithet? But let us not despair. The man says I am a real poet—which means that the hunt was not in vain.
Here is another twelve-line poem about boyhood torments. It deals with the ordeals of winter in town when, for example, ribbed stockings chafe behind the knees, or when the shopgirl pulls an impossibly flat kid glove onto your hand, laid on the counter as if on an executioner’s block. There is more: the hook’s double pinch (the first time it slipped off) while you stand with outspread arms to have your fur collar fastened; but in compensation for this, what an amusing change in acoustics, how rounded all sounds become when the collar is raised; and since we have touched upon ears, how unforgettable the silky, taut, buzzing music while the strings of your cap’s earflaps are being tied (raise your chin).
Merrily, to coin a phrase, youngsters romp on a frosty day. At the entrance to the public park we have the balloon vendor; above his head, three times his size, an enormous rustling cluster. Look, children, how they billow and rub against each other, all full of God’s sunshine, in red, blue and green shades. A beautiful sight! Please, Uncle, I want the biggest (the white one with the rooster painted on it and the red embryo floating inside, which, when its mother is destroyed, will escape up to the ceiling and a day later will come down, all wrinkled and quite tame).
Now the happy children have bought their ruble balloon and the kindly hawker has pulled it out of the jostling bunch. Just a minute, my lad, don’t grab, let me cut the string. After which he puts on his mittens again, checks the string around his waist, from which his scissors dangle, and pushing off with his heel, slowly begins to rise in an upright position, higher and higher into the blue sky: look, his cluster is no larger now than a bunch of grapes, while beneath him lies hazy, gilded, berimed St. Petersburg, a little restored here and there, alas, according to the best pictures of our national painters.
But joking aside, it really was all very beautiful, very quiet. The trees in the park mimed their own ghosts and the whole effect revealed immense talent. Tanya and I would make fun of the sleds of our coevals, especially if they were covered with fringed, carpet-like stuff and had a high seat (equipped even with a back) and reins that the rider held as he braked with his felt boots. This kind never made it all the way to the final snowdrift, but instead went off course almost immediately and began to spin helplessly while continuing to descend, carrying a pallid, intent child who was obliged, when the sled’s momentum was spent, to work with his feet in order to reach the end of the icy run. Tanya and I had weighty belly sleds from Sangalli’s: such a sled consisted simply of a rectangular velvet cushion on iron runners curved at each end. You did not have to pull it on the way to the slide—it glided with so little effort and so impatiently along the snow, sanded in vain, that it bumped against your heels. Here we are at the hill.
One climbed up a sparkle-splashed platform.… (Water carried up in buckets to pour on the slide had splashed over the wooden steps so that they were coated with sparkling ice, but the well-meaning alliteration had not been able to get all this in.)
One climbed a sparkle-splashed platform,
One dashingly fell belly first
On the sled, and it rattled
Down the blueness; and then
When the scene underwent a grim change,
And there somberly burned in the nursery
Scarlet fever on Christmas,
Or, on Easter, diphtheria,
One rocketed down the bright, brittle,
Exaggerated ice hill
In a kind of half-tropical,
Half-Tavricheski park where, by the power of delirium, General Nikolai Mihailovich Przhevalski was transferred, together with his stone camel, from the Alexandrovski park near us, and where he immediately turned into a statue of my father who was at that moment somewhere between Kokand and Ashkhabad, for example, or else on a slope of the Tsinin Range. What illnesses Tanya and I went through! Now together, now by turns; and how I would suffer when I heard, between the slam of a distant door and the restrained quiet sound of another one, her footfall and laughter bursting through, sounding celestially indifferent to me, unaware of me, infinitely distant from my fat compress with its tawny oilcloth filling, my aching legs, my bodily heaviness and constriction; but if it was she who was sick, how earthly and real, how like a crisp soccer ball I felt when I saw her lying in bed with an air of remoteness about her as if she had turned toward the other world, with only the limp lining of her being toward me! Let us describe the last stand before the capitulation when, not yet having stepped out of the normal course of the day, concealing from your own self the fever, the ache in your joints, and wrapping yourself up Mexican fashion, you disguise the claims of fever’s chill as the demands of the game; and when, a half hour later, you have surrendered and ended up in bed, your body no longer believes that just a short time ago it was playing, crawling on all fours along the floor of the hall, along the parquet, along the quarpet.
Let us describe Mother’s questioning smile of alarm when she has just put the thermometer in my armpit (a task she would not entrust either to the valet or to the governess). “Well, you’ve got yourself into a nice fix, haven’t you?” says she, still trying to joke about it. Then a minute later: “I knew it yesterday, I knew you had a fever, you can’t fool me.” And after another minute: “How much do you think you have?”
And finally: “I think we can take it out now.” She brings the incandescent glass tube close to the light and, drawing together her lovely sealskin eyebrows—which Tanya has inherited—she looks for a long time … and then without saying anything she unhurriedly shakes the thermometer and slips it back into its case, looking at me as if not quite recognizing me, while my father rides his horse at a walk across a vernal plain all blue with irises; let us describe also the delirious state in which one feels huge numbers grow, inflating one’s brain, accompanied by someone’s incessant patter quite unrelated to you, as if in the dark garden adjoining the madhouse of the book-of-sums several of its characters, half out (or more precisely, fifty-seven one-hundred-and-elevenths out) of their terrible world of increasing interests, appeared in their stock parts of apple-woman, four ditchdiggers and a Certain Person who has bequeathed his children a caravan of fractions, and chatted, to the accompaniment of the nocturnal sough of trees, about something extremely domestic and silly, but therefore all the more awful, all the more doomed to turn into those very numbers, into that mathematical universe expanding endlessly (an expansion which for me sheds an odd light on the macrocosmic theories of today’s physicists). Let us describe finally the recovery, when there is no longer any point in shaking the mercury down, and the thermometer is carelessly left lying on the bedtable, where an assembly of books that has come to congratulate you and a few playthings (idle onlookers) are crowding out the half-empty bottles of turbid potions.
A writing case with my note paper
Is what I most vividly see:
The leaves are adorned with a horseshoe
And my monogram. I had become
Quite an expert in twisted initials,
Intaglio seals, dry flattened flowers
(Which a little girl sent me from Nice)
And sealing wax, red and bronze-gleaming.
None of the poems in the book alludes to a certain extraordinary thing that happened to me as I was recovering from a particularly severe case of pneumonia. When everyone had moved into the drawing room (to use a Victorian cliché), one of the guests who (to go on with it) had been silent all evening.… The fever had ebbed away during the night and I had finally scrambled ashore.
I was, let me tell you, weak, capricious and transparent—as transparent as a cut-glass egg. Mother had gone to buy me—I did not know what exactly—one of those freakish things that from time to time I coveted with the greed of a pregnant woman, afterwards forgetting them completely; but my mother made lists of these desiderata. As I lay flat in bed among bluish layers of indoor twilight I felt myself evolving an incredible lucidity, as when a distant stripe of radiantly pale sky stretches between long vesperal clouds and you can make out the cape and shallows of God knows what far-off islands—and it seems that if you release your volatile glance just a little further you will discern a shining boat drawn up on the damp sand and receding footsteps filled with bright water.
In that minute, I think, I attained the highest limit of human health: my mind had been dipped and rinsed only recently in a dangerous, supernaturally clean blackness; and now, lying still and
