öâåò dufour
RUTH FAINLIGHT
8-10-2004
RUTH FAINLIGHT
(b. 1931)
Ruth Fainlight
was born in New York City, and has lived mostly in England since the age of
15. Her father was born in London, and her mother in a small town on the
eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine). She was
educated at schools in America and England, and at Birmingham and Brighton
colleges of art, and married the writer Alan Sillitoe in 1959. She was Poet
in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1985 and
1990, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1994. Ruth Fainlight
lives in London.
Her many books
include poetry, short stories, translations, drama and opera libretti. Her
poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, and her stories in books
including The Penguin Book of Modern
Women’s Stories (1991) and Caught in a Story: contemporary
fairy-tales and fables (Vintage, 1992).
Her poetry books
include Cages (1966) and To See the Matter Clearly (1968),
from MacMillan in Britain and Dufour in the USA; The Region’s Violence
(1973), Another Full Moon (1976), Sibyls and Others (1980),
Fifteen to Infinity (1983), Selected Poems (1987) and The Knot
(1990), all from Hutchinson and Century Hutchinson; This Time of Year
(1994) and Selected Poems (1995) from Sinclair-Stevenson; and
Climates (1983), Sugar-Paper Blue (1997) and Burning Wire
(2002) from Bloodaxe Books. Fifteen to Infinity was published in the
USA by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Sugar-Paper Blue was listed
for the Whitbread Poetry Award.
She has also
translated two books of poetry from the Portuguese of Sophia de Mello
Breyner, and collaborated with Alan Sillitoe on a translation of Lope de
Vega’s play All Citizens Are Soldiers (Macmillan, 1969). Her own
poetry has been published in Portuguese (1995), French (1997) and Spanish
(2000) editions.
She has published
two collections of short stories, Daylife and Nightlife (André
Deutsch, 1971) and Dr. Clock’s Last Case (Virago, 1994). Her libretti
include: The Dancer Hotoke (1991), a chamber opera by Erika Fox
(nominated for the Laurence Olivier Awards in 1992); The European Story
(1993), a chamber opera for Geoffrey Alvarez; and Bedlam Britannica
(1995), a Channel Four War Cries TV opera directed by Celia Lowenstein with music
by Robert Jan Stips.
(from the book Burning Wire)
Portugal:
Visitação, de Ruth Fainlight,
Tradução colectiva (Mateus, Abril-Maio 1994), revista, completada e
apresentada por
Ana Hatherly, Livros Quetzal, ISBN: 9725642279, 1995, 54 pág.
LINKS:
Biographies:
O
O
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Articles:
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Articles by Ruth Fainlight:
on Paul Bowles
on
Sylvia Plath
Poems:
8 poems:
Solstices
A
Short History of Ladbroke Square
Early
Spring
An
Encounter near Ladbroke Square
Autumn
A
Day at the Races
Late
Winter
In
Ladbroke Square
Lisbon Faces
The cats on the
azulejos
on the Fronteira
palace,
the putti, birds and
satyrs –
cobalt blue and
manganese
black, with yellow
eyes,
the fishermen and
monks, Jews
and courtiers, the
royal pair
with ornate
rich-toned robes,
honouring São
Vicente
in Nuno Gonçalves’
painting,
have a subtle
resemblance – that
shrewd, mournful,
watchful expression –
to people I passed
in Alfama
this morning: they
all share
the same Lisbon
face.
from Burning
Wire
Young Men
Young men disturb me as they never used to –
a sharply physical disturbance, with full
awareness that stiff joints and slack flesh
no longer could perform what I imagine;
mind and body
moving further apart.
I feel a tenderness and sympathy
for old body, that poor donkey, most
burdens too heavy now, though once little
seemed beyond it; ruefully acknowledge
how only rage and lust
augment with time.
Whether mind becomes more tolerant
to repetition of the same absurdities,
nothing learned, is a moot point.
But those young men – ought I to want
the day ever to come
when they don’t disturb?
from
Sugar-Paper Blue
The
Tree Surgeon
Pressing
against the trunk, he twists around
and back to test the resilience of the branch,
the rope, the safety of his position,
then crawls along a bough – a primate
in his habitat. When he stops to rest and
contemplate the distracting criss-cross of last
season's twigs, plot his next move and where
to cut yet not harm the tree's structure,
he becomes a modern human.
Next
spring it will start again. By autumn,
when this year's leaves have fallen, the space
he's cleared will be filigreed with new growth.
The pressure of a tool on his palm, the timeless
repetitions of toil, seem part of the same
process – something more important than
an individual life. He's caring for trees,
not carving a sculpture that will immortalize
him; would never conceive such ambitions.
At ground
level, two men, helmetted,
their ears muffled against the sound, feed
fallen branches through the mouth of a hopper
that spits the shredded stuff into the open back
of a truck. The tree surgeon, gracefully
stretching toward the tip of the tallest branch,
is only not an artist because he knows
that what he does could be done as well –
or maybe even better – by someone else.
Pressing
against the trunk, he twists around
and back to test the resilience of the branch,
the rope, the safety of his position,
then crawls along a bough – a primate
in his habitat. When he stops to rest and
contemplate the distracting criss-cross of last
season's twigs, plot his next move and where
to cut yet not harm the tree's structure,
he becomes a modern human.
Next
spring it will start again. By autumn,
when this year's leaves have fallen, the space
he's cleared will be filigreed with new growth.
The pressure of a tool on his palm, the timeless
repetitions of toil, seem part of the same
process – something more important than
an individual life. He's caring for trees,
not carving a sculpture that will immortalize
him; would never conceive such ambitions.
At ground
level, two men, helmetted,
their ears muffled against the sound, feed
fallen branches through the mouth of a hopper
that spits the shredded stuff into the open back
of a truck. The tree surgeon, gracefully
stretching toward the tip of the tallest branch,
is only not an artist because he knows
that what he does could be done as well –
or maybe even better – by someone else.
from
Burning Wire
Ancient Egyptian Couples
Ancient
Egyptian couples
standing or seated side by side.
Plaited wigs and pleated robes
breastplates and bracelets patterned
with lotus and papyrus buds
in wood, stone, plaster,
meticulously worked and incised.
Signifying separate realms,
his skin is painted
earth red, hers gleams soft
and golden as the sky.
Sometimes, the wife has placed a hand
upon her husband's shoulder.
They stare at us, not at each other,
from enormous kohl-rimmed eyes.
That
surge of affection
across millennia, like
the sudden return of desire
which haloes the head, the whole
body, of the one confirmed
again as beloved, brings them
close as you and I.
from
Sugar-Paper Blue
Handbag
My
mother's old leather handbag,
crowded with letters she carried
all through the war. The smell
of my mother's handbag: mints
and lipstick and Coty powder.
The look of those letters, softened
and worn at the edges, opened,
read, and refolded so often.
Letters from my father. Odour
of leather and powder, which ever
since then has meant womanliness,
and love, and anguish, and war.
from
Fifteen to Infinity, 1983
MALA DE MÃO
A velha carteira de cabedal da minha mãe
atulhada das cartas que andaram
com ela durante a guerra. O cheiro
da carteira da minha mãe: mentol
e bâton e pó de arroz Coty.
O aspecto dessas cartas, amolecidas
e gastas no cantos, tantas vezes
abertas, lidas e dobradas.
Cartas do meu pai. Um cheiro
a cabedal e pó de arroz, que
desde então quer dizer mulher,
amor, sofrimento e guerra.
De "Visitação"
Four
Pheasants
Where the road curves sharp
left, it dips,
and after heavy rain, a glisten of wet —
what might be the bed of an old stream or
an overflowing spring — marks the surface.
The water sinks into the dark earth
deepened by centuries of rotting leaves
and decomposing creatures, and the trees arch.
Their top branches meet above the gap.
When the leaves are russet
and gold, the wet road,
fiftully lit by weak sunlight filtered through
interlaced twigs, seems to lead somewhere important.
From a bank of bronze and copper bracken,
dew-beaded, frost-softened, four pheasants
emerge, one behind the next, and stalk across.
from Burning Wire
Sunday Afternoon
A Sunday afternoon in late July:
the leaves look tired, the sky is
clouding up,
pressure falling. The couple
in the next apartment are arguing
about how much he does or doesn't
help.
Eavesdropping from my terrace,
I am jealous of how it's bound to
end:
the stuffy bedroom, moans and
love-cries muffled
so the baby won't wake.
I remember every detail of
the misery there is in marriage -
and then making up.
from Burning Wire
Inward
Her eyes are staring
inward
into a space as endless
as the distance from here to the mountains
she has forgotten.
Between
those peaks and this high cave
lies the drowned valley floor where it happened:
whatever gave her
the look
of a violated woman
or a bird that clings to a storm-struck mast
and made everything
fade--
like being formed from clay and breathed
into life. Or a god's
visitation
from This Time of Year
December
Moon
Like the
web of a leaf - fine as the mesh
of a moth's crest or a filigreed
blade of coral - that I'd stoop to peel
from the damp pavement and carry home
(another object for my collection)
in spite of Mother's protestations
like a
scrap of lace on the blue carpet
of her cool bedroom, that lay unnoticed
since I cut and hemmed a veil for my doll
from a torn scarf (or perhaps to knot
around my neck for dressing-up)
like the
wrinkled skin my mother would scrape
so carefully with a little spoon
from the top of my cup of boiled milk
(which unless she did I wouldn't drink)
and watch
her drop it onto that plate -
my favourite - with a painted line
around the rim like autumn trees
against a sky (it's not that long
since the leaves fell) of the same
rare
December blue as the morning sky
I see today here when I draw
the curtains apart, and this pale moon,
half consumed by the last month
of another year, floats into view.
from
Burning Wire
Ephemeral Lives
This year
seems an interlude
between two events, though I don't yet know
what those events are. The first
must already have happened (at the time
I didn't notice), but until the second,
whenever it comes, the future stays obscure.
A week now
is as short as a day,
a month no longer than a week used to be.
The only way to stop acceleration
(this hopeful theory still needs testing)
would be to concentrate my attention
on the smallest details of a fly, a mouse,
a flower. Compared to such ephemeral lives,
my own will proceed with glacial slowness.
from
Burning Wire
Agua de
Colónia
The sharp
smell of cheap eau-de-cologne,
agua de
colonia,
will call it back:
every
aspect of the lonely summer
in that
other era, when I was young.
Watered
pavements of narrow streets between
old
buildings. Dim high-ceilinged cafés blue
with smoke
from yellow-papered cigarettes.
The almost
neutral taste of almond horchata
in tall
glass beaded with moisture. I pressed
my wrists
against its sides to cool my blood.
Molten
sunlight through the shutter slats
corrodes
the floor-tiles’ lozenges and arabesques.
Insomnia
under a mosquito net.
My scent.
My languor. My formal clothing.
from Sugar-Paper
Blue
AGUA DE COLONIA*
O cheiro forte de
eau-de-cologne barata
(agua de colónia)*, há-de recordá-lo:
cada aspecto do solitário verão
nessa outra época, quando eu era jovem.
Calçadas regadas de ruas
estreitas entre
velhos edifícios. Cafés sombrios de tectos altos, azulados
com o fumo dos cigarros de mortalha amarela.
O gosto quase neutro de orchata de amêndoa
num copo alto embaciado. Pressionei
nele os pulsos para arrefecer o meu sangue.
A luz solar difundida
através das ripas das persianas
corrói os losangos e arabescos dos ladrilhos do chão.
A insónia sob a rede de um mosquiteiro.
O meu odor. A minha languidez. O meu vestuário formal.
* sic, no original
.................more
poems,
here
The poem "Sugar-Paper Blue" was translated into
Russian by Marina Boroditskaya (Марина
Бородицкая), poet and translator, and was published in the April 2003 issue of
the Moscow monthly Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature).
It was found
here.
SUGAR-PAPER
BLUE
I
Trying to
describe a colour
by comparison
and metaphor
is as futile as
the attempt
to hum the tune
I hear in my head.
But I thought
everyone knew
what was meant
by sugar-paper blue.
Sugar-paper –
that thickish, stiffish
somewhat-grainy-surfaced, mottled
faded-navy
paper glued or folded
into bags for
sugar: the next image
is my aunt and
mother stocky-fingered
in the family
grocery store.
After school,
pushing a metal scoop
through the
shifting granular dampness
inside a hairy
sack of jute,
they’ll find
bags, then to their homework.
You
understand, there is no proof
this actually occurred.
I was trying to
describe a room in Leningrad (in ‘65
still the
city’s name), walls painted
the traditional
nineteenth-century tone
I called
sugar-paper blue,
to a friend in
New York, years later.
II
It was the
study of my guide’s parents,
two polite
Petersborgians
who had
survived the siege,
their daughters
said, with bodies gaunt
and eyes
enormous as Rublev saints
on icons at the
Hermitage (“That’s
how we all
looked”), and now, proudly,
showed books,
albums, pamphlets
guarded through
terrible years.
I turned the
pages of thick or flimsy paper,
thought of
those writers and artists
gone to the
gulags or Paris, and knew
that I was
touching holy relics.
“Here’s
Mandelstam’s first published verse,” Galya
translated.
“These woodcuts are by Goncharova.
And look: Blok.
Bely. Gumilev.”
“The Acmeist
who married Akhmatova?”
(I was such a
show-off). “Yes,” they confirmed.
“And this is
the book with the cycle of poems
dedicated to
her by Marina Tsvetaeva”
-
who titled them The Muse, and later said:
“I
read as if Akhmatova
were the only person in the room.
I
read for the absent Akhmatova”,
-
who didn’t hear them, but carried the manuscript
in
her handbag for years, until
it
split at the folds and fell apart.
III
I was probably
not more than twelve then,
in my aunt’s
glass-fronted mahogany bookcase –
dusting its elaborated clawed feet,
the
swagged garlands of leaves swathing
the
hips of the female torsos
that surged from the column each side
like naked caryatidis, or
twin figureheads with the fixed eyes
and
stern faces of implacable Fates
on
the vessel of expectation
which that bookcase (the same piece now
in
my London apartment; the one object
whose look and contents, I suspect,
formed my taste in everything) became –
I found what
can only be called
“a slim
volume”, with limp covers,
in an unknown
script and language.
I don’t
remember Aunt Ann translating
one line from
its pages, nor ever
explaining how
she came to own it.
But she told me
some facts about the woman
who wrote it –
the first time I heard
those words:
Anna Akhmatova –
later, I wondered how important
the
coincidence of name might be for her,
my
aunt, who since the sugar-bagging days
saw
herself an artist-manqué;
IV
“You are and
admirer of Akhmatova?”
It was a loaded
question, then.
Faces gleaming
white against the dark
blue walls and
shelves of books
as marble busts
in a library,
all three
watched me closely.
“You know I
don’t read Russian. But
there are a few
translations – “
I couldn’t go
on. I felt ridiculous.
“She’s ill
now,” Galya said,
“but still in
touch with everything.
And what a good
neighbour”.
A neighbour?
Hard to imagine her
in such a
mundane situation.
Like the taut
silk of a parachute
collapsing
inward, billowed out,
by contrary
winds, the barriers
of time and
space changed shape and meaning.
“Do you hear
that sound?” My gaze followed
Galya’s to the
ceiling. “She must be
better today,
she’s walking around”.
“Anna Akhmatova
lives upstairs?”
My awestruck,
disbelieving voice
creaked like
the floorboards.
V
Incredulous
questions:
as if needing
to hear the simple fact
reiterated yet
again;
pleading that
somehow they help me
to meet the
famous poet,
the witness,
the sacred
monster,
the old, dying
woman –
or at least
help me to see her –
even if only over the shoulder
of
one of them – who could knock
at
her door and let me look
even if only a moment –
just to see her – a glimpse –
Anna Akhmatova:
my obsessed
demand exceeded
decent behaviour.
But they firmly
insisted, repeating,
as many times
as I asked, that what
I wanted could
not happen.
VI
I have scanned
encyclopaedias
and
dictionaries, read every entry
under “sugar”
and “paper” and “blue”:
endless,
tedious searchings. But no one
acknowledges
the relevance
of those
qualifiers, or recognises
the
description, though I see it
so clearly: a
glaucous sheen
ob the cheap,
thick sheets of paper.
Mandelstam – I hadn’t read him
then – might have written
of
sugar cones from North Africa,
but
eating blue grapes
under “the burning blue sky”
os
Tashkent, did Akhmatova notice
one
wrapped in blue paper?
(As for “papier
bleu”, in White Flock
I found it:
“the blue copy-book
with the poems
I wrote as a child”.)
There are other
more poetic blues:
azure,
cerulean, lapis lazuli,
ultramarine,
cornflower, indigo;
(the colour of
rivers and ocean,
the shadows on
ice and snow).
But my
imagination
stubbornly
returns
to my aunt and
mother,
Feigele and
Channah – Fanny and Annie –
unhappily
filling packets of sugar
(while sucking
the crystal residue).
It’s not as if they came from Russia.
Somewhere near Bukovina
was
where they were born.
It is
impossible to say:
standing side
by side in the damp room
behind the
store – like sisters
in a
Dostoievsky novel –
their
chilblained hands and feet
burned as blue
with cold
as Anna
Akhmatova’s
heart, mind,
soul, body,
or allude to
the janitor’s blue cap,
or the blue
lips
of the woman
who whispered,
“Can you
describe this?”
as she stood in
line
three hundred
hours
With the other
mothers, wives and sisters
outside Kresty
prison.
Is it shameful
or shameless
that I can’t
disentangle the stories?
How
they all must have yearned
for
something to sweeten their mouths,
or
had they forgotten
even the taste of sugar?
VII
Poetry,
maternal figure. Sugar syrup, blue paper.
The Muse: a
veiled girl with pipes in her hand.
Cassandra: “…my
rods prophesied those graves”.
sugar syrup, blue paper
“Not quite a
harlot, burning with passion;
not quite a
nun, who can pray for forgiveness.”
sugar syrup, blue paper
Orthodox
Russian village women pilgrims.
Michal, Rachel,
all the daughters of Israel.
sugar syrup, blue paper
“They are very
nice when they are courting”.
The face of a
child with divorced parents.
sugar syrup, blue paper
“Hiding her
heart” from her husband,
drinking to
“loneliness spent together”.
sugar syrup, blue paper
“Everyone looks
through a foreign window.
One in
Tashkent, another in New York.”
Poetry.
Maternal figure.
Sugar syrup.
Blue paper.
VIII
I wanted to see
her.
I wanted to be
initiated.
Like a hungry
animal
wanting to push
its muzzle
into the
sticky, blue-sugar secrets
of suffering
and poetry,
to lick the
gritty essence of love
from the palms
of her hand:
such were my
ignorant, urgent demands.
The vibration
of footsteps,
the sense of a
body’s bulk and weight
displacing
space, the mystery
existing, alive
and breathing
above my head,
were maddening.
There was then – my first trip to Russia –
after letting me talk, and spin a rope
of
hopeless platitudes more than
long enough to hang myself,
a
stranger said: “If you ever come back,
then I’ll tell you how really is”.
Glad to join our party – the table already
covered with half-empty bottles and glasses –
he
then revealed he’d last seen his father
in
the witness box at the Doctors’ Plot trial.
Unsure if there would be a next visit,
his
wife murmured, “Murdered”, in my ear.
Remembering
this, I had the childish wish
to take the
misery of the century
compact it to a
small black stone
with the
density of a neutron star –
hundreds of
million tons per cubic inch –
wrap it up in
blue sugar-paper
then cast it
into the core of a black hole
from which
nothing can ever escape
from which the
signals would come
dimmer and
redder and fainter
until they
stopped forever…
IX
What I wanted
would not happen. What
I wanted made
the rest of my visit awkward.
Quite soon,
Galya and I
were saying
goodbye to her parents –
and that
beautiful blue-papered study –
and walking
down the stairs.
The
same stairs, etc. etc.
All
the obvious thoughts.
I stopped to
look up at the grey façade
(a handsome
building, as I recall) and,
thinking I was
very cunning, casually asked,
“Which window
is yours?” Half-reluctant,
half-amused,
she gave the answer I hoped for.
There was a
time,
in the forties,
after the war,
when guards
were posted
in the street
outside her house,
and Anna
Akhmatova
was obliged to
appear,
morning and
evening, at her window,
to confirm that
she had not escaped
or killed
herself.
Thought I stood
for a long time
next day
on the opposite
pavement
and stared at
the window
hoping to see,
behind
the spun-sugar
lace of the curtain,
the pale blur
of a face
which might be
hers,
no one was
there.
NOTES by the
Author, to section VII:
“a veiled
girl…” As in Akhmatova’s poem, The Muse.
“Cassandra” So
Mandelstam had called Anna Akhmatova. In that “persona”, she wrote: “Oh
grief/ my words prophesied those graves”.
“Not quite a
harlot, etc.” From the critical essay about Akhmatova’s work by G.L.Lelevich
(1923).
“Michal,
Rachel, all the daughters…” In the early 1920s, Akhmatova wrote about Old
Testament heroines. She had already used the figure of the Orthodox village
woman as a symbol of Russia, and of staunchness, etc.
“They are very
nice… “, “Hiding her heart”, “loneliness spent together” Quoted from poems
relating to Akhmatova’s relationship with Nikolay Punin.
“child with
divorced parents” Reference to Anna Akhmatova’s son Lyova (Lev Nokolaevich
Gumilev), her only child (by her first husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilev).
“Everyone looks
through a foreign window…” Quoted from Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero
(1940-1962).
Цвет сахарной
бумаги
Поэма. Перевод с английского М. Бородицкой
I
Пытаться объяснить словами цвет -
такое же бесплодное занятье,
как песенку, что в голове засела,
вслух напевать. И все же я пыталась:
"Такой шероховатый, блекло-синий,
цвет сахарной бумаги".
Та бумага
была довольно плотной, чуть шершавой
на ощупь, в мелких крапинках, разводах:
вот из нее-то клеились пакеты
под сахар. Тут я вижу мать и тетку,
со слипшимися пальцами, вдвоем
в семейной лавке бакалейной:
придя из школы, руку с черпаком
в мешок лохматый джутовый по локоть
совали, в отсыревшую сыпучесть,
и лишь наполнив сахарным песком
пакеты, ѕ принимались за уроки.
Возможно, я все это сочинила.
Я комнату пыталась описать
в квартире ленинградской, где была я
в году шестьдесят пятом и где стены
хранили с девятнадцатого века
такую точно краску, ѕ описать
подруге из Нью-Йорка, в девяностых.
II
Это был кабинет в квартире
родителей моей переводчицы,
безупречно воспитанных петербуржцев,
переживших блокаду.
("О, тогда, - усмехнулась дочь, - мы все походили
на рублевских святых из музея:
изможденные, с ввалившимися глазами!")
А теперь мне демонстрировали альбомы и книги,
сбереженные ими в те страшные годы.
Я листала плотные и тоненькие страницы,
представляла себе художников и поэтов,
растворившихся в ГУЛАГе или в Париже, - и понимала,
что прикладываюсь к мощам.
- Это первое издание Мандельштама, -
переводила Галя, - с гравюрами Гончаровой.
Вот, взгляните: Блок, и Белый, и Гумилев.
- Муж Ахматовой, акмеист? (мне так хотелось блеснуть!)
- Да… а это вот книжка Марины
Цветаевой, с циклом стихов,
посвященных Ахматовой. Он называется "Муза".
"Я читала, - скажет Марина потом, -
для одной лишь Ахматовой, словно мы с ней вдвоем
были в комнате. Для отсутствующей - читала".
Не слыхавшая чтения Анна
Ахматова после носила рукопись в сумке,
много лет носила ее с собою, пока
она не распалась, протершись на сгибах.
III
Мне, наверное, было лет двенадцать, когда
в застекленном тетином книжном шкафу,
протирая от пыли его звериные лапы
и гирлянды листьев из красного дерева,
что обвивали бедра
двух женских фигур, выраставших из двух колонн -
обнаженных кариатид, а может, суровых мойр
с неподвижными взорами, двух скульптурных двойняшек
на носу корабля надежды, -
в этом шкафу
(он теперь стоит у меня в квартире, в Лондоне,
предмет обстановки,
чья форма и содержимое, подозреваю,
определили мой вкус навсегда и во всем)
я наткнулась на тонкую книжечку в мягкой обложке,
на чужом языке - даже буквы были чужие.
Я не помню, чтоб тетя Анни хотя бы строку
перевела мне оттуда или хоть объяснила,
как эта странная книжка попала к ней в руки.
Лишь немногое рассказала она о той
женщине, что ее написала, ѕ
я тогда впервые услышала эти два слова:
Анна Ахматова.
Позже я спрашивала себя, какое значенье
имело для тети моей совпаденье имен,
для тети Анни, которая с тех бакалейных,
сахарных дней
считала себя неудавшейся артисткой.
IV
- Вы любите Ахматову? - вопрос,
в те годы полный скрытого значенья.
Их лица, обращенные ко мне,
светились, белые на синем фоне,
как мрамор в сумраке библиотек.
Все трое ждали моего ответа.
- Ну, я по-русски не читаю, но -
есть переводы… - Тут я замолчала.
Мне было стыдно. Галя поглядела
куда-то вверх. - Она сейчас больна,
но держится, и в курсе всех событий,
и вообще - прекрасная соседка.
Соседка? Что за будничное слово!
Как будто шелк тугого парашюта
вогнулся вдруг, оборотившись ямой,
и тут же вздулся вновь под мощным ветром:
так искривились, изменяя смысл,
границы времени и ткань пространства.
- Вот, слышите? - Я подняла глаза,
за Галей, к потолку. - Сегодня ей
получше: встала, ходит по квартире.
- Ахматова? Она живет над вами? -
мой голос, севший вмиг от потрясенья,
скрипел, как половицы наверху.
V
Я задавала вопросы,
не в силах поверить,
снова и снова требовала подтвержденья,
я умоляла помочь мне встретиться с ней:
со знаменитым поэтом,
с очевидицей,
со священным монстром,
с умирающей старой женщиной,
или хотя бы
разрешить мне взглянуть на нее
из-за чужого плеча:
ведь они могли
постучаться в дверь
и дать мне хоть краем глаза,
хоть на миг увидеть
Анну Ахматову...
я перешла
все границы приличий. Но каждый раз
мне в ответ повторяли:
то, о чем я прошу -
невозможно, никак невозможно.
VI
Я копалась в энциклопедиях и словарях,
терпеливо читала
все, что было на слово сахар,
и бумага, и синий цвет.
Но никто и нигде не связал
эти близкие вещи, никто по моим описаньям
не признал этот цвет, который я вижу так ясно:
тусклый глянец хрустящих листов
деше
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