Green Aquarium (1953–1974)
Drawing by the poet.
Green Aquarium
I
"Your teeth are bars of bone. Behind them, in a crystal cell, your chained words. Remember the advice of your elder: the guilty ones, words that dropped poisoned pearls in your goblet — let them go free. Grateful for your mercy, they will immortalize you. But the innocent ones who will trill falsely like nightingales over your grave — don't spare them. Hang them! For, as soon as you let them out of your mouth or your pen, they turn into demons. May the stars fall out of the sky if I'm not telling the truth!"
This was the legacy left me many years ago, in my living hometown, by an old bachelor, a cracked poet with a long braid hanging down his back like a young birch twig. Nobody knew his name or where he came from. I knew only that he composed rhymed missives to God in Aramaic Targum language, deposited them in the red mailbox on the green bridge, and strolled, contemplative and patient, on the banks of the River Viliya, waiting for the postman from heaven to deliver an answer.
II
"Walk through words as through a minefield: one false step, one false move and all the words you strung in a lifetime on your veins will be blown apart with you."
This my own shadow whispered to me when both of us, blinded by searchlight windmills, plodded at night through a bloody minefield and every step I took for life or death screeched on my heart like a nail on a violin.
III
But nobody warned me to beware of words groggy from otherworldly poppies. I became their slave. And I cannot understand what they want. Or whether they love me or hate me. They make wars in my brain like termites in a desert. Their battlefield reflects in my eyes like the glow of rubies. And children turn gray with fear when I tell them: "Good-dreams …"
The other day, out of the blue, as I lay in the garden and, above me — a branch of oranges or children blowing golden bubbles — I felt my soul move. Oho, my words are getting ready for a journey … Having won a victory over one person, they apparently decided to conquer fortresses so far impervious to words. Victory over men, over angels, why not over stars? Drunk on otherworldly poppies, their fantasy soars.
Trumpets blare.
Torches like burning birds.
Accompanied by lines. Frames of music.
To such a word, wearing a crown glimmering with my tears, riding in front, the leader perhaps — to such a word, I fell on my knees.
"That's how you leave me, with no 'good-bye,' no 'see-you-soon,' no nothing? For years we wandered together, you gnawed at my time; now, before we part, before you conquer worlds — one request! But promise you won't refuse …"
"OK. I give you my word. But make it short. Because the sun is bending over the blue branch and, in a moment, it will fall into the abyss."
"I want to see the dead!"
"What a request … Well, I've got to keep my word…See! "
A green knife split the earth.
And it was green.
Green.
Green.
The green of dark fir trees through a mist;
The green of a cloud with a burst gall bladder;
The green of mossy stones in a rain;
The green revealed through a hoop, rolled by a seven-year-old;
The green of cabbage leaves in splinters of dew, that can bloody your fingers;
The fresh green under melting snow; in a ring around a blue flower;
The green of the crescent moon seen by green eyes under a wave;
And the solemn green of grass making seams on a grave.
Green streaming into green. Body into body. The earth transformed into a green aquarium.
Closer, closer, to the green eddy.
I look inside: Humans swim around like fish. Myriads of phosphorous faces. Young. Old. And young-old in one. Those I saw throughout my life, death has crowned them. with a green existence; all swimming about in the green aquarium, in a silky, airy music.
Here, the dead live!
Beneath them, rivers, forests, cities — one enormous, palpable map; above, the sun swims in the guise of a man of fire.
I recognize acquaintances, friends, neighbors, I tip my straw hat to them.
"Good morning."
They reply with green smiles like a well answering a stone with broken rings.
My eyes strike with silver oars, rush, swimming among all the faces. My eyes roam, searching for one face.
Found, found! Here's the dream of my dream — —
"It's me, my dear, me, me. The creases are just nests of longing."
My lips inundated with blood are drawn to hers. Alas, they remain on the pane of the aquarium.
Her lips too swim to mine. I feel the breath of burning punch.
The glass is a cold knife between us.
"I want to read you a poem about you … You must listen!"
"My dear, I know the words by heart, I gave you the words myself."
"Then I want to feel your body one more time!"
"We can't get any closer, the glass, the glass …"
"No, the boundary will soon disappear, I'll smash the green glass with my head — —"
After the twelfth bang, the aquarium shattered.
Where are the lips, where is the voice?
And the dead, the dead — did they die?
No one. In my face — grass. And above — a branch of oranges or children blowing golden bubbles.
The Woman in the Panama Hat
One day, in the Age of Slaughter, I sat in a dark nook and wrote. As if the Angel of Poetry told me: "Your choice is in your own hand. If your song inspires me, I will protect you with a fiery sword. If not — don't complain … My conscience will remain clean."
In the little room, I felt like the clapper of a bell. A movement, a tremor, and the bell starts ringing.
In the silence, words hatched.
Then, knuckles rapping on the door.
The silence ran off over the floor like quicksilver out of a broken thermometer.
"Danger, a friend is warning me." I pulled the bolt.
A woman appears. At first glance — a beggar. Nothing unusual. In the pause between life and death, when hunger reigns in all its skeleton glory, hosts of beggars swell like a swarm of locusts. But this beggar surprised me with her clothes: a straw summer hat, a kind of panama hat, trimmed with dried wild strawberries; a long old-fashioned crinoline — a rainbow of rags; at her side, a bag; on her neck hung a thin jade necklace with an ivory lorgnette; and the points of her polished shoes — two shining crows with blood-red beaks, gaping open.
I didn't ask anything, just offered her a piece of bread with moldy crusts.
She advances a step, takes the bread, puts it on the table and then — cackling like a cookoo, she says:
"If I'm not mistaken, you are the person I'm looking for; so I won't take this bread."
"Sit down, auntie, you'll feel better. The bread? Yes, indeed, mold. But, on my word of honor, I don't have any other bread. We shall live to eat challah again."
I indicate to the woman the only stool and I myself sit on the table facing her.
"Oh, that's not what I mean, believe me." She lifts her crinoline so as not to wrinkle it, like a dancer, and sits down on the stool.
"Might I ask about a small matter?"
"A small thing is a small thing, auntie. You don't have to wear gloves with me."
"There are sheets of paper there. The ink is still fresh on them. Who wrote them?"
"Me …"
"Are you a writer?"
"Yes, a writer."
Not only from the corners of her eyes but from all her wrinkles did tears drip. A rosy smiling freshness, like a mist after a spring rain, bloomed from her soul.
"That's good. Now let me pour out my heart. For these few minutes, the Almighty will repay you with years."
She pulls out of her sleeve a pink handkerchief with a silver border and wipes her lips. From the handkerchief comes the dying trace of an old perfume. And she tells:
"My name is Felicia Poznanski. The writer I. Y. Singer has immortalized me in a novel. Once I looked different. But that's not important."
Out of the other sleeve, she pulls another handkerchief in a medley of peacock colors, with another perfume, wipes away the moisture under her eyes, and goes on:
"As for Felicia — let's say it's another person, not the beggar sitting here in front of you — she was once a rich woman. That is, her husband, Ignatz, was a millionaire. Nine factories, hundreds of spinning machines. In one of his palaces lived the president of the city. In addition, he was Honorary Consul of Portugal — —"
The sunset lit up her wrinkles with the green light of glowworms. She became thinner, more shriveled, looked like the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess.
"Nobody liked Ignatz, not even his own family. He was considered a misanthrope. Well, maybe he was. We mustn't judge too easily. There was a reason for his hatred of men. As a child, his nose had been broken like a clay pot and the greatest professors in the world couldn't put it together again. He had to wear a false nose, a rubber one. Because of that, his voice lost its virility and he spoke so thinly, too thinly, like a newborn kitten."
But Felicia loved him. Not for his wealth or for his manners. She loved him for his writing. He was writing a poem about Job in Polish … At night, in his study, he would take off his rubber nose so he could breathe more freely and would write until daybreak. And Felicia was the happiest woman in the world. No, this wasn't Poznanski the industrialist, this was Heine,
Byron! Byron lacked a piece of foot — but wasn't he the greatest poet of his century? Just like Poznanski, who lacked a piece of nose…
The sunset heats up the copper bell of my garret. The tears of a hidden child wander to his creator. And the woman in the straw panama hat goes on:
"On the first day of the war, the wheel of fortune turned. Splinters of a bomb struck Ignatz in the head. Before he passed away, he made me swear: Felicia, my dear, take care to save my work, my whole life is in it. My world here and my world to come…"
With a little valise in hand, Felicia fled the city. Inside — the poem about Job, a packet of diamonds, and the costume she wore to the masked ball where she had met her husband. When she tried to sneak across the Lithuanian border[76] by the river, her boat capsized and the valise sank in the water. Miraculously, Felicia swam to the bank and told the ferryman about her diamonds. He dived in a few times and fished out the valise. He was an honest peasant and they divided it as agreed: he took the diamonds and she took her husband's share of eternity, his work, and the costume she had worn to the masked ball…You can see it, Felicia is wearing it now … She wants to wear it to the masked ball of death.
The woman in the panama hat suddenly stands up and curtsies, as once upon a time in that celestial masked ball. But what happens? She can't get up again. Her face grows dark, changes color like paper as it burns, and, on the brim of her panama hat, the strawberries are bleeding.
"No need for water, no need. A twinge of the heart, nothing. Where were we? Oh, yes, I'll make it short —"
Standing, she examines me with her lorgnette and her voice takes on another tone, as if one of her veins had burst:
"Now I am a beggar. Almost a year now. For a while, I taught Portuguese to two girls and, for each lesson, I got two potatoes. But since the girls disappeared, I don't have anybody to teach Portuguese to. I go begging from house to house. Not just for a piece of bread. I wanted to find someone like you, a writer, and give him the masterpiece of my dear husband. For I, dear sir, don't have much longer. I'm going to Join the two girls … Give me your
hand that you will keep the poem about Job just like your own papers and after the war — you understand, don't you? Give me your hand! …"
As her bony right hand with the delicate pianist's fingers was closed in mine, her left hand pulled a pocketsize notebook out of her sack and put it on the table, next to the moldy bread.
When the woman was gone — the bell started ringing. It could no longer bear the silence. The silence of old people snatched up in the street.
Children's Hands
The single pane of glass in a cellar, covered with frost. On the pine forest of the window pane, the print of two children's hands, open as if in a priest's blessing. Through the forest and the handprints, the sun falls into the cellar like a corpse into a tomb.
The walls are lined with downy snow and glimmer like a salt mine.
On the ground, in a corner — the scattered rags of a pallet and, among them, like gold teeth, gleam scraps of hidden straw.
On the rags, a thick Korbn Minkhe, a woman's prayerbook, covered with candle drippings, printed by the Rom Widow and Brothers …
Next to it, in a pot of sand — a stiffened wax candle like a bird piercing its own heart with a dead beak.
And in the middle of the cellar, between the children's handprint on the window and the Korbn Minkhe on the rags of the pallet — a bronze horse' s head with a silver spot like a stab wound on the brow and cold, eternal eyes of black marble.
And the children's handprints on the window pane speak:
Dear head, forgive us. It is not we who cut you off your living neck. When the last ones, the very last ones crumbled into ashes — we found you in a butcher shop and dragged you, slowly, hidden under a stranger's long coat, to the cellar. With you — we wanted to feed an old woman. Lonely like you now, the old woman was lying here in the corner. At her head — a burning candle. But all of a sudden — dogs. Dogs. Dogs. They attack the old woman,
attack your frozen flesh. Attack the boy we belong to … Oh, how we wanted to help him … We ran to the window pane, to the snowy forest, and where are we, where are we? …
While the children's handprints on the window pane speak — the icicles melt on the bronze head. His skin starts glowing, becomes alive. His left ear drops like a lock of hair. And tears appear in the black marble eyes.
Lady Job
From pulverized clay nests, from the grids of cellar apertures and broken doors, burning pages of Holy Books rise to the sunset — children with outstretched hands as if the sun had given birth to them in the Synagogue Yard[77] and now they fly back to their mother.
When the sun hides her children behind a cloud, they leave black tears — burned-out soot — on the gallery of the synagogue.
The two-storied gallery, rising to a pyramid over the rickety ruins of narrow streets and alleys, is not the same as before.
The gallery has metamorphosed into an eagle on top of another eagle!
The eagle on top, with the head of an animal and a blue breast between purple wings, like a brook amid rosebushes, plants his four claws of bronze into the eagle below.
And the eagle below, with the head of an angel, a gleaming serpent around his neck, and his wings — two rocks facing each other over an abyss — bows over the synagogue. His ten claws — columns carved of salt — falter under the heavy wings.
Above, between the bronze feet of the eagle on top, leaning on his blue breast, I see a hidden little man.
"Little man, who are you?"
"I am the painter Yankel Sher, the painter of the narrow streets …"
In his green velvet vest, he stands in front of a canvas. It was a vest he once got in Paris. In our town, it was unique. People used to stop in the street, admiring its beauty. He fastened it at the neck with a big copper clip. Its folds shimmered like a peacock's feathers. It had ten different pockets stuffed with brushes, pencils, and notebooks.
Now the vest hangs on him, puffed out, covered with mold, not a garment for a man but for a hen. And the brush he holds in his teeth looks like a ritual slaughter knife.
The squinting, watery eyes bulge out over his nose and two twin tears enclose it.
The painter looks at the twisted narrow streets, then looks at the canvas and doesn't believe his eyes. Ever since he hid in this gallery, today is the first time he has seen how his world had changed.
What wind blew him up a church opposite? And how did the medieval city hall get here where the butcher shop was?
Who lit the lights in the dead Synagogue Yard?
Why, dear God, does the Gaon's Prayerhouse[78] deserve stoning? And why was the tree over the gate condemned to fire?
Only the sewers haven't changed.
They too! Shimmering with blood …
Yankel Sher wants to smear the canvas with paint. Where is the truth — inside him or outside?
Maybe it was his palette that was guilty?
He once saw a violin in the hands of a virtuoso. Right in the middle of the concert — alas, the sound was gone. The audience was bewildered. The violinist turned pale as the rosin on the strings. But soon, he bent his ear and said: Honored audience, this violin has just given up the ghost. I beg you to stand up and pay him a final homage.
He brings his ear to the palette. It lives, it lives.
Bunches of soot of the burning pages of Holy Books fall on his hair, fall on the canvas.
Now he pulls the brush out of his mouth. The brush, with the hunger of an artist, devours colors. The spots of snow vanish from the canvas. From the young, fresh, springtime earth, an old woman emerges.
That's just how she looked, the eighty-year-old woman. Now she lives again, lives again! A black Sabbath dress with little crystal buttons. Her hair white, dazzling white, like frozen milk. Her face — a ball of silver creases where springtime rivulets shimmer. Plop, plop. In the rivulets, the sun dances. Casts little beams in cold bayonets. And the old woman, just a bit bent, carries a blond girl on her shoulders — —
Behind the old woman — faces. Faces. A chimney with a slaughtered neck.
On one knee, a window bends in the air. And the gate over the narrow street, where the old woman makes her way, has a black slit.
Yankel Sher recoils a step. Yes, that's just how she looked, the eighty-year-old woman. It just lacks … Oh, what is missing?
His watery eyes bulge even more. Spill over onto the palette. A damp flush covers his face.
The old woman walked … with a tefillin box on her forehead … she picked up the tefillin box from the ground, from the sewer …
"Yankel, you're a painter, paint the tefillin box!"
He dips his brush in the fallen tears, in a spurt of red; and the old woman, with the blond girl on her shoulders, now passes under the split gate, between bayonets, with a little box on her brow, where God lives.
"Lady Job, that's what the picture will be titled …"
A shudder came over the gallery. Both eagles rose. Two pairs of stormy wings. Along with the painter Yankel Sher, along with Lady Job, along with the kneeling window, along with the whole alley — the eagles vanish in a lightning cloud.
The Last of the Blind
Her eyes did not dwell in flesh like everybody else's. They lived inside, in a separate face — two small magnetic needles.
The needles attracted flowering branches, sun and shade, colors like throbbing veins, faces and, most important, the face of her blind lover.
The two of them met like two nights and their stone blindness gushed out sparks.
And when he, with a face like a windowpane in the rain, clambers over the walls at night, so the moon would throw him a silver herring, he plays on the long flute he inherited, plays a melancholy tune, a kind of funeral march for a bird; and she, in her garret, sees her lover in a mirror of his tones.
Once, he didn't come back. A deaf veil darkened the mirror. And she — as if another blindness had seized the blind woman!
She gropes for his shadow. The pompadour of his shadow. The magnetic needles do not attract him anymore…
Someone stuck a knife in a corpse!
Her fingers — ten droning bees — dance around the hollow garret, where the air is consumed like white ash.
"Come, sister!"
Her little sister who can see, half naked, a book under her arm, two little braids like open scissors, looms up out of a glimmering corner, with a lantern in her hand.
"Teach me to dance, I have never danced, never, never in my life."
The lantern — a one-eyed owl — remains hanging on a beam. Underneath, in the light of that bloody eye, the two sisters dance. Accompanied by the vanished flute, the bird funeral march…
"Thank you, my dear. Now leave me alone. I want to see if God is blind."
A shudder went through the garret, like a nest at the touch of a saw.
The blind girl slowly approached the lamp, her buzzing fingers unwound the cylinder, moistened her braids, her dress with kerosene, and the owl-eye cast a jet of fire.
Over streets — caverns of ghosts — sun. Sun. Sun.
Sun in bandaged windowpanes. Sun in faces. Sun in corpses who haven't found death …
Men, sundered into two separate profiles, become skeletons again in the rosy glow of her dance.
And she herself, the blind girl, all of her in her fiery eyes, inflames the streets with her dance, inflames the city, inflames the clouds:
"If you are blind, my God, take away my fire! …"
Honey of a Wild Bee
This is how the night will remain forever: An old maid sitting till her braid turns gray.
The moon, who left all her dear ones on earth and can see no one, prays a confession on her marble deathbed for the only creature left in the city, the
gravedigger Leyme[79] huddling down below, on Rudnicka Street, in a heap of sighing leaves.
Leyme, a gravedigger ever since he can remember his own face, who sowed half the graveyard with the sons of man, will bury no one anymore.
Children, old people, all those born here, all entered the kingdom of the stars. At first — they became flaming branches. Bony winds, in tatters of shirts with Magen-Dovids, have scattered their sparks in a bloody crown over the skull of the earth.
They shamed his graveyard.
Shamed the tombstones.
So they sink with downcast heads, like offended in-laws when the bride disappeared from the Chupa.
Shamed is Leyme.
"Spade, where are you, I must bury the moon …"
Now he sees the moon with his glass eye. On the other eye hangs a padlock. The silver key is no longer in This World.
Once, half a century ago, a wild bee stung out his left eye.
The story of the wild bee is written in a chronicle:
One nice summer day, when Leyme lowered a corpse into a grave, the dead man's soul, disguised as a wild bee, flew with him into the grave. It had to whisper a secret into his ear before they parted forever.
Leyme, a simple man, did not understand the machinations of ghosts. He didn't like any of this hanky-panky and he swatted the bee with his clay-caked shovel.
The bee uttered a childish cry. Its polished, sunny face assumed the countenance of the dead man. A minute later, a screech was heard. Leyme grabbed his left eye where the wild bee entered as into a beehive; and the eye soon ran out in a red, buzzing wax under the gravedigger's hairy paw.
The whole city was up in arms about it. His gravedigging was menaced. They wouldn't let him near a distinguished corpse. But Leyme didn't give in and the "arms" subsided: Dr. Tsirulnik put a glass eye in his socket, an eye as blue and almost as big as a hen's bellybutton. And along with the clods of earth on the Zaretshe Cemetery, Leyme buried the story of the bee.
Winds, coupling like cats, meow at his head.
No savior. The dead are far away. No one to bring him a cup of water …
"Hey, spade, where are you? I must bury the moon!"
But his spade, his graveyard wife, is out of reach.
Hush. His spade is wandering above him. Wandering alone among hanging sparks. His spade is digging the ringing eternity.
Leyme stretches out a long hand to the moon, puts a star to her nostrils. The silver feather does not flutter…
Then — I saw it with my own eyes — the wild bee flew out of his glass eye and stung into my heart her last fiery honey.
1953–1954