Serhiy Zhadan

This happened some fifteen years ago, if I'm not mistaken.
Right here, you know, on the next street, there's a tall building
where they rent out rooms,
well, several Chinese lived there then and, it turned out, they were
trafficking drugs in their own
stomachs,
like some unseen heavenly caviar, capable of finally destroying this rotten
civilization.

These rooms were mostly rented out by taxi drivers and charlatans,
as well as aeronauts, deprived of their heavenly apparatus, who always
made coffee in the kitchen
and listened to jazz radio stations,
till things would start to glow with a bright light, without casting shadows,
while former rugby players drank beer and smoked camels, as they played cards
and talked about
their damned rugby.

But something went wrong with the Chinese business, much was written
about this later,
you know how it is: one day the split wasn't right - and that was it,
so they had this terrible shoot-out right there in the back yard,
scaring rats into the basement and birds into the heavens.

I look in there, once in a while, I make a little detour on my way home,
I look up at the fire escapes and see the sky in which, if you think about it,
there's nothing but sky,
and you know, sometimes it seems to me that people really die,
because their hearts stop out of love for this
strange-strange fantastic world.
...

You will reply today, touching warm letters,
leafing through them in the dark, confusing vowels with consonants,
like a typewriter in an old Warsaw office.
The heavy honeycombs
glisten with gold from which language is spun.
Don't stop, just write,
type over the empty white space, stamp through the black silent trail.
No one will return from ramblings through the long night,
and forgotten snails will die on wet grass.

Central Europe lies under tissue white snow.
I always believed in the lazy movements of Gypsies,
not everyone has inherited this worn coin.
If you look at their passports,
which smell of mustard and saffron,
if you hear their worn-out accordions,
which reek of leather and Arabic spices -
you'd hear them say that when you leave - no matter where you go -
you only create more distance and will never be any closer than you are now;
when the songs of old gramophones die,
a residue seeps out
like tomatoes
from damaged cans.

The overburdened heart of the epoch bursts every morning,
but not behind these doors, not in cities burnt by the sun.
Time passes, but it passes so near that if you
look closely, you can see its heavy warp,
and you whisper overheard sentences
and want someone someday to recognize your voice and say -
this is how the era began,
this is how it turned - awkward, heavy like a munitions truck,
leaving behind dead planets and burnt-out transmitters,
scattering wild ducks in the pond,
that fly off and call louder
than the truckers,
god,
barges.

When choosing your course of studies you should find out
among other things -
if the culture at the turn of this century
has already pressed itself into the veins of your slow arm,
rooted itself in the whorls of your thick hair,
carelessly blown by the wind,
and tousled by fingers
like streams of warm water in a basin,
like colored clay beads over cups and ashtrays,
like a vast autumn sky
over a cornfield.
...

Falling asleep, she remembered the river -
somewhere in the caverns of sleep, where she started to forget his face,
the freezing river glistened bronze from its center,
although snow covered its current;
later old post-war locomotives crawled out of the mist
and workers came out in their blue denim overalls.

We wound up on opposite sides of winter,
and the announcer's voice, caught in a random taxi
reminds you
of the eighties when the radio
was full of Polish rock:
rock'n'roll - mechanics in train depots listened to it
rock'n'roll flew over the Carpathian Mountains,
leaking into the air somewhere near Rava-Ruska;
our country is not big enough for us to miss each other,
our air space is not vast enough
for us to listen to different kinds of music.

I think that if a direct link to God existed
it would be through the help of
warm brown covers
containing Polish rock records
with narrow grooves cut by god's nails
on their black fields;
you can see his vinyl skin,
you can feel his strawberry blood,
washing off the dust and
wiping the cuts
with a sponge soaked in vinegar.

Birds frightened by the wind
calm down and assume their places
in the spaces between her heartbeats,
without knowing what she sees in her sleep,
or who she is forgetting in the middle of the dry river bottom;
her life's baggage - beauty marks on her skin and
tram tickets in her jacket pockets;
as winter rolls from one hill onto the next
and the hot weather comes,
when so many things grow from the earth,
that the air has to rise up a little higher,
to avoid touching the long tall stems
that grow out of nowhere and stretch towards nowhere
just beneath her window.
...

She's fifteen, sells flowers at the train station.
Sun and berries sweeten the oxygen beyond the mines.
Trains stop for a moment, move further on.
Soldiers go to the East, soldiers go to the West.

Nobody stays in her city.
Nobody wants to take her with them.
She thinks, standing in the morning at her spot,
even this territory, it turns out, may be desirable, dear.

It turns out, you don't want to leave it for a long time,
in fact, you want to hold on to it for dear life,
it turns out, this old train station and an empty
summer panorama are enough for love.

Nobody gives her a good reason for this.
Nobody brings flowers to her older brother's grave.
In a dream, you hear that motherland forms in darkness,
like the spine of a teenager living in a boarding house.

Light and darkness are formed, take shape together.
Summer sun flows into winter.
Everything that happens today, to everyone, is called time.
The main thing is understanding that all this happens to them.

Her memory is being formed, consolation formed.
Everyone she knows was born in this city.
At night she recalls everyone who left this place.
When there is no one left to remember, she falls asleep.
...

To know that you still lie there beyond the scorched mountain,
even now easily reached by the road, zigzagged, old, the city
where I grew up, a life that seemed to be a game.

But who will let me reach your limits now?
Who will watch me from your windows?
What joy is there in returning to the city of the dead, what's the point?

Betrayed by you, cast out past your outskirts,
cut off from your tenements and boulevards.
Your people wear their holiday clothes,
the ground shudders from strikes.

But you still don't see the great shadow
that will cover your streets and squares,
and I stand beyond the scorched mountain, under the rays of the sun,
and I lament you, my city—hateful, dearest.

Maybe I'm not the only one who laments, maybe.

I don't have a home anymore, I have only a memory.
But when they fire from your blocks, damn it, how they shoot.
How well they sleep now, in my house,
in the city where all names are familiar, all addresses known.

When you, god, look into a mirror,
what do you see in your image?
Woe unto you, the city forgotten by all.

Woe unto your women who give birth in a time of pogrom.
The city of betrayal, the city of sorrow, the city of poison.
Woe unto all who won't come back to their homes.

Silent evenings in July.
Golden stars among the dense leaves.
To know that black rain will flood your backyard.
To know that it won't pass over anyone.
...

Dance, carpenter, until the sun stands
above the largest bridge god created.
Dance, Homer already described everything.
The city was up all night like a love-struck teenager;
a stranger steps onto the bridge.
Vendors carry red roosters in black bags to slaughter.
Do you remember the words from that song,
carpenter, flowing from a morning window?
Do you remember how you ran away from school,
how you walked down a sandy bank?
She's the only one who loves you, carpenter,
in the whole world, the only one.
At night, her street smells like bread and garlic, like a mother's heart.
Dance in the middle of this world
that spins tirelessly and aimlessly.
A boy leaves his parents' home
like a morning sun escaping darkness.
Everyone, carpenter, has a mark, the mark of love and solitude.
When your son is born, he'll explain why.
And long nights of tenderness, when you called her by name,
called as if you're inventing a language for the deaf.
Now you sing this song like it's only yours,
that it was you who found her in one of your books.
And dancing takes away your breath and you're sweating.
And the smell of seawater weaves through the air like a stream of blood.
And the whole world may fit on this square on a Saturday morning.
And when your son is born—you'll bring him here too.
Dance, carpenter, vendors shout, dance, the butchers get excited.
Someone's weaving this world like a basket from green vine.
You remember the song all dictionaries started from.
She's the only one who loves you, whoever your son may be.
Everything we know how to do, everything we know, everything we love.
everything you're afraid of, carpenter, everything you wanted.
The sun beats its wings like a beheaded rooster,
it welcomes this strange world, the fairest of all worlds.
...