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My first love First time I fell in love I was six. That was September 1, and white flocks of girls went to school, and I could not take my eyes off her. She was about twenty-five, a young doctor, just somebody my grandmother met in a town park when we were on vacation. They sat on a bench and talked, I guess, about her plans to marry, about a new job. It wasn’t so bad, that southern town in the mountains: mineral waters, mud baths, trails, a sort of resort, a lot of flowers. She was blond, a soft smile and green attentive eyes, but unable to recognize me. I was just another little boy to her playing in the park. I whispered in my grandmother’s ear: I love her! She laughed and told the young woman: He says he loves you, silly boy. The woman leaned and kissed me lightly. That was not far from the site of Lermontov’s duel, where he was lying still alive all night in the deep ravine. There was a terrible storm that night, the books claim. Lermontov fell in love for the first time, when he was four. Now there is a Russian Army base in town: trains, bringing more troops, refueling stations, personnel carriers, hangars, oil, gas, heaps of the surplus dead equipment on the roadside, teenagers in fatigues sitting on tanks, smoking Marlboros, growing roar of the MIG fighters, taking off for the next sortie and heading East over the snow-covered plains, framed by the mountains. I haven’t seen her since, and I’ve never known what happened in her life. I would not want to know. For my father After you've been gone, I've been flying alone back and forth above the waters and the continents. Both of us: me here and you there know too well that this is a waste of time and space. I may be flying, looking for you for the rest of my life or death, and still never see you. Nothing can be undone, and I can't take it. Nor I can take the fact that every time I see my close ones, I know, it may be the last time I see them. Don't worry about me. While I fly, an angel in uniform attends me, gives me some water and bread, and smiles to me. She takes care of me until it's time to get out, get in line for the luggage and then to disappear into crowd which lives on the exhaust, cyclic persistence and canned expectations. The latter is something I live on myself, expectation melting slowly into waiting as I keep on flying in the space given for the time being. Motel All cheap motels possess that terrible smell of dispossession, dislodgement, airless sleep, and plastic crucifixion, an owlish, shapeless face behind the double-glass window, the smell of life unlived, of old rugs and dusty sorrow. What can be dimmer than the night of dreams that followed the thick, tenacious odor of the sleepy hollow. You leave behind this street and a frozen meadow, the only blinking light. You leave behind a vacant cube of the borrowed, of the sealed, stale, and silent space, where one stays overnight, where time is seized, the pool is dry and cracked, the phone is dead, TV black and white, the corner pizza place closed last winter and the street sign says: Do Not Enter. |
| © Copyright Andrey Gritsman |
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