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The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

Page 4

by Guy Davenport


  We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory

  A city, not Paris. NOTCH, an old woman in a chair made from a barrel, beside a tall porcelain stove, a basket of potatoes in her lap. Kerchief, shawl, ample skirts, boots. POLDEN, a young soldier with lots of brown curly hair, Mongol cheekbones, green uniform with scarlet shoulder tabs.

  NOTCH

  There was once an Englishman named Vernon.

  He was hunting hyenas near Carthage.

  This was back in the nineteenth century.

  He stumbled and fell into an abyss.

  He was surprised, however, going down,

  That it seemed indeed to have no bottom

  And when one came, it was as if he’d dropped

  Down into a great goosefeather mattress.

  What’s more, he was coming back up again,

  Rising on a steady and busy heave

  Which by degrees brought him to the pit’s edge

  And rolled him out onto terra firma.

  He had fallen into a mass of bats

  Which, disturbed from their slumber, had risen

  All together out of the deep abyss

  And brought the English hunter up with them.

  POLDEN

  Is that true?

  NOTCH

  Every beautiful word.

  My husband Osip read it in a book.

  He was a poet. They took him away.

  I have all of his poems off by heart.

  POLDEN

  Are they published in a book?

  NOTCH

  No, never.

  One of them is about the Old Cockroach

  Seeing his face in the shine of his boots.

  POLDEN

  Did he write a poem about Lenin

  Taking a walk in his automobile?

  NOTCH

  The square. Barracks of the Guard to the north.

  Flagpole with flag. Blue sentries pacing there,

  Scarlet facings with the odd number nine

  In gold threadwork on their tunic collars.

  They pace, cold, along the top of the wall,

  Pace from the turrets to the tower gate

  Where they meet, and about-face with a stomp,

  And then tread back to the turrets again.

  Below, along the blank wall, another

  Pair of cold guards make the same cold movements.

  POLDEN

  The square, west. Friedrich Engels Institute.

  Iron doors. Allegory of Labor.

  Classical columns. Red bunting banners

  Across the front on anniversaries.

  Sometimes, a delegation with roses

  From the People’s Republic of China.

  The committee from Shqiperija

  No longer visits, nor its football team.

  The windows are lit at night twice a year

  And then you can hear Rimsky-Korsakov.

  NOTCH

  But not Stravinsky or Francis Poulenc.

  The square, south. The Ministry of Culture.

  Bicyclists from Czechoslovakia.

  Paintings by Aleksandr Deineka.

  Sevastopol Dynamo Aquasports

  Workers’ Summer Vacation Swimming Pool.

  And Lenin Taking a Walk in His Car.

  POLDEN

  Peasant embroidery from Hungary.

  Lenin teaching history to children.

  NOTCH

  The square, east. Ministry of Peace. The Dom.

  Though it is understood that modern men

  Do not light candles in Sankt Pavl’s Dom,

  They still wear garlic against the Devil

  And say nine novenas under their breath

  When they have heard an owl hoot at night

  Or by evil luck a bootlace has snapped

  Or the mirror has fallen from the wall.

  Women and children slip into the Dom

  Before they have to go and wait in lines.

  POLDEN

  Old women do talk.

  NOTCH

  Puppies make doodoo.

  Another tale, already. Herr Schriftbild,

  A publisher, as soon as he had found

  The apartment building specified in

  Robert Walser a Swiss writer’s letter,

  In a court off a square, both with children

  And dogs, also found Walser’s door inside,

  And, drawing the pull, heard a bell jangle

  On a bouncing coil of wire deep within.

  An interval, and the door was opened

  By a butler in a swallowtail coat.

  POLDEN

  Capitalism.

  NOTCH

  With large liquid eyes,

  Military moustache, hair brushed back

  With such parallel regularity

  That you suspected a pigtail in back.

  POLDEN

  Imperialism, English navy.

  NOTCH

  Was this, Herr Schriftbild asked, the apartment

  Where Herr Robert Walser the writer lived?

  Exactly, Sir, said the butler, taking

  Herr Schriftbild’s card.

  POLDEN

  Decadent plutocrats.

  NOTCH

  If the Herr Schriftbild would wait a moment,

  Herr Walser would be told of his presence,

  Which, in very fact, he was expecting.

  POLDEN

  What a prick.

  NOTCH

  Herr Schriftbild sat. He took in,

  By way of passing the time, the carpet,

  Old furniture, strange pictures on the walls,

  Probably German, certainly modern,

  Some meadow flowers in a blue pitcher,

  A paper parrot on a bamboo perch,

  A chromolithograph of Palmyra,

  A plaster bust of Gottfried von Leibniz,

  One of whose eyes had been outlined in red.

  A blank brick wall, the view from the window.

  Clearly, he thought, it pleases this Walser

  To let visitors cool their heels awhile.

  Perhaps he was ending a paragraph,

  Seeing another visitor, female,

  Down the back stairs? Then again, you never

  Knew what these writers might not be doing.

  Paring their toenails, sitting in a trance,

  Reading right through the French dictionary.

  And this one, now, could afford a butler.

  POLDEN

  A pampered bourgeois.

  NOTCH

  The carpet had lived

  At many addresses before this one,

  The chairs had ridden through the streets in carts

  Pulled by elderly horses. Herr Schriftbild

  Avoided the paper parrot’s yellow

  And Leibniz’s red eye and gazed instead

  At the flyspecked ruins of Palmyra,

  And was wondering if that city is

  In the Bible or profane history

  When the door through which the butler had gone

  Opened just enough to admit a man

  In rumpled corduroy and blue flannel

  Shirt as fancied by British Socialists.

  Large liquid eyes, military moustache.

  If his bohemian hair were brushed back

  With a parallel regularity,

  You would suspect a pigtail tied behind.

  POLDEN

  Imperialism, English navy.

  NOTCH

  God help us, Herr Schriftbild said to himself,

  This is the butler wanting me to think

  He’s Walser, who has some frump on his lap,

  Or is reading the French dictionary.

  The voice, however, greeting Schriftbild

  With a familiar and bright nonchalance,

  Was wholly different from the butler’s.

  You would suspect a pigtail tied behind.

  POLDEN

  Karl Marx brooding with folded arms, his head

 
Massive in bronze, Lenin raising his fist,

  Exhorting the people.

  NOTCH

  Walser, you see,

  Was his own butler. He could do voices.

  A poet. After a while, he gave up

  And lived in a lunatic asylum.

  Our poets all went into prisons.

  POLDEN

  His own butler?

  NOTCH

  The world was like that, then.

  Variety. Versatility. O!

  The century before ours, the nineteenth,

  It was a kind of earthly paradise.

  Avenues of lindens and of poplars.

  Men, women, and children, horses and dogs.

  And now it’s only old women sweeping.

  News of tomatoes at a market

  Over near Tramstop 6 on the Prospekt.

  As soon, ha! believe the clowns at the Cyrk.

  They would be gone, anyway, when you came.

  POLDEN

  In America gangs roam the cities,

  Taking the workers’ money at knife point.

  The rich, without conscience or character,

  Are addicted to narcotics and die

  Drunk in hideous automobile wrecks.

  Imagine fifty thousand wrecks a year.

  The sole policy of the government

  Is to suppress freedom and to finance

  Fascism all over the world.

  NOTCH

  Heigh ho.

  POLDEN

  At Sankt Boris some poets and workers

  Staged a protest last Tuesday in the street.

  They had a 1917 banner

  And some modern paintings done on cardboard.

  The Ideal of Life they called one of them

  And What Does It All Mean? was the other.

  Very ugly, the paintings. Daubs, in fact.

  One of the poets was wearing blue jeans

  Made in Pinsk, hammer-and-sickle label.

  They did not fit and did not have the look

  Of Western jeans, and the blue was purple.

  The poet shouted a pukey poem

  Before the Guard came and took them away.

  NOTCH

  The Old Cockroach.

  POLDEN

  And the gypsies are back.

  They have made a camp where the synagogue

  Used to be. With beautiful white horses.

  Why was he his own butler?

  NOTCH

  For the joke.

  People used to do such things. It was fun.

  POLDEN

  Silver thunder. That was in the poem.

  NOTCH

  A bust of Pomona, and a cabbage.

  A copy of The Red Dawn beside her.

  The goods train, when it passed, rattled the cups

  And made Pomona shake. The window shook.

  And a shiver of light opened her eyes.

  That was long ago. In old poetry

  She is the spirit of apples and pears,

  A tall woman dressed in flowers and leaves.

  The clock on the tower no longer works.

  Still, it is a fragment of Italy

  Here in the gray, in the sameness, the drab.

  POLDEN

  You live in the past.

  NOTCH

  I live in my mind.

  POLDEN

  Her mind.

  NOTCH

  Where dreams appear in old colors.

  Come, shadow, come, and take this shadow up,

  Scarlet in the shadow of an orange.

  Words.

  This oak, this owl, this moon.

  There is a

  Death in this wind the owl cannot find.

  Death in the thistle, white loaf of the moon,

  Death in snow, the cricket and wildflowers.

  You do not know, Polden Wolf Eyes, what things

  There used to be. The thousand-branched oak tree,

  With a thousand leaves a branch, red red leaves,

  The red oak of Velimir Khlebnikov.

  That was red.

  Now there are no more cities,

  Only distances of stone. Verona

  Was yellow, Venice was red. And we had

  Urbs et fanum, city and cathedral,

  Gorod i khram, and bell sound in the air.

  Being’s the gift. It’s difficult to be.

  POLDEN

  But I am, and you are. What is so hard?

  NOTCH

  The stitch of things. He had a mind that was

  Part centaur and part streets of Megara.

  That was a lecture I once heard in school,

  About Theognis, ancient Greek poet.

  Silver-rooted waters of Tartessos!

  You wouldn’t know. He wrote of oiled athletes,

  Laws of property, and of irony

  And rhythm in behavior, of archers,

  Real wealth and vain wealth, loving friends, good talk.

  He was critical of democracy,

  Muttering that horses were better bred

  Than sons and daughters. He fancied the studs

  Of both genera, a wide-minded man.

  POLDEN

  That’s against nature.

  NOTCH

  Lenin was a prig.

  Theognis lived through a revolution

  That cost him his books, olive groves and house,

  His racehorses.

  POLDEN

  Good.

  NOTCH

  And another war

  That cost him his Spartan control of self.

  He moved from city to city, always Greek,

  Writing in a geometry of words

  A poem that was to Homer’s beauty

  And the verve of Hesiod what later

  Apollos modelled on gymnastic slaves

  Were to the stiff archaic kouroi.

  POLDEN

  You remember all this?

  NOTCH

  Shakespeare and Petrarch.

  It keeps coming back. Lensky and Pushkin.

  Willows and stars.

  POLDEN

  Before the Aurora

  Flew the red flag. A moment of glory.

  NOTCH

  There is a woman sweeping the crossing.

  You see her: over there.

  POLDEN

  I see her, yes.

  NOTCH

  The clock tower and the barracks. Do you

  See how they make a perspective for her,

  As in a painting by Canaletto?

  POLDEN

  Italian landscapist. Hermitage.

  NOTCH

  And the sky above her, dull as a ditch.

  What is she thinking of?

  POLDEN

  Nothing. Lenin.

  NOTCH

  Save the hectic red, the bilious yellow

  Of the flag over the barracks, there is

  No color anywhere.

  POLDEN

  None. Patch of red,

  Smitch of yellow. All of the rest is gray.

  You are going to make something of it,

  As if she could help being a figure

  Alone in the square. She is a picture

  In your imagination.

  NOTCH

  Old woman

  Is what she is. Events happen again

  In memory, knowing, or narrative.

  Time rolls up as it goes along, bringing

  The past with it. Nothing is left behind.

  POLDEN

  That old woman with the besom gets paid

  Ahead of the commissars in the line.

  NOTCH

  Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome

  Visited at Yasnaya Polyana.

  They talked about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  Ah! the music, string quartets. Poetry.

  You could meet someone who had seen Monet

  At Giverny, beside the lily pond.

  Proust. If you knocked on his door his servant

  Had the same set speech for everybody:
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  Monsieur Proust wants you to know that there is

  No waking hour when he is not thinking

  Of you, but right now he is too busy

  To see visitors. The Boratinskies,

  Khlebnikov, Tatlin, Osip Mandelstam.

  People who had been to Gertrude Stein’s house.

  Who recommended that you come? was what

  She asked at the door. What a time that was,

  Back then.

  POLDEN

  Parasites.

  NOTCH

  Venice, Rome, London.

  Every shop had potatoes for sale,

  Heaps and hampers of potatoes for sale.

  Oranges, grapes, editions of Homer.

  And Lenin had the cleanest bicycle

  In Zürich. And he did Indian clubs.

  One two three, one two three. At the window.

  POLDEN

  If there had been no Lenin, there would have

  Been a Lenin.

  NOTCH

  And a sealed German train.

  Red flags on the locomotive, a crowd

  To welcome him at the Finland Station.

  Committee of peasants wanting to learn

  Hegelian dialectic.

  POLDEN

  A workers’ brass

  Band playing the Internationale.

  NOTCH

  Springtimes were sweeter, summers were greener.

  The apple trees, the singing, and the gold.

  There is no kindness now in the years.

  POLDEN

  But there are years.

  NOTCH

  Oh yes, the promised years,

  Right on time.

  Bronze Leaves and Red

  He sleeps on an iron cot and his only income is the royalty the State pays him for the use of his portrait on our postage stamps. They say he can sit by the hour regarding a bust of Nietzsche. He likes to chat with his friends on the telephone. The sole decoration he wears is his Iron Cross. That and the armband of the Party are the only accents that alleviate the drab plainness of his uniform. His favorite composer is Anton Bruckner, the strong surge and harmonic progressions of whose symphonies remind him of the old Germany, the forests and the mountains, the coffeehouses with their newspapers, chess games, metaphysical conversations, and scientific journals, the Germany of fine autumns and mists when between the hamlets the little roads are lined with trees whose bronze leaves and red burn with a kind of glory in the afternoon sun.

 

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