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(My Encounter with Andrei Bely)1
Dedicated to Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich

"Forgive me that I summoned you here!

"But then, nothing ties us down? (Leaning over toward my car.) We can leave, can't we? First sit a while and then—leave? To spend a marvelous day?

"I've only just gotten here myself. You know, of course, that yesterday I didn't go out there—here! I turned around and followed you on the very next trolley to the Pragerdiele, but shame got the better of me... All evening I went around the cafes and in one of them I met (he names the name that wounds him). What do you think about it? Can she love him?"

I, firmly: "She can't."

"It's true, isn't it: she can't. So then what does it all mean? Putting on a show? To cause me pain? But of course she doesn 't love me, so then why should she cause me pain? But of course it's first and foremost causing pain to herself. You know him?"

I tell him.

"So then he's not a bad man... I tried to read his poetry but... I didn't feel anything: words. Perhaps I've gotten old? I read very diligently, I tried with all my might to read something in it, to feel something, to discover... That way it would have been less painful.

"... You can love, and it's even completely natural after a writer to love a man who is completely simple, a savage... But that savage ought not to write theoretical poems!

(In an outburst:) "Oh, you know, she is so malicious! You think—she needs him, she needs the savage, she who is (his head turns away)... thousands of years old... She needs (in a whisper) to wound me in the very heart, she needed to murder the past, to murder herself, that self, to make it so that that self never existed. It's revenge. A revenge that I alone know the value of. Because for other people it is simply a distraction. That's... natural. After a forty-year-old man, balding, clumsy—a twenty-year-old man with black hair, a dagger and so forth... Well, she fell in love and forgot herself: she broke open the whole shape of her life. Oh, if only it were that! But you don't know her: she is cold, like a knife. All of it is naked calculation. She doesn't feel anything for him. I am even convinced that she hates him. Oh, you don't know how she can keep silent, like this: sit and keep silence, stand up and keep silence, look on and keep silence."

"Revenge? But for what?"

"For Sicily. For Ofaira.72 'I am no longer your wife.' But-read my book! Just where do I say that she's my wife? For me she's... she... A scintillating vision... A she-goat on a promontory... Nelly. What did I say wrong about her? And then the book was already in print... Where did she see the 'intimacy,' 'proprietorship,' the imprint of a husband?

"The pride of a demon, and the behavior of a little girl. I am so thoroughly not your wife that, look... I am someone else's wife. As if I didn't feel it without that. As if I didn't always know that. And now, from the most complex spiritual sources, the grossest fact that insults everyone, except me.

"... I am so sorry for her.

"You've seen her? She's beautiful. During those years of separation she's grown up so much, grown so strong. She was Psyche, she has become a Valkyrie. There's a strength in her! A strength given her by her loneliness. Oh, if she would act like a human being, meet me not in passing, with a group, a troupe, a half hour in a cafe, but in a friendly way, like a human being, in a deep way, in a lofty way—I would, flushed and sanguine, be the first to welcome her and be glad...

"You don't know how I loved her, how I waited! All those years of horror, death, darkness—how I waited. How she shone on me...

"And I'm sorry for him too. If he is a man with a heart, he has paid for this cruelly. She will pour out her disdain on him... 'The Moor has done his deed. The Moor can depart.' And he, most certainly, loves her madly!"

("How lofty everything is with you," I am saying inside my mouth. "You even consider him the Moor... And from the man's side at least, how incomparably simpler everything is, a kind of simplicity which it is not given to you to understand. And the 'mad love' sits in the Pragerdiele scowling like a barn owl and swallowing down a yawn he thinks: 'But it's colossally boring with her! She's silent, doesn't carry on any conversation, never smiles. Just like some kind of owl...' But that you will never find out about.")

"Forgive me, I've tired you out! A sun like this and I've tired you out! No need to say more about her. You see, it's over. We'll talk about something else. You know—I'm writing poems. After your Separation I am writing poems again. I think I am not a poet. I can go for years without writing poems. That means I am not a poet. But now, after your Separation—it has flooded me. I can't stop. I am writing you—furthering you. It will be a whole book: After the Separation,73 after the separation from her and after your Separation. I am mentally dedicating it to you, and if I don't put in an explicit dedication, it is only because the book is yours, it comes from you; I can't give you what is yours, that would be immodest.

"Can I read to you? When you're tired, stop me, I won't slop myself, I never stop myself..."

And now, over the dreariness of the Zossen landscape:

You, rising, said—it's vanished!

And we are specters.

The light does not prevail

Does not prevail—over darkness.

You went away. Between us the years

Are water—poured out...

Where does the water go?

I will never see you again.

He runs over the pages as if over piano keys.

Yes, you draw the haughty lie

Around you in an evil circle.

And you go away with a true shudder

Forever, evil love, away from me

Without an answer.

And I will never see you,

And I bate—myself for it!

"And this one too!" In his hand the pages are like a small flock of white wings ready to fly away.

You ate the shadow of shadows, I do not name you,

Your face is cold and evil...

I sail that way, beyond the smoke of days, I call

Beyond the smoke of days—no, not you: the past,

That I tear apart (how often does that make?).

That—how often does that make?—arises,

That, bow often, casts down the diamond,

The diamond of a star, the star of love...

And as if amazed at the quietness that has suddenly set in: "But what a quiet daughter you have. She doesn't say anything. (Knitting his brows:) It's pleasant! You know, I am afraid of children. (Looking all eyes and in doing so making them infinitely bigger:) I am in-sane-ly afraid of them. Oh, since childhood! Since Prechistenky Boulevard. Every Christmas party, every birthday. (In a whisper, the way one complains about a powerful enemy:) They broke everything I had, their arrival was an assault... (Boiling up:) Angels? I can hear even now the rip of the page: that angel is going through my favorite book and tears it from corner to corner—it's the same as a wound torn open... And don't say it's an accident, it's rarely an accident, it's always on purpose, everything is on purpose, out of spite, they are always on guard—will I tell or not? Oh, they are like animals, they can't tolerate something unfamiliar and they smell out anything weak. The whole trick is only not to show fear, not to shudder... A sick wolf, you know, when he falls sick steps down on the hurt paw... He knows that they will tear him to shreds. Oh, how afraid of them I am! And you're not afraid? Of your own—no. But I don't have my own. And certainly now I won't have. Maybe it's too bad? Maybe it would have been better if there had been some? I sometimes regret it. Maybe I would somehow have been more firmly fixed on earth..."

Alya, who has long since been sending dark and significant glances my way:

"Ma-ama!"

I, with forced simplicity:

"Boris Nikolaevich, where is it, the child has to..."

"Of course, the child has to, has to, has to."

Convinced now that there won't be any other answer, I say more insistently: "She needs to go to one particular place."

"O-oh! That we don't have. We don't have a particular place, but there's space, as much as you want—everything is space that you see from the window. In the bosom of nature, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere! It's called—the West (hissing like a snake) civilization."

"But who... deported you out here?" (Having said it, I understand that the word is correct: he is here in deportation.)

"Friends. I don't know. They packed up. Brought me here. Apparently it has to be. Apparently, it has to be this way for someone." And now like a canonized refrain: "The child has to, has to, has to."

* * * * *

"Alya, aren't you ashamed! Right in front of the window!"

"In the first place, you went on talking with him too long; in ihe second place, he doesn't see anything anyway."

"How doesn't see? You think he's blind?"

"Not blind but he's a madman. He is very quiet, very polite, but a real madman. You mean you really don't see that he's look-in;', the whole time at an invisible enemy?"

So as to finish up about the "child who has to" and Bely. A few days later her father arrived from Prague74 and was horror-struck at her passion for beer. "Like a bottomless barrel! At eight years old! No, we must put an end to that. Today I'll give her as much beer as she wants—so as to wean her off for good."

And then, after the nth mug, Alya suddenly says:

"And now I'm going off to sleep because I already feel that I'm soon going to start saying the same stupid things as Andrei Bely."

* * * * *

"Of course, Pushkin wrote his Godunov75 in a bathhouse," Bely is saying, surveying with me from the window his Zossenian expanses. "But is this really comparable to a bathhouse? Oh, I would pay dearly for a bathhouse! (In a whisper, smiling ashamedly:) Why, I've completely stopped washing here. There's no water, no basin—is that really a basin? Why, you can put in—only your nose! So I don't wash until I get to Berlin and in the end I don't write anything. (Already threatening:) To wash my face I have to go to Berlin!

"But now... (the door opens without a knock but with a hang, admitting first a tray, then a woman's checkered stomach)... please share what I have. Don't be hard on me. I am condemned to the utter absence of culinary imagination in my landlady."

The soup is wordlessly and jerkily poured into the bowls. After the landlady's departure, Bely says in a dejected voice:

"Haferbruhe... Oatmeal soup... I knew it..."

We sit gulping with bravado the half-soup, half-porridge; it is too liquid for solid food, too solid for a liquid...

"Haferbruhe, Haferbruhe, Haferbruhe..." Bely mutters. "Bruhe... bruten... as if she hatches those oats, wilts them with her own body heat, waters them down... Milchsuppe—Haferbruhe, Haferbruhe—Milchsuppe... "76

And gulping down the last spoonful, beaming like a sick man who's had a tooth pulled:

"And now let's go have some dinner!"

* * * * *

Berlin. The "Bear" restaurant: "zum Baren."

"No soup, all right? We've already souped! We're going to eat meat, meat, meat! Two meat dishes! Three! (With simple and even intellectual curiosity:) But can your daughter eat three meat dishes?"- -"I want beer," comes the phlegmatic answer. "How well she talks—laconically. Of course, beer. And for us—wine. But your daughter doesn't drink wine?"

The first of the three meat dishes. (Later on Alya says to me: "Mama, he ate just like a wolf." With a smile and looking out of the corners of her eyes... "He just about jumped on the meat...")

After finishing the second dish and impatient for the third, Bely says to me: "Don't take me for a wolf! I've been on oats for three days now. Alone—I don't dare: it's somehow ugly and a betrayal of the landlady. She eats the same thing, you know, and doesn't go to Berlin. But today I've allowed myself because you at least aren't tied to my landlady by any bonds of communal misfortune. So why should you endure it? And your daughter along with you. And then, I'm acting as a good neighbor to you."

And by an obvious association with the wolf:

"And now—let's go to the zoo."

* * * * *

At the zoo, in front of the cage of a huge lion, a lion of lions, Alya says: "Look, Mama! Just like Leo Tolstoi! The same kind of eyebrows, and the same broad nose and evil little gray eyes— as if everyone's lying."

"You don't say!" Respectfully and aggressively the forty-year-old says to the eight-year-old, "Leo Tolstoi is the only man who put himself under a glass dome and carried out a vivisection on himself."
Absorbed by my companion, of that whole trip to the zoo, apart from the lion, I remember only the hippopotamus and that because of the Belian remark that follows: "Last time I got here and chanced on a hippopotamus wedding. Some people pay money for that! I didn't quite hear what the attendant was saying and I followed him because he was walking along. What a horror that was! I almost fainted..."

72. It is not clear exactly which parts of which book offended Asya, or what book Bely is referring to here in his own self-defence. Very likely Asya's objections were directed against something in Bely's Travel Observations (Putevye zametki), which had details of their travels together and were published in Berlin in 1922 where Asya could easily have read them. Bely may, in addition to this prose work, have been thinking of the poems he dedicated to Asya and included in the collection The Star (Zvezda), which was published in Moscow in 1922.

73. Bely's collection of poetry, After Separation (Posle razluki), appeared in 1922. The word translated as "separation" in Tsvetaeva's title can also mean "parting." Considering the circumstances, the translation After Parting would be more appropriate for Bely's title were it not for the connection with Tsvetaeva's earlier book.

74. Sergei Efron, Tsvetaeva's husband, had left Russia with the defeated White Army Forces and had settled in Prague where he was studying at the university.

75. Pushkin's play in verse, Boris Godunov, was written in 1825 and published in 1831.

76. Bely is muttering: "Milk soup-oatmeal soup, oatmeal soup-milk soup."