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Thus was the son, on that evening, reincarnated in the mother.

... But the young Ilovaisky table had its own domain— a quiet land. It was the Heavenly Kingdom of "the cherubim" Serezha, a swan among the white-coated conservatives; among the mama's boys—the son of his mother. Here were neither arguments nor questions. Here from the first all was decided: foreordained. Of all the children Serezha from the first commited himself to Pimen and even when dying did not raise any question. An exemplary mite in a small dress, an exemplary high-schooler, an exemplary university student. Repulsive? Yes, if it weren't for the spell that could not be resisted: of eyes, smile, stance and manners, the light touch of something like shamefacedness or perhaps a gentle mockery at himself, or perhaps at you because you accepted that good behavior in such good faith... Eyes slightly-narrowed, bright-black, in perfect correspondence with the mouth, slightly-mocking and also seeming to be narrowed at the corners, the eyes that constantly and encouragingly say farewell, say welcome (it was no accident that he died in the reception room!), eyes older than the one looking out through them, the eyes of many generations, the eyes—of the last one of a final generation. A quiet mouse, a cherubic angel, a mama's boy, an old ladies' lackey, a white-coated conservative? Not a quiet mouse but the soul of quiet, not a cherubic angel but a Cherub, not a mama's boy but the son of his mother, not an old ladies' lackey, but the faithful servant of the oldest commandment, not a white-haired conservative—whiteness itself, not one of the Black Hundreds52 - a dark ermine.

Strange thing: in that handsome youth there was a certain similarity to Paul,53 yes, despite the beauty. Paul was the ugly extreme of the type of which Serezha was the extreme of beauty. But the type is the same: death-like. The very-marked nostrils of a nose that is slightly-truncated, as if trimmed off by a scissors, very visible teeth, deep eye sockets, hollowed-out places at the temples. As if death doesn't so much have to take less away from them (it wasn't a matter of thinness), but had to labor less over them (modeler, shape and form), so as to get back its own image. You often get faces like that in children, or rather: there are many children with that face. (The children are many, the face-one). Boys. Without fail: dark-eyed. I appeal to the reader's sympathetic imagination.

I carry my thoughts farther and farther off into the past, trying to identify, to capture, who it was I loved first, the very first, in very first childhood, pre-childhood, and I give up in despair, because right next to the very first (a green actress in "The Merry Wives of Windsor") turns up a still firster first (the green doll in the arcade), and next to that first of all, an even more first of all (a strange lady at the Patriarch Ponds54) and farther and farther (only into a different, twice-removed farther!)—when it turns out the way the poet put it:

I've looked into so many eyes

That memory cannot tell me now

When I first loved—when didn't I?

And where? And when? And how?

—and I myself, in the incalculable situation of someone who loved from the first, before the first: who started right off from the second, maybe the hundredth... in the situation of continuity without a he-ginning, in the situation of inherent continuity... But the end to this chain of words, by the very infinity of its inner Unkings, can't possibly exist.

True enough, there is my mother's testimony to my two- year old stormy love for the dark-eyed and -skinned student Ainalov, but I don't remember this love, besides which, how could mother know that he was the first, how could she give a guarantee that I was not already straining from my nurse's arms to other arms, not hers? (If there are things that never end, that will always be, and these things do exist, and everyone knows them, it is just as defensible that there were things that never had a beginning, that always were. But now that I am so forcefully getting into Serezha's life, living my way into him, and because of the agitation which he, evoked by me, evokes in me, it begins to look to me—I am on the very edge of certainty—as if the first living male being that I loved was he.)

I see myself as a four-year-old, chubby girl, holding out on my feet in complete silence for hours, standing alongside Serezha and watching him on the slope from the Oka to our summer house, while he dug a stairway in the steep side of the hill. And once, irritated at such stubborn immobility and such immobile stubbornness—(to budge me further ahead than the step on Serezha's current schedule was impossible)—Avgusta Ivanovna said: "Whatever for do you keep on looking at that Treppe? There is nothing in it at all interessant!55" And I answered, sighing with my whole insides: "I'm looking at his blue trousers..." Blue? I don't know. He was a high-school student then, and high school students had gray trousers. Or maybe—it was summertime-natural canvas. The blue of the Oka? Of love? But the word and the feeling "blue"—that I remember.

But one other thing comes up, very early, very late? "Serezha and Nadya"—not the Ilovaiskys, but other ones, not brother Serezha and sister Nadya but other ones, a different name. In a supplement to the Niva.56 Something read? Something heard? In our house in Tarusa, as in all families like ours in Russia, so as to hide from the dark night, we crowded together under the white lamplight circle (the foot of the lamp had the dimensions of a bear's foot: a bear crawling up into a beehive!) and someone would be reading something. Sometimes they "forgot" the children. I only remember the cold and hot fear of the secret in the middle of my chest, right there where the ribs come apart: don't tell anyone about Serezha and Nadya, Serezha and Nadya... Serezha and Nadya. A supplement to the Niva, the dawn of the twentieth century.

It is strange that I got my first lesson on frivolity from Old Pimen—a lession which did not take. Here it is black and white, in Nadya's raspberry album57 which was out on loan at the time to my sister Valeria.

I hasten in my hours of leisure

To write these warning lines, my friend,

Accept my counsel in full measure:

Don't place your confidence in men.

You laugh all day, you seldom sigh,

You drift upon a winsome wind,

And if you never wish to cry,

Don't place your confidence in men.

Just let them vow and let them swear

To fire the shot that means the end,

Or cast their life on fatal air-

Don 't place your confidence in men.

But if your choice is to believe them,

They 'II leave a scar, my dearest friend,

Your wounded heart will ne 'er be free from—

Don't place your confidence in men!

I said "frivolity," although from the content you would have to say: good sense. But since neither the one nor the other was assigned to me in our book of generations, the lesson didn't take, and I, like Olya too, and poor Nadya, and all of us, that were in the beginning are now and ever shall be for ever and ever, amen—did not believe in "disbelief," met a man and believed him.

But we are concerned not with me, but with the tone of an epoch, an epoch that dictated to a gifted and noble girl a poem like that, written in an album destined for a rarely endowed and enspirited sister.

I am not judging. It's harmless. It's the same thing as "Once upon a New Year's Eve"58 and of course the main point—it's those same girls! (" 'What's your name?' He looks and answers: 'Agafon'."59) The eternal, precautionary cry of one sister to another (of one trusting soul to another!): "Don't believe: he'll deceive you!" Not the decadence of virginal innocence (which is immortal) but the decadence of a whole culture that opens with Pushkin and rolls onward to the last page of an album, a girl's album, from a gentry family, on which is written (and now I don't know in whose hand):

When I have ended my sejours

Mesdames, then I will be all yours!

(Sobineau's farewell to the ladies of Moscow, the dawn of the twentieth century.)

Once—I was seven years old—Serezha said to me: "So will you copy out your poems for me?"—"Well, of course, the devil take it!" -"But why 'the devil take it'?" he said, with such confusion, even pain, in spite of his barely nascent smile, that I, suddenly thrusting my chin down on my chest (why not on his?), forced all four front "shovels" into my lower lip all at once. I had a strange feeling, a feeling that would never have been credited to me at that time: in front of Serezha (seven years and seventeen) I always felt ashamed of being myself—of being what I was. What was I? Why, healthy (he wasn't sick yet at the time), saucy, bold, with black fingernails. I, like a Negro, was ashamed of my own incorrigible blackness. I remember what a laborious effort it cost me to walk into that room where he sat on a green couch between green philodendrons in his sky-blue jacket with the other students, but not like him, also wearing jackets, but not like his. What clenching of jawbones it took to walk through that whole parquetry desert and give him my hand. "And you're still writing poetry? Write on, write on!" I had the sudden impulse to cry at the first sound of that voice. To cry and to beg forgiveness, that I, such a bad, ill-mannered girl, had again thrown the toothpowder can into the face of the governess who picked on me, while there he was, so good to me, so gentle... And the more gently and kindly he would question me, maybe sensing something and trying to cheer me up: "There now, smile, smile, come on, smile, you sourpuss!" the lower I hung my head with the tears welling up and, with the final remnant of voice power: "I'd better bring you the notebook; you'll read for yourself..." That, I think, was the one person during my whole childhood and adolescence, who didn't laugh at my poems (mother—got angry), who didn't use them, like the red cloth and the bull, to lead me into the temptation of rage... Perhaps he wrote poetry himself? Prose—that I know. At the age of twelve (my mother's, an eyewitness' story) he, at his parents' insistence, began to read his play Mother and Son at one of their "Fridays." Dramatis Personae: "The mother—twenty years old, the son—sixteen years old." A burst of laughter and the author, not understanding the reason but understanding the disgrace, immediately and irretrievably ran away into his room, from which even his mother could not draw him out.

And his mother's influence could do everything. I'll say more: he could not do things differently than the mother, lie could not do something different than the mother. I think they spoke very little with one another, more often—they looked. For words are always dangerous. In words he would have had to say to her: "Mama, why are you browbeating Nadya? Mama, why are you casting dark shadows over our youth? Mama, we arc going to die soon." But with his eyes he said one thing to her: I love you. I am yours.

Among the liberal young people that love was called "conservatism" just the same as a personal instinct of self-preservation was called "opposition politics." There are strange words (most often—total strangers!) attached to the simplest things. But while you are thinking your way to simplicity...

Dear Serezha, a quarter century and more later, accept my gratitude for that big-headed, short-haired, plain little girl that nobody liked, from whose hands you so carefully took the notebook. With that gesture—you gave her to me.

Thank you too for the old world, now betrayed by everyone, everyone, everyone, and most of all, although done innocently, by those who want to resurrect it. You were its purest mirror.

Thank you for your fidelity to that house—even a house like that.

Thank you for mother.

* * * * *

After Nervi the brother and sister started dying. Not immediately. Rumors reached us abroad that they had been taken by their father to Spasskoe. That he was feeding them there on oatmeal and making them sleep with the window open. "Well, all right (mother said over the letter), both the oatmeal and the window are useful things, but there you are—the dampness. Spasskoe is right in the middle of a marsh. And wouldn't it be simpler to go to the Crimea?" But to the Crimea (the arguments advanced, we assumed, at Old Pimen) they could not go alone: everyone will instantly fall in love with Nadya again and suppose the exemplary Serezha is ensnared by some kind of trash? And for their mother io travel with them—that means dropping everything. "Everything" means the house. The "house" means the trunks. Leave ihem to whom? To the little German housekeeper? But she herseIf is a mere fledgling, what use is she? All she knows how to do is to look unblinkingly through her frightened blue eyes at everyone and especially at Serezha who never so much as hurt a fly... How can she cope with the thievish maid, the sly yardman, the drunkard cook and all their kith and kin—with the whole gang of grab-it-and-runners? Beside that, the Crimea means two separate families. And who is going to pour the tea at D.I.'s professorial Fridays? Olya? Why, Olya alone needs to have a governess attached to her since, of the three, she is the worst, the most secretive and stubborn. I looked in her things again and found pine oil vaseline for making eyebrows and lashes grow. And not only stubborn, but a spendthrift too, since that same vaseline is stored in my locked cabinet, so that means hers is yet another new jar. And all these vaselines and eyelashes, just to win over that—God forbid! How ever did they allow him into the house? How does the Crimea fit in with all that?

And in the evening, in response to all these cogitations, D.I. laconically answered: I'll take them to Spasskoe. Fresh air and oats, that's the main thing.
Serezha died first. He knew about his own death. That innocent angel, unversed in worldly matters, proved in this last worldly matter to be just that, an angel: a knowing angel. How many I have seen of them during my mother's illness, in the Beaurivages, the Kvisisans60 (and almost—in graveyard chapels!), on the Riviera, and in the Black Forest and in Yalta: doctors coughing out the last shred of lung with shining confidence that it's "a little bronchitis"; fathers of families who didn't think ahead far enough to say farewell to their children; young men planning out their evenings for twenty years to come; old men like wolves who tore into the very possibility of a possibility like raw meat; (the women, even the youngest, invariably knew); gravely-ill people with the experience of someone else's sickness, of other people's deaths every day and with the same symptoms, right up to thus-and-such a place, where they take the dead person away or, as in Nervi, up to the house opposite, along the spiral iron stairway, in under the funereal vaults of the nuns' chapel. And here was this young man, who had no experience of dying, since he died of that illness first in the family and was never in a sanatorium, who was not deceived by the promise of the Crimea, nor by his own ruddy cheeks nor the peculiar lightness of body that can so easily be taken for strength: death in the veins that can be taken for life; this one understood right away and accepted it. All his worldly thoughts were only for Nadya (about whom he also knew)—to take Nadya away as quickly as possible, to save Nadya... All other thoughts rested in God.

52. The Chernosotentsy or "Black Hundreds" were members of an extremely right-wing, anti-Semitic organization active during the final decades of the Russian Autocracy.

53. Paul I (Tsar Pavel Petrovich-1754-1801), the son of Catherine II (the Great) and Peter III, reigned from 1796 to 1801. He was assassinated in a conspiracy directed by a certain Count Pahlen probably acting with the tacit approval of the next Tsar, Alexander I.

54. A park-like section of Moscow.

55. French. "Interesting."

56. The magazine Field of Grain (Niva), an illustrated journal of literature, politics and contemporary life, came out weekly from 1870 through 1916. A monthly literary supplement was published from 1901 though 1916. (See Note 16 to "A Captive Spirit.")

57. During the nineteenth century and up at least until the Fkst World War, it was customary for young ladies of good family to keep more or less public albums in which their friends and guests of the house would write poetry of their own composition. Works by poets of the stature of Pushkin and Mickiewicz were composed for ladies' albums. The level of talent among album poets was, however, usually a good deal lower. Tsvetaeva inscribed her early poetry in an album; hence the name of her first collection, Evening Album, 1910.

58. The opening line of i famous ballad by Zhukovsky, "Svetlana": Raz v kreshchenskii vecherok / Devushki gadali. The first stanza describes a group of young women telling fortunes by various means including melting wax and floating it on water, and taking rings out of a dish while a song is being sung.

59. Another fortune-telling game, this time from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. The heroine, Tatyana, goes outside alone on a snowy night and holds a mirror up to the moon. When she hears the footsteps of a passerhy she asks him his name. The response was supposed to indicate the name of her future spouse, according to Pushkin's note on this episode.

60. The name suggests a hotel or sanatorium in the Crimea, the place where Tsve-taeva's mother spent the year 1905-06, the last year of her life.