The day of the museum's opening. The morning, barely underway, of the triumphal day. A ring. A courier from the museum? No, a woman's voice.

Aroused by the bell, father is already on the threshold of the ballroom wearing his old, invariable dressing-gown, greenish-gray, the color of bad weather, the color of Time.1 The very lovely apparition of a very tall woman comes through the other door to meet him, a woman with huge green eyes in a dark, deep, thick frame of eyelashes and lids, like Carmen's and with Carmen's same swarthy, slightly terra-cottean blush.

It is the friend we all share: the friend of my old father's museum and of my very young poems, the friend of my grownup brother's nighttime fishing trips and my younger sister's first grown-up conquests, the friend of each of us separately and of the entire family as a whole, the woman in whose friendship we took refuge when our mother died—Lidia Alexandrovna T., born Gavrina, half Ukrainian, half Neapolitan, of princely blood and romantic soul.

Father, discerning who the visitor is:

"For the Lord's sake, forgive me, Lidia Alexandrovna! I'm in such a state... I didn't know it was you. I thought it was a courier... Allow me, I'm... (with embarrassment indicating his dressing gown)."

"Oh no, no, my dear, very honored Ivan Vladimirovich! It's much better the way you are. On this auspicious day your dressing gown is like a Roman toga. That's it exactly—a toga. Even a Greek peplum. Yes."

"But... (father, more and more embarrassed) you know, I am... somehow... not used to..."

"I assure you it's the toga of a sage! And besides, in a few hours you will come forth in all your glory. I am here so early because I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on this great day, the most beautiful day of your life—and of mine too. Yes, of my life too, in which I never received the gift of creating anything. That happiness was not given to me. And it's just because of that that I came to love you. Loved you at once. And will go on loving you to the last breath. Because you are a creator. That's it exactly—a creator. I had to be the first to thank you for the achievement of your life, for the achievement of your labor. In the name of Russia and in my own name, I have brought you—this."

In front of my bedazed father she holds out—a laurel wreath.

"But please, please..."

"Put it on—right away, and here before my eyes. Let it crown your beautiful, your noble brow!"

"Brow? Lidia Alexandrovna, my dear, I'm endlessly touched, but... a laurel wreath... for me?!... it's really, somehow, unnecessary!"

(In his complete detachment from externals, father doesn't even pause to think about how a laureate might look in a dressing gown!)

"No, no, no, don't argue!" says the visitor with an appeal on her lips and tears in her eyes. "I have to crown you, if only for an instant!"

And taking advantage of the fact that my father, in a movement of embarrassed gratitude, is holding out both arms to her, in a treacherous, and in truth, Italian move, she lays, no—claps the wreath on his head.

He, defending himself: "I beg you, don't. Don't!"

She, pleadingly: "Oh, don't take it off. It suits you so well!"

And, with all the passion of delight (for delight is the greatest of passions that I know!) she kisses him, the thirty-five-year-old beauty kisses the nearly seventy-year-old man,2 on the brow crowned with laurel.

An instant later (the wreath has already been taken off and carefully placed on the table) the visitor, still standing there, is pressing my father's hands in her own:

"I want you to know: it's Roman laurel. I had it sent from Rome. A little tree in a tub. And I wove the wreath myself. Yes. You were born in Vladimir Province, well and good. But Rome is the city of your youth (and mine too!), and your soul is Roman. Ah, if only your wife had had the happiness to live to this day. It would have been her gift!

* * * * *

My father died on the thirtieth of August, 1913, a year and three months after the opening of the museum. We placed the laurel wreath in his coffin.
1936

1. The passage of time and its impact on human existence was of great importance to Tsvetaeva and was a main motivation for her autobiographical writing. Several images are linked with Time in the prose and the poetry of this period, the most important of which is the color and sound of newspapers mentioned in "Mother and Music" and in the poem "Newspaper Readers" ("Chitateligazet"), November 1935.

2. Professor Tsvetaev was actually sixty-six when the museum was opened. His dates are 1846-1913.