During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there):
‘Could you describe this?’
I said, ‘I can!’
Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.
Tag: foreword
You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...
That was when the ones who smiled
Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
And it seemed to me that there were fires
Flying till dawn without number
And I never found out things-those
Strange eyes of his-what colour?
Everything trembling and singing and
Were you my enemy or my friend,
Winter was it or summer?
The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .
But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.
I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else's mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.
We are all carousers and loose women here;
How unhappy we are together!
As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.
Wiem już, jak się twarz zapada w sobie,
Jak wzrok gasi błonka strachu szklista,
Jak cierpienie na policzkach żłobi
Twarde znaki klinowego pisma,
Jak się jasne albo czarne włosy
W mgnieniu oka w srebro zmienić mogą,
Jak się uśmiech z pokornych warg płoszy
I jak suchy śmiech dygocze trwogą.
I nie modlę się za siebie, Boże:
Za nas wszystkie, ustawione sznurem
W skwarze lipca i w styczniowym mrozie
Pod czerwonym ociemniałym murem.
It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
Anna AkhmatovaPagina 1 di 6.
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