In a Room and a Half
To L.K.

The room and a half (if such a space unit makes any sense in English) in which the three of us lived had a parquet floor, and my mother strongly objected to the men in her family, me in particular, walking around with our socks on. She insisted on us wearing shoes or slippers at all times. Admonishing me about this matter, she would evoke an old Russian superstition; it is an ill omen, she would say, it may bode a death in the family.

Of course, it might be that she simply regarded this habit as uncivilized, as plain bad manners. Men's feet smell, and that was the pre-deodorant era. Yet I thought that, indeed, one could easily slip and fall on a polished parquet, especially if one wore woolen socks. And that if one were old and frail, the consequences could be disastrous. The parquet's affinity with wood, earth, etc., thus extended in my mind to any ground under the feet of our close and distant relatives who lived in the same town. No matter what the distance, it was the same ground. Even living on the other side of the river, where I would subsequently rent an apartment or a room of my own, didn't constitute an excuse, for there were too many rivers and canals in that town. And although some of them were deep enough for the passage of seagoing ships, death, I thought, would find them shallow, or else, in its standard underground fashion, it could creep across under their bottoms.

Now my mother and my father are dead. I stand on the Atlantic seaboard: there is a great deal of water separating me from two surviving aunts and my cousins: a real chasm, big enough to confuse even death. Now I can walk around in my socks to my heart's content, for I have no relatives on this continent. The only death in the family I can now incur is presumably my own, although that would mean mixing up transmitter with receiver. The odds of that merger are small, and that's what distinguishes electronics from superstition. Still, if I don't tread these broad Canadian-maple floorboards in my socks, it's neither because of this certitude nor out of an instinct for self-preservation, but because my mother wouldn't approve of it. I guess I want to keep things the way they were in our family, now that I am what's left of it.

2

There were three of us in that room and a half of ours: my father, my mother, and I. A family, a typical Russian family of the time. The time was after the war, and very few people could afford more than one child. Some of them couldn't even afford to have the father alive or present: great terror and war took their toll in big cities, in my hometown especially. So we should have considered ourselves lucky, especially since we were Jews.
...

5

Apart from an excess of thirteen square meters, we were terribly lucky because the communal apartment we had moved into was very small. That is, the part of the enfilade that constituted it contained six rooms partitioned in such a way that they gave home to only four families. Including ourselves, only eleven people lived there. As communal apartments go, the dwellers can easily amount to a hundred. The average, though, is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. Ours was almost tiny.

Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But the kitchen was fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathroom, Russian hygienic habits are such that eleven people would seldom overlap when either taking a bath or doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to the kitchen, and one knew the underwear of one's neighbors by heart.

The neighbors were good neighbors, both as individuals and because all of them were working and thus absent for the better part of the day. Save one, they didn't inform to the police; that was a good percentage for a communal apartment. But even she, a squat, waistless woman, a surgeon in the nearby polyclinic, would occasionally give you medical advice, take your place in the queue for some scarce food item, keep an eye on your boiling soup. How does that line in Frost's "The Star-Splitter" go? "For to be social is to be forgiving"?

For all the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartment has perhaps its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions about human nature. By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you know what he/she bad for supper as well as for breakfast. You know the sounds they make in bed and when the women have their periods. It's often you in whom your neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you dead in a chair, if you live alone, or vice versa.

What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about goods suddenly available in this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen in the evening when the wives cook their meals! This is where one learns life's essentials: by the rim of one's ear, with the corner of one's eye. What silent dramas unfurl there when somebody is all of a sudden not on speaking terms with someone else! What a school of mimics it is! What depths of emotion can be conveyed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile! What smells, aromas, and odors float in the air around a hundred-watt yellow tear hanging on a plait-like tangled electric cord. There is something tribal about this dimly lit cave, something primordial—evolutionary, if you will; and the pots and pans hang over the gas stoves like would-be tom-toms.

6

I recall these not out of nostalgia but because this was where my mother spent one-fourth of her life. Family people seldom eat out; in Russia almost never. I don't recall either her or my father across the table in a restaurant, or for that matter in a cafeteria. She was the best cook I ever knew, with the exception, perhaps, of Chester Kallman; but then he had more ingredients. I recall her most frequently in the kitchen, in her apron, face reddened and eyeglasses a bit steamy, shooing me away from the stove as I try to fish this or that item from the burner. Her upper lip glistens with sweat; her short, cropped, dyed-red but otherwise gray hair curls disorderedly. "Go away!" she exclaims. "What impatience!" I won't hear that anymore.

Nor shall I see the door opening (how did she do it with both her hands holding a casserole or two big pans? By lowering them onto the latch and applying their weight to it?) and her sailing in with our dinner/supper/tea/dessert. My father would be reading the paper, I would not move from my book unless told to do so, and she knew that any help she could expect from us would be delayed and clumsy anyway. The men in her family knew more about courtesy than they themselves could master. Even when they were hungry. "Are you reading your Dos Passos again?" she would remark setting the table. "Who is going to read Turgenev?" "What do you expect from him?" my father would echo, folding the paper. "Loafer is the word."

10

I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under "a foreign code of conscience," I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian. To write about them in Russian would be only to further their captivity, their reduction to insignificance, resulting in mechanical annihilation. I know that one shouldn't equate the state with language but it was in Russian that two old people, shuffling through numerous state chancelleries and ministries in the hope of obtaining a permit to go abroad for a visit to see their only son before they died, were told repeatedly, for twelve years in a row, that the state considers such a visit "unpurposeful." To say, the least, the repetition of this utterance proves some familiarity of the state with the Russian language. Besides, even if I had written all this in Russian, these words wouldn't see the light of day under the Russian sky. Who would read them then? A handful of émigrés whose either have died or will die under similar circumstances. They know this story only too well. They know what it feels like not to be allowed to see their mothers or fathers on their deathbed; the silence that follows their request for an emergency visa to attend a relative’s funeral. And then it’s too late, and a man or woman puts the receiver down and walks out of the door into the foreign afternoon feeling something neither language has words for, and for which no howl will suffice, either…What could I possibly tell them? In what way could I console them? No country has rnastered the art of destroying its subjects' souls as well as Russia, and no man with a pen in his hand is up to mending them; no, this is a job for the Almighty only, this is what He has all that time of His for. May English then house my dead. In Russian I am prepared to read, write verses or letters. For Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky, though, English offers a better semblance of afterlife, maybe the only one there is, save my very self. And as far as the latter is concerned, writing this in this language is like doing those dishes: it’s therapeutic.

11

 My father was a journalist—a newspaper photographer, to be more precise—although he wrote articles as well. As he wrote mostly for small dailies that are never read anyway, most of his articles would start with "Heavy, storm-laden clouds hang over the Baltic…," confident that the weather in our parts would make this opening newsworthy or pertinent. He held two degrees: in geography, from Leningrad University, and in journalism, from the School of Red Journalism. He enrolled in the latter when it was made clear to him that his chances to travel, especially abroad, weren’t worth reckoning: as a Jew, a son of a print-shop owner, and a non-member of the Party...

17

In 1950, 1 think, my father was demobilized in accordance with some Politburo ruling that people of Jewish origin should not hold high military rank. The ruling was initiated, if I am not mistaken, by Andrei Zhdanov, who was then in charge of ideological control over the armed forces. By that time my father was already forty-seven, and he had to, as it were begin his life anew. He decided to return to journalism, to his photoreportage. To do so, however, he had to be employed by a magazine or a newspaper. That turned out to be quite difficult: the lefties were bad years for the Jews. The campaign against the "rootless cosmopolites" was in full swing; then, in 1953, came the "Doctors' Case," which didn't end in the usual bloodbath only because its instigator, Comrade Stalin himself, all of a sudden, at the case's nadir, kicked the bucket. But long before, and for some time after, the air was full of rumors of the Politburo's planned reprisals against the Jews, of relocating all those "paragraph five" creatures to Eastern Siberia, to the area called Birobidzhan, near the Chinese border. There was even a letter in circulation, signed by the most prominent "paragraph five" individuals—chess champions, composers, and writers-containing a plea to the Central Committee of the Party, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to permit us, the Jews, to redeem with hard labor in remote parts the great harm we had inflicted upon the Russian people. The letter was to appear any day now in Pravda as the pretext for our deportation.

What appeared in Pravda, however, was the announcement of Stalin's death, although by that time we were preparing to travel and had already sold our upright piano, which nobody in our family could play anyhow (notwithstanding the distant relative my mother invited to tutor me: I had no talent whatsoever, and even less in the way of patience). Still, in that atmosphere, the chances for a Jew and a non-Party member to be hired by a magazine or a paper were dismal; so my father hit the road.

For several years he freelanced all over the country under contract to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibit in Moscow. This way we occasionally would get some marvels on our table-four-pound tomatoes or apple-cum-pear hybrids; but the pay was less than meager, and the three of us existed solely on my mother's salary as a clerk in the borough's development council. Those were our very lean years, and it was then that my parents began to get ill. All the same my father looked his gregarious self and he frequently would take me about town to see his Navy pals, now running a yacht club, minding old dockyards, training youngsters. There were quite a lot of those, and invariably they were pleased to see him (on the whole, I've never met anyone, man or woman, who held a grudge against him). One of them, the editor in chief of the newspaper for the regional branch of the Merchant Marine, a Jew who bore a Russian-sounding name, finally hired him, and until my father went into retirement he worked for that publication, in the Leningrad harbor.

It appears that most of his life was spent on foot ("Reporters, like wolves, live by their paws" was his frequent utterance), among ships, sailors, captains, cranes, cargo. In the background, there was always a rippled zinc sheet of water, masts, the black metal bulk of a stern with a few white first or last letters of the ship's home port. Except in winter, he always wore the black Navy cap with the lacquered visor. He liked to be near the water, he adored the sea. In that country, this is the closest one gets to freedom. Even looking at it is sometimes enough, and he looked at it, and photographed it, for most of his life.

19

The biggest item of our furniture-or rather, the one that occupied the most space-was my parents' bed, to which I think I owe my life. It was a large, king-sized affair whose carvings, again, matched to a certain degree the rest, yet they were done in a more modern fashion. The same vegetation motif, of course, but the execution oscillated somewhere between Art Nouveau and the commercial version of Constructivism. This bed was the object of my mother’s special pride, for she had bought it very cheaply in 1935, before she and my father got married, having spotted it and a matching dressing table with three mirrors in some second-rate carpenter shop. Most of our life gravitated toward this low-sitting bed, and the most momentous decisions in our family were made when the three of us gathered, not around the table, but on that vast surface, with myself at my parents' feet.

By Russian standards, this bed was a real luxury. I often thought that it was Precisely this bed that persuaded my father to get married, for he loved to tarry in it more than anything else. Even when he and my mother were engaged in the bitterest possible mutual acrimony, mostly on the subject of our budget ("You are just hell-bent to dump all the cash at the grocer’s comes his indignant voice over bookshelves separating my "half" from their "room." "I am poisoned, poisoned by thirty years of your stinginess!" replies my mother), even then he'd be reluctant to get out of it, especially in the morning. Several people offered us very good money for that bed, which indeed occupied too much space in our quarters. But no matter how insolvent we were, my parents never considered this option. The bed was clearly an excess, and I believe they liked it precisely for that.

I remember them sleeping in it on their sides, backs turned to each other, a gulf of crumpled blankets in between. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills, fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most helpless. It was their very private lair, their ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one except me, place in the universe. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the world order. A seven-by-five-foot vacuum. It was of light-brown polished maple, and it never creaked.

29

We called her "Marusya," "Manya......Maneczka" (my father's and her sisters' diminutives for her), and "Masya" or "Keesa," which were my inventions. With the years, the last two acquired a greater currency, and even my father began to address her in this way. With the exception of "Keesa," all these nicknames were diminutive forms of her first name, Maria. "Keesa" is a slightly endearing form for a female cat, and she resisted being addressed in this way for quite some time. "Don't you dare call me that!" she would exclaim angrily. "And in general, stop using all these feline pet words of yours! Else you'll end up having cat brains!"
That meant my predilection as a boy to enunciate in a catlike fashion certain words whose vowels seemed to me to invite such treatment. "Meat" was one, and by the time I was fifteen, there was a great deal of meowing in our family. My father proved to be susceptible to this, and we began to address or refer to each other as "Big Cat" and "Little Cat." A "meow" or a "purrmeow," or a "purr-murrmeow," covered a substantial part of our emotional spectrum: approval, doubt, indifference, resignation, trust. Gradually, my mother started to use it, too, but mainly to denote detachment.

"Keesa," however, stuck to her, especially when she got really old. Rotund, wrapped in a couple of brown shawls, with her terribly kind, soft face, she looked very cuddly and very much self-contained. It seemed as if she might purr. Instead, she would say to my father: "Sasha, have you paid this month's electricity?" or to nobody in particular: "Next week is our turn for cleaning up the apartment." Which meant scrubbing and washing the floors in the corridors and the kitchen, as well as cleaning the bathroom and the john. She would address nobody in particular because she knew it was she who had to do it.

30

How they managed all those chores, cleanups especially, for the last twelve years, I have no idea, My departure, of course, meant one less mouth to fill, and they could hire someone from time to time to do these things. Still, knowing their budget (two meager pensions) and my mother's character, I doubt that they did. Besides, in communal apartments, this practice is rare: the natural sadism of neighbors, after all, needs some degree of satisfaction. A relative, perhaps, may be allowed, but not a hired hand.

Croesus though I became, with my university salary, they wouldn't hear of exchanging U.S. dollars into rubles. They regarded the official rate of exchange as a rip-off; and they were both fastidious and fearful of having anything to do with the black market. The last reason was perhaps the strongest: they remembered how their pensions bad been revoked in 1964, when I received my five-year sentence, and they had to find work again. So it was mostly clothes and art books that I sent them, since the latter command very high prices with bibliophiles. They relished the clothes, especially my father, who was always quite a sharp dresser. As for the art books, they kept them for themselves. To look at after scrubbing the communal floor at the age of seventy-five.

33

The way other people mark the growth of their children with pencil notches on the kitchen wall, every year on my birthday my father took me out to our balcony and photographed me there. In the background lay a medium-size cobblestone square with the Cathedral of the Savior of Her Imperial Majesty's Transfiguration Battalion. In the war years its crypt was designated a local bomb shelter, and my mother kept me there during air raids, in a big box with remembrance notes. This is one thing that I owe to Orthodoxy, and it has to do with memory.

The cathedral, a six-story-tall classicistic affair, surrounded by a considerable garden full of oak, linden, and maple, was my playground in the postwar years, and I remember my mother collecting me there (she pulls, I stall and scream: an allegory of cross-purposes) and dragging me home to do homework. With similar clarity I see her, my grandfather, and my father, in one of this garden's narrow alleys, trying to teach me to ride a two-wheel bicycle (an allegory of common goal, or of motion). On the rear, eastern wall of the cathedral, there was, covered with thick glass, a large, dim icon depicting the Transfiguration: Christ floating in the air above a bunch of bodies reclined in fascination. Nobody could explain to me the significance of that picture; even now I am not sure I grasp it fully. There were a great many clouds in the icon, and somehow I associated them with the local climate.

34

The garden was surrounded by a black cast-iron fence held up by equally spaced groups of cannons standing upside-down, captured by the Transfiguration Battalion's soldiers from the British in the Crimean War. Adding to the decor of the fence, the cannon barrels (a threesome in each case, on a granite block) were linked by heavy cast-iron chains on which children swung wildly, enjoying both the danger of falling on the spikes below and the clang. Needless to say, that was strictly forbidden and the cathedral wardens chased us away all the time. Needless to say, the fence was far more interesting than the inside of the cathedral, with its smell of incense and much more static activity. "See those?" asks my father, pointing at the heavy chain links. "What do they remind you of?" I am in the second grade, and I say, "They are like figure eights." "Right," he says. "And do you know what the figure eight is a symbol of?" "Snakes?" "Almost. It is a symbol of infinity." "What's infinity?" "That you had better ask in there," says my father with a grin, his finger pointed at the cathedral.

35

Yet it was he who, having bumped into me on the street in broad daylight when I was skipping school) demanded an explanation, and, being told that I was suffering from an awful toothache, took me straight to the dental clinic, so that I paid for my lies with two hours of straight terror. And yet again it was he who took my side at the Pedagogical Council when I was about to be expelled from my school for disciplinary problems. "How dare you! You who wear the uniform of our Army!" "Navy, madam," said my father. "And I defend him because I am his father. There is nothing surprising about it. Even animals defend their young. Even Brehm says so." "Brehm? Brehm? I ... I will inform the Party organization of your outfit." Which she, of course, did.

36

"On your birthday and on the New Year you must always put on something absolutely new. At least, socks,"—this is the voice of my mother. "Always eat before going to see somebody superior: your boss or your officer. That way you'll have some edge." (This is my father speaking.) "If you've just left your house and have to return because you forgot something, take a look in the mirror before you leave the house again. Else you may encounter trouble." (She again.) "Never think how much you've spent. Think how much you can make." (That's him.) "Don't you ever walk in town without a jacket." "It's good that you are red-haired, no matter what they say. I was a brunette, and brunettes are a better target."

I hear these admonitions and instructions, but they are fragments, details. Memory betrays everybody, especially those whom we knew best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. It is a fishnet with a very small catch, and with the water gone. You can't use it to reconstruct anybody, even on paper. What's the matter with those reputed millions of cells in our brain? What's the matter with Pasternak's "Great god of love, great god of details"? On what number of details must one be prepared to settle?

37

I see their faces, his and hers, with great clarity, in the variety of their expressions—but these are fragments also: moments, instances. These are better than photographs with their unbearable laughter, and yet they are as scattered. At times, I begin to suspect my mind of trying to produce a cumulative, generalized image of my parents: a sign, a formula, a recognizable sketch; of trying to make me settle for these. I suppose I could, and I fully realize how absurd the grounds of my resistance are: these fragments' lack of continuum. One shouldn't expect so much from memory; one shouldn't expect a film shot in the dark to develop new images. Of course not. Still, one can reproach a film shot in the daylight of one's life for missing frames.

42

Or else a key is thrown up to the surface of my mind: a longish, stainless-steel key which was awkward to carry in our pockets, yet which fit easily in my mother's purse. This key would open our tall white door, and I don't understand why I recall it now, for that place doesn't exist. I doubt that there is any erotic symbolism to it, for among us we had three replicated versions. For that matter,  I don't understand why I recall the wrinkles on my father's forehead, and under his chin, or the reddish, slightly inflamed left cheek of my mother's (she called it "vegetative neurosis"), for neither those marks nor the rest of their bearers exist any longer either. Only their voices somehow survive in my conscience: presumably because my own blends them the way my features must blend theirs. The rest—their flesh, their clothes, the telephone, the key, our possessions, the furniture is gone, and never to be found, as if our room and a half had been hit by a bomb. Not by a neutron bomb, which at least leaves the furniture intact, but by a time bomb, which splinters even one's memory. The building still stands, but the place is wiped out clean.' and new tenants, no, troops, move in to occupy it: that's what a time bomb is all about. For this is a time war.

43

They liked opera arias, tenors, and the movie stars of their youth, didn't care very much for painting, had a notion of "classical" art, enjoyed solving crossword puzzles, and were bewildered and upset by my literary pursuits. They thought me wrong, worried about the way I was going, but supported me as much as they could, because I was their child. Later on, when I managed to print something here and there, they felt pleased, and at times even proud; but I know that should I have turned out to be simply a graphomaniac and a failure, their attitude toward me wouldn't have been any different. They loved me more than themselves, and most likely wouldn't understand my guilt feelings toward them at all. The main issues were bread on the table, clean clothes, and staying healthy. Those were their synonyms for love, and they were better than mine.

As for that time war, they fought it valiantly. They knew that a bomb was going to explode, but they never changed their tactics. As long as they were vertical, they were moving about, buying and delivering food to their bedridden friends, relatives; giving clothes, what money they could spare, or refuge to those who now and then happened to be worse off. They were that way always, for as long as I remember them; and not because deep down they thought that if they were kind to some people, it would somehow be registered on high and they would be treated one day in kind. No, this was the natural and uncalculated generosity of extroverts, which perhaps became all the more palpable to others now that I, its main object, was gone. And this is what ultimately may help me to come to terms with the quality of my memory.

That they wanted to see me before they died had nothing to do with a desire or an attempt to dodge that explosion. They didn't want to emigrate, to live their last days in America. They felt too old for any sort of change, and at best, America for them was just the name of the place where they could meet their son. It was real for them only in terms of their doubt whether they could manage the trip should they be allowed to travel. And yet what games these two old, frail people tried to play with all that scum in charge of granting permission! My mother would apply for a visa alone to indicate that she was not intending to defect to the United States, that her husband would stay behind as a hostage, as the guarantee of her return. Then they would reverse roles. Then they wouldn't apply for a while, pretending that they had lost interest, or showing the authorities that they understood how difficult it was for them to make a decision under this or that climate in U.S.—Soviet relations. Then they would apply just for a one-week stay in the U.S., or for permission to travel to Finland or Poland. Then she would go to the capital, to seek an audience with what that country had for a President, and knock on all the doors of the foreign and internal ministries that there are. All was in vain: the system, from its top to its bottom, never made a single mistake. As systems go, it can be proud of itself. But then inhumanity is always easier to structure than anything else. For that job, Russia never had to import the know-how. In fact, the only way for that country to get rich is to export it.

1985

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LESS THAN ONE
by
Joseph Brodsky

ForPoetry