nταβί και aνισσα

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“without you i wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.”

♡

“16 july, 1923

i won’t hide it: i’m so unused to being – well, understood, perhaps, – so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting i thought: this is a joke, a masquerade trick… but then… and there are things that are hard to talk about – you’ll rub off their marvellous pollen at the touch of a word… they write me from home about mysterious flowers. you are lovely…

and all your letters, too, are lovely, like the white nights – even the one where you so resolutely underlined several words. i found it and the previous one when i got back from marseilles, where i was working in the port. it was the day before yesterday, and i decided not to reply to you till you wrote me more. a little joke…

yes, i need you, my fairy-tale. because you are the only person i can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when i went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.

(...)

and if you’re not there i will come to you, and find you… see you soon, my strange joy, my tender night. here are poems for you:

evening

you call – and in a little pomegranate tree

an owlet barks like a puppy.

in the evening height the moon’s curved blade

is so lonely and ringing.

you call – and a spring splashes with the turquoise of evening:

the water is fresh, like your voice,

and the moon, quivering, pierces a clay jug,

gleaming with its glaze.

swelter

i wiped the prickles of burning drops off my forehead

and lay supine on the slippery warm slope,

where the sun thundered among fragrant pines

with the voices of flattened cicadas.

and I floated into the scorching darkness

of the southern day, to the drunken swash of a timbrel,

to the babbling of flutes, and pan’s purple mouth

pressed greedily to my heart.

v.”

♡

♡

“8 november, 1923

how can i explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much i am all yours – with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? or explain that i cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it – and can’t recall a single trifle i’ve lived through without regret – so sharp! – that we haven’t lived through it together – whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible – or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road – you see what i mean, my happiness?

and i know: i can’t tell you anything in words – and when i do on the phone then it comes out completely wrong. because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way we talk with people long gone, do you know what i mean, in terms of purity and lightness and spiritual precision – but i – je patauge terribly. yet you can be bruised by an ugly diminutive – because you are so absolutely resonant – like seawater, my lovely. i swear – and the inkblot has nothing to do with it – i swear by all that’s dear to me, all i believe in – i swear that i have never loved before as i love you, – with such tenderness – to the point of tears – and with such a sense of radiance. on this page, my love, i once began to write a poem for you and this very inconvenient little tail got left – i’ve lost my footing. but there’s no other paper. and most of all i want you to be happy and it seems to me that i could give you that happiness – a sunny, simple happiness – and not an altogether common one.

and you should forgive me for my pettiness – that i am thinking with aversion about how – practically – i will mail this letter tomorrow – and yet i am ready to give you all of my blood, if i had to – it’s hard to explain – sounds flat – but that’s how it is. here, i’ll tell you – with my love i could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour – ten whole centuries, enormous and winged, – full of knights riding up blazing hills – and legends about giants – and fierce troys – and orange sails – and pirates – and poets. and this is not literature since if you reread carefully you will see that the knights have turned out to be full.

no – i simply want to tell you that somehow i can’t imagine life without you – in spite of your thinking that it is ‘fun’ for me not to see you for two days. and you know, it turns out that it wasn’t edison at all who thought up the telephone but some other american, a quiet little man whose name no one remembers. it serves him right.

listen, my happiness – you won’t say again that i’m torturing you? how i’d like to take you off somewhere with me – you know how those highwaymen of old did: a wide-brimmed hat, a black mask, and a bell-shaped musket. i love you, i want you, i need you unbearably… your eyes – which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrown back, you tell something funny – your eyes, your voice, lips, your shoulders – so light, sunny…

you came into my life – not as one comes to visit (you know, ‘not taking one’s hat off’) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps. fate wanted to correct its mistake – as if it has asked my forgiveness for all of its previous deceptions. so how can i leave you, my fairy-tale, my sun? you see, if i’d loved you less, then i would have had to go. but this way – it makes no sense. and i don’t want to die, either. there are two kinds of ‘come what may’. involuntary and deliberate. forgive me – but i live by the second one. and you can’t take away my faith in what i am afraid to think about – it would have been such happiness…”

♡

♡

“13 august, 1924

my delightful, my love, my life, i don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? i’m so infinitely used to you that i now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul. you turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed – you put a glint of happiness on everything – always different: sometimes you can be smoky-pink, downy, sometimes dark, winged – and i don’t know when i love your eyes more – when they are open or shut. it’s eleven p.m. now: i’m trying with all the force of my soul to see you through space; my thoughts plead for a heavenly visa to berlin via air… my sweet excitement…

today i can’t write about anything except my longing for you. i’m gloomy and fearful: silly thoughts are swarming – that you’ll stumble as you jump out of a carriage in the underground, or that someone will bump into you in the street… i don’t know how i’ll survive the week.

my tenderness, my happiness, what words can i write for you? how strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, i don’t know how to tell you how i love, how i desire you. such agitation – and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine – mounds of happiness. and i am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting – and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint – my inexplicable love. i cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations.

when you and i were at the cemetery last time, i felt it so piercingly and clearly: you know it all, you know what will happen after death – you know it absolutely simply and calmly – as a bird knows that, fluttering from a branch, it will fly and not fall down… and that’s why i am so happy with you, my lovely, my little one. and here’s more: you and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love.

what are you doing now? for some reason i think you’re in the study: you’ve got up, walked to the door, you are pulling the door wings together and pausing for a moment – waiting to see if they’ll move apart again. i’m tired, i’m terribly tired, good night, my joy. tomorrow i’ll write you about all kinds of everyday things.

my love. v.”

♡

♡

“17 august, 1924

i’m more than thinking about you – i’m living about you, my love, my happiness… i’m already expecting a letter from you – although i know that it’ll be late, since they’ll have to forward it to me from prague.

my dear love, my priceless joy, you haven’t forgotten me, have you? the whole way i ate your sandwiches and plums and peaches: very tasty, my love.

my sunshine, my tremor of joy, had you been here with me i would have been completely happy. here there’s quiet, solitude and greenery. terrible clay storks and dwarves here and there in the garden – obviously of german origin. terraces, fountains. we have lunch and dinner outdoors.

i must go to lunch, my joy. i love you. i can hear your little toothy sigh. and the rustle of your lashes against my cheek. you’re my happiness. if you want – call mme. tatarinov and tell her i’m arriving in a week. and please give my best regards to your father.

kisses, my love, deep ones, to the point of fainting, i am waiting for your letter, i love you, i move carefully so as not to break you, as you ring out inside me – so crystal-like, so entrancingly…

v.”

♡

♡

“19 august, 1925

my sweetheart, my love, my love, my love – do you know what – all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. it was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when i imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog… but today it arrived – and now it seems to me that in the mailbox where it was lying, in the sack where it was shaking, all the other letters absorbed, just by touching it, your unique charm and that that day all germans received strange wonderful letters – letters that had gone mad because they had touched your handwriting. the thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation – a week’s, ten days’ – what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you. i wake at night and know that you are together with me, – i sense your sweet long legs, your neck through your hair, your trembling eyelashes – and then such happiness, such simmering bliss follows me in my dreams that i simply suffocate… i love you, i love you, i can’t stand it any longer, imagination won’t replace you – come…

will you come, my love? my little kitten, my joy, how happily i love you today… i kiss you – but won’t say where, there are no words for that.”

♡

♡

“30 december, 1923

my dear happiness,

how charming, lovely, light you were at that bustling station… didn’t have time to say anything to you, my happiness. but i could see you through the window of the carriage, and, for some reason, while looking at you standing there pressing the fur coat to your sides with your elbows, hands deep in your sleeves – looking at you, at the yellow glass in the station window behind you, and at your grey little booties – one in profile, another en trois quarts – for some reason it was precisely then that i realized how i loved you – and then you had such a fine smile when the train began to glide off. but you know – our trip was absolutely, exceptionally awful. our things were scattered all over the train, and we had to hang about standing upright, in the draught, till the border. i wanted so much to show you how amusingly the frozen snow, like kernels of silver corn, attached itself to the inner side of those, you know, leather aprons that connect the carriages. you’d have enjoyed it.

(...)

i love you very much. love you in a bad way (don’t be angry, my happiness). love you in a good way. love your teeth. my love, you know, I’m simply very bored without you.

how i wish you were saying, right now, with feeling: ‘but you promised me!?…’ i love you, my sun, my life, i love your eyes – closed – all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels. i’m tired, off to bed. i love you.”

♡

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