WHILE STRANDED
ON THE AMSTERDAM TRAIN
— after
Nazim Hikmet’s, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.
It’s almost
the Summer Solstice, I’m sitting by the window of the stoptrein to Amsterdam.
It’s raining again, diamonds come to mind. I don’t like comparing rain on glass
to that of diamonds; the word apartheid was invented here. Returning from the poetry reading, I know the
express train always arrives first, but I’m too impatient to wait for it. I
dreamed I walked barefoot on red African earth with the white grandmothers. On
the platform, a poster announces the arrival of the Harlem Globe Trotters. The
train sign, Haarlem with its two aa’s reminds me of where I am. Glass beads to buy an
island, to furnish the ghettos of Niewe Amsterdam. I’m borderless, night has
fallen, the water fragments into shards of darkness and light. I like the
easiness of comparing water to broken glass; where are the Black grandmothers?
I didn’t know
that in this country of canals, the past would follow me (like the tail of this
train); or that the common thread between disparate journeys and lovers would
be both the noose and the lifeline. That I’d become mute from bearing witness
like the poets exiled from the sordid gardens of home: what of Breytenbach, on Malebranche, the street of sinister branches, or was it apples?
who cannot shake South Africa from his words, Paris, an afterthought. In
Leiden, where the Pilgrim Fathers left for the new world, I watch Duo Dou and
Bei Dao cycle down Papengracht, Tianenman Square whispering in the spokes: red
meat could do no better, red meat
could do no better.
The plane
wreck at the Bijlmer ghetto, Black grandchildren sitting down to Sunday dinner,
where I witnessed the flames rise like a mushroom; walked among the debris of
the dead. Hikmet, in the middle of Moscow winter, dreaming of Ramadan nights
with his grandfather and the Turkish poplars of Izmir; the white birches of
Russia could do no better. What of the secrets that are kept from us?
At the
reading, a Mexican poet recognizes me from the photo on an old chapbook,
Falling to Sea Level, given to him years
ago, and asks if I am la mujer de John. I say ¡No, es finito, es kaput! I don’t like mixing languages, speaking ill of those I once wished dead,
or being identified by their bedsheets. There is reason enough to be concerned;
I am living below sea level with another man I will leave on the train. Near
midsummer, the northern light extends its boundaries toward midnight. I don’t
like being jealous of famous old men poets whose work does not move me. Someone
asks, What makes it a poem? I am
at a loss for words and I don’t like it.
* * *
It seems I am
destined to circle the outskirts of the city by night, on the wrong train,
going nowhere in a hurry, in search of the right platform home. This train
doesn’t go to the final station, but plunges toward the darkness of its origin;
the point of destination doppleganging with the point of departure, everything
replaying in reverse, Möibius time slipping out from under me. I don’t like
sitting by the window, in my 4th decade, crying like a lost child because I’m
in the wrong language, don’t understand the equation of broken tracks while
sitting by the window on the Amsterdam train.
* * *
I remember a
train ride across Ireland; I was 19—horses galloping after the fox, the ruined
tower against billowing sky. I knew I wanted to live there, had lived there in
a past life, the concept of home buried in the simultaneous suspension between
the pillars of ancestral memory and déjà vu; the new trailhead of lovers at my
feet.
I just
remembered the how Belgian lowlands rose imperceptibly, like a slow sigh, the
fields of grain giving way to the urgency of the Swiss Alps, the village lights
so high above us, I mistook them for stars. I waited on tables, mute, unable to
speak, except in the language of food. I rode tiny cog railways, loved the way
the clouds unveiled the secret faces of the mountains, slowly—Jungfrau,
Schilthorn, Eiger—I knew their beauty was too much to see all at once, like
that of Medusa’s; my eyes did not turned to stone. I didn’t like being alone in
a strange country with no way home, or how it soured my perception of beauty;
the separation of ice and stone, not equal to the whole. I didn’t know I came
so close to dying in a chateau turret in the hills of Luxembourg; the fireflies
were magic enough when the fever broke. Came home to a man for seven years,
became a writer, but he left, just like that.
* * *
The Mexican
poet, Victor Manuel, smiles at me so beautifully, I am reminded of Alps and
train rides across the Andes to Lake Titicaca with my middle-aged lover: the
poet who left me at the end of the trip for a 19-year-old blonde with cheaper
words. Sleeping in the underbelly of the southern continent I dream they
removed Lenin’s shroud, slowly. Hammer and Sickle stenciled on the wall of the
Inca fort, Puku Pukara; ¿Que Condor Pasa?
and Tambomachai take flight on
quena flutes. Cuzco nights under the Southern Cross, my ribs ache
from breathing thin air. In the 2nd-class car with no light, we sit on boards
propped in the aisles with the restless chickens. Soldiers stop the train;
bayonet the Indians’ luggage, looking for coca leaves.
A myopic
Frenchman crawls out to take a piss, a thief steals the glasses from his face—Por
el oro, the gold. The mines of Potosi, no longer productive. Bolivia
shines with the deceptive white of purity, or of death. The Frenchman blindly
fumbles his way back to his seat. I can still see him pinching his pale
one-eyed cock by the foreskin like a naked rat. At the biological experiment
station, we watch llamas mate while lying down. Sendero Luminosos will slaughter these same animals a few nights hence.
The news follows us like plague dogs. Darkness is descending, fearing for our
belongings, maybe even our lives, I rage at John who crawls back to the Pullman
where the mordida, five US
dollars “buys” us first class, air-conditioned seats. How simple. Titicaca parts like the Red Sea on both sides of the
train. We have reached the promised land.
I take Victor
Manuel to the train station, navigate between Spanish and English with the
ticketseller, and contemplate the way his lips move in his native tongue. He
lives on Calle Amsterdam in Mexico City;
we laugh at the cosmic joke.
* * *
Moscow
Nights. This is not Hikmet’s Prague-Berlin
train; I never knew I liked the way he compared night to a tired bird on a
smoky wet plain. I know I am not writing this from a known place; and I don’t
know if the guards are beating another prisoner, or if I’m imagining things in
my own oubliette of words. I know
the guerrillas blew up the electrical plant Independence Eve,
the explosion
rocked Lima, I finished my soupa criolla
in darkness, the staccato of guns in the distance like a drum tattoo. I didn’t
know the body we found the next morning was that of the famous lawyer, named
after flowers. I didn’t know we would be among the first to welcome him to
death. I didn’t know that my life might depend on the difference of knowing
Soviet and Israeli guns upon sight. That I’d see so many dead men, or that I’d
throw three fetuses back into the sea at the request of the men who loved me,
or that John’s would be the last. I never knew I’d bear witness to all these
things before I was 40, or that I’d have to lose my heart in order to write
about them while stranded on the Amsterdam train.
* * *
I know my
escape to another country will bring other forms of exile. It’s August, 1989, I
don’t know the Berlin Wall will fall, or that in the aftershock, eastern bloc
countries, like so many dominos, will lose their boundaries in the calendar of
days. Or that the velvet revolution will cloak another kind of darkness. I have
some questions for the kosmonaut stranded in space three months after his
country disappeared: did his shrunken heart find the capacity to love again,
could he still look into the night sky without finding despair; what was worse,
the exile or the abandonment? Did he
have to learn to walk again?
Cherkassy, on
the Dniper River, shashlik picnics amid
the haystacks; I read Zhivago,
and sleep on the living room couchbed of my host-family. Sordid details we
blame on the erotic poetry we translate; it undoes us like slow mother-of-pearl
buttons. Leaving the Ukraine in the private Car #17, a communist party official
coach, I worry about pregnancy; the blonde leaves John for another woman:
poetic justice.
New Year’s
Eve, 1990. Carnival. In the square, a masked stranger kisses me; the sound of
ice falling. Bitter cold; I learn to eat fat in order to keep warm. We return
to Moscow in Car #17; the tickets cost a half a month’s salary, we celebrate by
eating Ukrainian cherries in brandy. Slowly he enters the temple of my body but
the urgency of residual memory separates us from ourselves; the paneling is of
cherrywood.
* * *
In Red Square
I stand transfixed, snow falls on the writhing madness of St. Basil’s domes. I
don’t know if Ivan the Terrible put out the architect’s eyes, or if it’s
another story of languid squalor amid false beauty. At the Pushkin Museum,
Matisse’s Goldfish has me in real tears.
I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because my period started. Or because I’ve seen
Akhmatova’s sister feeding pigeons in the snow, or that the Arbat, where
Akhmadulina still lives is a carnival for the camera’s eye. A sentimental
journey of no return for the dead: A daughter of the light, Marina Tsvetayeva,
my namesake, found only compelling darkness in the noose in the language of
lost words, & I cannot write. None of us knows the USSR will cease to exist
in two years, or what will succeed it.
I never knew
red carnations in the snow by Lenin’s tomb would stain my retina. I never
expected to be on the Moscow-Leningrad train in a 2nd-class cattle car without
official permission, not able to speak English, and risk facing deportation.
Mid-winter, six people to an open compartment; two more in the aisle. Eighteen
hours of wet fur, coal fumes, and garlic kilbasa-kilbasa; the whispering of the tracks. I long for sweet tea
from the rough, capable hands of the dizhurnia. The matron carrying flowers to a funeral and I come
to blows over gladioli and sleeping benches. Oleg says, You’re a real
Soviet citizen now! I have no country,
except that of the mind. We huddle a few moments in an upper bunk under the
glare of six pairs of eyes and a light bulb that will burn most of the night. I
am reminded privacy is a western affectation. I didn’t know we would be sentenced to understand
each other. Slave, slav, slavery of the heart, the tracks whisper. I am not Karenina, I will not
bow my head to the altar of steel tracks though sometimes it comes upon me for
weeks on end. There is no escape from the heart. We say our final goodbyes at
Platform A; he has no right to be jealous, but he is. In Car #17 the American
businessman holds me from Moscow to Kiev.
* * *
It’s August,
1991, The Coup. I fall in love with a Soviet pop singer stranded at Fort Ross
who stays with me until his ship sails. He lives in Leningrad, only now it’s
St. Petersburg. He calls me his Conchita, only I’m no nun or saint. He’s not
Rezanov, this is not Siberia, there are no horses to be thrown from except in
dreams. And death is a ship with a cargo of repeated history.
What if the
Russians had stayed in California, or if Rezanov hadn’t been killed by a horse?
* * *
At the Hotel
Kosmos the singer gives a speech in Russian, hands me red carnations. The
interpreter translates, He proposes marriage. What do you answer? The singer and I live in Petersburg. He’s devoutly
orthodox, has insomnia, Living in sin makes him uneasy. He prays for sleep,
won’t talk of the past. On the subway, people touch his arm like a holy relic: Payush
Guitara? Whispering suicide, his dead wife sleeps in the other room. When he
leaves I try on her things. He sings One-way Ticket, doesn’t know what it means. Returning by train from
the mirrored halls of Ekaterina Dvorets, I whisper yes to a life sentence, then change my mind. Vagaries of
the heart.
In the city
where Catherine loved men and horses & Peter the Great’s prick was aptly
named, we make love in elevators and stairwells because the singer’s house is a
shrine to God. I tell him I’m an atheist; he falls to his knees, adds my name
to the prayer list. We ride to Moscow;
in the quiet dark of the rocking train, making love in the lower bunk becomes a
game, my hand over his mouth. Our mouths, small white O’s in the dark frozen
wasteland halfway between the two cities, our faces lit by the erratic strobe
of platform lights. I waver over the proposal, and dream of captive horses. We
explore the Summer Palace in winter, the solstice approaches, New Year’s Eve, the
Soviet Union will cease to exist. By then, I’ll be safely home. Maryna comes to visit; we are twins on an island in a
sea of insane people. In line for bread, she says, I was 19-years-married
to a religious fanatic. They don’t get over it—ever.
* * *
On my return
to Russia, I stop in Vienna to visit Ken; we go to Hungary by train. I wander the hills of Budapest, find no answers,
other than the commerce of ambivalence. Speech eludes me, my paper becomes mute
when my notebook drowns in the Secheny Baths, a Rohrshat test of migrating ink;
six months of writing lost. Having no family, and afraid of infirm streets, I
cannot write about it. The Siganiy’s
Magyar-Russlich is as bad as mine, but we have a common yezik, or tongue, singing Russian songs after the violins
and tourist coins fall silent in Obuda. Why am I suddenly remembering the
Seagull Cafe off Nevsky Prospekt where we drank coffee bought in hard currency,
worth a month’s wages in rubles? Censorship comes to mind. Is it because
freedom is what we value least, there’s always a Jesse Helms in the wings
waiting to ride shotgun on the world.
* * *
The Vienna
train is about to leave, I heave my luggage onto the floor. My rucksack catches
on the door, I’m thrown off-balance, my waterbottle clatters onto the moving
tracks. So this is how it ends, beneath
the wheels of the Budapest train, but a conductor shoves my ass through the
door. The ticket agent sees this, lets me ride to Vienna for free. A friend of
Isaac Singer tells me even with all the prizes, in America, he couldn’t sell
his work. I get “stood up” at the Succession Building where Klimpt’s kiss
unleashes the demons of pleasure in frescos of Byzantine gold, I am crying in a
lost language. At the gates of Vienna where Turkish horses once grazed on the killing
fields, Ken changes travel plans again. He’s going home to America, leaving me
here. We decide on the night train, learning Amstel is another name for Amsterdam. The train is late.
First-class on the freight train is four airplane seats, no bed. Our last
supper: in a foul mood, I swig Hungarian wine, the tracks whispering in Eb. Tchaikovsky’s violin
concerto comes to mind.
The conductor
conveys to Ken in broken French: You must get off at the next station to
flag down the Köln train to
Amsterdam. Amstel is nothing: a
village in the Alps. I’m twice-abandoned on
the night train with mail sacks. We say our goodbyes, but the conductor,
alarmed, motions me off too. In
my nightshirt, I throw my things out the door and leap toward faith. We sleep
in the waiting room; like Cretaceous monsters from the deep, periodic trains
shake us awake
Six A.M.,
we’re the wild-eyed travelers among the placid businessmen, riding across
Germany (a billboard of swine on satin pillows—we know we’ve crossed the
border). Ken gets off in Frankfurt. I remember to change trains in Köln, offer
florins to restore the Gothic cathedral, the gargoyles need a facelift. The
Netherlands are like the paintings I saw at the Hermitage. Peter the Great also
lived in Amsterdam, saw the mirrored light for himself.
Ten years has
aged Vins, I barely recognize my college classmate who chain smokes and stays
up all night pondering the philosophic vagaries of the human psyche. My
three-day stay before catching the Petersburg train extends several months. We
pass the houses of the thinkers, the ghosts of Cartesian logic and Calvinism,
the philosopher’s stone, the cornerstone in the city of bankers: cogito ergo
sum. At the train station I tell him what
he already knows, there’s no turning back.
* * *
It’s the
Winter Solstice, I’m 40 years old. He writes me long love letters. A friend
comes to San Francisco, we photograph the homeless, we are moths circling the
light. He makes love to me; says he loves men. I dream of large cocks, the
gaunt faces of the men with AIDS that glow with a holy light, and enter into
complicated equations of ownership that will come to fruition when I return to
the Netherlands. Marilet invites me to teach poetry in South Africa. Fearing
tainting from the Dutch, the Pilgrim Fathers fled to the New World, then,
imposed their will upon the savages
where apartheid was practiced
long before the word was coined. We who laugh at the Russians who confuse
democracy with capitalism; our own freedom is bought at the expense of others.
Dreaming is circular breathing. Living is no laughing matter; will I ever be
able to laugh from the deep, this far below sea level where the plain reveals
ancient transgressions of riverbeds.
The
Yugoslavian lover, is he still alive? Do my Russian friends have enough food to
eat? Each time I enter Russia, it’s from another fallen border. I cannot speak
of the Belgrade where I bought a wedding dress for the married groom; lace made
of bedsheets for the bride who never was, never will be. And I haven’t talked
of the woods outside Peredelkino, Pasternak’s white birches and Hikmet’s dark
exile; there is a Zhivago in each of us searching
for the purity of love in the midst of war and there’s always a Lubyanka to
hold us prisoner; Hikmet knew that best. Did he dream his poems in Turkish,
transcribing them from the mother of tongues?
Riding the
train at dawn, I divide fragments of time like the mathematical dilemma of
Hermes and the tortoise in a race that never ends because it never begins. To
get half way, they had to travel half that distance, and so on, back to the
beginning of divisible time. Hikmet was right: exile is not easy—especially
from the language of lost words.
Maybe the
train never left the station. Maybe we were never born. Maybe this is a dream
in search of the whole picture both coming and going. It’s raining again. I’m
borderless, night has fallen, water fragments into darkness and light; I’ve
lost the words for home. Sitting by the
window on the train to Amsterdam I watch the world disappear like the evidence
of truth, an arrow shot into the air and falling back without leaving the
plucked song of the bow in the wind.
14 June, 1993,
enroute to Amsterdam
& 14 August, Bolinas, CA
