Everybody was going on talking the same talk—
aging, breakdown, the sense of failure—
so I dreamt myself a Celebrities’ Liner
loaded with Perrier and Beaujolais and crowded
with opulent riffraff. Maybe
the Titanic. Maybe.
There was Kennedy, Marilyn, and—odd—
a very young Arthur Miller. They’d not
met? Stalin, sadly
smoking a pipe and singing
words I can’t make out, Georgian most likely.
Complacent, in a coat cadged
from a Greek café proprietor,
Osip Mandelstam sits writing, notebook on his knee,
cellphone on his belt. A ring.
“Who? From Koktebel? No,
I don’t remember. I don’t owe you
anything. Cheers, then.”
No sign of Nadezhda. Not far off
Bliumkin of the KGB
goes past, grinding his teeth.
In the crowd, Oskar Schindler, drunk,
and Hitler run into each other. That perfunctory
salute. “Hi, Oskar! How’s it going? How’s trade?” “Well.
I’ve brought a few really good workers. You’ll see.”
Some very amusing
kids, I just can’t remember whose—except
the one on the left’s the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to Russia. And a whole brood of lovely
curly-haired madcaps from Palestine: cast
any one of them as Judas. Zhabotinsky
the Zionist poet keeps an eye on the fun.
Cast him as Christ.
Bankers, ponces, hackers, traders,
Egyptian sheikhs with harems in tow,
a soldier and a businessman at the bar—
“Vietnam?” “Oh no: Chechnia. Stone dead.”
Nureev, Freddie Mercury in purple, all
hot and bothered, both of them.
Hippies without tickets on the liner,
a ballerina from Chile, transvestites,
and somebody sweet and familiar
in a crumpled velvet jacket; also
his friend, the puny, bespectacled
expert in kitsch, his nose
eternally in a book, and uttering
never a word about the sick twentieth century.
Grimaces, giggles—two girls! Heading
they don’t know where, looking for free
tangerines, as far as they can get
from their sad mothers.
And I wander bewildered for a while, then suddenly
this character charges up—“Just
how long do you think you can just hang around?”
—smacks me across the face and hauls me
into the kitchen. And now I’m holding
a heavy tray: fruit, chocolate,
champagne, drugs, books.
—“Serve the guests!” And I’m crying
in total terror of Hitler.
Translated by Roy Fisher