Владислав Ходасевич{*}

472. THE MONKEY{*}

The heat was fierce. Great forests were on fire. Time dragged its feet in dust. A cock was crowing in an adjacent lot.                      As I pushed open my garden-gate I saw beside the road a wandering Serb asleep upon a bench his back against the palings. He was lean and very black, and down his half-bared breast there hung a heavy silver cross, diverting the trickling sweat.                       Upon the fence above him, clad in a crimson petticoat, his monkey sat munching greedily the dusty leaves of a syringa bush; a leathern collar drawn backwards by its heavy chain bit deep into her throat.                  Hearing me pass, the man stirred, wiped his face and asked me for some water. He took one sip to see whether the drink was not too cold, then placed a saucerful upon the bench, and, instantly, the monkey slipped down and clasped the saucer with both hands dipping her thumbs; then, on all fours, she drank, her elbows pressed against the bench, her chin touching the boards, her backbone arching higher than her bald head. Thus, surely, did Darius bend to a puddle on the road when fleeing from Alexander's thundering phalanges. When the last drop was sucked the monkey swept the saucer off the bench, and raised her head, and offered me her black wet little hand. Oh, I have pressed the fingers of great poets, leaders of men, fair women, but no hand had ever been so exquisitely shaped nor had touched mine with such a thrill of kinship, and no man's eyes had peered into my soul with such deep wisdom… Legends of lost ages awoke in me thanks to that dingy beast and suddenly I saw life in its fullness and with a rush of wind and wave and worlds the organ music of the universe boomed in my ears, as it had done before in immemorial woodlands.                                And the Serb then went his way thumping his tambourine: on his left shoulder, like an Indian prince upon an elephant, his monkey swayed. A huge incarnadine but sunless sun hung in a milky haze. The sultry summer flowed endlessly upon the wilting wheat. That day the war broke out, that very day.

473. POEM{*}

What is the use time and rhyme? We live in peril, paupers all. The tailors sit, the builders climb, but coats will tear and houses fall. And only seldom with a sob of tenderness I hear… oh, quite a different existence throb through this mortality and blight. Thus does a wife, when days are dull, place breathlessly, with loving care, her hand upon her body, full of the live burden swelling there. <1941>

474. ORPHEUS{*}

Brightly lit from above I am sitting in my circular room; this is I — looking up at a sky made of stucco, at a sixty-watt sun in that sky. All around me, and also lit brightly, all around me my furniture stands, chair and table and bed — and I wonder sitting there what to do with my hands. Frost-engendered white feathery palmtrees on the window-panes silently bloom; loud and quick clicks the watch in my pocket as I sit in my circular room. Oh, the leaden, the beggarly bareness of a life where no issue I see! Whom on earth could I tell how I pity my own self and the things around me? And then clasping my knees I start slowly to sway backwards and forwards, and soon I am speaking in verse, I am crooning to myself as I sway in a swoon. What a vague, what a passionate murmur lacking any intelligent plan; but a sound may be truer than reason and a word may be stronger than man. And then melody, melody, melody blends my accents and joins in their quest, and a delicate, delicate, delicate pointed blade seems to enter my breast. High above my own spirit I tower, high above mortal matter I grow: subterranean flames lick my ankles, past my brow the cool galaxies flow. With big eyes — as my singing grows wilder — with the eyes of a serpent maybe, I keep watching the helpless expression of the poor things that listen to me. And the room and the furniture slowly, slowly start in a circle to sail, and a great heavy lyre is from nowhere handed me by a ghost through the gale. And the sixty-watt sun has now vanished, and away the false heavens are blown: on the smoothness of glossy black boulders this is Orpheus standing alone. <1941> вернутьсявернутьсявернутьсявернуться