Journey to Narva; In the Silence of Cities
Journey to Narva
My father was driving fast. Eyes fixed on the road, he gestured at the landscape flying by. “That is the burnt pear orchard,” he explained, “that is the smaller burnt pear orchard,” “that is the burnt Golden Delicious orchard,” “those white clumps are all that’s left of the vineyards.” As if his words had created them, I saw a field of ashes where embers still flickered.
“When did it happen?” I asked. “Oh, years ago,” he said, “no one remembers.”
Horses were grazing in a field of black stubble. “At least they are untouched,” I said. “No, no,” said my father. “If you were to look in their eyes, you would see the fires just beginning to catch.”
“How is it,” I asked, “that you are a man, an exile, unscathed?”
He said nothing but glanced at me, and in his pupils for a breath I could see the shivering flame. Then he turned to concentrate on the road. It was twilight, he explained, the hour when the extinct animals, ibex and Eastern elk, come down to lick the white line, the pure idea of salt.
In the Silence of Cities
“We are each a note of music,” she says. “We must be tested against pitch and meter. They are absolutes. We are relative. We are made of them, but we fail. We alone can be melody. We must be sounded together. The listener won’t really recognize us, just the intervals between us-—that’s a perfect fourth! A minor third! The diminished triad! Two lovers—a whole note trill. That panicked serenity, as if someone healed from a deadly sickness—that’s the major sixth in the Lydian mode.”
She pauses, thinking. Will she say that you can make up signs to duplicate us? That children will practice us until their eyes turn square from boredom?
I love her so much it feels like an addiction: is that really acceptable? We are lying on the nasty mattress. We feel its flat buttons prickle against the small of our backs. It’s midwinter, past midnight, January lasts forever, and the city never ends. Vast avenues of Detroit, factories of Brooklyn, tenements of Tallinn. The landlord still heats with coal. We are covered in a film of pale ash. We smudge each other. The sour sheet rubs against our chins. Or: rubs against my chin. She’s lost in thought.
In the window beyond the open dimity curtains, dark snow is whirling, Allegro, then Andante, then Adagio, then Presto, again and again, theme, recapitulation and coda, in sonata form.
Could it be that the night sky suffers?