Airman
When he returned from there,
where he screamed in his sleep and bombed towns
and spirits appeared to him,
he used to get up to smoke and open the window,
our ragged clothes lay together in a heap
and I gathered up a bag for them in the darkness,
but that is nothing yet.
He didn’t begin to and forbade me
to dig the back garden by the big house –
food and income for the family.
He put on weight, got angry, brutalised, then got thin
and rolled his own home-grown.
But life went on.
When he returned from there,
where the vessels of the civilian fleet fly,
from the heavens beyond the clouds,
when he had really come back from there,
we were all helpless
as children sucking at mama.
But that is nothing yet.
High up there they are singing at the controls,
the flight stewardesses are giving out wine,
trundling their carts down the rows,
but mine can’t live up above,
he leans on the Father’s shoulders
and I will not give that up.
But life went on.
When he returned forever from there,
a released man from the prison of heaven,
mysterious as a suitcase,
we became servants to the fine night,
a son in arms and a daughter around.
And he hit me in the face.
But that is nothing yet.
Like a moist blush at the word love
his blue-eyed glance slid over his face
while he hurt me.
All our family tree sat on the lawn
and saw the glow, where the horizon was,
where they hadn’t yet put out the fire.
And life went on.
He drank for a week, tear after tear,
threatened someone, “Piss off” said to someone.
He held his stomach and wheezed,
then he felt silent and said quietly
that – Up there – he did not look in my eyes –
the Heavenly Daughter lives.
She’s a daughter, a woman, a wife
and what she was like under her clothes –
I would have forgiven the lies
but he described painstakingly
her dispassionate as the skies
colourless eyes.
First he saw her, he said,
when the snow-white town was burning
and we had completed our mission
and in her blue skirt and white scarf
she stretched to me in an empty dive
to open the parachute above me.
He added: She is more visible at dawn.
She is always in a pioneer uniform,
a bluish ribbon in her hair.
Then he snored suddenly and woke the house,
now empty, without even a lock,
since we’d wasted all the money.
As for me I have nothing of my own,
but this astral bitch of his,
his commissar of the air
will answer, answer for his every turn
and remember his crashed plane
and what else was fated.
But everything changed. Life healed,
as though everything was bright, more transparent
than glass and nothing was owed it.
My man stopped, looked round
and became a controller for honest trips
on the country’s transport resources.
Only once he returned home different,
like before, the same stress in his voice
and looking me close in the face
said that he was fed up with life on earth:
the Heavenly Daughter had appeared to him
on the trolleybus by the ring road.
He lay on his bed and began to die,
picking invisible fluff off the sheet
and died, while I, out of my mind,
was running, screaming to buy Corvalol
and saw: the trolleybus was going round
and at the first window was – She.
She had on a pioneer uniform,
she was blushing to the roots of her hair.
I leant towards the window,
there was a terrible roaring in my ears,
but I made a pace towards the platform
and judgement met me.
. . . Forgive me, although there can be no forgiveness,
for the killing of a twelve-year-old girl,
innocently perishing because,
in the soulless abyss, like a fish in soup,
the Heavenly Daughter is living in sin,
but with whom, no one will ever know.
. . . And life goes on.
Translated by Richard McKane
Page(s) 221-223
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