Perhaps Polina should have become a poet after all. Her mind clearly yearned for poetic heights. If Polina had not been so utterly misunderstood in her work community, which at the very least failed to encourage her to pursue her strengths, and if she hadn’t been so bibulous and died before her time, she might have written anything. For example, perhaps an ode to the beautiful Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, like this:
ODE TO A BUTTERFLY
Spark of life, oh thou, bright and colorful,
amidst the tattooed crowd you walk,
but paint yourself with marks as well,
you dance, wild, and burst into song,
guileless, innocent child,
whose merit, whose success
is to play with flowers beneath the trees!
Your nature is to be like the butterfly: free,
a winged flower that soil cannot mire,
who may, and can, and wishes to find,
to search the garden’s corners and boundaries!
Fly, fly away now,
reject the root, the ground,
nimble, flee far with the winds and squalls!
For only a moment you can endure, Nadezhda,
thus must your brilliance burn bright
like the red dying of the day
to color the sky and land,
you too, bold girl,
will conquer the choir of men,
despite their wish to silence your sound!
Nor would you devour the offerings of your garden,
although you reveled until you were old,
since even a drop of honey suffices you:
a second would daze your delicate frame!
Here is the virtue of your feast,
although you do not bow to the snare,
nor laws restrain or hold you back!
Even laws are made to remind us
of will, of desire surrendered,
of power to prescribe oneself alone,
what we will surrender for peace,
but we remember still
what true freedom is like:
your game, frenzied, riotous, bright, innocent!
The ode would have been published in Novyi Mir, and Polina would have become famous. No one would have dared question her uniqueness any more. No one would have laughed at her. She would have been a woman equal to her poem, equal to all the poems she wrote, equal even to all the poems she might one day come to write. She would be big and magnificent and soon greater than Akhmatova herself!
“Despite his poetic ideas, Swedenborg’s works were left rather incomplete. Œconomia regni animalis, ‘The Economy of the Kingdom of the Soul’, was a hastily patched together book, and only three installments of the planned seventeen ever appeared of the Regnum animale, ‘The Kingdom of the Soul’ series. It may be that Swedenborg preferred thinking and reading to writing his ideas down. It may be that he preferred dreaming to writing . . .”
Out of habit, Polina slips back into her book-reading stoop, into the posture she assumed when scanning the words that throbbed on the paper. Thoughts born of words soaked into her with ease, becoming her thoughts, her knowledge, growing her larger and larger, making her a giant. But why was talking about those ideas so hard? As soon as she tried something, disturbances cropped up, circuits shorted. Maybe Emanuel was the same. The mystic closed his eyes, saw angels around him, and that was enough for him. Then when he tried to write out of a sense of duty, the visions didn’t bend so easily to words, the words didn’t melt into sentences, and the angelic nature of the angels didn’t appear on the paper at all. The ideas became dead, rotting things, little more than poor maxims. “He that is deficient in mind and spirits, is also deficient in life and intelligence; he is a dead man, a stock, a carcass,” Swedenborg wrote.
Just then a melancholy enters Polina’s mind, somewhat similar to that in her fourteenth-story flat on Yauzsky Boulevard, in those moments when she thought of her French professor, the Swedenborg scholar with the beautiful soul. He had given an assignment to her and only her: “Read Swedenborg. Even though he may be a complete wacko from a modern perspective, I found myself identifying deeply with him as I studied his ideas. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m going crazy myself. My wife already lives somewhere in the world of the angels. She smiles into emptiness and doesn’t even recognize me. But, to return to the point, it would be interesting to hear what you think of Swedenborg as a layperson. Does he arouse any feelings in you . . . for example a protective instinct?”
The professor had cast Polina a significant look, and Polina returned it. A long, burning silence ensued, an electricity between them, and snap, Polina received a shock on her fingers when she happened to touch the man’s red scarf. They both burst out laughing in relief, after which they leaned on each other. The wine was better than ever. And soon they would meet again.
But then the world built a barrier between them. The House of Culture of State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1 was occupied, people were killed, and the world observed a moment of silence for the deceased. The timing was perfectly wrong for Polina. It was nothing but the snot-faced mockery of a sadistic fate. Polina was left alone with her Swedenborg. For a long time, a full six months, she believed that things would work out, that fate would yet deliver a surprising, joyous reunion. Because it couldn’t be a coincidence that a man like that, speaking words like those, with glances like his, appeared before her—could it?
Polina read, waiting and pining. Her heartache was salty, manifesting as sweat in the folds of her knees and on her back, palpable as a burning in her face. Begemot was gracious. He didn’t judge her as
