Excerpts from Journal with Closed Eyes

Every flower grows in a prison.

—Salvador Dalí

7 November. They assemble us in The Square.

The Square, decorated in red, flags and portraits. My friend next to me in her marine blue coat and little wool cap. She’s shaking from the cold, she’s shaking for fear, she’s shaking out of love for her mother she can’t see anymore.

A truck has arrived during the night. In silence. The silence of footsteps that don’t return. Siberia—is that far? No, not as far as death. But the day doesn’t want to end, nor the cold. Her mouth opens at regular intervals like a valve, chants: sta – lin, sta – lin.

The voice multiplies, resounds through the crowd. The crowd in the mirror, double-sided mirror. Agony of the seasons. She takes my hand and looks at me. Her mouth open, her eyes remain mute.

And can you describe that? a woman asks Akhmatova in the line in front of the prisons of Leningrad.

Yes, I can, she responds.

The executioner washes his hands after the ceremony. The spring water is a transparent pink, the blood has lost its color. The wind has fallen silent.

Black uniforms, black angels, we are leaving the earth. Who has seen us, who has known us?

I recognize the prison by the reflections of sunlight and the odor of mold. And sometimes, I see it.

The sun draws bars in the air through which birds enter and exit. Invisible.

But I sense them. They fall.

They spin.

They die. I hold them for a second at eye level, where, in the gaps between the light, they can still retain their form.

And I hear cries, human cries, when the wind blows from the east. Therefore, I can distinguish my own cry. I bend over, discover my body in the grass.

It’s Friday and the crucifixion has not yet taken place. So I’m told.

With a scalpel just the right size for each, thoughts are extracted. Torture without pain and leaving no trace. We content ourselves with little, very little indeed. We’re grateful for what we don’t have. We spy on one another in the halls and are ashamed of ourselves.

–Hate each other!

–Okay!

Walls are growing from the ground. Someone is whispering in the small rooms, little coffee cups, little alleyways, little world cut from the larger script, little trembling hands, little portions of life.

Suddenly you find that you’ve grown too old.

I’m reading a novel on a bench near the lake. The beach is empty, soon summer will arrive with all the noise and all the colors.

Two children in the distance, their ball rising into the air: a small incision in the blue.

This ball. The arc it makes in the air. It falls on the other side of time, in our old garden, in the country we’ve abandoned. I catch it in flight and night descends so gently I see souls dressed in white coming to meet it.

And I see myself, sitting there, listening to the descent of night on the hills. The blooming cherry trees of a palpable beauty . . .