The Laughter of Adam and Eve

At the Akhmatova Museum, Fountain House Annex

10 At the Akhmatova Museum, Fountain House Annex Eleven people knew Requiem by heart and not one of them betrayed me. In her room where I stood so many years later: two figures only at a time back then, and the word above all. The woman with the strong line of profile—there is a charcoal of her here in aquiline silhouette, in soft hat, portraited after the portraits of Dante— she is mouthing the words over and over to the other woman who silently repeats: a line, several at a time, whole stanzas, both pouring over the paper at intervals, and then without it again, between the bursts of inconsequential conversation: how early autumn came this year! Not daring even the whisper practiced waiting on line for hours outside Kresty Prison, the parcel in hand that if the warders take means the prisoner is alive— there may be listeners anywhere. 11 In the little room, just once or twice drawn close to one another, one breathes into the ear of the other who breathes back again. If it is winter, there is a fire in the tall white stove flowing around the logs washing them away. The tall, pale woman who made the poem looks at the shape of the poem she made on her friend’s lips. The hours of the making, the hours of the learning off by heart, and the moment would come. The visitor has the poem now, and the writer takes the paper, opening the iron door of the stove, slipping it onto the fire, and the two watch the paper seized by the flames convulse against a log. Or if there were no fire, Akhmatova would make a small one in an ash tray 12 and Chukovskaya would leave with what she had to declare mouth to ear, to paper again someday, reassembling the requiem, assembling us around it, mouth and ear and mind’s eye. She moves down Liteyny Prospect with no outward sign of having what she has, nothing to alert those who might be watching that anything had changed. ...