The Biscuit Joint: Poems

Siberia

45 SIBERIA I’m not thinking of vodka or the czar or the Orthodox Church or any other typically Russian topic as I look out the window of the train between Ekaterinburg and Irkutsk but of orgies, of all things, which I assume occur here at the same rate at which orgies occur in other countries or maybe even a slightly higher one, given the cold winters and general malaise of a people living in what is still largely a feudal society, which doesn’t mean I’m thinking of organizing or being in or even watching an orgy, in Russia or elsewhere, but how, according to an article I’d read by a guy who’d been in one, they’re pretty unsatisfactory, on the whole: the people are pasty-skinned and dumpy, and either you can’t get the others to do what you want to, or else you have people trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do, and yet the whole time the guy was excited because he was thinking, “I’m at an orgy! I’m at an orgy!” And that’s the way I feel as I look out the window and think, “I’m in Siberia!” Only Siberia is beautiful, not scary. The birch trees are so slim and silvery that you expect them to thrum like harp strings as the wind rushes through their branches and tosses their green leaves this way and that, and there are mountains in the distance and rivers in the foreground, and people are bathing in the rivers, Russian people, and they’re laughing and splashing each other, not starving or freezing to death or pulling their teeth out with their own fingers or being beaten by sadistic guards, which is all 46 you can think about when somebody says “Siberia” to you, but this is Siberia, and it’s beautiful. Well, not if you’re writer Varlam Shalamov who spent seventeen years in a camp there. Shalamov’s greatest story is “Cherry Brandy”; in it he imagines the thoughts of the dying poet Mandelstam: “Life entered by herself, mistress in her own home. He had not called her, but she entered his body, his brain. . . . Poetry was the lifegiving force by which he had lived. Yes, it had been exactly that way. He had not lived for poetry; he had lived through poetry.” When he was a boy, Shalamov’s father tried to stop him from reading so much: “Stop reading!” he’d cry, and “Put down that book—turn the light off!” He didn’t, of course, which is probably why he became a lover of poetry even if he didn’t become a poet. And it’s why he could write, in “Cherry Brandy,” that “everything—work, the thud of horses’ hoofs, home, birds, rocks, love, the whole world— could be expressed in poetry” and “each word was a piece of the world.” In his memoirs, Shalamov says his father never spoke to him of another poet, Batyushkov, and from this he concludes that “my father did not like poetry, feared its dark power, far from common sense.” He praises Batyushkov’s poems for “preserving the most unexpected discoveries” and then quotes a line from him: “O heart’s memory, you are stronger than reason’s sad memory.” No wonder people love poetry and the powerful fear it. “Poetry is respected only in this country,” Mandelstam said; “there’s no place where more people are killed for it.” I’m not afraid of you, poetry, therefore I must not be powerful. 47 But you are. Poetry for president! Tippecanoe and poetry, too. United we stand, divided we write poetry. Poetry’s got my back! Tread on me, somebody—go ahead, I dare you. I think a poem must be like an orgy—okay, you’re disappointed most of the time, but you never know what’s going to happen. Plus you can make the people in your poem as handsome as movie stars. Why aren’t we all poets? Why aren’t we all in jail. ...