Deeds of Utmost Kindness

The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus

The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus Your hurt is incurable and your wound is grievous There is none to uphold your cause no medicinefor your wound no healing for you FOR NINA ISKRENKO & ILYA BRODSKY This page intentionally left blank A woman reading beside a white, half-hooded pram. Before her a field of colorless weeds,just behind her the birch forest glossy and impenetrable as the eyes of the dead. There is no path to her bench, no path visible through the weeds. Her calves are thick, though when she stands her skirt and coat, of equal lengths, will cover them. Her hidden face tilts down, obscured by thick hair cut in the shape of a winter hat. In a language whose very letters I fail to recognize, she spends the morning reading. THE FACULTY FOR HEARING THE SILENCE OF JESUS 63 Moscow Baths Perceives two naked men— vermilion benchmarks splotch their buttocks like folded valentines— close the steam room door behind them. When again the door closes, odor of wet heat reams our noses, a birch forest breaking wind,sweet human sweat. They do penance, whacking twigs against our stingingbacks, we who cannot breathe and leave to wind ourselves in sheets, standing erect before mirrors touching our hair. A boy's candydrop genitalia. I stare at a man in the cold tank submerged to his hat. 64 DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S The Silence of Gorky Park Perceives a species of black and white crow, executioner's hood and wings, rocking down from naked trees to eye us on bended backward knees. Thus have we been made. Gargling from a puddle, birds crouch and spring into up, penitents croaking from birch limbs: nor can they sing for their supper. THE FACULTY FOR HEARING THE SILENCE OF JESUS 65 Alexandre Eremenko is lighting a match for Katya's cigarette . The muscles of his brow contract over his inner eyes, his eyebrows flatten and descend and a fold cleaves above the bridge of his unremarkable nose. Head listing sidewise into hunched shoulder, eyes nearly closed. He is saying to the match, Ok, last chance, his mustache drooping as though disappointed greatly in the failure. Fingers too, one set holding at their tips the small light blue box, the others pointed into a wooden stick, seem to be arguing, coaxing. He holds them up again toward Katya's face, his hands together in a gesture of prayer. Striking sulfur into air, Eremenko disappears. Becomes Failing-to-light-the-match. Is waylaid, enchanted, absorbed into the privacy of an old conversation, even the smallest failure looking familiar, having that nostalgic aura, connected in its tiny way to the vast network of failures that sustains him. Then the match hisses into colors. Then Eremenko returns to find himself extending it toward the proffered cigarette. 66 DEEDS OF UTMOST KINDNESS The Conversations Overhears syllablesof welcome, speeches yielding the milk which is the milk of speech itself. That he says this much to the ear: "Do thou sing out for me?" "Yes,: sayeth ear, singing such: Around the walled KGB, a sound of such big-mouth dogs "their mouths hung down from their mouths." The guide claims to recall screaming underground, where penance committed Mayakovsky. THE FACULTY FOR HEARING THE SILENCE OF JESUS 67 Tendencies Perceives a penchant for beet-red hair dyed across generational zones: on the metro, Red Square; the performance-poet's violinist. Everywhere in a population prone to natural dark and blonde, with eyebrows unremarked. With high eyebrows and remarks, we turn on subway stairs sneezing tear gas, heads lowered as if for prayer. MEMORY thugs arrested for punching a Jew. And so they do penance, whose wives' red ear-length coiffures did not keep the men at home. Outside the station, lipsticked glasses in "Drink" machine: press to activate and tke glassswirls nearly clean. 68 DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S Beside a lopped off sycamore, this triptych of small monuments marks the end of a lineage. Fixing the eyes of tour group strays, a photograph mounted on the stone to the left: a clean shaven man in his late fifties whose serious countenance , were he not wearinga dark militaryuniform decorated at...