Katia Kapovich
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
The Merry Disciplinarian
Now there's no way that I'd remember that tune the friendly psycho sang when we would sweep the yard together out by the homosexual wing. He had a pellagrin's dry skin - no laces on his beat-up boots. And it was fall. The cry of cranes filled up that leafiest of yards. The orderly would then escort three more out for their daily stroll. We'd squat, dragging on cigarettes, scattering ashes by the wall. That's when he'd start, his bald head swaying with what was spilling from his heart. One for all. We didn't know the song and sat there and listened, keeping quiet. * * * After a funeral in autumn the band drinks vodka in a garden; the midday chimes have fallen silent and the accordion's forgotten. To die like this- to have somebody strike up a tune for all my kin, then pull a corkscrew from a pocket, without a word, and take a drink. You'll look and see: the sky's cleared up above the belfry in the town, and now, once more, they'll pass around that little paper cup.
In Nabokov's Memory
Translated by the author
Dead roses, plastic tulips, dry immortelles- he hated them in the German hotels, drinking coffee from cups whose shiny backs had been designed with swastikas of cracks. He never settled down to sink his roots in any fathermotherland. Old bear, he wore the same old-fashioned English suits that had traveled so far during the war. His wife, his alter echo, read him books as he lay ill in bed, prepared to die. He knew by name all foreign lakes and brooks as they passed by. A man forgets men rather than forgives. Laugh, Mnemosyne, healing muse of those whose heads are crowned, but not with laurel leaves- with the whispering reeds of other shores.
Flamenco Evening
Because spring came a month late, whole crowds descended into the streets, including myself and that midget girl. A band was playing flamenco favorites, and she was all dressed up, as if for a date who had stood her up in front of all those people. She started tapping her foot, her shoes on unbearably high heels caught the rhythm but never left the spot between the neon of the Cambridge Trust Company and the dismantled meadows of Harvard Flowers. Her short white hands pressed to her chest embraced her broken heart and held it like a bowl of milk. She danced and danced, her shadow growing longer than her body, as the Square streetlights came on, erasing footprints from the dust but leaving standard paper cups to whiten in the regular dusk.