Bakhyt Kenjeev
Translated by J. Kates
. . . easy for me to grow old in a country I love, where a young argonaut takes to the open road. "Don't mind me," mutters the sleeper. "don't wake me up," the dead man babbles to God, "and don't be reckoning up my sins behind my back." Medicinal amber and agates insist: "You, too, will sail, impoverished nomad, to the happy shore." Province of mine, how you have fallen to ruin! your bridges steep, your brickwork barren and hard. "I too am a man," mumbles the living one, "I not guilty, not holy, not pleasing to the Lord." * * * How very much, it's likely, I will not get to see. In childhood I thought everything was subject to Soviet science, Sputnik, Laika, then Gagarin, and after him Titov, powerful humming mainframes swallowing rolls of computer paper, the TU-104 in a reactive sky, polyester, transistors, slides, and corn in a can. Now, here I've grown up, and now I am given over to a shameful melancholy, how wrongly mistaken I was. Yes, wrong. I imagined amiable, blissful columns of chemists and biologists in step one day, rejoicing, along Red Square on November Seventh brandishing recipes if not for eternal life, at least for happiness. And yet on the street rock or rap. Teen-agers spit on death and eternity. And yes glory to the creator. Sufficient unto the day Is the evil thereof. In youth we knew not ecstasy, nor isoamylnitrate, And as for our girls, à la Juliet, it did not enter our heads to give in to childish lust before marriage. Am I envious? My father didn't live to see Skype, my grandfather radio, my great- grandfather airplanes. What will I not live to see? I am informed of the decoding of the Neanderthal genome. What happiness that will be! Our new-born cousin will weep salt tears, will smile - a pity that I will know nothing of all that....
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Time is humming at half strength, measured, imperceptible, clearing out some, but leaving others untouched. Close the skins of your eyes, as Platonov said, To keep from seeing its pupils, to keep from hearing its wind, stop up your ears with oakum, your hands (for they are weary) - wrap in scratchy woolen mittens with knitted brown crosses. the sense of touch is also a sin, because a name (for the infant swaddling clothes, for the grown-up a shroud, for the teenager hope, warm and young) is the figure of pride, chiming with Russian time, but from time immemorial fighting with it, in tears.