Savage Feast by Boris Fishman

Author:Boris Fishman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

It was after midnight by the time the subway dragged me home. It was unseasonably humid, and the train felt as sluggish as the whole city. It crawled half-heartedly for several minutes, then gave out a long sigh and fell silent, the kind of definitive silence you don’t want to hear from machinery you’re relying on to get home. Somewhere in the station, voices droned from the intercom. There was a lazy, distant blare from a maintenance train.

Before me sat a giant bag stenciled with Ukrainian lettering and loaded with Tupperwares full of pork-shoulder soup, bliny stuffed with chicken and onion, the liver pie, and wafer torte. I was so slow with drink I didn’t remember to feel self-conscious about the foreign alphabet on my bag. I wondered vaguely whether the man across from me could smell what was in it.

When I got home, I pulled out a small book of poems by Mandelstam, the poet the Intellectual had been talking about. It wasn’t until twelfth grade that I’d become curious about what we’d left behind instead of how to make it work where we’d gotten. A book did it. From the category that specializes in forcing a hard look at things: nineteenth-century Russian novels. Well, not all—the frenzied cold light of Crime and Punishment, earlier in the school year, had felt like reading a foreigner. No, it was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with its love, hand-wringing, and sentiment. At university, I majored in Russian literature. I felt for Russian books even if I didn’t feel for Russian people; that happened sometimes, didn’t it? But since then it had all somehow mixed together. It had been many years since I’d read a Russian novel, even in translation.

In the Mandelstam volume, I tried to find a poem about the informer who smelled of onion after his “interrogation,” but nothing seemed close. I flipped to the famous execration of Stalin that eventually sent Mandelstam to his death and tried to translate what I could. My Russian had almost vanished during my years of trying to pass as an American, then revived to near fluency at university, then nearly vanished again. I managed to speak more or less comprehensibly with my family, but, I was now sadly discovering, I was no longer up to poetry. I went ahead anyway. Eight shots of Metaxa had loosened things up. You didn’t have to be exactly right.

We live not feeling the ground beneath us,

We speak so that, ten steps out, our speech is unheard,

something, something, and something,

They’ll remember the mountain man in the Kremlin.

The fat, greasy fingers like worms,

The words, like ton weights, something-something . . .

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