Living Pictures by Polina Barskova

Author:Polina Barskova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

SESTRORETSK, KOMAROVO

To Ostap

1985

“It’S ABOUT time you wrote a trip,” my companion laughed, flicking his divinely long fingers. Enchanted by this movement, I had trouble focusing on his words, distracted, as always, by form at the expense of content.

My friend is Japanese, a melancholy and whimsical interpreter of Russian poetry, and handsome, so it often happened that the better part of his conversation just flew past, scattered by the agitated morning light radiating from this most real beauty: you want to squint, turn away.

“Ah,” I said, “a trip . . . oh very funny, the poet’s dreaded, pointless p(r)ose.”

“Not at all,” my companion said, smiling, “a railroad prose, a nice little prose that stretches as far as it can. A prose that’s like time, so you feel like there’s too much of it, it’s everywhere—so you have as much prose as you have time. Not like poetry, which exits-explodes, and then what are you supposed to do? An act—an erection—an ejaculation (irresistible monstrosities from a medical encyclopedia)—you get your half hour’s entertainment and then what? You go to mother prose.”

And which trip shall we choose to fill out time’s uneven landscape, as it spreads out before us after the poem’s sweet contusion?

How about this one.

No, first I’ll tell you about something else—not a trip but a location, something like a prison.

My papa was not well.

Sometimes his face would take on a somewhat violet, actually more of a bluish, shade; his mouth would jerk to the side and words definitively stopped coming out. This meant that, once again, it was time for us to head to a sanatorium.

That year fate decreed we would take the waters in the city of Sestroretsk on the eastern shore of the shallow (depth of 2.5 to 3.5 meters at 200 meters from the beach) Sestroretsk Bay on the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea. Lining the shore is a wooded crest of dunes and hills, interrupted by riverbeds and small lakes, ponds and areas of bare rock. Sandy (“golden”) beach up to 50 meters wide. Not far from the sanatorium is Lake Razliv, created by the construction of a dam on the river. According to the Soviet census of 1989, Sestroretsk had a population of 35,498. The overwhelming majority worked at the sanatorium or leaned on the beer bar at the depot huddling against the Baltic wind, or they did both in shifts.

Why Sestroretsk? Each time my papa was suffused with his violet, Mama would procure from the mysterious-generous agency Prophylactics a vacation for two and, without missing a beat, mercilessly substitute me for herself in the formula—me, a puffy adolescent brimming with gloomy life-force. No one was given a choice. Of all the prescribed procedures (the mineral baths, the terrifying mud baths that were like being buried alive, the Charcot showers, the swims in the barely heated pool past old women looking like jellyfish), the hardest to endure was Papa’s silence.

•

Sometimes the physical strain of this exercise grew unbearable, but opportunities to take a

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