In Memory of Our Fathers
for Fedor Poljakov
How did our fathers survive many decades of Soviet mendacity? How did they manage to teach us the antidote to memory? There lived in them such a distinct, elegant audacity,
it manifested itself in everything: how they sidestepped rules of history, how they tied the knots of their silk neckties a little askance, disliked hollow words, stains on the tablecloth, unpolished cutlery,
how they forgave the cowardice of colleagues and despised laziness, how gorgeously they pronounced “a punch in the mouth” or “knock ‘em dead,” and how they hated public holidays with bread and games and impure language.
After a father’s departure an empty trench remains in one’s head . . . Our dear soldiers are done fighting, curing the sick, rhyming, singing, and I don’t know how to put it without oversimplification. Instead
one evening in June you and I will find ourselves in front of Retsina Café, after traversing Judenplatz, once the center of Jewish life, now an emptiness. We’ll go inside, feel the aroma of resinated wine and see the carefree fa-
ces of the Viennese who don’t know guilt. We’ll occupy a table beneath the vistas of Naxos and remember our fathers after the Russian, Jewish, and Byzantine rites. Then we’ll go downstairs into the past, where they are eighteen and the muses
wear long black narrow skirts; where filterless cigarettes burn like streetlights; where tears are formally banned and sons are not allowed to sulk, only to play Biriba and laugh; where grim merrymakers sit around in black vests;
where on the kitchen counter in a deep dish sleeps the coarse Mediterranean salt, where, panting, lie the three fish of sorrow: sea bream, flounder, and red mullet.