The misery in Ukraine made me think strongly of all kinds of events in Moscow in October 1993. I lived there at the time and occasionally received Russian lessons somewhere in the city center from Irina, a good-hearted, always nervous woman of about 40 years old. who, in a large, run-down room, dispensed plenty of floury biscuits to endless locks of tea from an electric samovar.
On that particular October day, I found Irina sobbing. “There are tanks in town!” she shouted. ‘Terrible. What awaits us?’ It was so. A severe political crisis unfolded with gruesome fighting in the city that left 2,000 dead, but worst of all was the uncertainty: would the fledgling democracy last, or would Russia return to what we’ll conveniently call ‘Communist times’?
In a trembling voice Irina taught me a poem by Osip Mandelshtam that day. It was a short, simple poem, ideally suited for beginners. It read, more or less literally, like this:
‘You and I are sitting in the kitchen together/ Sweet smells the white kerosene/ The sharp knife, the round bread/ Pump up the primus if you like/ Or else gather some pieces of string/ Tie the crib before sunrise/ So that we can go to leave the station/ where nobody can find us.’
It sounds nicer in Russian, the lines are trochaeic (PAdum, PAdum, PAdum, PAdum, such as ‘Jantje saw plums hanging’) and they rhyme, two by two, in so-called ‘masculine rhyme’. A cozy rhyme, I thought, about two people in love who are planning a cozy trip in the warm kitchen, so why did Irina seem so captivated by it? I didn’t understand that kerosene either, but Irina explained that: that was the fuel for that primus (a small stove that you can easily take with you on a trip).
She had a lot more to explain, because without prior knowledge this is indeed just a verse, but it becomes something different when you know that Mandelshtam spent a large part of his life on the run from the Stalin regime. In 1938, at the age of 47, he died in a Siberian camp near Vladivostok.
The poem dates from 1931. That cozy sitting in the kitchen suddenly appeared in a different light. Those people are not in love, but on the run. Or worse, they’ve been on the run so many times that they’ve become mellow and laconic about it, like, shall we have another sandwich in the hot kitchen or shall we pack our bags again for the umpteenth time? leave for God knows where?
Once you know that, many words in the poem take on an ominous meaning. That sharp knife, for example, and those pieces of rope. It is not for nothing that some translators turn that round loaf into a ‘ball-round’ loaf, such as Peter Zeeman here: ‘We sit quietly in the kitchen/ White kerosene spreads a sweet smell/ Sharp the knife and round the bread… Turn the primus high/ Or else tie up with some pieces of string/ Close our travel basket before dawn/ To set off for a station/ Only findable by the morning sun.’
After Irina’s lesson, I knew the poem by heart. It kept haunting my head during those stormy, uncertain October days, between bending over to bullets and counting corpses (I was working for Dutch radio at the time). Well, it went well. Then yes.
I’ve been thinking about that poem a lot over the past few weeks. It doesn’t help, but it is beautiful. You would almost learn Russian for it.