She whispered, "Where are you going when you die, Sasha?"
"Not heaven."
"Why not?"
"I just know."
He should have said,"Because there is nothing to believe except you."
He was running. He was running. He was running, along the border. Breathing hard, alive, heart thudding against his pale bony chest, alive, alive and shouting! Fists punching the air! There must be some way outta of here, said the joker to the thief...
A-MARY-CA!
A-MARY-CA!
A-MARY-CA!
He was scaling the fence, flying. All around him was her. His shirt was caught in the barb wire, it tore at his large hands, ripped at his Western shirt. He was leaping, soaring, his feet crumbled against the ground, an explosion shocked the air. All around his was darkness, except for the red flowers bursting underneath his eyelids. He lay in the cool grass, silently chanting.
A-MARY-CA.
A-MARY-ca.
A-MAry-ca.
A-mary-ca.
a-mary-ca.
Her voice gripped him. "No, Sasha. I can't."
"Not for love." He begged. It wasn't beneath him.
"No"
"America..."
"My names Mary." She walked away. He walked away.
The scarlet, ruby and blood orange flowers bloomed, evolved, swirled, mezmerizing him. All around him a sea, the tide bringing in the future, teasing him, the tide carrying the past out, to be lost and forgotten. Black flowers faded in and out of the kaliedascope, getting bigger, overwhelming the red ones. The sea, picked him up, he was weightless, he was free, at last gloriously free. He closed his eyes.Coffee. Listening to Bob Dylan in his room. Her fingertips gripping his as they slipped up the stairs, her laughter echoing, echoing. Her innocence. There's too much confusion I can't get no relief...
"I'll see you in America." She promised with hope dancing in her eyes.
"Yes. Yes. You will." He said to please her.
He lay in the grass, on the other side of the fence, broken and whole, his lips blue, parted and chapped with unspoken words. Melancholy floated down from the sky in little crystals, cloaking his body in a coat of sparkling white resplendent beauty. Immortalized; his hands forever cradling bits of brown grass he had pulled from the Earth, from Ukrainian soil. He tried to remember what that man had said, it was so powerful, so great and so terrible: "Free at last! Free! At last! Good [god?] almighty! Free at last..." He could still hear those static-tinged words sparkling through the radio.
"Does anything ever stop being beautiful?"
"Yes."
"When?" She crinkled her forehead.
"When you die."
"Isn't that when everything's the most beautiful?"
He didn't answer.
She was dancing circles in square, the Cathedral was her canvas. She painted her footsteps across it's minnerets. She was rearranging the babushka dolls, she was crying as she touched painting of Anastasia and he understood that her tears were not for the lost princess, but for Russia, he was watching her watching, she was smiling at the children in their red hats, she was taking a photograph of four women, the sun bouncing of their shoulders, arms and faces.
He was watching red flowers, his life, black flowers, he was saying goodbye, he was chasing after that train she borded, he was living, he was alive, he was dying, he was living, he was dying. The lines between the two we're blurred. He opened and closed his eyes for the first and last times.
He answered her question: "No and yes. No because it's the end and yes because it's the end."
She wrote in her journal that night. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." And she wasn't sure to whom she was apologizing.
There are many among us
Who feel that life is but a joke (ha-ha-ha)
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
No comments:
Post a Comment