Katia Kapovich

Катя Капович

Katia Kapovich

(b.1960)

On April,3 2002, Katia Kapovich was interviewed in the Library of Congress by Grace Cavalieri, for the program "The Poet and the Poem" and read twelve of her poems from the manuscript of her book with the prospective title "Gogol in Rome". This interview can be heard here (Real Audio), and most of the poems are transcribed down.

Check the playing time for the poem's location.

INDEX:

A Death -- 18.00

A Paper Plane to Nowhere -- 24.40

A Waltz -- 21.31

A Wolf -- 22.28

At the Young Pioneer Camp -- 8.44

Black and White -- 25.56

Christmas -- 27.28

Diogenes -- 4.40

Generation K -- 0.52

Gogol in Rome -- 15.35

In the Bathhouse -- 5.32

Something to Oppose -- 21.51

1.st Part

Generation K -- 0.52 There is one lucid dream with open eyes: I lie down on the floor, the ceiling a stage, and see us gently floating, white-on-white, or hanging still like bats in Plato's cave. We all adore loud colors, drink on the stairs, smoke too much and speak too loudly, drive ramshackle cars with broken gears from hill to valley. We mumble in English with heavy accents, dropping the articles like cigarette ashes, and suddenly forget at the end of a sentence its initial station. We don't really care what clothes we wear and still enjoy French movies for their smack of sexuality. We raise the collars of our raincoats, turning our backs on a stray foreigner finding a hotel in the dark capital where we stay as guests until we transit to a better world as painlessly as moving to the West.
	Diogenes -- 4.40 . In lethargic October worn sneakers hang from a tree, a plastic bag starts a dervish dance in the driveway, high pitched ambulance sirens grow louder every day, as if trying to shout each other down. Saturday comes, and I sit down on the balcony, facing the rain. A homeless man in the private parking lot packs his blankets into a black plastic trash can. He"ll soon go away for the winter and the trash can, his summer home, will be chained to the fence.
In the Bathhouse -- 5.32 And when at last I used to leave the house after the lazy Sunday rest, the sun was high. It saw a town in drowse; a golden rush of leaves lay to the west. All northern Russian towns are quite alike: a river, a long street along the river, a square with a statue of a leader stretching his right arm forward like a guide. The crowd headed where his finger pointed: to a bathhouse on the river's bank. I walked along with the others, a poor student, a ghost of those blind alleys, nil, a blank. In the light and shade of my sixteenth October I carried but a parcel in my hand. The smell of soap, of public bathhouse timber is what I call the smell of the motherland. And I remember skinny women's shoulders, curved spines and - with a gasp of awe - their loose and bulky bellies in the folds of many motherhoods. The old stone floor was warm and smooth under their bare feet, sunlight fell on it through the upper windows, rays intermixed with steam and water lit the hair of the bathing women. Their faces up, eyes closed, they stood under the showers, like in an ancient chapel, and listened to the choirs of migrant birds. With their necks craned and with their nipples relaxed under the water, with their palms caressing chests and falling to their hips, with bluish veins crisscrossing their slim ankles, they looked like water nymphs. Time, hold them still, save them like flies in amber! I look out of the window across the cobble-stone plaza. I see the autumn river which like a saw cuts through the log of the horizon. The eye finds only what was there before: the sky, the water, many rivers ago.
	A Death -- 18.00 My first love died in the Afghan war, but not from bullets, not by the hand of Mars. He drowned while swimming in Ferry Lake. That"s why they didn"t bring him back to us, but buried him there, in the sands of the desert. The soldiers did not shoot into the air eighteen times, which was his quicksand age. No drums broke the sirocco silence. My first love died because he couldn"t swim. They had marched across the desert for two weeks, he saw a lake, a blister on the lips of the earth. He sneaked out to the bank and jumped into the water. Then his heart stopped. A water-nymph looking a bit like me pulled him by hand ashore. There he lay on dry mignonette and watched the clouds marching across the desert sky.
Something to Oppose -- 21.51 As the third generation of dandelions is turning gray, I'll visit Moscow, where my father and his friends still prod kitchen walls with their shoulders, drink cheap wine, chat politics, grow older than their own fathers. The great wars are over; death does not draft us into the defense of death. A domestic paradise of ancient photos, on several of which I'm one of those sunny spots without features in Eastern Europe's twilight. The ceilings are so low they make you stoop in this early-"60s-built "Khrushchev home" type of block of flats. On the kitchen table I find my father's "victim of repressions" special privileges card. Fully exonerated. "So what privileges does it grant you? Can you get a visa and visit me in the States?" - "No, but I can ride the subway all day for free, if I ever get that bored." Of Putin he says, "Shitty government but its very shittiness contributes to the development of political culture, because at least there is something to oppose." A classic "60s dissident, my father couldn't live in the West. There's nothing to oppose there. He says the atmosphere of freedom makes him shrink.
	Black and White -- 25.56 Twice a year - right before my birthday and on Christmas Eve - I climb on a chair, fetch a dusty Adidas shoebox from a shelf and lay out ancient black and white photos from Russia on the dinner table, noticing that the glossy paper has yellowed in the corners. One day, in the year, say, 2012, I'll be spreading this ritual solitaire over a bluish tablecloth, and my teenage daughter will float out of her room, head in earphones, look at the collection and ask with lukewarm curiosity "How do you get them to be black and white like that?"
Christmas -- 27.58 A dry northern wind at Christmas brings clouds of seagulls to Cambridge, landing them at 10 a.m. upon Harvard's stadium. I am dishonest, I steal my way in to run here once in a while without authorization, but right now I'm just passing by. Tall bleachers to my right across the hollow amphitheater of winter seem ready to surrender to snow, but there is none. A man in a greasy Santa uniform ambles from the direction of Mt. Auburn Cemetery with an empty cigar box in his hands. He sets it down on the curbstone. "Free. Take anything you need," reads the handwritten inscription in fat purple highlighter.

2.nd Part

At the Young Pioneer Camp -- 8.44 That summer day was dim, the yellow dorms of our Young Pioneer camp winked through the fence of rain, when the bus stopped by the doors of the main office building, exhaling us. Uniform white shirts, blue shorts, scarlet neckerchiefs, we headed upstairs for our physicals, were checked for diarrhea, headaches, chickenpox, bad teeth, and humiliating lice. "Are you a boy or a girl?" - a nurse asked me. I blushed and whispered that I was a girl. At thirteen I was as flat as veneer, wore short haircuts and bit my nails. I'd been eating unwashed fruits for a week hoping my tests would reveal parasites and they'd send me home. I walked heavy-footed out of the lab and into the night. The rain had stopped, crickets were trilling, my roommates were asleep, a lonely lightbulb under the ceiling lit their faces against gray flat pillows on ancient standard bunks. An iron frame, a mattress with bad springs, a clock above my head without one hand... I opened my journal and wrote "childhood stinks" and closed my eyes. They were full of sand.
	Gogol in Rome -- 15.35 Annoyed with the parochialism of the "fantastic city" of St. Petersburg and close to the unexpected end of his life, Gogol escaped to Rome. He settled in a colony of Russian artists, sharing lodgings with his bosom friend, the painter Alexander Ge. On their long walks they discovered "the inner meaning of everything." Gogol, a perpetual titular councilor, was almost happy there: he could forget the petty insults of the civil service and a failed career at the University. He was secretly working on Book Two of his magnum opus, Dead Souls, stealing bits of furniture and parts of the domestic atmosphere from paintings of his late-Romantic friends into the mansions and orchards of his grotesque characters. His own descent into madness occurred in strongly marked ages. He saw that everything was alive in Mother Nature - trees, stones, sand on the beach, seashells - and everything called for his empathy. He stopped eating, stopped drinking wine (that blood of grapes), turned almost into a Jainist. His friends were appalled; his mother freaked whenever she received another of his strange and ambiguous letters, full of advice for the improvement of the Fatherland. His doctors prescribed enemas, hazardous treatment which seeps potassium out of the body, causing a deterioration at the heart. He destroyed his novel, throwing four hundred pages into the fireplace, and would now spend his days mostly in bed, covered with three woolen blankets. "It's cold in Italy, it's dark!" he complained to his servant. The doctors bled him with leeches until he was dead.
A Waltz -- 21.31 A Russian accordionist in Harvard Square plays a familiar antique waltz and I suddenly remember the lyrics, which have escaped my memory for years: those warriors sleep on Manchuria’s hills, where no Russian words can be heard. Our school’s choir once rehearsed it for a New Year’s Eve performance for hours in a big cold auditorium: a dozen boys in navy blue uniforms and seven girls in brown dresses and a shabby piano in front of empty rows of chairs. Some of those boys now sleep on Afghan and Chechen hills, some of those girls sing with the angels, afraid to mess up a note, while the old music teacher scratches his beard and waves his conductor’s baton.
	A Wolf -- 22.28 Once when I was fifteen, I cleaned my room and went to empty out the garbage bucket at the neighborhood dump, where I found a big dog that was scouring for food leftovers on January snow behind the containers. When he raised its head and examined me with a most attentive stare, inexperienced as I was in matters of animal behavior, I was instantly aware: it was not a dog. Whether the angel of death or an extraterrestrial, he neither wagged his tail nor lowered his gray eyes the way dogs do under similar circumstances, but rather waited for me to dispose of the garbage and leave, When I looked back from my porch, his eyes were still on me in the bleached air. Another time, many years later in Israel, I went from West to East Jerusalem by bus, because I had to interview a PLO activist woman for a Russian magazine. Her hotel was not easy to find. I walked into the wrong lane and saw a man writing Arabic graffiti on the wall of a building. His hand with a piece of a charcoal dropped as he fixed me with his slow and cold unblinking eyes. Our staring duel was short-lived. He outstared me, and then I left.
A Paper Plane to Nowhere -- 24.40 There was one autumn vulnerable light locked in the transparent and fragile objects of a mental hospital within my sight. I took my medicine without progress, which made me meditative but not bright. Each day I woke at seven, ate bland food, drank weak cold tea and walked under the escort of a physician in an unfriendly mood to a remote section. Here my imprisonment became almost inanimate, absurd. Among some loonies in the corridor I"d wait in a silent line for the door to open wide and let me in again. The male nurse called with a phonetic flaw: the stress fell either after or before, but not in the golden mean of my strange name. I was eighteen, morose, a little blind, bereft of glasses after that fistfight with a policeman. Thus I was arrested and woke up on a rough asylum bed. Evil regimes must kill, but understand who has an Achilles' heel, who an Achilles" head. Slow as a turtle after taking pills, I walked to the "art therapy" ward, where patients made paper boxes or "developed new skills," e.g. cleaning rusty irons, knitting mittens and socks for patient nurses and impatient docs. But I would always doze or, playing hooky, read a forbidden book under the desk with nurses in the background watching hockey. Then one good day they brought a bunch of kids, who limped, and drooled, and smiled with their wry mouths. They looked at us from behind heavy eyelids and couldn't do a thing. After two hours they were all taken back. Some fellows said: "Those kids looked really, really sad." Another day they came again and stared at us, the other patients. No one cared. They were mumbling a dark stifled cry, sometimes they touched the paper, gave a shy and happy sound of comprehension. Weird! They had no difference, but their clothes did. There were skirts and pants. A female child came close and bestowed on me a glance of admiration in her greenish eyes. I looked in them and saw an abyss of sadness, the asylum of our mutual madness. I looked into her eyes and saw my face and yellow spots of Russian swamps in April, a chain of golden lights, a lace of days, while she stood still, a little ugly angel. I made a box out of gray paper. That was all that I could give instead of wisdom to myself and to that orphan. But she seemed happy with my paper coffin. Her name was Carmen. Colorless and sloppy, her flesh was older than her mind. To stare at nothing seemed to be her hobby, as well as mine. That autumn, just to meet her expectations, I learned to make all kinds of paper things: planes, boxes, trains and even railway stations, and white, white ships, and cranes with widespread wings... They flew and swam across the dirty table, across the lakes of glue, and seas of paint toward the window with its yellow maple, whose autumn brushes always were so wet. That eighteenth autumn, all those ugly ducklings taught me to laugh at the slapstick universe. Forgiveness and forgetfulness, my darling, oh my Carmen! My life is also scarce and made of paper. In the evening, nurses would take them back to the orphanage and I would walk across the park which mumbled verses in the blind alleys for a lullaby.

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