THE BIG FOUNTAIN, 1991-1935 1. The streetcar, like a broad dacha verenda, moves fast enough for you to forget the hot, still June air. Windowless, the car has a chin-high railing on ornate little posts, hard to hang on to, so you don't stick your head out, a thing forbidden by law and by Mama. Even now, I can see the warning sign illustrated with a heroic figure, breaking off pillars with his own head, which protrudes from the car. I don't hear Mama's voice; I don't hear streetcar wheels-- silent, voiceless past. When fainting away, sounds vanish last; when rousing, sounds remain hidden at the core. I'm just shy of seven. We are going to the dacha. Our landlady is named Anna Romanovna. I recall her face, her shape, her gait, but her voice and the sense of the words she spoke are lost. 2. Later, as a teenager, you no longer sense the importance of chocolaty smooth pebbles and dull bits of glass, of common little shells and simple sand, now scorching, sole-searing, now heavy and clammy at the water's edge where (and from which) is made the finest of sandcastles and is baked the finest of sandpies. And the water, sometimes clear and frigid, now warm and turbid, and so concealing from the eye the scanty sealife-- Remember the sea urchins who hide in the algae by the seacliffs? (Well, there were too cliffs)-- sometimes you could see a seahorse, tail wound round a swaying upright stem, and chunky crabs, claws outspread, scuttling for shelter. 3. A rockslide area--again and again they creep down along the overhang, a layer of earth built-up with shanties. Before them opens a startling vista. Easy to imagine that a few years on all the rest of the shacks would slowly slide downslope, that the roofs and walls, buckled and folded, would be left as strata of bleached limestone, lumber, slate and tarpaper, disassociated scraps of the tumbledown frame of time. 4. In silence goes the gaudy open endless coach of the streetcar past fin-de-siecle station kiosks (built by the Belgians and standing even now), past the former Catholic chapel, from which emerges a Catholic priest and several women, past flowering and petal-dropping and fruit-laden trees, snow, blazing sun, golden leaves-- everything a jumble-- Anna Romanovna smiling, Grandmother giving orders ("Slice the bread. . . not that bread. . . not that knife. . . don't slice that way!") Children elbow in around the basket where a cat licks newborn kittens doomed to die (save one, a ginger one, they'll let her keep). Comrade Eliza walks beside my teenaged father expounding on the subtleties of German speech (with which he'll become better acquainted during the war). The venerable arch missionary priest Petr Orlov is caretaker of the dacha. The German son-in-law will be deported with his wife on a day's notice by the Nazis. (The priest they will shoot.) 5. On the dacha lane it's autumn, scattered leaves the ground concealing, amber light, a tear of sprucegum, on a tree trunk slow congealing. Over fences spreading rampant runs untended ruby grapevine, rising up to scale the house front peering out beyond the fenceline. Back toward childhood life's flow lapses. Topsy-turvy turns the household. Death's a neighbor that surpasses all attempts to get to know. In the meantime, on our shoulders, wings have yet to lightly settle; we'll be happy just to gather, sitting 'round the kitchen table. Amber light, a tear of sprucegum, on a tree trunk slow congealing-- on the dacha lane it's autumn, scattered leaves the ground concealing. © 1996 Boris Khersonsky. All rights reserved. Translation by Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson.