Requiem

By Anna Akhmatova

Oh no, and not above an alien skydome,

Not under foreign wing-sweep's shroud - But stood together with my people,

Where my sad people were then found. – 1961

Instead of Preface

In the frightful years of the Yezhovshina I spent seventeen months within the prison lines of Leningrad. One day, there was a moment when someone "identified" me. And that's when a woman with blue lips who stood directly behind me and who, naturally, had never in her whole life heard of my name awoke from the stupor which came so organically to all of us and, leaning close to my ear, asked me (there, everyone spoke in whispers): "And all of this, are you capable of describing?"

And I said:

"Yes, I am."

That's when something slightly resembling a smile quickly slid over what was once her face.

Around April 1957,

Leningrad

Dedication

Before this sorrow mountains bend,

The one great river fails to flow;

But toughly-latched are prison gates

Across them are the slave-dug holes

And a deathly yearning falls.

Sure, for some of us the winds still blow

And the twilight bares its tender faces -

But we're the same all over, we don't know,

Only hear that keys are scraping coldly,

Hear the heavy steps that soldiers left.

When we would rise if to early supping,

When we would tread across a capital debased

And there would reconvene

More breathless than the dead ones.

So while the sun drops fast

And Neva River dons more fog,

Why, in the distance still keeps singing hope...

The sentence is decreed... At once the tears start streaming;

Now, from everyone I have grown far,

As if with my pain all of life they'd remove,

They'd remove from inside of my heart.

Or would push me askew, to my back,

Push me down.

But still walks, walks along,

Though wavering, she steps.

Walks alone, but walks ahead.

And where are they now,

Of my two bedeviled years

Those unwitting girlfriends?

What do they envision, sense,

Within Siberia's swirled storms?

And what do they hallucinate

Within the circle of the moon?

For it is to them that I send out

My farewell hello.

- March 1940

Introduction

This took place when the only ones smiling, 

Were the dead ones, for stillness so glad -

While, a useless appendage, meandered

By its prisons our own Leningrad.

And when, growing insane from their tortures,

The convicted ones started to move,

While some steaming train whistles

Were breaking

Into quick separation-themed tunes.

When such deadly stars hung right above us,

When so blamelessly grimaced the Russ

Under wheels of dark convict-filled train-cars,

And beneath all the blood-covered boots.

I

They were walking you out in the dawn time,

As if carried, behind you I stepped.

In dark pantries the children were crying,

By God's altar the candle wax wept.

On your lips is the cold of an icon

Deathly sweat on your face...

Can't forget!

And I will, like the guard archers' wifeys,

Howl beneath Kremlin towers, lament.

- November 1935, Moscow

II

Softly flows the quiet Don,

Yellow month enters the home.

Enters in a hat astray,

Sees that yellow month the shade.

Ill, this woman feels all wrong

And this woman is alone.

Husband buried, son in jail.

Would someone for my sake pray?

- 1938

III

No, it isn't really I,

No, it's someone else who suffers!

Not this way...

Just couldn't I...

And that thing,

The thing that happened,

May black branches hide with growth,

Let the streetlamps nights cart off.

– 1939

IV

If someone could then show that

Mocking girl,

That lovely favorite of friends,

That jolly Royal Village sinner gal,

What some far day your life

Would have become.

Show how, three-hundredth in a line,

And with a package

Beneath the Crosses you would stand,

And how a falling tear, while growing heated,

Your New Year's ice would burn away.

There,

Where a prison poplar wavers, bends,

And not a sound.

While just how many crimeless lives

There end right now...

V

For seventeen months now,

Do I yell and yell...

"Come home!", I call you,

Before a hangman's toes I fell,

My son, my horror.

All things at once became confused,

I couldn't say:

Which one's the human? Who's the beast?

How soon the execution's day?

And only flowers flared away,

An incensed ring,

But every footstep somehow strayed,

Fell into nothing.

While at my eyes directly stared

And threatened an impending death

A star grown bloated, vast.

- 1939

VI

Weeks are lightly fleeting by,

What took place I can't divine...

How, my son, into your prison

These white nights would keep on peering,

How these nights would glare, would look

With the hot eyes of a hawk

And of your exalted cross

And of death would surely talk.

- Spring 1939

VII

The Sentencing

And then they dropped a word

Made out of stone

Right onto my still-breathing chest.

It's okay — for, after all, I was ready —

Somehow I'll take care of all that.

Today, I must finish, oh, so many things:

Must slaughter my memory dead,

Embalm my old soul, make it turn into stone,

Must learn how to live with myself.

And if not,

Then...

— Summer's heated rustling

Through my window: like a holiday...

So long ago, I first foresaw within me

This empty dwelling and this shining day.

- June 22nd, 1939, The Fountain House

VIII

To Death

I know you'll come for me one day - So why not now?

And I await you -

It is so hard to carry on.

I dimmed the lights and open the wide door

For you, so simple and from wonders forged.

So, take upon whatever form you want,

Commit a break in with a poisoned gunshot

Or slide by with a metal weight,

Just like some steely bandit,

Or poison me with a typhoid disease...

Or with a faerie tale,

Incessantly Imagined by you thus,

And nauseatingly well-known

To all of us, - So that I'd see

Above the sky-blue hat 

Of a pale cowardly old housing head,

That I no longer care.

Still swirls and swirls the River - Yenisey -

And shines, so luminous, the Northern star;

Now those beloved eyes, their clear blue glimmer,

A final-most of horrors covers up.

- August 19th, 1939

The Fountain House

IX

Already madness

With its wing

Half of my soul

Is covering.

Intoxicates with wine of flame,

Invites into a blackened vale.

I understand now, that to him

I must give up this victory.

That to my alien, by now,

Such alien nonsense

I must continue listening.

And it won't let me take away

Nothing at all

Into that vale

(No matter how much I could ask it,

No use, however desperate my pleas)...

For neither the son's eyes,

So frightening

With stone-turned pity,

Nor the day when finally the thunders came,

Nor that lone hour of a prison date,

Neither his hands,

With all their darling coldness

Nor nervous shadows of the lindens,

Nor distances

Nor even easy-sounding words

Of final-most of comforts.

- May the 4th, 1940

The Fountain House

X

The Crucifixion

1

"Weepeth not for Me, oh, mother,

While in a casket Me seeith..."

A choir of angels the great hour

Proclaimed and blessed,

And heavens melted down in flames.

And unto Father did he say:

"Why have you, thus, forsaken me?!"

And to the Mother: "Oh, but do not weep for me..."

- 1940, The Fountain House

2

While Magdalene kept tossing, weeping,

The favored pupil slowly turned to stone,

But where, in silence, the old Mother stood,

Why, no one dared to glance there,

Not at all.

- 1943, Tashkent

The Epilogue

1

I learned how faces shed themselves,

How 'neath the eyelids fear would glance,

How cuneiform's hard parchment pages

Upon the cheeks would sorrow trace,

How locks of hair from black and ashen

Would turn to silver in a flash,

On lips, resigned, would wilt a smile,

In small dry laughter shivers fright.

And all my prayers are not just for myself,

But for each of the people

Who would with me there stand,

Within those cold July's

Or in that merciless cold,

Beneath the red and blinded wall.

2

Again the hour of remembrance has neared.

I see you and I feel I heard:

Both her, whom almost to the very window they would walk,

And also her who would no longer tread her homeland's earth.

And also her who, with her pretty head a'flaunt,

Would say:

"When I come here, why,

It now feels like home."

I'd wish each one of them by their true name to call,

But they have confiscated all the lists,

Nowhere can one now learn such things.

For them such broadened tapestries I wove

Out of these poor words

That I from them had overheard.

And I remember them wherever runs my way,

In every time and place,

And can't forget them anyways

Whatever may be

All these new calamities.

And if they shut again my tortured mouth,

With which a hundred million people now shout out,

Let them recall me as I stood back then,

And think of me on anniversaries

Of my remembrance day.

And if, one day, within this very country

A statue they would wish to build for me.

In favor of such celebrations,

I can't help, but happily agree,

But with a sole condition - Please do not build it

Where I was once born, beside the sea,

For my last link to sea I have now ripped,

Nor by my Royal Village garden's tree stump of belief

Where, so disconsolate, a shadow seeks and seeks for me,

But build it here,

Where for three hundred hours I would stand,

Yet, they refused, in spite of all my wait,

To open for my pain that latch.

For, even in the midst of blesséd death,

I fear that I'd forget the rumble of the black Marusya trolleys,

Forget the shutting of that heavy,

Hate-constructed, door,

And how, just like a wounded beast,

An aging woman wailed and wailed some more...

And let it be that from the still and bronzéd orbs

Like tears would stream that slightly melted snow,

And in the distance let him coo,

That prison dove,

While on the Neva River

Silent ships still make their path.

- Around the 10th of March, 1940.

The Fountain House