Manuscript Found in a Nutshell
Translated By Tatiana Retivov
Dedicated to my cellmate in the prison mental hospital, Dmitry Vatulin, thanks to whom I managed to keep my sanity during my first days there. Dmitry was sentenced to ten years of strict regime for drug trafficking, despite the lack of any proper evidence.
Sections I, IV, VI, and VII translated from the Russian by Tatiana Retivov, remaining sections written by Andrey Egorov in English
i
The impudent clang of locks
lops off blessed sleep at midway.
Angels convulsively putter about
sleep’s stump and then perish.
Foxes hide briskly in their foxholes
looking out from under their lids
in red alarm
into the outer dark—
there where one of our own,
mind you not the worst,
is given 5 minutes to pack,
not enough for even his bundles
which only need to be tied.
ii
It’s the end of May, four-twenty in the morn.
With jest and joke our fellow
deftly packs the would-be necessities
into a dozen makeshift sacks
I admit, his smile looks convincing—
as they take him away,
his smile, devoid of cheer, and then, of face,
still stays on, etched in stale air, and looks convincing.
iii
Angels of our golden dreams
cut in halves with the heavy serrated now,
devoid of what’s left of the moist matter of sleep—
freeze, dead, in crescent-like poses
and thus,
the 4:20 in the morning
is the time of the crescents:
the first one, intervened in our sleep,
the serrated clang of the lock;
the second one, the Cheshire crescent
of our good fellow’s parting smile.
I’d lie if I said he never looked low
but ne’er too much, most certainly, not now;
the third one—every dying body
of the life flock of our dream angels
cut in half, dried down lifeless;
not to mention the crescent of the moon
that could or could not
but most certainly had to
shine through the bars
witnessing the ongoing abomination.
iv
But even if it did, the moonlight reached us
through the bars of Butyrka,
through the cold glow of a warden’s projector
and the residue of sleep in our eyes—
then whatever left of it, died in towering cloud,
that devoured us as we envisioned
ten years
the term that our inmate was to serve.
v
Ten years—ten and a half: put a year for each evidence,
then add another eight, for the lack of proper evidence
makes room for the excessive amounts of justice—
there, do you hear it? “Tshuhs-tee-sss!”
Behold! Lady Justice at its worst: blindfold, blunt sword,
coiled body, length after length,
slithering into a court room—
“All rise, the court isss in sssesssion”—
cold, serpentine, scaleless.
vi
“Ssscales!”—there, cheap electronic scales,
a circumstantial evidence, becomes an alchemy tool
to transfigure old junkie into drug lord,
to deliver judgment beyond measure and scale—
to deliver a junkie from any temptation—
into Hell, a gaping tomb, long past overcrowded.
Wrong place for such a lively old man, or whoever else.
Who’d come and bargain for another junkie’s soul?
“Not by thy merit thou art dignified,”
scrawny Cerberus would have snarled,
wondering how scarce became guilt these days,
though justice is so abundant and vastly delivered.
But Cerberus has mouths to feed.
And it says nothing.
It turns away.
It grins.
It grins.
vii
Come morning we cast lots
for the belongings of the departed:
a pullover, a shirt, and baseball cap
fit me just fine,
like they were to me tailored:
the departed was a tall old man,
lean and sturdy.
viii
I turn my new baseball cap
backwards, kid-style,
and quit thinking of Dmitry Yurievich
as the deceased
as an old man
as bone marrow
now fought over by
the maws of Cerberus.
Yurievich, I wish this fiend
to choke on you to death.
The old man would have chuckled sarcastically,
still, he’d appreciate it, that’s for sure.
Source: Poetry (February 2021)