Maria Baker. In Memoriam

In Memoriam
Maria Baker

Publication date: April 18, 2003

The girl's name was Zhenya. She had gray eyes, smooth brown hair and soft skin. She was flexible, graceful and silky, like a Siamese cat. She laughed like a cat - she grinned, looked intently, and her eyes lit up. She bit her nails when she was worried. Maney called me.

It was probably me who found Piazza Mattei. And I fell in love first - for the proper names - in Cyrillic. For Michelina, Naso, Horace, Virgil, Euterpe and Via degli Funari. And also for terracotta, tramontana, pine and chocolata con panne - also in Cyrillic. And Zhenya was then in love with the boy Kirill. And she was the first to learn the entire “Piazza” by heart. So we sang it, that is, we chanted it with a guitar.

The fountain turned out to be nondescript. And inactive. At least in January. The last frame remained on the film, I tried on for a very long time in order to fit more dampish cracked ocher and tiles into the lens, and so that license plates on Fiats would not hurt the eyes, and graffiti on tightly locked doors... And this way and that... Didn’t come out photo. The film is over. But Zhenya was no longer there.

Therefore, it was impossible to send her a postcard with a view of the Baths, the Colosseum . I sent a postcard to the Sole Witness. But at that time he was already interested in Egypt and homestead farming. And my hasty: “I went to Piazza Mattei” flew away to the North, where it dissolved in fumes and smoke in the frosty air . So what remains is the most exciting feeling of the landscape, the delights of the topography - Mattei, Piazza - map 12, square D4. But it turned out that the place is as good as any. “The more you travel, the more complex the feeling of nostalgia becomes.” Well, yes, get there and share what you got to. We were the last generation in Russia that knew how to savor foreign travel as if it were forbidden fruit. In the late nineties, mass tourism began, and today for a Muscovite or Leningrader of our age and circle, London, Paris and Rome are more of an industrial necessity than a territorial imperative.

Joseph Alexandrovich and his brothers are another matter. Here is a New Year's ( 1974 ) card to Andrei Sergeev :

Although the unconscious body
The same everywhere... But closer to the point:
I'm in Venice again - Infection! -
You will exclaim here, Andrey,
And rightly so: I am the Jew,
Who visited twice
In Venice. What in this century
The Slavs also failed.

At the beginning of my performance with Zhenya, there was a complete shocking effect. Parents who sometimes happened to be present at the gatherings were shocked. Whore and oh God in one breath, puts it doggy style; where, how we ended , we chanted bravely. True, by the time we wring our eyebrows, obscenity ended and ancient literature and high philosophy began. The mothers were catching their breath. The boys I knew were thrilled. Strangers considered it their duty to get to know each other.

Meet... Zhenya came to New York in 1991 with a student group. While the whole group was climbing the Statue of Liberty, Zhenya, out of love, affection and faith , ran to some university address that we had obtained in Moscow from competent sources - to meet with Brodsky . Unfortunately, he had a day off from work and was not at the department. What if it turned out? She and I once argued about how to behave in the presence of Brodsky. The dispute was conducted in the conditional mood. I would try to catch the eye, Zhenya would hide in a corner and listen quietly. But they would both dress in their best. True, our ideas about everything better then were very different. She was attracted rather by minimalism, I was rather attracted by surrealism. And we had to use the same thrift stores.

And yet we, the last Soviet generation, never dreamed of the wardrobe difficulties with which Joseph Alexandrovich and his comrades fought. What was almost fashionable for us was simply anti-Soviet for them. “God, what torment, what tricks and eloquence it took to convince our mothers - sisters - aunts to remake our invariably black, saggy post-war trousers into the direct predecessors of then unknown jeans to us! We were unshakable - just like our persecutors - teachers, police , neighbors... This is why a man who grew up in the fifties and sixties today becomes desperate when trying to buy himself a pair of trousers: all this shapeless, excess baggy junk!"

Andrei Sergeev says that Brodsky “once boasted in a Mephistophelean manner about how he came to Etkind and said:

- Efim Grigorievich, I really need my book (we were talking about the first one published in America), I know you have it.

Etkind took out a book:

- Please please.

- You see, Efim Grigorievich, they give me such good jeans for her..."

In Piazza Mattei the clothing items include a caftan, a skirt and a toga. Slav, Mistress and Europe. The costumes are quite carnival-like (not like the wrinkled jacket and blue shirt of “Roman Elegies”), and the story is completely documentary. Indeed, there lived such a Michelina in Rome. Benedetta Cravieri introduced her to Brodsky, for which she received a dedication to the “Roman Elegies”. But he fell in love with Michelina! Michelina was a brunette with brown eyes and, apparently, a complete lack of taste.

That’s what Zhenya and I thought. She preferred to feed the peacock on the count's estate . What a fool! Then an Estonian collection of poems appeared (from the dear Eesti Raamat publishing house) with a photograph of Brodsky with a cat on the cover. The cat is there in an unnatural pose, like Leonardo’s ermine . Zhenya adored this photograph - the cat too, not only Brodsky, and argued that the cat should be called Aretuza. Why, I say, Arethusa? Well, that's it, Man. Then it turned out: not a cat, but a cat. The name is Mississippi. But Zhenya was no longer there.

She loved to walk. We took long walks along the boulevard ring - uphill, to Pushkin Square, or downhill, to the Yauzsky Gate. Sometimes, if we were tired, we returned home by tram. They got off at the Colosseum (known to our contemporaries as the Sovremennik ) and ran home. In front of me the river lay flattened under coal smoke, behind me a tram thundered across the bridge unharmed, and the gloom of the brick fences suddenly brightened. Good afternoon, here we are, poor youth. It turned out that in Rome you can also take the tram to the Colosseum. Or to the Pantheon. Or to the Vatican. Or to the center of the universe .

What does Michelina and her antics with the Count have to do with it, when you move a little away from the fountain, walk along Via degli Funari, cross Corso Vittorio Emanuele, there are a couple more steps and... it will appear and shine through Buonarotti and Borromini , on top of the domes and tiles with the Holy Fathers , contrary to Space and Time (or space-time according to Lotman Yu.M. and M.Yu.) the very center of civilization, the primary source, the epicenter of culture. It is impossible to become close to him (that’s why Brodsky has St. Petersburg or, according to him, New York, and we have Moscow), it is impossible to comprehend him, but it is possible to fall in love with him to the point of unconsciousness, yearn for him and strive for him. This is what Zhenya and I became infected with. Longing for world culture. And at the same time a cultural inferiority complex.

Brodsky told Solomon Volkov : “And as a result, during all my travels in Italy, I saw quite a bit there. Because it really took me quite a lot of time and energy to fully assimilate what I saw. And I, in the end, don’t think that I understood what I saw. I don’t think I know it. Because behind any cultural phenomenon, be it a facade or a picture, there is a lot of information that you need to assimilate at each cathedral, at each fresco, and try to understand what it is. What happened here that brought this miracle to life? I have such feelings especially strong in Italy, since this is the cradle of our civilization. Everything else is variations, and not always successful ones. And you absorb Italian impressions with particular acuteness, since they relate directly to you. , to your culture. And this needs to be dealt with seriously, and not skim over the surface. And I have a constant feeling that I am not able to assimilate and comprehend all this mass of information.”

Unable. And Michelina is unable to hold on. That's it. Michelina as a European culture. A view from the east (or from the west, if you remember Nabokov 's Lolita - Europe). How elevating this work is! The stub of Caesar, an athlete, a singer, especially since there is a version of a self-portrait... You are always thirsty, but it always slips away, seeps through your fingers... Oh, leave it. That's not what we're talking about!

Good afternoon. Well, we have a meeting. How insubstantial you are: next to you, a new sunset is driving sheets of fire into the distance. How poor are you? So many years have passed in vain. Good afternoon, my youth. My God, how beautiful you are.

We separated long before her death. Something broke. The string broke. A wonderful era has ended. We went to the new post-Soviet Estonia to breathe European air and became intoxicated by it. It will provide an escape from a suffocating era . They left separately. Each of us is in another life. Everything there was different or new - friends, gentlemen, outfits, cinema centers, plywood waffle cakes, exams, exams, exams. We sometimes met by chance on platforms and escalators. In the Library of Foreign Literature . But we didn’t meet again in France. Our common stars remained burning over Chistye Prudy, over Tarusa, Peredelkino, Trakai, Pärnu and Sokolniki. Especially over Chistye Prudy. And it’s not even about the stars, as the poet noted:

fall all the stars from the sky,
disappear the area,
still freedom is not abandoned,
whose daughter is literature.
She, while there is moisture in her throat,
not without shelter.
Creak, feather. Blacker, paper.
Fly, one minute.