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SOMEWHERE BETWEEN
Jul. 31st, 2011 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rokutaWhen I say it was only two weeks, I mean that the time we spent together was important, not that I'm making light of what, you know. Transpired. Between us. It isn't the sort of thing that happens every day. In fact I'm not sure this particular scenario has even happened to anyone else, ever, in like all of human history. To level with you, some days I'm not sure it even occurred at all. Like, in actuality. Not just to me, in my head.
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rokutaBut as Esenin turned the key, the prospect of a week off work began to weigh on him. There was nothing for it but to hole up in his little bedroom, steeling his thesis and stomach for another bout of getting sneezed on at MGU. To sleep and wake under the nymphs with some regularity. Or to call up Lyonka after all, so they could get a feel for the remaining grasses at Romanovo while Dunia was busy with the baby. The scene behind the pane now seemed sealed in, preserved for all mankind like a museum piece, The Last Day On Earth. The desks were strewn with the debris of the morning. Panteleev's had on it a glass of tea, mostly full and sweating condensation still, as if abandoned in the path of some calamity.
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conversation/01
Jun. 13th, 2011 02:52 amrokutaArriving fresh-faced and ready to instruct at St Lucida, the young Gaspard Arneri found his junior fellowship mentored by Maestro Francis Kosteas. The otherwise soft-spoken Kosteas was locally infamous, foisted on newcomers for the bouts of indigestion which sparked his temper at random. These bouts rendered him metathetic, so that those on the business end of Kosteas’s readings-out felt the ungainly urge to laugh, cower, and correct him all at once.
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rokutaHe brought with him a satchelful of documents, none of which impressed the girl who fetched the transcripts. "I don't know what these are," she told him, and vanished. Esenin spent twenty minutes in wait for further signs of life, pacing the lounge and inspecting its posters with growing resentment. When the hands on his watch crossed into lunchtime, he gave up and went to make his case empty-handed.
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rokutaThe black frames were repaired at both hinges. Esenin wiped the lenses, then worried if he shouldn't have. Thudding along the tunnel under Leninsky Prospect, he put the glasses in his breast pocket. As he arranged his coat again he could feel the jut of them against his chest, with nothing to cushion it but a reworn alcogolichka and a cotton shirt. It was too public a sensation for the Metro, as intrusive as open tears. Esenin's heart pumped like he was running. He pretended the glasses weren't there. When that didn't work, he pretended they were just a piece of clothing, only strange against his skin until his nerves dismissed them. Perhaps he had gotten away with it. He couldn't have gotten away with it. Perhaps, having noticed their absence, Panteleev was going to spring full-formed from the crowd pushing into the train. Esenin chuffed at the thought, but considering a moment longer moved the horn-rims back to their original location. That all this occupied him so much more than Pear's safety would strike home only later.
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rokutaLyonka himself had never minded losing by association, or at least had never seemed to. He was good because he was simple, and because he was simple he was a lost cause from the beginning. But even then Esenin had shared with him a sort of kinship born of struggle. Lyonka fared better, untroubled for being so low on the chain and so hopeless at schoolwork. When his classmates called him "Lyon-kol" after the post-like shape of the failing mark, Lyonka had to have the joke explained to him. He never stayed for workroom, and shredded his notes to cushion the saddle of a seven-string Ural, which he loved. He also loved Bylat Okudhzava, and had never been in a fight until he lost one just to keep Esenin company.
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rokutaThe tenements of Chapaevsky Passage had been built in 1934, the year of Esenin's conception, and as such still hearkened to a time before peepholes, when everyone was always surprised. Volunteering to answer the buzzer in 1957, their contemporary quickly became their latest victim. After a moment of staggering blankness he found himself clutching a sturdy doorknob. Then the leather cracked over his wits, to drive them boldly across a chasm between shutting the door and going for the horns.
"Nu, zdraste."
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"Nu, zdraste."
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rokutaVladimir Esenin recalls his old sofa, private behind the partition of a family bookcase, and falling asleep staring at the nymphs. Atop the bookcase there were three of them, all very nude, cast in plaster miniature to dance in a circle of interlocked arms. It was just the sort of dance nymphs would get up to: hands caressing, legs crossing legs. Their heads of half-caught hair were thrown back, such that each maiden seemed to cast her glance on the wall above. Just there, nailed up in the cramped span between nymphs and ceiling, hung an heirloom icon of the Nativity. Its shepherds echoed the nymphs with upturned faces, gazing at the Star of Bethlehem. The pathology of this spatial arrangement had always smacked of Esenin's mother, though she made no secret of hating the icon, claiming it triggered her memories of the air-raids.
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portrait/01
Jul. 2nd, 2010 03:18 amrokutaWhen Nicolaes Vondel made known his intent to hire an assistant, all of Kleine Virrserijstraat should have gone abuzz with it. Painters should have gossiped like old women -- particularly the youngest de Bloot across the way, whose successes in procreation and investment balanced the blandness of his brush and let him think himself perceptive. But then it hardly took brains to know that invitations to Vondel's studio were normally reserved for his patrons: prim lawyers, modest industrialists, landless patricians upon sudden notions of frugality. And even they rarely accepted the privilege, hating to trip along the meat-market topping the Virrserijstraats (the Grosse tapered sausage-like to the Kleine) and preferring to send runners after their canvasses.
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rokutaFrom the mixed-up home videos of Mrs. Lola H. Wilding: an artifact on VHS tape. The label establishes a period when Oskar, Mr. Wilding, still held dominion over the old Sony camcorder with its family biographies. His lettering is easy and masculine, the same hand that once marked Lola's essays on Chaucer and no doubt played some part in inspiring her to mark him back.
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