The empty and the full

In the cities of that disbanded empire, my heart was as given to riot as ever; my tongue was always out of office. Whether in Lviv, a city possessed by lions through and through, from its façades to its doorknockers, or in Piter, where all questions were answered with a bridge, I moved from café to café, trampling time like St. George trampled the snake beneath his steed’s feet. His steed may well have been a lion, and afterwards, horse and rider probably crossed the frozen Neva and descended like a horde upon the teashop where I sat conniving with my crowd, pretending to read the press, comparing acquisitions, sightings, dreams in as eloquent a Russian tongue as we could muster. Our legs hobnobbed with the wooden, worn, elaborate, spindly, iron legs of tables; on trains our fingers wrapped around the hot bellies of tall glasses in tin подстаканчики, or glass-holders. The ten-ruble note sometimes included a thin sliver of lemon; the more generous conductors urged us to take as many as five cubes of sugar. The girls asked for a refill of hot water; the boys threw down extra coins as if summoning duels. We sipped or we swilled; we took turns pouring; we knew no measure. Польную жизнь, full life, we clamoured: fill our cups to the brim, that we might also have full lives. And then we drank to the bottom, in toast to those who were in the sea.

Beer bottles, emptied, of course, leaned against even the Kremlin wall, their necks reaching for the sun in mimic of the tulips that populated the surrounding Alexander Gardens for three sweet weeks in spring. The ubiquitous brown glass gave rise to this fairy tale, which I wrote home: in the metro every other man held a rose, a gerbera, for his flame, and every other man, having lost his reason for a rose, held a bottle by the neck, and when he’d emptied it into his throat, gave it away to a man with a rose, a gerbera, so that man’s flame would not need to buy a vase. Come spring, I was living in a neighborhood called Krylatskoe, writing home about the grubby fistfuls of early flowers lying each afternoon in the doorways of the apartment buildings. Presumably, these had been picked in the hills by children, whose parents wouldn’t let them bring the blooms inside and upstairs. But I read the poor bouquets as offerings to the gods, who could not decide when to summon old man winter stage exit left, when to cast the bees among the audience, so they might collect pollen from the flowers adorning the women’s hats.