Bowstring

The Young Tolstoy

We ate apples all winter long.

Those were difficult times.

I am not writing about this in a book to criticize the past, or brag about my health. I want to recall how happy we were despite those difficulties.

It was very cold in Petrograd during the revolution years. We had very little food; the bread was variegated, kind of tousled, mixed with straw—you could only eat it if you were distracted by something else, when you had no time to look. Fortunately we were very busy.

Uplifted by the wave of the revolution, without really comprehending it, we were immersed in it, and we were in love with it as young people can be in love.

We lived a difficult life.

I witnessed everything from the very beginning, I began to understand things much later.

There are names of people in my old phone book that I can’t call anymore. But names don’t get erased from memory. I lived with my friends and thought along with them. My mistakes form a major part of their mistakes. Generally speaking, I haven’t been able to make them happier in life. Still, my suppositions and conversations have played a part in their discoveries.

Nightingales sang below my window, or maybe they weren’t nightingales at all.

They don’t care that they have been exhausted in poetry; they don’t know that they’ve been refuted.

Leaves fall surreptitiously here, almost unnoticed, like words change in a language