Vova! Am I late? Can you hear me? Today we stand in line together.
Why do you not write to us - to your father, your mother and your sister?
Vova! Your hands cannot move to wipe away your tears.
You cannot move your head.
Fill your lungs with breath.
Why are your eyes always so blue, blue, blue?
Will another dawn never pass behind those charred eyelids?
Look – can you not see through the waving corn
The white house standing cool, in the shade?
Look – here are the high bridges you dreamt of building.
Can you not feel that in the morning you will be walking arm in arm
With your beloved with her golden hair? I cannot speak her name.
Listen. Do you hear the guns our soldiers are firing towards the west?
They say, “Storm the front!” They say, “Rise up, rise up from the wet earth!”.
And then from far off lands, from the distant front
My dear son answers:
Do not call me, father. Do not seek me.
Do not call me. Do not wish me back.
We’re on a route unchartered, fire and blood erase our track.
On we fly on wings of thunder, never more to sheathe our swords.
All of us in battle fallen – not to be brought back by words.
Will there be a rendezvous? I know not. I only know we still must fight.
We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet, nevermore to see light.
Perhaps this is where it all began. But there is no beginning just as there is no end.
About the future, life keeps its silence.
Do not distress yourself in vain,
father.
All those years while my boy was growing up: they were wonderful years.
Life’s circle: clouds, rooms, orchestras, winter blizzards and summer storms.
My boy grew, his hair ruffled in the spring wind, his cheeks burnt in winter.
He flew on skis in the powdery snow floating as if at sea.
He loved music. He taught himself listening to the radio
Which filled the room with the competing sounds of drums and bassoons,
Of accordions from Tula and the Caucasian zourna.
He worked hard…. to draw and colour, crumpling the paper in
his fingers.
Columns of logarithms, mathematical formula he brought home from school.
Mock ups of stage sets not house din a theatre;
Models of schooners that didn’t sail anywhere.
And he liked to watch the houses that sprouted up on the
quiet Moscow streets,
Like giants of glass and steel, of dark blues bathed in peaceful specks of
light.
He wore out so many tires cycling in the park by the Moscow River.
How many photographs he took.
So many times at bedtime and in the morning he said “No, I am not lonely”
What did he still love?
To walk aimlessly with his comrades, in winter without his hat.
Was it right?
…..
What did he still love?
3
Snow, snow. Walls of snow. Hills. Thickets of snow up to the eyes.
The cold smoke from the travellers’ camp. The smell of grief.
All reach without end up to the mountains, all grow numb.
All are confused by the untrodden paths. Every road is gloomy. All grow numb.
Europe’s Eastern Front – here is our sons’ rendezvous.
In the field with you we stayed untouched, however be reversed, however
cry!
My son was a member of Komsomol; you a fascist. My boy was a man; you an
executioner.
In all combat, in the posts of the fire of continuous, in [rydanyakh] of
humanity in all,
One hundred times of [pogibnuv] and after being born again, my son calls
for your answer.
8
… It left the entrenchment. Smell
of the field It breathed into the person [predvestem] of kindness. In the same
instant the explosive bullet, after opening lip, was torn in the mouth
It saw all to the point, did not offend Dry blades of grass, bent by fire, And [solnyshko] for the last time saw, Both it was sorry and it forgot about the Ger. And it recalled, and it recalled, and all recalled that he forgot, from the beginning to the end. And understood he, as it will be not easy to me, Both it was sorry and it forgot father. It lived still. Minute. Half a minute, On the favor of the unrealizable of mole. And collapsed, into three ruins that bent. And made room the mother of cheese the earth. And it clung to the earth by tired body I greedily, breaking to understand, It whispered at the earth - but not by lips - by whole [Sushchestvovanem] ended: “Mother”.
Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience.
Farewell my youth, my solace, my one and my only.
Let this farewell be the end of the story,
A solitude vast in which none is more lonely,
In which you remained barred forever
From light, from air, with your death pains untold.
Untold and unsoothed, never to be resurrected.
Forever and ever an 18 year old.
Farewell then.
No trains ever come from those regions,
Unscheduled and scheduled.
No aeroplanes fly there.
Farewell then my son,
For no miracles happen, as in this world
Dreams do not come true.
Farewell.
I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son, then, is come to its close.