Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya

trans. Julia Mikhailova

American Prayer

Fireworks were flashing and going off behind the window but I was wrapping myself up in a blanket in such a way that neither hands nor feet would be out, into a single warm cocoon. If any body part sticks out, then when the war starts with America, it will be cut off by a missile and blood will drip on the floor, and explosions behind the window will be louder and closer. When under fire, all the space outside the blanket is the most dangerous.

Americans were expected to start the war at night, around ten or eleven, after the TV program for children, Goodnight Kids, was over, and when two of the show’s puppet hosts, a piglet Khryusha and a rabbit Stepashka, would be deep asleep in their plush dreams. Americans had to wait insidiously until the tired puppets fell asleep and started dreaming; definitely after that no one will rescue me. I knew I would not cry because hero-pioneers from a book that I had just read did not cry when they were dying. As for the puppet piglet Khryusha and the puppet rabbit Stepashka, they never cry at all. The only thing I wanted was for everything to be over quickly. Another thing I wanted was to have time to burn my red dress, which was hanging in my closet. Our people are always Reds, which means that they, the others, are of a different color--they hate red. And very soon, around eleven or maybe at half past eleven, when the war begins, the first thing they will do is come to my closet, open the door on the right, see my red dress in it and look at me with a question: "What? Is it your dress? But it is of the same color as your flag!" And then neither my blanket will help me nor will hero-pioneers protect me, and I will see how buildings collapse across the street and how dust glimmers in a dull sky.

The blanket was choking me. My heart was beating. I was mumbling a prayer that I made up in a hurry: "Oh, Lord, listen. I agree to give you a week of my life but please make it so it doesn't start tonight." The Lord was listening and I was falling through black dreams. I didn't know how many times I would have to wake up with horror and lay afraid, afraid to come up to the window--what if right now the last, the brightest flash appeared on the horizon?

But there were no flashes outside the window. Instead there dragged on interminably the May and then November Demonstrations, it rained and the rain was dark. It snowed, and the new year sunk into the snow. It was another year when the war was cold but it was warm under the blanket; and before I went to bed I used to read Mark Twain, then Salinger, then Vonnegut, and after that Faulkner, Faulkner and Faulkner, because I needed to know what to talk about with those who would come and wake me up—so it goes--and the sound and the fury behind the window were dying down, fading away into the night.

Back then I didn't know yet the exact number of friends my parents saw off to this very America, while I huddled, scared of the imminent war--all those who along with my mother were called to the court for an interrogation: "Is it true that you said American pants are better than ours?"--"That's true, and I haven't changed my opinion!" All those with whom my father calculated how much alcohol was consumed by the characters in Hemingway’s novels (the amount was very small for some reason, something like 128 grams per person). At farewell parties everyone drank more than those characters--by the glasses or by the bottle--because my parents were saying farewell to friends forever. Only to meet again in twenty years, and by then my parents’ friends didn't drink anymore, they took care of their health. They were unfamiliar and strange people, and Papa Hem was left far behind, further than America, and further than Kilimanjaro.

Back then I didn't know how many friends I would see off. All those friends with whom I stood in line to get tickets for an Aquarium concert, with whom I sang along with Butusov "Goodbye America, oh-oh! Where I will never be!"--all those who lent me "Wish you were here" and "American Prayer" to copy overnight… all those I will never see again. Well, granted, sometimes some people do come back, sometimes, and they have the faces of onetime friends, those who left Russia--but now they speak with an accent, they think in a strange language, and our youth has passed long ago.

Another thing I didn't know back then was how many times I would wake up in that very America that swallowed my friends and the friends of my parents; that very America which I recited from memory to my dozing nephew. "I have been once acquainted with the night"--I told a two-year-old child, and he would close his eyes, and his dream was peaceful.

Out of my American window I would see the waving stars and stripes of a strange flag above a neighboring building. And the next morning, at the seminar of American Journalism History, we would be discussing whether a citizen has the right to burn his or her state flag, and for a second I would feel hot, just as I had under the blanket, waiting for the war. But I’d pretend as if this subject was of no interest to me, I don't understand its very premise, each person has the right to burn down all of her or his life, after all, and start an entirely new one, one possessing only a smoldering whiff of one’s past.

Then school would start, and I would sit in a big auditorium and study theory of Hollywood Cinema and American History of the 60s. The teacher would start knocking chalk against the board and say: "You should learn this. If you have questions, please ask." "Cold war" and "A-bomb" would appear on the board, and everyone would copy these words in their notebooks obediently in order not to forget them. And afterwards we would drink "White Russian" in a bar, and the bright yellow streets of the Boston night would plaster us with snow, and an American boy would say with a smile I’ve been looking for ever since, "You are you, there is no one else like you."

The American blanket would be too cold, and I would have to ask for another one. And then we would pass our exams, go grocery shopping to a supermarket across the street. Dry milk, egg powder, olive oil and whiskey--some wonderfully well-balanced nutrition I am taking back with me to Moscow, where they say there is nothing to eat at all!

Back then I didn't know yet that I would miss these streets and this feeling that everything is fine and that the world is built wisely, and that any problem can be solved--all you have to do is put down in your notebook the important words, or smile, or go grocery shopping. I didn't know yet back then that upon my return to Moscow I would stop being scared of the bomb and start wearing red sweaters, thinking of that which is sacred, listening to Leonard Cohen, reading Richard Brautigan--and would watch in a David Lynch film the red roses sway slowly against a white picket fence and blinding blue sky--the colors of the American flag.

Yet sleep would come fast and easy to me, and I would never dream of America, nor of those, all the friends of mine who left, died or stayed over there. And even when wrapping myself up in the cocoon of a blanket and whispering a child's prayer ("Holy Father, let everything be fine. Let the world be built wisely. Don't let the war start tonight"), I would know that they would not come--neither at ten or eleven, or even eleven thirty. Never. They would never come because they are already here, somewhere close to my heart, together with the puppet piglet Khryusha and puppet rabbit Stepashka, hero-pioneers, Jim Morrison, Papa Hem, Bob Dylan echoes in the lyrics of Aquarium’s early songs, and a burning flag. It’s burning, and the flames are flaring and going out, flaring and going out, and I just cannot understand why my heart is beating so madly.