I had to shield myself
from beauty to survive it.
Waywardly, we made our
way to Rome. Did I mistake
our pause for a holiday in Italy?
I was a girl, I went everywhere
she’d take me. On Saturdays
to the Vatican, Rome’s main
post office to collect letters
from my father & mail our
letters to him. After we left,
he moved in with my maternal
grandparents in Kyiv for what
felt to all—palliative/urgent care.
Across the street, the twelfth-century
cathedral kept to itself, shy in gilded
theology. Her father, a decorated
officer in the Red Army.
Her mother cooked like a Michelin-
rated chef. The three of them
eventually ghosts in gold leaf.
After dinner, my grandfather
playing Schubert on the baby
grand. My fiery dangerous
memories. Three objects
of beauty.
———–—On the train back
to our practically priced apartment
for Soviet immigrants (thirty minutes
to anywhere), my mother read
his letters like Pushkin’s lovesick
Tatyana on that fevered night she
wrote Onegin her youthful, foolish
love letter. I looked on & on, on
moving grottoes occupied by livestock.
Italianate pastorals. Train travel bores &
pains me. First: the monotony of thuds,
jumps like the needle off track on
a vinyl record, skipping its way back
on track. Second: The violence of parting.
My father waving us off on a hill forever.
Third: my entry through the train window
to banality of family suffering.
Doing nothing especially special.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Inside the Sistine Chapel (in the
archipelago of theological &
administrative buildings) in
Vatican City. Encountering
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment
wall fresco, up the steps
inside the vault, on our Saturday
visits. My mother reassuring
me that the suffering of the
damned is a creative project.
In the right corner, Charon
ferrying the dead to the
underworld. Would he take
my father away, I wondered,
denying a dying man’s wish
to be with family & friends?
————-—Was my mother
hopeless? Did she believe this to be
our only time together in Italy?
I have been back a handful of times.
At twilight, my Margot just two, in the stroller
facing Rome (pickpockets, bats above us
navigating down for prey) drew out.
Behind the lip, Margot, untouched,
safe with me.
————-—Was my mother
afraid I would be stolen in plain sight,
in daylight? How would she report me
missing in hysteria of Russian?
She held on to my hand everywhere
we’d go. Like a pearl diver holds her
breath deep underwater. My wish:
to be back with my mother on our
Roman holiday. While she still had
the letters, while she stayed alive.
————-—It was on a trip
to Florence—
I was in love with my father.
(I am still in love with him.)
His love letters for us. My mother,
in step with me—
I dressed in flared denim, Roman
gladiator sandals, my own copper
hair at a standstill when I saw her
rising out of the Uffizi’s marbled
floor. I saw her as Botticelli
(her maker)—intimately, in
Birth of Venus. She invited me in,
tenderly at ten. I could see myself
in her. Alive. Away from adult
problems. Beauty saved me.
A maiden before the mark
of puberty. Small breasts
on the rim of beginning of skin.
The shell, her permanent room—
porcelain & compact
like a woman’s
mirrored pressed-powder
case. Her dead hair,
depressed down. Her
voluptuous belly, before
puberty, before marked
as someone’s again. Before
the fall. Her copper hair
covers her navel. The dream
the museum visitors could
not make overnight. She would
do away with sleeping.
Let her hair fall heavy like water,
dripping from a rarely used faucet.
The self, unmade overnight,
stubbornly clinging to symmetry
of stanzas. Moving us away
from that overnight train
from eastern to western
Europe. Cutaways of train
platforms stretching out before
the eye, like sunburned skin.
From wheat fields to cities.
The private sleeping car
my mother procured
rocked us to sleep like a cradle
to a hum of parting.
Moving in & out of
memory. I wasn’t old
enough to live for myself.
The Uffizi’s made-up air,
smothering her visitors—
Stella Fridman Hayes grew up in Brovary (a suburb of Kyiv) and Los Angeles. She earned an MFA in poetry from NYU and is the author of two collections, Father Elegies and One Strange Country (both from What Books). Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, Four Way, and others.
Photo by Damini Rathore on Unsplash
