WEBVTT

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This next one is also new.

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I wrote this last March and I
wrote The Prisoner in December.

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I just recently mailed
this on to my editor

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to also add to the book.

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This is called The Emigre and
it's about a Russian woman.

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Lubyanka is the prison
in Russia where Stalin

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imprisoned a lot of people.

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And if you watch that
program, Reilly, Ace of Spies,

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then you'll remember
the name Lubyanka.

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"The Emigre"

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I stared down from a terrace at
the firemen and their slickers.

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Black mice and black hats.

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Close my hand around
some smoke, then open it

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and that smoke is gone like
the Russia of my childhood.

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When I was a girl, my
father worked for the Cheka.

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One morning, he forced my mother
outside in her torn nightgown.

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The apartment was
filled with a scent.

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Ink.

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Paper.

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Fresh bread.

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I was warm, full of
potato latkes and milk.

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I sang the song of
the world revolution,

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but that revolution
betrayed my mother.

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It's quiet now, as the
fire trucks pull out

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onto the asphalt sea
like tiny crimson arcs,

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as quiet as the apartment
when I stopped singing.

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When my father said, "Come.

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Your mother's safe."

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I followed him down the steps,
but near bottom I stopped.

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He turned around and
held out his arms.

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Then I jumped.

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I sit down at the
word processor.

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On the screen, a page from
the memoir I am writing.

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Even now, I hear
my father's voice

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as he shouts at my mother.

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She jerks her head toward
me, then raises her skirt

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and wipes her face.

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I erase one word, another,
until the whole page is gone,

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but I cannot erase that scene.

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My mother is locked forever
in the Lubyanka inside me,

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her dirty bruised face
streaked with tears.

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The handbill she printed in
that beautiful script of hers

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torn and scattered
about her on the floor

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like mutilated black
and yellow butterflies.

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Now as I lean over the
keys with my eyes closed,

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her face rises inside me, a fat
harvest moon in a sky of India

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ink, a face whose features
are so clear, so like my own,

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that I cannot deny them,
yet I do deny them.

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My life is mine.

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She's dead.

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She died.

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She dies each time I write.

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But no, she's alive.

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She condemns me for leaving,
for bearing witness only

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in the dark.

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I begin once more.

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A scene fades in, out, there
are shouts from outside.

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A door is flung back.

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Mother and father are
taken from the room.

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Father, who worked for the
Cheka, murdered by the Cheka.

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Mother, who opposed
it, also murdered.

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I go back to the window, look
up with a gray tarpaulin of sky,

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and see Father riding a red star
down from proletarian heaven.

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And further out, Mother,
straddling her own renegade

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star, gesturing
and waving to me.

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They want to teach me to
die for what I believe,

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but I say disown the world.

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Don't save it.

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Don't try.

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Live for what you believe.

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Survive.

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Survive another night.

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But here they are,
pressing their bloody faces

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against the glass.

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I slide the bolt back.

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It's then our eyes meet, my
two brown speckled marbles

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and their sockets filled
with a black blinding

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light of the universe.

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Jerry Stern came
to read in Kentucky

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and I had been trying
to work on this.

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I had seen this program
about Russian emigres,

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which was really interesting.

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A lot of them aren't
really happy or comfortable

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with freedom.

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It's a frightening thing for
people who haven't really

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had it or whatever.

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Maybe we don't have
complete freedom,

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but we have a lot more than
a lot of the emigres do.

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At any rate, and Jerry
Stern was reading

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and he was talking
about Mayakovsky

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and he said Mayakovsky had been
betrayed by the revolution,

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and I thought that is
kind of what I want

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for the mother in the poem.

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