Spring of a Down - 9
Собор
You will not find this in any Encyclopedia of the world.[1] Try as you may, it will elude you. And yet it is – existence as your as unreality. And yet by habit, it will sound strange to you when I tell this story. On a road with many writers, one of them stopped to capture the dull brown grass at his feet. It was wartime and he realized that many people would not recognize the subtle shades that brown could muster. Brown sky over the city made of brown smoke.[2] Pounding with violence on the Sea of Azov.
But high overhead there was smoke mixed in with the white clouds and salt air from the city. The roof of the Cathedral had a hole in it with only one person kneeled over praying for forgiveness. Anastasiya knew that the Russians were closing in on the center of the city and would stop here soon enough. She did not weep for there were no tears. She took a moment to slice a pear with a short sharp knife. Wolfing down the juices.
All around her, there were ghosts in the machine.[3] The time was short – what did she have to pray for? One vision of forgiveness. But then light came rushing headlong. Her neck looked up. She could feel the wind. She thought of the wind in the bushes and the aftertaste of forbidden knowledge to be plucked there. At midnight, after the night shift whirs by on bicycles towards the smelters.[4] At midnight, after the night shift whirs by on bicycles towards the smelters.
It was in the far past, that the forbidden fruit is the sweetest if plucked but the most poisonous if enrapture. No innovation can change this. No bench disdains no position decommences.
In the present, half a statue of the Virgin Mary half looked down – because she had only one eye under the blue cloak. Two fingers were raised-up on one of her hands. A bird’s nest had already laid out of the devastation. She tried to look closer.
But all she saw in her mind’s eye were factories with rusted bicycles though enchanted by the view of the Cathedral at anti-night.[5] The was music from within the Holy Church of God, silently harmonizing the intricate lines of silence.[6] She closed her eyes tighter because she thought she heard the hoofprints of men. Here in Mariupol, the buildings fell to a shamble of soldiers – after they had been destroyed. She turned to kneel.
The thunder of the collapse of liturgies – on the sleek point forward bombers, seeking redemption from the Satan of Earth. It is still full of sins, repentance, confessions, cupolas and … and the ecstasy.[7] She counted the engines. 4. She imagined them piloted by men who gray languid, yet intertwined, baroque tales of the gallantry that they perform – littering on a cathedral and a bizarre steel factory. Their consciences slept behind the anesthesia of cosmonaut taste and whimsical abundant silver inflorescences. A laugh at those poor slobs taking sanctuary from the pilots’ temperament and derision.
Factories melt outside as she looked in at the twisted inside. What she knew was coming was what had been before. She knew that wasn’t her high-legged silhouette. It was that the man’s ugliness could penetrate and expunge and decay.
She remembered how two months ago she had wandered down the avenue by the sea, watched the delectable boys masquerading as men The spray, the waves, the torrent of grainy sand that, for the time, she did mind as she huddled close. She licked her lips wanting to taste. But she, then, was a virgin too.
Footsteps by the doorway. It was the epicenter of the domain of death, she was sure. For her anyway. She mouthed a scream. The horror, the horror, the horror.
The horror of the smashed ripple brick with yellow stucco cinders beneath lie the bodies, the bodies of children, and the young women who nursed them.
The crows that fed on the tendons picked at the eyes.
The blocks of buildings scored sideways in blacked and white stitched rows. She had seen them, each and everyone, as ghosts with the torn clothes of the fallen. The gaps in the concrete tops are scattered with sticks. She had seen them with their hands stuck out sideways, reaching for the light. Dead in the doorways burning. Dead that haunt her, as she crawled for the cathedral, away from the low rumble of Russian tanks growling on the turf. There were dogs strapped to uniform hunters on the splay of green splashed below. The living carried some of the dead in sheets. Trundle trundle march march.
Outside in the harbor teeth of pure titanium exposed to rain death conclusive maul. There was no fire she heard on a Russian dezinformatsiya channel from a passerby while scurrying. Cats and birds and dogs swoop down to catch the floating debris.
Hail Mary,
Full of Grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary,
Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now,
and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
In spirit, she rose above the nest to the dome. Over and above the distant citadels the men built over ruins of the dead and ruined by the moonlight. It was like an alien looked down and questioned the expansive complexities, not of the universe, but of man. Of all the secrets proportionated and fragile to be torn and wrapped asunder by bright acacia.[8] Her bare flesh was desecrated. She then made a decision – she turned around and take the knife placing it across the nape of her own neck. She imagined the slice. She stood and went erect anyway. The wind from the roof stopped. It was not Russian but a Ukrainian, and a face that she recognized intimately. But 5 days of beard. A disheveled body. A weary face. A husk of the man she had wanted to flicker.
He stood and she rushed up to him. She reached him and rushed into a sweltering embrace. But as she held him glowing up, he caressed the floor. Banned from life for a visage too surreal as a number: he was dead and delivered. [9] And that is the way you will find them in fallen Mariupol – looking up through the roof, perhaps with a sunbeam piercing through the hole.
Towards God, if there is one.
[1] Honchar, Cathedral.
[2] Honchar, Cathedral.
[3] Ryle, The Concept of Mind. Police, Ghost in the Machine.
[4] Honchar, Cathedral.
[5] An allusion to Honchar, Cathedral. A central theme in Chapter 1 is the metaphor between the Cathedral and the iron works.
[6] An allusion to Honchar, Cathedral.
[7] An allusion to Honchar, Cathedral.
[8] An allusion to Honchar, Cathedral.
[9] Conway and Knuth formulated the surreal number. Knuth, Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned On to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness. Conway, On Numbers and Games.