4 June 1995 Almaty, Kazakhstan
The raising of the bells in the cathedral has my head ringing with ideas. I spent Thursday night trying to write the event into a story. I got bogged down. How do you tell what these bells mean without telling the history of communism here, the collectivization and the Great Starvation, The Terror when millions were sent to the Siberian gulags where they were beaten or worked to death or froze, the Second World War where one of three men sent to the front never returned and maybe 20 million Soviets died, and after that fifty years of shortages and life tangled in a vast bureaucracy? And after all that the chaos that Perestroika brought where the centralized crime of government was privatized into little mafias everywhere. And everyone’s life savings dissolved overnight in inflation. Only against this 75 years of misery do the bells take their full meaning.
Last night phrases and lines kept running through my mind. They come out verse, maybe something for a song. So I devoted a part of today to that most presumptuous waste of time, writing a poem, or maybe a song.
(refrain)
Only the babushkas remember
when the church bells disappeared
when they were young and slender
and the Revolution ended
and the red flag appeared.
Citing Marx and Lenin
The commissars’ committees
lowered down the bells,
cut out their iron tongues and left
the towers mute as trees.
(refrain)
The boys and girls learned how to sing
and sang new songs of industry and labor.
They learned their Marx and Engels.
They learned what Lenin said. They learned
what not to say to stranger and to neighbor.
(refrain)
Life that is short, got shorter.
Not heaven came to earth, but hell.
Starvation, then the Terror, then the War.
Some whispered, some cried out and many
disappeared like bells.
(refrain)
The women’s backs are bent,
the men are hard of hearing.
Mouths dark like empty belfries,
the remnants of a choir
and death is nearing.
(refrain)
In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
the church bells never rang.
The faithful still stayed faithful
to the prayers they never heard,
to the hymns they never sang.
(refrain)
Seventy-five, the years that passed.
It’s 1995, the bells return
and rise into their tower
and from that tower speak
no language you can learn.
(refrain)
Babushkas light candles.
Their faces stream with tears.
They hear the bells’ bronze voices
And millions more cut short
in the long silent years.
Only the babushkas remember
when the church bells disappeared
when they were young and slender
and the Revolution ended
and the red flag appeared.
