The Egyptian Stamp / The Noise of Time

Selected Prose of Osip Mandelstam

Meanwhile, above the fly-weddings and braziers, the life of the city proceeded along large, clean lines. From the Mithradates-the ancient Persian fortress on a stone mountain resembling cardboard stage-setting-to the long arrow of the breakwater and the strictly genuine backdrop of highway, prison, and bazaar, the city described the aerial flanks of a triangle formation of cranes and offered to negotiate peace between the earth, sky, and sea. As in most of the amphitheatrical cities of the southern coast, its light blue and gray flocks of gleefully stupid houses ran down from the mountain like a consignment of sheep.

The city was older, better, and cleaner than anything that was going on in it. No dirt stuck to it. Into its splendid body bit the pincers of prison and barracks, along its street walked cyclopes in black felt boots, sotniks, smelling of dog and wolf, guardsmen of the defeated army, wearing service caps and infected to the soles of their shoes with the foxy electricity of health and youth. On some people the possibility of committing murder with impunity acts like a fresh mineral bath, and for such people, with their childishly impudent and dangerously empty brown eyes, the Crimea was simply a spa where they were following a course of treatment, keeping to a stimulating and salutary regime, suited to the requirements of their nature.

Colonel Tsygal'skij played nursemaid to his sister, feebleminded and lachrymose, and to the eagle-the sick, pitiful, blind, broken-clawed eagle of the Volunteer Army. In one corner of his quarters the emblematic eagle, as it were, pottered about invisibly to the tune of the hissing primus stove, and in the other, wrapped in an overcoat or a down shawl, huddled his sister, looking like a mad clairvoyant.

His extra pair of patent leather boots cried out to go-not, like seven-league boots, to Moscow-but to be sold at the bazaar. Tsygal'skij was born to nurse someone and especially to guard someone's sleep. Both he and his sister looked like blind people, but in the colonel's eyes, bright with agate blackness and feminine kindness, there stagnated the dark resolve of a leader, while his sister's contained only bovine terror. He gave his sister grapes and rice to eat and would sometimes bring home from the cadet academy certain modest ration packets, which reminded one of the food rations given out to intellectuals and those who lived in the House of Scholars.

It is difficult to imagine why such people are necessary in any army at all. Such a man would be capable, I think, of throwing his arms around a general at some critical moment and saying, "Forget it, my dear fellow, let's rather go to my place and have a talk." Tsygal'skij used to go to the cadets to lecture on gunnery like a student going to his lesson.