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Pale sun falls on the milky wall. The table’s draped with cloth and there are velvet-covered chairs but she stands as she reads, her loam-coloured skirt flowing down into darkness and her smock, as blue as a Madonna’s, like a wide sky round the full-moon shape of her almost-born child.
A crumpled map’s pinned up, showing the countries where he travels: lands of fat coconuts and ginger root, of turmeric heaped like powdered gold. Each day her fingers trace the place-names, weaving over rivers, climbing mountains of another language. And his name too has begun to sound odd on her tongue, which, as she reads, moistens her lips, and her heart beats faster, for the ink words on the flimsy, cinnamon-scented paper that trembles in her hands, tell her that he will be home, that he is on his way, his ship sets sail—
Her face is lit, as though for a moment she were touched by a rich hot sun that ripens spices, or felt the breath of sea-winds plumping canvas sails. She smiles, and feels the child inside her wriggling to be born.
Winter is ending, the ice is cracking under the boat as they carefully lift
the shrouded paintings onto the shore. They’ve reached Siberia: a tiny island
where prisoners have lived, and monks, each cradling in the lightless days
the glimmer of a memory, a liturgy, a poem learned by heart.
She’s carrying one of the icons under her coat, as if to protect it
from cold, as if to keep it secret as her father once did, smuggling
holy pictures out of the country into safekeeping in his English church.
She remembers stories of babies in wartime who stay in the womb for more than a year
until danger has passed, and she smoothes down her coat and knows that beneath it, close to her skin
is her favourite Madonna and Child. And now, in the white beginnings of spring
with the gulags all gone, the barbed wire torn down, and fresh paint on the domes
so they gleam in the sun, the icons are back from their exile:
and all through the Orthodox chants the radiant haloes of saints
are stroked and blessed and kissed and it seems in the candlelit dark
that all those hands and lips you see are flickering with gold.
So precious that she holds it in a white cloth, not to let her fingers touch or stain the cover; but more precious still are the words she reads, that she’s absorbing from the book which is lifted up from her lap
as though she will in a moment raise it to her lips which are the same pinkish-red as the cover and kiss it, the unmarked book with its delicate paper and peculiar smell, its pages and pages of undiscovered words—
Late summer, and the last of daylight grows more precious: it’s as if by gazing at the sky you could somehow bear the sunset’s weight, keep back the dark that comes so quickly
and, scattering the ashes in the field at dusk you don’t look down at the earth where they fall but keep your eyes fixed on the sky, the last of the light, its yellow so pale.
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