The Voice Over

The results of this catastrophe (not understood at first to its full, utmost degree), which always remained underwater for her (not pronounced aloud or else delivered in an abbreviated version “for outsiders”), are immeasurable. What she herself allows into her notebook is obviously insufficient (especially compared with the degree of finish of other, so much more incidental topics); it is a muffled incomprehension and bewilderment: why did it come out this way? Why did this child come into the world? Irina, whom no one needed, in her dirty little shirt, is a lacerating recollection of the collapse of maternal and female essence. Not managing to give her love to her

ordinary younger daughter, who was tailored differently than the wonder-child Alya, leaving her outside the parentheses of her own existence, consciously or unconsciously (the second is worse) having chosen one of the two (she would later dissect the possibility of such a choice in “Mother’s Tale”), she turned out to be “a child-killer on trial” by her own conscience—and for the first time wrong all around in her own eyes.

What came after that? A sharp turn of her life, internal and external. Tsvetaeva turns toward Efron with all the powers of her soul—as if from a burning house or a sinking ship. She has no doubts about his moral goodness: in their relationship she had assigned him the just

role—of ethical compass, showing the true path. The fact that his image becomes more and more stylized in her poems and memoirs (the Swan, the Warrior, Saint George the Volunteer), is crucial here, too—but the certainty that she could come only to him, “by black midnight, for the last help,” is long-standing: the poem just cited was written in 1916. Tsvetaeva doesn’t even know now whether Efron is alive; and what she is ready to promise to him and herself is entirely mythic and extremely urgent: she would like to bear him a hero. “If you’re alive—I am saved. […] We’ll have a son, I know that this will be—a marvelous heroic son, for we are both heroes.” The sudden, desperate thought of a son came amid her first reactions to Irina’s death; possibly, she saw here a chance to

win back that death symbolically, to serve-out and de-serve, to become a genuine (“proper”) mother, with diapers instead of poems. In good time she succeeded in this, and even too much: her third (one wants to say: summary), passionate, arduous maternity was precisely like that—hard service, everyday work, source of a hundred anxieties and fears, the main one of which, perhaps, was the old fear of once again not managing

.

In 1921, Tsvetaeva finds out that Efron is alive and that their meeting is possible, and this acts on her like the repeal of a prison sentence. Leaving Russia, she locks it closed, leaves it behind her back, along with her own memory of the past—in the name of a new, straightened-up life. Her poems written abroad will come out as a book entitled After Russia.