Russians

During the McCarthy Era, when I was five years old, my father, who was an aeronautical engineer and had a high-level security clearance, pulled me aside one evening, rather roughly, after my mother had stuffed me with dinner, pushed his face into mine and commanded: Don’t ever tell anyone we’re Russian. His parents were Russian. Waves of his aftershave, Old Spice, radiated off his face and nauseated me.

I knew my grandparents. I knew they spoke with an accent, but didn’t know they were Russian. I didn’t know what Russian was. I didn’t know what he did for a living or that FBI agents came to his work, questioned him, and tried to entrap him into admitting that he was an alcoholic, an adulterer, and a homosexual, though he was none of those things.

I learned the lesson to keep my mouth shut, which served me well when I married a Sicilian and went to work for her family.

After I joined the Witness Protection Program and was relocated to a dry, western state, I became a poet. Later, I went on this vacation. Walking mindless round and round the promenade deck of this cruise ship is all I want for eternity.

No, I told the interviewer after my third, greatly acclaimed collection of poetry was published, I don’t take myself seriously. How could I take myself seriously? How could anyone? If I were a member of an animal protection society who snuck into slaughterhouses with a hidden camera, at great risk to myself then I might take myself seriously. If the owner discovered my activities and had his Mexican crew chief and her twin sister take me outside in the space between the killing floor and a set of battered dumpsters to beat the shit out of me and leave me like a carcass bleeding from the mouth, maybe then I’d take myself seriously. But I’ve already had my life of danger, and it was solely for selfish reasons.

Mitchell Grabois

Braganzas

If they were going to put me in the nuthouse I was going to need my collection of Bertita Harding novels. They had power. They would keep me alive, those stories of Karl and Zita of Hungary, Austria’s Franz Joseph and Elizabeth, the Mexicans Maximillian and Carlotta, Duse and Da, whose tale age cannot wither, and the glowing story of Clara Shumann. But my wife, a Lithuanian, whose hands were superlatively strong from decades of milking cows, tore them from my grasp and shoved them into the Fat Boy, where I heard them crackling in anguish as she held me away. I would have burned my hands retrieving them and not cared at all.

All I could save was my favorite, the story of the Braganzas of Brazil, who torn independence from the Empire of Portugal, which I had hidden in my patterned brocade vest, which I wore over my cummerbund.

They also took my zither away from me when they got me in the bughouse. They said I was disturbing the other prisoners, but how could the celestial music that issued from my fingers disturb the already deeply disturbed? I would have cured them with music, though I could never cure myself. That is often the way of the world: Jesus died for our sins.

The hell with you all. I was never cut out to be a farmer. When they release me I’ll take Bertita on the open road, and together we’ll find a green paradise, something like Ireland.

Mitchell Grabois