I was not in the crowd that day.
I was not even close to 14 Waatersdram, although I was in the city on the day, and I did hear about the uproar. There is always some kind of uproar in Staff Borsch.
I am not strictly a fan of ice hockey, you see. I am a poetess. My name is Rachajl Martujns.
That agglomeration of vowels and consonants must look frightful to a non-Borschic eye. My name is pronounced something like the French name Raquel, and my last name is Martins, really not that unusual, I don’t think.
You also may be thinking, what is a poetess, and what kind of career is that for a young Borschic lady who happens to be the daughter of a deacon, and one of the most prominent deacons in Staff Borsch, indeed.
The fact is that there have been many poetesses in the land of Borschland, almost ever since Borschland began, and the first people landed on the shores and met the Loflins, who are very poetic, by the way.
I don’t think we Borschers are very poetic by nature, but the Loflinlanders are so. They have their epics that go back a long, long way, and their love poems, I do so adore those, and they have their religious poems, and wisdom poems, and almost everything they say is a kind of poem. So it was impossible for the Borschic people not to have some kind of poetry pass into them, despite that we have not always been on the best of terms with the Loflinlanders, to say the least.
Being a poetess is not a lucrative career, I will admit, and I will admit as well that poetesses tend to rely on their fathers for their livelihoods, and then on their husbands once and if they get them, unless they become deaconesses, at which time they sort of cease to be poetesses, although I can’t imagine why the two can’t mix.
At the time that our beloved Sherm Reinhardt came to Borschland, I had not yet thought on marriage, being just shy of 20 years old, and newly graduated out of the Borschland Women’s University, or as it is called in Borschic, the Daamensveltinstitut. I was much encouraged by my professors to be a poetess—that is, to write sentiments that unite all of Borschland with their beauty and universality and sometimes their subtlety, and to perform this poetry everywhere, for in Borschland it is customary to start things like state dinners and openings of steel mills with a bit of verse.
My professors, in fact, encouraged me to become a kind of celebrity, for a good poetess does engender notoriety amongst the common people, and is invited all over the country, and does sometimes sell enough books to be well off on her own, though, I dare say, that is getting more and more seldom for some reason. Perhaps that great new love of the people, the murder mystery, is cutting in to our market.
But as I say, I was nowhere near the offices of the great ice hockey club when this uproar over Sherm Reinhardt took place, and yet I feel as if I was.
I, being a poetess, must always follow my intuition and inspiration, and that afternoon as my mother set the evening tea before us, and my father the deacon took his leisure to bless it, and there was a newspaper open on the piano bench as I came to the saloon to take our meal, that I spied a picture, a lovely engraving, as our newspaper artists are wont to make, of the face of this young American man.
It was not like Sherm’s face, not as I came to know him, but it did capture something of him. It was of his profile, with roses about his neck, and looking off to the side, to the advertisement about the ladies’ foundations on that page, and there was something noble about the angle of his jaw, the command of his eyes, the roughness of his unshaved cheek, the perfect circle of his ear, that touched me. He seemed entirely himself, even though he was not really himself, just a picture. It was as if the artist had received some kind of essence from Sherm and had transferred it to the picture, with that essence intact.
And I thought, what an extraordinary young man.
“Mother, did you see the papers?” I asked as we sat down, and Father was finally finishing his prayers and blessings.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “It’s going to be nothing but ice hockey for the rest of the year up until Epiphany and long beyond.”
My father grunted, and poured Mother a glass of Anvorian wine.
“Did you see the picture of that man, the American, who’s arrived from the wide world?”
“I did,” she said. “Imagine. The first American ever to play the game in Borschland. What a feat.”
My father sipped at his own glass of wine, grunted in approval, and rubbed his hands over his fish cakes. He loved his fish cakes, especially with the dill sauce that my mother directed our cook to make for them.
“I think I may have a poem for that man,” I said.
“Saints,” said Mother. “Already in love, my dear Rachajl? What about that young man Kejls? He has such good manners.”
“I am not in love, Mother,” I said. “This is a national poem I am thinking about.”
“Then you are smitten and soaked already,” said Father.
“A national poem about an American?” said Mother. “Come now.”
“It is going to be about how we are a welcoming nation,” I said, although I didn’t really know what the poem was going to be. “And I am going to write it both in Borschic and in English.”
“But you don’t know English.”
“I know English literature. I took a course of it with Professor vaan Flijcht. It should not be that difficult to do.”
“My dear,” said father, buttering bread.
“Well, keep it short,” said Mother. “And ask Kejls about it before you submit it anywhere. He has good judgment.”
Kejls Muttik was the last person I was going to ask about this poem. Kejls was not a poetic person or even an academic person, though he did have some pretensions of that. He was a university graduate, of the Military University of Borschland, and he was getting a commission in the Borschland Navy, so I expected that I would not be seeing much of him in the very near future.
Mother was hoping that Kejls and I could get married someday. His family knew my family, and his family was a very pious one, donating much money for the restoration of Father’s chapel and the care of the deacons and deaconesses who keep our religious traditions strong and our people blessed and prayed for. I was grateful to Kejls’ father, who owned a lot of factories in the city of Tarlunz, next to Staff Borsch. But Kejls himself, well. I was hoping for quite a bit more, frankly. Is it too much for a woman to want to stand behind a great man, and I mean, one who truly realizes his greatness?
A young woman in Borschland is not like a young woman in the wide world. I have done some study of the so-called twentieth century, and I understand how it is that women are emerging from under the broad, many-feathered wings of their men and standing in the bright light of the sun. But that is a long way from coming true in Borschland, I’m afraid, and I don’t exactly know if that is what is best for us Borschic women in the long run. I hope I do not disappoint any female readers.
In any case, I thought the very first thing I must do in order to begin work on this poem was to meet the estimable Sherman Reinhart. What an intrepid young man he must be, I thought, to have come from so far away, to have understood the depth of what it means to play ice hockey in Borschland, to know that he would have such a great weight on his shoulders of being the first man ever from America to play the game for us, and for our legendary team, Te Staff.
First I took out pen and paper and composed something I thought would please the editor of Te Taglik Staff newspaper, Mejster Chrujstoff Dookens, with whom I had lately developed something of an understanding. I would write small, topical poems for the women’s society pages, for which he paid me a shilling or three. The poems were beginning to find a readership, if any of my friends’ talk was worth anything.
This time, I wrote Mejster Dookens, I would write something of the same character, but I would like to see it published in the sporting pages, where poetry is not so familiar, though not unheard of.
“Mejster Dookens,” I wrote, “I feel as if something great and grand is about to happen in our nation. With the arrival of the American in our land, can we finally be close to a moment where the whole world might be flooding to our doorstep, to follow the people of Borschland into a life that is decent, gentle, restrained, and yet joyful?”
I thought that last perhaps an overreach of the truth, and I started anew, but when I came to that spot again, I realized it might not be, and I left it that way.
“This will be the first of my poems about the estimable Sherman Reinhardt, a series of poems that will culminate in a grand work both in Borschic and English. I give you, sir, rights of first refusal to publish the entire series.”
And I finished the letter, put it in an envelope, stamped it, and left it in the box for the evening mail delivery.
Then I went to work on the poem itself, and that took me some time, for I did not finish it till well after soup, and after my mother scolded me for leaving on the electric lights so long, and not switching to candle, which is so much more pious, if less lighted. But it was worthy, I thought, worthy enough for the moment.
This is what it said, translated, of course, from the Borschic:
Ode to a Face
Hope’s an odd thing, you ring
a bell and all a city’s looking
to heaven to sing.
Saints among us, someone paints a picture
of a face that newsprint cannot taint.
What is that tracing? Of a long-awaited lacing
of boots and a crunching race as steel
cuts into ice.
Reinhardt, lion of a man
Scion of the New World, ion broken
free from the orbit of an atom
That one, not massive enough
to contain your courage.
Ah, the Borschic muse was stingy enough to contain my poem in only those few lines. I could’ve written more. But I am aware of the journalistic imperative! So much news, so few column inches.
I hoped he would like it, Mr. Sherman Reinhardt, for, I thought, he would certainly be reading the sporting pages in the newspaper, and certainly not about women’s society.
In any case, I hoped the young lion of America would understand that it was not because I was smitten with him that I wrote it, but because, as all good young women are in Borschland, I was a patriot.
I want to know more about the Loflins. Maybe you can give an example of their poetry.
Posted by: Carmen | 07/02/2011 at 02:37 PM