What she was thinking over I wonder
Ever well-dressed elderly Kapr-Tarry
Always on a bench in front of her house
One with faded sidings
Its color a dried bread crust
I liked to melt in my mouth
What she was then pondering over
Wearing national black sackman*
In front of her front garden
When she trained us to count from one to five
In the strange lingo of Gorny Mari folk
Carefully bending little kids’ fingers
Oh, if I were only more intent
Or better concentrated on it
If my fingers were not so dirty
Then I would have learned
To count from one to five
In a mysterious Gorny Mari language
Fair girls from alien Gorny Mari land
Would ride bicycles to my town
Their white teeth dazzling me
And sparkles
From the bikes’ spokes
Reflected in my cracked lenses
In the morning I’d hurry to meet them
Skipping a small rivulet
It’s just a tiny brook in summer
When the bright-eyed girls from Kozhvazh
Were cycling into my town
To buy some daily bread
Dashing they swept past me
On bikes so close to me
The fair girls of Gorny Mari side
They were so much alike
Like sisters
But not like my sister at all
I heard that an elder girl
Had been waiting for a Mari guy
Who served in the Army
But if he served in the Navy
She had to tarry for him even more
For three long years
When old woman Kapr-Tarry
Peacefully passed away
Then Master Leon
The strongest man in the town
Hammered out and brought
A huge iron cross
As he had promised before
To engrave there the years
A Gorny Mari woman Kapr-Tarry
Kept sitting on a bench here
Waiting for her husband a soldier
Who never was back from the front in fact
Yet I don’t know his name
In spring in her front garden
Right in front of her house
One with faded sidings
A white lilac flowering shrub ever blossoms out
And I’m picking a spray of lilac
So low a fence over
I’m looking for an inflorescence
With five petals
Among all those cross-headed ones
Oh, if I were able to count up to five
If Kapr-Tarry had bent my little finger
So tiny, a little boy’s
Ikty
Kockty
Kamyt
Four
Five.
~ Valery Petrovskiy
Valery Petrovskiy is a Chuvash State University, Cheboksary graduate in English, and graduated VKSch Higher School, Moscow in Journalism. His work has been published in The Missing Slate, Metazen, Legendary, Monarch, and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and Super-10 finalist to The Open Russia’s Literary Contest, 2012. Valery lives in a remote village by the Volga River, Russia.
* sackman – traditional Russian women’s clothing
Featured artwork: Cotton Candies, by Maria Khan.
