Old Photographs

by Dmitry Vedenyapin
translated by Yuri Vedenyapin

Old Photographs
I want to arrive in “the other world” with a handkerchief.
     I will settle for no less.
     (V.V. Rozanov)

Say what you will, but it is very difficult
to imagine heaven.
Although
if you try hard,
it is possible.

To begin with,
you have to imagine
feeling absolutely wonderful,
like
you probably last
felt when you were six.
No! Even better.
Next—family.
Everyone is well.
It is written that in the Kingdom of Heaven
people don’t marry—
thank God!—
yet nothing is said about food.
It’s therefore reasonable to imagine
Grandma
at the heavenly stove
(which is, by the way, not that dissimilar
to the double-burner electric hotplate
that we had in Aleksandrovka),
stirring something heavenly
in a heavenly little pot.
Grandma Nyura has gone to the heavenly grocery.
Dad is leaving for heavenly work.
Mom is sewing a heavenly dress for Grandma…

After dinner, Mom and Grandma
are reading
under the pine trees
in a wide chaise longue.
The day is full of many other heavenly miracles.

Despite the popular belief
based
on the erroneously understood biblical verse,
in heaven, time
does exist.
Naturally, of a different kind than here.
The same is true of space.
The principle of the three unities,
restrictive
even for the earthly theater
in the heavenly theater
is fully abolished.
Our boldest notions of freedom
are disgraced.

I am saying it just in case
someone is tempted
to accuse me
of being too harsh in my directing.
What if Grandma
perhaps
has no desire to stand at the stove,
or even to be Grandma in the first place;
or Dad—to go to work,
however heavenly.
Of course, in heaven,
everyone is given the ability
to be anywhere at any moment.
Including
being in different places at the same time.
While the notion of age
does not exist there at all.

The past will happen again,
which evidently
or rather
inevidently,
means the following:
themainpast—
theonlyone
that for sure
exists here—
will become part
of what does not exist here
and cannot exist,
namely:
the future
(in the true sense of the word),
or—
sub specie aeternitatis—
the present
(in the future sense),
which is—
try imagining it all you like—
different, different, different...