MY SECRET LIFE

Extract My Secret Life  Translated by Sir George Szirtes

Tourist Turista

It was evening when I arrived in the town 

you did not visit with me. People were going home:

women with closed faces, men with well-brushed hair.
It was glaringly obvious I was a stranger, so tired

I was dead on my feet.

I slept in a double bed

but they only laid out a single piece of chocolate.
The person at reception

suggested I use the safe in the cupboard.
I wondered what I might put there,

a souvenir perhaps, something

one couldn’t lock, something expensive,

and how to manage life from then on

so I could forget the code

as soon as possible.

The town you didn’t visit with me

was colder than at home. The streets were windy

and I spent hours gazing at shop windows.
I spent a whole hour 

in a Chinese shop, the assistant eying me

suspiciously from behind the till.
It was glaringly obvious

that I was a stranger

and dead on my feet.

How fragile we are

Sting was crooning on the radio,

so I went to pay, fiddling with small change.

The toy robot that looked fine in the luggage

went wrong the minute we took it out.
It span and span then fell flat on its back
and stared straight up from the carpet,

as if – said my son, examining the battery –
someone had plucked its heart out.

But even when you did come things went wrong.

Once, in another town, you woke

with a scab in your mouth and we couldn’t 

think of the English for herpes.
You pursed your lips and pointed at your mouth

like a cheap Romeo as you leaned across the counter.
The woman in the lab coat looked at you in disgust

till she finally understood what you meant.

In yet another town the toilet was blocked

and we stared at the bowl in the rented apartment,
the turd like the tip of a frightened animal’s tail.
It gurgled when we tried to flush it down the pan

and we were too scared to mess around with it.

The Portuguese plumber asked where we were from

and if we were used to modern appliances

such as flushing toilets and cisterns with handles.

When they’re not mocking you they’re gypping you,

– you remarked in bed later. We spent the night

talking about workmen rather than making love.

Pretty soon I had walked every street of the town

you did not visit with me. The ornamental clock

in the main square counted the hours not spent with you.
A man with a laptop kept staring at me, 

the scent of his after-shave filling the lift.

I felt I could love anybody then,

anyone except you. I could walk round town with him

while he awkwardly carried his umbrella

and I could lie that you were calling me from home

though it was just a message about my balance.

By now I was out of everything,

out of weary old arguments,

out of ill-fitting clothes and my ill-fitted life.
It was glaringly obvious that I was a stranger

and dead on my feet.

I kept pressing the wrong button on the coffee machine

and when I backed off, the steam kept spouting,

and there wasn’t a clean table anywhere.

The town you didn’t visit with me

was pummelled by rain. It took me

three years to return.
The rain had grown since then.

Cutting a path between transparent shoots of it

with my umbrella, I found my way back to the shop.
The goods on offer had hardly changed.
I bought a new purse and threw the old one,

the one I had when we were still together

into a bin in the hotel car park. No one

saw me but I still felt like

a cheat, a pickpocket who, having robbed 

someone not mentioned in this poem,

was wheeling her baggage away

leaving the bill for her unpaid past behind.

I hold that town responsible, the town you didn’t

visit with me, the town where missing objects go.
How many such towns have I visited since!

It is you that I have to thank for having become 

a professional tourist, someone who keeps crossing borders

never forgetting that wherever she is

she has to go home some time.

Till then I’ll make do with a decent map

so I can go anywhere, wandering down

the crowded alleys of memory, 

recalling whole continents of a previous life

and a long buried bathroom where

your stupid electric toothbrush 

still lingers like an angry old punk,

its face turned to the tiles, 

its white bristles stiff with dry paste.

East European Triptych

Kelet-európai triptichon

I

We spring to our feet when they call our names

on the loudspeaker. Our names 

are misspelt and mispronounced,

but we smile enthusiastically.
We’re carrying soap from hotels,

we leave too early for the station.

Our fellow nationals are all over the place
with heavy cases, wearing baggy trousers.
We get on the wrong trains, and if we pay,

our loose change simply rolls away.

We are scared even at our own border

and are lost once past it, but we recognise

each other. Even on the far side of the world

we know each other by our sweat drenched clothes.
The moving stairs stop under us, our full

shopping bags break off at the handles and when

we leave, the alarm siren goes off.

Under our skins, like a precious jewel,

glows the microchip of guilt.

II
I know where you live. I’m familiar with the city.
I’m familiar too with the black rain.

Your mother would lie and sunbathe on the roof,

in summer you’d swim in the gravel pit.
I remember people who’d lost their legs

who made their home in shelters in doorways.

I’m familiar with the country, I have known

its trains, its weeping,  its chlorine coloured sky,

its acid rain, its long slow fall of snow,

its overdressed, pale babies.

I know where you live but wherever you do,

whenever you think of home, your dreams 

are full of avenues lined by stunted acacias.

After Christmas when others are dragging the tree

by its feet like an overweight corpse,

you stop and watch them dumping it with the rest.
I know what you see. A tangled pile of human bodies

their yellow arms extended, wearing forgotten 

blue and gold sweet wrappers like stolen jewellery.

III
My name is Alina Moldova.

I come from East Europe,

I am 170 centimetres tall,

my life expectancy is 56 years.

My mouth is full of amalgam fillings,

my heart full of inherited anxieties.

No one understands when I speak English

nor when I try to speak French,

the only language I speak without accent

is the language of fear.

My name is Alina Moldova,

my heart valve is an unmanned level crossing,

my veins are full of circulating poisons,

my life expectancy is 56 years.
I can manage my ten-year-old boy,

I find some flour, I leap on a moving train.
You can hit me, you can shake me about,

only my earrings will rattle

like a long-defunct component

in an engine that’s still running.