The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [14]
As the crowd of mourners swelled to the hundreds, it grew hushed. I took my place as we began to march down the tree-lined alleys, past silhouettes and gravestones and little manicured patches of grass. It was a long shuffle to the burial site, in and out of shadows, as the sun baked away what remained of the storm. His resting place was obvious—the area was festooned with a thousand bouquets draped with ribbons bearing condolences in golden lettering. Finally, the crowd, still silent, watched as the poet was lowered into the ground. Andrei Voznesensky took his place alongside Gogol, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and of course, Chekhov.
After the service, I found Pavel, the driver, at the appointed meeting place outside the cemetery gates. As I slipped into the passenger seat of the car, I asked him, “Who were all the mourners?”
“Just Russians,” he said.
“Do you think he was a great poet?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he stopped. “But he was our poet.” And then he said, with a low flourish as if he were alone on stage, “Life like a rocket flies/Mainly in darkness, Now and then on a rainbow.”
Late-afternoon sunlight poured through the open window and landed in my lap. Moscow sparkled from the thunderstorm, and Pavel drove gingerly through pools of rainwater. Finally, I broke the silence.
“Voznesensky?” I asked.
“Yes,” Pavel the cab driver replied. “The Parabolic Ballad.”
Back at the room, I looked up the title and the line of the verse my cab driver had recited by heart. I remembered it. I had read it in college. I cracked open a $20.00 mini-bar vodka and stood by the window. The cupolas of the Kremlin were shining as they have for hundreds of years on June evenings like this one.
Finally, it made sense.
Marcia DeSanctis spent years traveling the world as a network news producer and is now writing a memoir. Her work has been in Vogue, Departures, The New York Times Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, More, Princeton Alumni Weekly, and the Huffington Post. She loves to travel alone and her idea of heaven is arriving at a new place, opening the hotel room door, checking out what candy is in the mini-bar, and then heading outside to explore her new, temporary neighborhood. She tries to pinpoint a place to have her coffee every morning and always ducks into a pharmacy. She loves to bring home toothpaste or a jar of vitamins as souvenirs.
KEVIN McCAUGHEY
How I Promised Anusha the Smile
Finding the Mona Lisa—there’s nothing to it.
“THERE’S THE EIFFEL TOWEL AGAIN,” I SAID. IT KEPT popping up outside the window as the tour bus bounced us around Paris.
“Tower,” Anusha said. “I say that only one time, Kevish, Towel. Now you must every time say Eiffel Towel. English words sometime very same.”
We had arrived the evening before, after twenty-seven hours on the road, fifty Poles from Gdansk and one American. The year was 1995, so for most of the Poles this was their first time in the West, first time in the City of Light. And they were willing to punish themselves to see it all. In less than twenty-four hours we’d already done the Towel, Versailles, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou Centre, Notre Dame, Les Halles, and some street where paintings were sold. My twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Anusha, had more defined ambitions. She wanted to see the Eiffel Towel, the Mona Lisa, and if possible, find some Polish food.
I just wanted coffee. Much of the previous night I’d spent in the hotel bar. It was afternoon now and I was flagging a bit.
“There’ll be a café at the Louvre,” I said.
“Eiffel Towel was my first big dream. And now, Kevish, Mona Lisa.”
She brightened a bit, leaving her own tiredness behind.