Czernowitz – Reminiscences of a Drowned Man
Czernowitz – Reminiscences of a Drowned Man

Summary/Abstract: My connection with Czernowitz runs deep. I can even gauge it by eye: approximately two metres. The cemeteries of this city host the remains of my aunts, my grandmother, my father and my elder brother. Even today my bride, now my widow, alas, and my cousin still live there. I left the city in 1970, when I finished university. One of the reasons was simple: after graduating in English from the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology I was unable to find work locally. Czernowitz, like the rest of the Empire at that time, was draped with an iron curtain. There was, it is true, a camp site frequented by foreign tourists, but I never managed to get along with the KGB, even in my youth, so I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it. There was another reason though. I was a young man with big ambitions, I looked the future boldly in the eye and felt an overwhelming passion for poetry. And I believed my love would be reciprocated. I felt I was the equal of any capital city and would be met with applause wherever I went. I was wrong. But I left town and haven’t been back for nigh on 35 years now. I simply can’t get down there, even when I travel to Kiev. I know you should do the things you’re frightened to, go to places you’re scared of, overcome fear and so on. But maybe it’s not fear I feel, but embarrassment. It’s like meeting a girl you once loved forty years on. You say stupid things – “Hi there!”, “How’s life?” So, I say to the city “How’s life?” It looks at me sceptically, then says: “How’s life? Well, we managed to get by without you somehow.” It’s true, there’s no way I could come out with what that old provincial, Plutarch, used to say: “I live in a little town, and as long as it doesn’t get any smaller, I’m happy to stay there.” Czernowitz stayed little for me, like a fly in amber, stilled in the memory, frozen in history. Or like my favourite dungaree shorts with button-down braces.

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