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Emigres / Joseph Cornell's Operas |
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from Joseph Cornell's Operas Fred was there and Ginger was there and also Stalin, he was there, smiling kindly at us, smiling broadly under his bushy Georgian eyebrows, Fred and Ginger danced together in a whirl of black tails and taffeta while Stalin sat on the red sofa and crossed his legs which were not so elegant as Fred's and not so shapely surely as Ginger's, he crossed and uncrossed his peasant's legs pleasantly while the orchestra hid in the fernery where, to and fro, flit several gold finch, and all was beautiful this time and all was beautiful at this particular jeweled moment that could not be, The Opera of Class Struggle raged in the fernery, sprawling note by note onto the shining parquet where the dancers danced, it may not have been taffeta, I cannot in all honesty swear to its having been taffeta that flounced about Ginger's pretty legs, but the sofa was red and the finches were gold and there was no hint of malevolence in Stalin's smile.
from Emigres An old woman sat all day by her apartment window, watching the November wind rip the birds out of the trees. Red, yellow, rust-colored -- the birds let go their perches and were swept into the gray city sky. Never in her country, which was an island in the southern ocean, had she seen the trees stripped of birds like this. "Not even in a hurricane," she told the other old women who lived in the building. Here the birds flap and hiss and let go suddenly into the air with a rattling sound that amazed her. "Stupid emigre!" they said. They liked to ridicule the old woman, who could not see well because of cataracts and did not understand life in their country. "Stupid emigre does not know that in November the leaves fall." |
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