Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

the fire.
When I travelled to Berlin to join Marina, I immediately felt that I had
nothing to give her. A few days before I arrived the stove had been lit by
someone else. For a while. Then everything whirled round again and
again. The final stage - the most difficult for both of us - was her meeting
with a friend of mine from both Constantinople and Prague, someone quite
alien to her and whom she had always ridiculed. My unexpected departure
served as a pretext for the beginning of a new hurricane.
I found out about it myself by chance, though her friends had been
informed by letter. It became necessary to put an end to our absurd life
together, nourished as it was by lies, clumsy conspiracies and other
poisons. That was my decision. I would have done it before, but I kept
thinking that I might be exaggerating the facts, that Marina couldn't lie to me,
and so on.
This last affair brought out into the open a whole string of previous
meetings. I told Marina about my decision that we should separate. For
two weeks she was in a state of madness. She rushed from one person to
another (she had moved in with friends for a while), she didn't sleep at
night, and she became very thin - it was the first time I had ever seen her in
such despair. Finally she informed me that she was unable to leave me
since she was unable to enjoy a moment of peace - let alone happiness -
with the thought of me being somewhere or other on my own. (That -
alas! - is what I knew would happen.) If Marina had ended up with
someone I trusted, then I would have been firm. But I knew that the other
man (a little Casanova) would abandon her in a week, and with Marina in
her present state that would have meant death.
Marina longs for death. The ground long ago disappeared from
beneath her feet. She talks about this incessantly. And even if she didn't, it
would be obvious enough to me. She has come back. All her thoughts are
with him. His absence inflames her feelings. Now it's her poems to him that
she lives on. With regard to me - total blindness. An inability to come near
me, very frequent irritation, almost malice. I am at one and the same time
both a lifebelt and a millstone round her neck. It is impossible to free her
from the millstone without tearing away the only straw she still has to
clutch. My life is utter torment. I am in a fog. I don't know what action to
take. Each succeeding day is worse than the one before. Solitude a deux is a
burden.
My immediate sense of life is destroyed by pity and a sense of
responsibility. Maybe it is just my own weakness I'm too old to be cruel
and too young to be both present and absent at once. But today my today is
just putrefaction. I'm so completely defeated that I feel a revulsion
towards everything in life, as though I had typhoid. It's a kind of slow
suicide. What can I do If only, from a distance, you could direct me back
onto the true path! I haven't written anything about Marina's life in
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