Margarita

My relationship with Margarita was expressed in three volumes of poetry which I then published as one volume under a pen name. Here is another poem that I wrote since then which explains briefly my feelings (click on the image to enlarge):

When we met, Margarita was 38 and I was 71, almost double her age. I have loved other women in my life, but this was special. She was the Russian girl I had been longing for since I first went to that country. She became my muse, and this was my Indian Summer. From the beginning it was poetry, with the first poem in the shape of a face, likening her to a bird that let me hold her face in my hands (click here to see the poem close up). When I sent her the poem, she replied, "Your poem is so beautiful and exciting that it causes anxiety and fear". Our first love encounter is described in the poem of the Piano. And our first voyage to Vermont is described in the poem Place. I compiled three books of poems to her which, could not be published under my name because it would hurt both Margarita and Kiki : Our Secret Garden, The Fire Book and Poems for Vanka (her boy). The first book was completed when we were still on good terms and she made the cover and frontispiece illustration. Although Margarita did not write poetry as such, there was a kind of poetry in our repartees, often in emails or text messages. She compiled a remarkable "Double Diary" of our dialogues. And we lived a life of fantasy in films, beginning with Master and Margarita and extending through scores of films that we would watch naked in bed before making love. In our fantasy, we became Master and Margarita, Zhivago and Laura, Larissa and Ivan, Olga and Count Kameyev, Goya and the Duchess of Alba, Bathsheba and Gabriel, Katie and Hubbel, Liz and Darcy .

We shared our love for music in many concerts, mostly at Yale. But perhaps most emblematic were the several trips to the Metropolitan Opera to hear our favorites Anna Netrebko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky (see their Gala Concert St Petersburg. One time she wore a very sexy dress with a cape and was the most beautiful woman in the opera audience, telling me she wanted to attract a millionaire lover!

I have published the poems under a pseudonym, hoping that Margarita will never see them and that Kiki will have it only as a secret which others do not need to know. In addition I have edited the Double Diary along with two epilogues, one that is publishable and one that is not publishable. To open correctly in a Chrome browser, go instead to Double Diary and unpublishable

Margarita was beautiful - here's one of perhaps a hundred photos that I took of her:

She was a good scientist and we had interesting discussions about scientific questions. She went back and forth from Russia for her work and each time she left she would say that maybe she would never return, which added a special passion to our last nights together. From the beginning she insisted that our love was just for a moment: "Yest tolko miq!" a line from one of the many songs she sent me.

Our relationship was passionately sexual, and she came easily in my arms. Although she was a mother of an 8-year old boy, she still had the body of a young girl (Click here for a closeup of the photo). After she moved into her own apartment, I would spend most nights with her, waking at 6 in morning to leave and get back home for the morning skype call with Kiki. Her apartment with its tilting floors and treehouse, matching the treehouse on Lyon Street, became a place of magic, which I celebrate in one of the poems.

With all our comings and goings - her to Moscow, me to France - I figure we had twenty lives. The story of the first twelve of our twenty lives is contained in the DOUBLE DIARY.

The first two of our "twenty lives" were brief, what she called a "Roman Holiday" after the Audrey Hepburn movie with Cary Grant which both of us loved, and we said goodbye when she was going back home for a visit to see her husband and her boy. In the meantime, Kiki had figured it out when I started speaking Russian to her on the phone (Margarita and I spoke mostly Russian, both of us loving Pushkin). I had to take a trip to France to settle up with Kiki, based on having said goodbye to Margarita. Here are her sad eyes when we said goodbye:

We got back in touch when I returned in 2011, but to keep Kiki, I had to say goodbye again. Here is my goodbye letter:

Dear Margarita,

With those words always in my head,, I wrote a letter of farewell last week. I was confident that you would understand and respect why I must do so.

I tried to send you the letter, but I could not not. It was not complete. And so, I had to think, and think and think, to the point that I began to fear that I was becoming like Hamlet.

As I read and re-read the letter, I had to admit that I had fallen in love with you.

The girl from the Kavkaz who dreamed of being a speleologist-anthropologist, just as I dreamed, the young Tom Sawyer (yes I come from Missouri) of finding my Becky when I explored the caves of the Ozarks.

You are the girl I sought and never found in 1976 when I went to live in Moscow, knowing no Russian except what I had memorized from Evgeny Onegin, and going with my friends to the Taganka.

You are the beautiful woman holding Vanka in trust over the precipice in the mountains and the beautiful girl in the video of the wedding dancing to the waltz of Doga.

You introduced me to the Master and Margarita, and our wonderful love inspired the best poetry I have ever written.

And so, during this week, Woland has returned again and again, tempting me to try to hold on to our moment of wonderful love forever.

But I know it cannot be forever.

I would write you a poem, but the poem was already written. "Only death can make love eternal. Only death can bring peace to love. And we are not about dying for there is so much life to live, so much love to give, so many places to go, so many rooms to enter, dreams to share. Thank you for teaching me, my beautiful co-pilot!"

Please, please understand! And please, please accept this letter simply, gently, cheerfully and without tragedy.

Margarita's response was typical:

Well. This's your choice. I promised that I'll accept any of your decision.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2XbVEN795o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ht551RPV0Q&feature=related

Farewell, David Adams

But that was only our second life. We went on to have 18 more, at first happily in love, but then, more and more, filled with frustration and anger, as I had to divide my time with Kiki and could not give Margarita the love she wanted and deserved. Instead I gave her poems, but that was not enough.

At the end she told me the following bedtime story:

Once there was little girl who lived in a little town. When she was still young she fell in love but it was not a happy time for her, so she ran away to the city. In the city she met a man and they thought they loved each other, but it was only half-way. Eventually they got married and lived together many years. Finally, she had a child and then something happened and he did not even love her halfway any more. So she ran away to another country. There she met another man whom she thought she loved. But he was cruel to her, and so she stopped loving him and became cynical, believing that she would never find love.