The Dictator's Daughter from a Nursing Home in Wisconsin

1.
My father had such a pure tenor,
he could’ve sung professionally.
A matter of circumstances, revolution or
opera, but his favorite, Rigoletto,
if he learned from it, taught that daughters
are dangerous, stupid, willing to sacrifice
themselves only for the men who deceive them.

And he saw Jews everywhere.
(I made sure) Jewish hands first
up my skirt. Alexei repented from his cell
in Siberia, but I did not. The next year,
I married a Jew. My father threw
a party when we divorced.

2.
Even before Mama put a bullet in
her head, his favorite aria was the Duke
of Mantua’s from Act III.
He sung La donna e mobile at parties when
coaxed, when shaving in his
shirtsleeves—He is always
miserable, he that trusts a woman.
His tenor was ripe, bursting
open on the long
notes, somersaulting off the arched
ceiling in our airless dacha:
E sempre misero, chi a lei s’affida.

That was seventeen years before Polina was
arrested in her squirrel fur coat
for speaking Yiddish to Golda Meir,
for having been Mama’s best friend,
putting dangerous ideas in her head.

3.
He could smell me, changing—
not just the undertones of Mama’s perfume
dangling in the air (I had one of her
decanters hidden in my viola case),
but whatever else seeped out—salty
underground, the copper of my monthly blood.

In the end, dazed by fainting spells, maddened
by sore gums and slipping false teeth,
Jews again. The family doctor in leg irons,
all doctors Jews, all Jews trying to spike
his soup. All the top doctors being beaten
in the Lubianka, and those left
didn’t dare treat him,
so he lay for days in urine-soaked pants.
Aria means air. Air. In the end,
he couldn’t get enough, purpling
up. It sounds metallic, like scraping tin,
when a voice that’s drowning
hourly finally hits the bottom
of its range.

It was the cord of his
voice that held me all
these years and when
that chord snapped, they
waited outside my door, wanting
to bundle my grief in their aprons
and carry it out into the streets.
And one of the servants dropped
to her knees, wailing
like women in the villages do, proof
that something could splinter
through the arched ceiling,
not just hang below it,
that there was air enough.

Shelley Puhak