Spoon, mug and blanket.
The summons held only this. 

—I don’t want it.  I won’t go to the station
with the blanket, spoon and mug.
These things are a warning, and
they threaten vast disaster. 

I’ll send the warning to the devil.
I won’t go. —So spoke on that day
in October of the fortieth year
the daughter of some Swab or Goth,

in plain talk a German woman; she
was liable then to eviction.

The entire German village
was evacuating.  What’s to be done—it’s war.
In the beginning everyone gathered
the blanket, spoon and mug,
irrigated the pillow with tears,
sorted through all possibilities:
—Won’t go! (with German stubbornness)
Let them roll me out by a tractor!
Nowhere!  Never!  Not for anything!

Meanwhile reliably hidden
in a cloud of smoke:
     a Kazan station;  
like a pump, it sucked up extras
from Moscow and nearby borders,
because someone told, 
because someone commanded it. 
This was all carried out quickly, 
as the yellowish square of the summons
of every German whitened.

The summons held only three words:
spoon, mug and blanket.
But, covering the bed with the blanket,
hiding the spoon and mug into the pantry,
the German woman decided not to open up
to anybody, not for anything on earth,
tough broad she was.

So what do you think?  She didn’t open,
didn’t go, didn’t speak, 
didn’t make a noise, didn’t burn a light, 
didn’t snore, didn’t light the chimney. 
People thought—she must have died.

—I was born in this city,
and in this city I will die:
I’ll quiet, go dumb, go deaf,
the regional force won’t find me.

As if from a diving board, jumping from fate,
she wintered the entire winter,
picked mushrooms in the summer,
sold junk “on the down low”
and rented out corners of her apartment.
And in fact, to me.

Just so
You won’t doubt this,
behind the husband’s portrait were kept
the documents.  Among them, the yellowed
square of that summons.

I churned it in my hands:
nothing about trains or
chases.  Three words stood:
spoon, mug, and blanket.