The last trolleybus

The title of the previous post made me think of the hours upon hours of my youth spent on guitar playing. If someone were to ask – and how did you waste your high school years? I’d have to answer “staring into space, strumming my guitar and wallowing.” My guitar playing, which thrived at a self-taught level of not good but not god-awful either, is possibly not something I want to brag about in public.

And yet…

I was in love with the ballads, mostly those of the Russian, Bulat Okudzawa.

He was a poet (in the 1950s and 60s) and he used music to add even more lyricism to the beauty of the Russian verse. The lines are laced with what my friend here has once referred to as the typical Eastern European angst: living in the shadow of World War II, Okudzawa wrote mournful poems (filled with innuendo) about the brutality of war, about loss, about displacement.

I should remember to pick up my guitar at times when the Maiden of Nuremberg threatens repeatedly to close the lid on my insides with her sharp spikes. This song would be at the top of the list of wallowing-in-angst song moments:

the Last Trolleybus (crudely translated by me)

And when it is impossible to float against the tide
Impossible to pull out of despair
A blue trolleybus takes me away from here.
A blue trolleybus,
the last one.

My midnight ferry, you sail through the night
Not caring whether it is deep, whether it is shallow,
You collect all of us who are hitting rock-bottom,
From the boulevards,
The fallen ones.

Oh, open your doors: a passerby, a guest,
I know that for those sinking through the night --
Someone from your passengers, from your crew
Will get up
Will help them.

Many a time I fled with them from despair
I felt their shoulder against mine…
And yet, really, there is sense in silence
There’s goodness
In silence.

A release for the downtrodden, your doors beckon
Moscow is like a swollen river,
And the pain that has made itself felt from morning
Leaves off
By morning-time.

Chipper little piece of writing, isn't it? To be savored and deployed as needed, accompanied by the strum of a few minor chords.