30
AFTER THE FIFTH ELEGY * Don LaBranche
But tell me, who are they, these wanderers‌who from Their earliest days are savagely wrung out by A never-satisfied will?
--Rilke
Because business at the market, the trade in fruit, honey, and black tea, became so lucrative her mother sent her to a good school from where she pursued a career and five times a day Dzhanet Abdullayeva gave thanks to God and so did not go to Moscow.
The young man she loved became instead a carpenter like many other men in the family who built sturdy homes at a fair price and would, down the road, rise in stature and become a respected elder whom the police did not hunt down and kill, and so, happily married, Dzhanet Abdullayeva would not have gone to Moscow.
Or perhaps someone showed her the news photograph with its thin surfaces glossy with boredom’s specious half-smile and she recoiled from the implication of the gun and the hardness on her face that looks barely a teenager prepared to die and so Dzhanet Abdullayeva reconsidered going to Moscow.
Photograph by Patty Koller