Brodsky Beat

And then there was the Renault 2CV* that I saw one day parked on an empty street in my hometown, by the Hermitage's caryatided portico. It looked like a flimsy yet self-contained butterfly, with its folded wings of corrugated iron: the way World War II airfield hangars were and French police vans still are.

Citroën 2CV

I was observing it without any vested interest. I was then just twenty, and I neither drove nor aspired to drive. To have your own car in Russia in those days, one had to be real scum, or that scum's child: a Parteigenosse, an academician, a famous athlete. But even then your car would only be of local manufacture, for all its stolen blueprints and know-how.

It stood there, light and defenseless, totally lacking the menace normally associated with automobiles. It looked as if it could easily be hurt by one, rather than the other way around. I've never seen anything made of metal as unemphatic. It felt more human than some of the passersby, and somehow it resembled in all its breathtaking simplicity those World War II beef cans† that were still sitting on my windowsill. It had no secrets. I wanted to get into it and drive off--not because I wanted to emigrate, but because to get inside it must have felt like putting on a jacket--no, a raincoat--and going for a stroll. Its side-window flaps alone resembled a myopic, bespectacled man with a raised collar. If I remember things correctly, what I felt while staring at this car was happiness.

-Joseph Brodsky. "Spoils of War." From On Grief and Reason (1995)

(From the Research Bureau: *It hardly matters that Brodsky was probably looking at a Citroën and not a Renault. Renault introduced its "3" and "4" models to compete with the Citroën 2CV in 1961. Brodsky would have been 21. Such is memory. †American corned beef cans, opened with a small key, arrived in Leningrad towards the end of the siege; described earlier in the essay.)