The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk

by Yuri Vynnychuk

  “Marko! We have to immediately get to your aunt. Is there a phone there?”

  “From where? She’s living in Krivchitsi.”

  “Alone?”

  “I already said that she’s alone... do you think...” His eyes bugged out at me with a half-crazed look. “Oh, Lord! Let’s go!”

  But first, before we left the house, I took the cassettes with me so that the rat wouldn’t chew them up.

  We drove up to the building by taxi and ran to the door as though we were possessed. But the door was locked from the inside. We hollered and listened whether we’d hear somebody’s voice in response, but silence reigned everywhere. I walked around the building looking for an open window or something else to get in; but I didn’t succeed.

  In the meantime Marko found a crowbar in the shed and was already forcing open the door. This was an old oak door, and it gave way with great difficulty. But finally a loud crackle reverberated, and a woman ran out from the neighboring house.

  “It’s me!” Marko shouted to her. “For some reason, we knocked and didn’t get an answer. Someone has to be inside, ‘cause you can see the key in the chink.”

  “I didn’t see anybody come out,” the neighbor woman said. “I already thought of knocking myself...”

  The door split open and we crossed into the entryway. And in the entryway, and in the kitchen, and in the bedroom—an ideal harmony reigned everywhere, and am there wasn’t the trace of a living soul among it.

  “Upstairs there’s another bedroom. Maybe they’ve gone to sleep,” Marko said with a dried out voice. “Auntie sometimes snoozes after dinner.”

  We saw them both on a wide bed. They were lying under the covers and with pale, waxen faces. Just the way that death had caught them. Marko slammed open the blinds. A playful sunny glow overflowed the bedroom.

  Their heads were lying in pools of dried, darkened blood. The blood had clotted on their throats, and the red tracks of rat claws were still visible on the covers, on the bright parquet floor, and disappeared under the dresser.

  “Now there are only two of us who know the horrifying secret of Ratburg,” said Marko.

  Shivers ran down my spine from those words.

  Now I had no choice but to transfer all of Marko’s tale onto paper, and I sat down to work.

  But the entire time that I had been writing, the mice and rats had been on the watch for my work nearby. When I left my desk I had to take my tape recorder, cassettes and typescript with me. First, before beginning to retype, I bought two Siamese cats. If not for them, I, maybe, wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink.

  I constantly heard squealing and shuffling under the floor, from every corner rat eyes constantly peeped out. My wife could not handle our ill fate and ran off to her parents.

  Taking care of both floors of my home was quite impossible. The rats succeeded in destroying all of my food reserves besides those that were kept in the freezer. They couldn’t get in there. I live alone now, like a rat, without sticking my nose out of the house.

  Fortunately my wife didn’t leave me completely on my own, but would come every morning and bring me food. She wasn’t bold enough to enter the house, she would give me a bag through the window, throw me a kiss and disappear. We greeted each other this way:

  “Are you still alive?”

  “Yes, alive. And as hungry as a dog.”

  She also took care of the food for both of my Siamese knights, who, in the morning, would always carry their nocturnal prey to the windowsill, praising their battle successes.

  On the eighth day of work I finally placed the final period. And here my wife made me the best gift that she possibly could—she brought me a not very big safe. Not very big, but the driver and I could barely slide it into the house. Now the cassettes and papers will be safeguarded.

  We lived under the rat siege for another week, after which the number of gnawers successively began to grow smaller, although they didn’t disappear entirely. Someone always continued to watch over me.

  I got myself a metal briefcase, I put my manuscripts in there and carried them off to a publisher together with one of the Siamese cats.

  “I suggest that while you’re reading this tale, you keep this cat near you,” I said to the editor.

  He looked at me with sympathy and asked:

  “It seems you’ve gotten a bit tired. Take a rest somewhere.”

  “Definitely. But only after you read this. And I beg you to keep the briefcase under lock and key.”

  The editor sighed and offered me his hand:

  “Come tomorrow. If not for this cat, I’d ask for you to come in a month. But I really don’t feel like taking care of your cat for an entire month. Once in my childhood just this kind of Siamese cat nearly chewed off one of my fingers.”

  And right by the door he added:

  “Your cleverness with the cat has succeeded, but I beg you: don’t share your experience with other literary types. Because one of them might feel obliged to toss me a panther.”

  5. Spring Games in Autumn Gardens

  Spring Games in Autumn Gardens

  Prologue

  1

  The dark waters of sleep spread so slowly and softly — the flow carries me to the surface rocking, and though my eyes are shut, even so, I see everything beautifully — I see the Arabian dance of the underwater plants and the silver glimmering of the tiny fish, the sorrowful twinkling of the water and the undulating beams of light that penetrate the water from above and below, stealthy shadows and the flashes of a shell — it seems I am so tiny in my mother’s cradle and it’s so warm and peaceful that a baby bird wouldn’t want to wake up and remain happy in this balmy water rocking on the waves, but some inexorable power pushes me out from the depths to the surface grabs me brutally by the hair and I don’t don’t don’t want to wake up — I don’t want to go to the surface I want to go back into the depth into the silence there into the half-shade into the balmy water into the soothing rocking…

  2

  The winter sun gnaws through squinting eyelids, the rays painfully bore your brain and open the damaged cupboards of memory, pull out the drawers, shake them out with a clamor, and then he begins to remember what had happened till now, with which thoughts he had fallen asleep and why his head was buzzing like a tambourine… This kind of awakening is so horrible… as if it were a plunge into glacial water. Back, back into the balmy water of dreams, into a warm mirage, into a world without pain and sorrow, into meadows filled with flowers… But eyes are incapable of closing, the brain has become fixed on the transition from dreams to wakefulness, there’s nowhere to retreat, the dream is disintegrating, like mortar on an old building, baring the surrounding world — your eyes glide along the room, filled to the brim with bookshelves, drooping lower to islands of papers, magazines, books, empty bottles, eyes wander, sinking in the thick pile of the rug, to the doors, beyond which dead silence lurked, for a certain amount of time your ears try to capture at least the hint of a sound, a strum, a clink, but the silence is dead — it is never more dead… Together with the consciousness of awakening from a dream something else appears — painful and unpleasant, filled with despair and a sense of being lost, consciousness of complete ruin… All the fortresses crumble all at once, and the towers have fallen to ruins, the smashed armies have fallen to their knees and lowered their banners, everything that surrounded him till now, everything behind which he continued to live in a cozy nook and in safety disappeared in a single instant.

  3

  In the middle of the night and dreams the ringing of the telephone reverberated, it burst into his brain, like a dashing train, rattling and giving off sparks, it seems his head would crack in another minute, split into two halves. What’s this? Who is it? In the middle of the night! He tears from his bed, stumbles on the books strewn all over the floor, slips on piles of manuscripts, nearly falls, but he manages to grab onto the table, finally blindly with a trembling hand groping for the receiver, and first befor
e putting it to his ear, in which the warm sea of dreams still continues to splash, and not everything is still sufficiently distinguishable between mirage and reality, he shouts out: “HELLO!” — so loudly, as if he needed to be heard on the street.

  The morning recollection of a telephone conversation is like reading a palimpsest. Did it really happen? Or did he dream it? But your gaze falls onto the table — there were two bottles of champagne, and both of them empty. They were drunk up during the night. Right after the phone conversation. And this is reality, which it is impossible to doubt. His memory retained several fragments of the conversation, all the rest is torn, shredded, and submerged in the wine.

  The call was from the US. She suggested getting a divorce. And she added: “It’ll be better this way.” Better for whom? He couldn’t manage to ask her, he was so stunned that he was incapable of squeezing a single complete phrase out of himself. Eventually, this wasn’t all that strange because he was asleep, and the phone call had awakened him. A phone call in the middle of the night has its peculiarities. It always forces you to shudder, it forces the heart to beat faster, it fills you with anxiety. The one making the call is in a better state because she knows what she wants, has had time to think out what she has to say, she knows what she wants, but the one picking up the receiver is absolutely unprepared for a conversation. What kind of conversation can there be when someone calls from the U.S. and to save money babbles hurriedly, chokes on her words, swallowing individual syllables without any pauses, that would allow anything to be grasped — the sleepy brain is unable to digest all this, to comprehend it, to counter it…

  “…it’ll be better this way.”

  These words stung my brain and will never be effaced, all others — will wither, will crumble, but these will remain and will prick for years and years, will shoot out in sprouts of couch-grass and wound.

  The conversation lasted for a short amount of time, he mostly listened, and she quickly set out everything in its place, arranged everything onto shelves, numbered and sealed everything. And then she threw down the receiver: somewhere far far away on Long Island in New York. And he heard her slam the receiver down. And he even dreamt that he had heard her words that were directed not at him, but at another man, who the entire time was next to him listening to their conversation. She said: “Well here…,” and the man also said something hoarsely, it was hard to make out the words, maybe it was all said in English, in the dark room only the rustle of his voice wafted, and then silence came, and he stood next to the telephone and didn’t move away, as if he were continuing to listen to the receiver gone silent, waiting for another call, though he understood that the conversation had come to an end, no one would call, but all the same there was some kind of invisible thread that linked them across the ocean, it continued to vibrate, continued to link them, refused to be broken, and until he stopped hearing its vibration, he didn’t move from where he was standing.

  And in a moment the vibration disappeared, and in his ears silence again dawned, but it was restless and dreadful, clenching his heart with a burning sadness. Back, back into sleep… gropingly, scraping his brow with his hands, diving and swimming, further, further from that place, further from that time, to return everything from the beginning, to fix it, to rewrite it, to save it… Actually, to save it — he needed to rush beyond the seas and oceans to foreign lands and to free the princess, whom a wicked sorcerer had imprisoned in a tower without windows, to snatch her onto a winged horse and, pressing her to himself ever so tightly, to fly home… In his head a noisy carousel swirled and assorted colors twinkled. This lasted for several long wearisome minutes, until outside the window it began to drizzle, a fine, miserable, winter rain, but he sensed a certain strange gratitude to this rain that finally destroyed the silence, forced him to move from where he was standing and turn on a light. In his head the carousel of words continued to swirl, separate sounds, pauses and breathing… He uncorked a bottle of champagne, fell onto an armchair and drank glass after glass, and at that time around him the walls fell and a wasteland appeared. Time after time he replayed that conversation, trying hard to recreate it in its entirety, but the champagne set in all too quickly, for every new recollection something was lost, words were confused, order was lost, he was annoyed mostly by the fact that just when he had immediately grasped something, he could answer this or that reproach. The words faded, were replaced by others, and the further he got drunk, the less and less memory of the conversation remained, and just one phrase refused to fade and continued to circle in his ears: “It will be better this way.”

  Maybe it really will be better this way? Wine saves you from sorrow and covers everything with a semi-transparent film of paraffin. If not for the wine, he would have never fallen asleep after that conversation.

  The man finally crawls out of bed and shuffles heavily to the bathroom. The cold water washes away dreams from his eyes. He squeezes out onto his toothbrush an entire mountain of toothpaste and, when he begins to brush his teeth, his gaze falls into the mirror. In the mirror he sees he sees the sullen, unshaven face of a forty-year-old man, he sees swollen bags under his eyes, he sees disheveled hair, he sees sadness in his eyes.

  And at that moment with horror I suddenly become conscious of the fact that this man in the mirror is — me! And it was I who had had a conversation on the telephone with my wife who called from the US, and then — again it was me — who downed two bottles of champagne, and now it was my head aching, and not somebody else’s.

  A mirror is always indifferent to whose kisser it is reflecting. My kisser half-awake had a sour taste. To somehow sweeten it, I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, washed my eyes, then I crawled under the shower, shaved, got dressed — but anyway I still looked like a squeezed lemon. It’s always this way. Waking up in the morning after a drinking bout, I always feel like a cat run over by a car. But my nighttime drinking bout was of a particular kind — I drank out of despair. When you drink out of despair, it’s a completely different feeling, because then you usually drink alone. You drink alone with yourself late into the evening when all the sounds around you grow quiet, and when midnight passes, you’re finally the way you need to be, you’re drunk, your no one’s, and here right then, right in that state you can finally speak with yourself, openly and candidly, to cut out all your insides, all your intestines, hang them all up nicely and make a diagnosis. And more, and this is always the most interesting, to create plans for the future. Well, what can you say — plans at such moments simply bloat your head, and everything looks so courageous, so rosy, that despair disappears, hides itself in the deepest recesses of memory, so that it can rise to the surface tomorrow, but it will be tomorrow, not today, and today you just feel like swimming along the waves of daydreams.

  The Pilgrim’s Dance

  Part 1

  1

  You really begin to understand women only when they leave you. It’s right then that they finally illuminate some kind of higher truth unknown to you to that point and with it slay you on the spot. You might have lived with a woman for forty years, but just as that moment arrives when she tells you she’s leaving, you find out something about yourself that had never occurred to you. And this, by the way, can be some totally inane thing, a complete nothing, nil, that at any other moment would have elicited just wild laughter, but not then, not at that moment, when she tosses it out at you as she’s saying good-bye. And the main thing is that she tosses it out! Something at which you just want to wildly burst out laughing. What? At such idiocy? Yes, strictly speaking, at it. Thus it sounds like a verdict, like a final judgment, that is driven into your forehead with a nail, into the very center of your forehead, right here between your eyebrows, and from that time on you have to wear this nail in the middle of your forehead, to touch it and think quite hard what it really all meant and what in actuality stood behind it.

  From every young lady with whom I’ve been close I’ve learned something new. Strictly speaking at the time wh
en we broke up. Perhaps someone might call this masochism, but when I’ve wanted to break-up with a young lady I’ve never said such a thing to her. I couldn’t have pasted together words such as these: “Pardon me, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else” or “Everything’s over with us. Let’s break up.” I’ve listened with astonishment to several of my friends’ stories about the strange scenes that they’ve played out with young women they’ve broken up with. Some even arrange a farewell dinner that ended again with such similar farewell endearments. Oh no, that’s not for me. I did it in a simpler way. I have in mind simpler for me, and not for the young lady, for in fact all this was not simple for her. I did things so that they would break up with me. I began to play the role of a scoundrel, this isn’t a simple role if in your heart you’re actually not a scoundrel, but you want to come out dry from the water, you don’t feel like enduring any scenes, explaining your relations, maybe even earning a slap in the face, anything you feel like — all this so that the young lady will tell you to go to parts unknown and that the windy rhetoric will turn out to be shorter, that’s better for you. But in reality it never turned out short. It always lasted a long time. Always the young lady’s fault. It’s superfluous to say that I never guarded myself against slaps to my kisser. Finally understanding what kind of scoundrel she was dealing with, the young lady exploded into an uninhibited fountain of accusations that uncovered for me such bizarre facets of my “self,” that it was impossible to comprehend even a single one of them: and why did you, my little dove, waste so much time with such a monster?

  And do you know what? It made no sense to ask the irate young lady any such question. The answer would always sound like this: “I thought I could make you better!”

  In the relations between two people can there be a nobler wish than to make someone better? At the very moment of utterance of such a sacred intention fanfares, flutes and trombones enter, at such a moment you feel like embracing the young lady by her knees, kissing her shoes and begging: “Keep trying, make me better!” But no, if you’ve seriously aimed at breaking up with her, don’t relax, because all this is a fiction, no one will ever make anyone better in reality. You can mold from clay, but not from sand. You will remain the very same as when you first met, the only thing that can be expected from you is that when at some point you accommodate the young lady, you’ll strive to rid yourself of habits that irritate her, but only at those times when she’s there next to you. Certainly you in fact can become what the young lady thirsts for you to be, but if for you she is not a gift from heaven and you feel just a physical attraction, and just her butt interests you, you can just sneeze at all the conventions, you are the way you are in reality: inattentive, imprecise, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonorable, unreliable, ill-bred, mendacious, insolent, unsocial, conceited, shameless….