The main thing here is not to get depressed and to take these accusations seriously. Otherwise a vile thought might really steal in to allow yourself to be saved, to give in to reeducation and, constantly improving yourself on the wings of love, to become exemplary, to become ideal, and sometimes, stepping out on the balcony, to listen to the rustle of the wings behind your back.
Usually, my method of breaking up with a young lady to some will stick out as a bit protracted, but the process of becoming a scoundrel can’t last just a number of hours, or even days or weeks, but nevertheless I’ve been lucky with the young ladies, for some reason fate for the most part has constantly provided me with explosive frenetic women, ready at any suitable moment to scratch out my eyes, tear out a handful of my hair, scald me with boiling water, or tear my manuscripts to shreds. It is strictly speaking the manuscripts and books that for some reason evoke in them — evidently for a long time — a pent up ferocity, nevertheless it was just literature that stood as an obstacle to complete possession of me. Consciousness of the fact that there is something more important and more valuable for me than their vagina, their butt, their breasts, their loving heart, than their lips with droplets of sperm, for their kitten-like caresses and even for their plum-filled fried dumplings, elicits in them aggression directed right at what is most valuable and dearest, by which a writer lives, and then at moments of hysteria they grab papers and tear them up, tossing bits of your writings in every direction, with their feet they step on half of a book, and with a wild scream pluck the other half upward — and where do they get such strength? — in ecstasy they’re ready to help themselves with their teeth, and here into the air a plundered Baudelaire flies down, and after him — Rilke, and after Rilke — Svidzynsky, and you, as though you are mad, try to save what’s nearest and dearest to you, and, helpless, you must revert to your strength, twist her arm, knock her to the floor, rip her nightgown, and tearing her underwear with the very same ferocity that she had ripped up Rainer-Marie Rilke, you screw her, while she’s all tearful, sobbing, howling, moaning, agonizing, in front of the plundered Charles, Rainer-Marie, and Volodymyr.
Actually, with frenetic women who love to drink and smoke, it’s considerably easier to split up. Draw them out of their equilibrium — then spit once. It’s enough just to refuse to do something that you’ve done to that point without excess words, but beside that give such a shaky reason for your refusal that it grates the ear. For example, if you have constantly made coffee for her, but one time growl out to her request: “Make it yourself — I’m busy,” then you can be sure that at that very instant you should abruptly duck, otherwise a cup will crack right on your forehead. The very same reaction awaits you after a negative answer to the question: “Will you go along with me?” Then in the best case a slipper flies at your head, and in the worst — a shoe.
I don’t know how others react, but when I listen to groundless accusations from my beloved, then I feel offense, sadness and despair, as well as absolute helplessness, inasmuch as I am not capable of answering with the same astonishing fountain of words. The words are strewn out in such a way as if they were hurled into my face not individually, but in entire handfuls, they scorch and blind me, they jam my lips and span the air, and if in the first minute any kind of timid attempts to defend myself appear, to hide behind any of my own words, perhaps, and not so sharp and painful ones, then in the next minute — unexpectedly for me I begin to feel in my heart a slight crust of responsibility, and in an instant I’m already unable to come to the conclusion that I’m not guilty of anything, and it begins to seem that these accusations are completely just, and I am being insulted not undeservedly, but with justification. And here I already discern in those words a note of indulgence; actually, I’m left the small apartment with the door open, a quite tiny apartment, but I can take advantage of this magnanimity and fly into it with arms crossed over my chest uttering: “Forgive me! Forgive me!” However I never did this, inasmuch as everything went according to plan. And it was only that nighttime ring of the phone that wasn’t according to plan. It stunned me with its unexpectedness.
2
Everything began completely innocently and not because I had to hear what kind of swine I was. At first my wife set off for the U.S. on some kind of shaky invitation to have just as shaky of an exhibit of her paintings. We said good-bye with intense embraces and nearly with tears in our eyes. She didn’t hide the fact that she intended to remain there, to find work and tried to convince me to go after here, inasmuch as I had an invitation to Canada. I didn’t take it seriously: for me to live in the U.S. there’d have to be at least a return of Soviet power in Ukraine.
My last vivid memory of her is a kiss through the air. But after that, a strange situation began: she disappeared, and for half a year I heard no news from her. Besides one — the shaky invitation turned out to have been so shaky that no one met her on arrival and she was barely able to find an artist acquaintance of hers and took up residence in his studio where she slept right on a table. A woman who had just returned from the U.S. passed along this disconcerting news to me by. My wife’s parents, of course, got letters from her, but they told me they didn’t have any news. Right at that moment she phoned me and announced that we needed a divorce. And here, strictly speaking, I heard something about me that I never would have guessed: I didn’t have a clue that I was some kind of philanderer, that I chased after every skirt, that I slept with all my female colleagues and God knows who else, that I may even have hit on her mother, but that now at last I could fashion an idyllic existence with… and here she named about a half-dozen of my female colleagues, whom I not only hit on, but dreamt of marrying. The cascade of absurdity poured onto my head so unexpectedly that I couldn’t find a single argument to counter it, I choked on the nonsense the way a fish gasps for air, as for the fountain of her accusatory words I managed only to gurgle out something inarticulate, and then she didn’t try to hear me out, but prattled like a machine gun, tossing out of herself a hundred words per second. That’s why it’s not surprising that I couldn’t remember a tenth of what flew into my ears later.
From what I remember anyway, a rather unattractive picture arose. For monsters such as me there simply was no place on earth. There is nothing sacred! There was no hope to fix things up. I flirt with everything of the opposite sex on two legs. I’m a monster! A maniac! A vampire! I suck out energy, I drink blood and get enjoyment out of the torments of others.
After this there were several phone conversations, just as agitated, in haste, she attacked, I defended myself without knowing that her attacks already made no sense whatsoever, she was just searching for justification for herself because during that time when I continued to live alone, she already had found a cozy little nest and was living with a dentist near New York. When I found out about it, I sensed a heavy winter’s ice floe slide off my chest and it became easier to breathe. I grew weary of fighting and understood all that I needed now — which was, strictly speaking, to turn into what she said I was: a maniac and a vampire. But for the purity of the experiment I needed to convince myself that she never was.
6. Malva Landa
Malta Landa
Part 1
1
Somewhere deep in the heavens golden stars flew from branch to branch, shaking shimmering golden ambrosia from their wings, and it fell on the city that was concealed in a stony slumber, in the cold tears of autumn, it settled on the sleepy windowpanes of the evening, dying on the illuminated ones, blossoming on those darkened…
Boomblyakevych randomly leafed through a slim dried-up and yellowed book and read…
At such an hour loneliness is deeper
And space more confined.
Like a spurt of blood, the linden trees cast
Their deep blue shadow to the dew.
The bitter acacia, the sour apricot,
Simmered in blossom,
And the sky floats between white fingers
In spring water.
Such a fragrant evening background—
The siege of spring…
The sun leapt up in a quivering tear
From my face…
There wafted over him again the certain special magic of nostalgia for the colorful world of the Secession, that is interwoven with the hops and blades of Indian cress that has already blossomed, where the flowers and sprouts of the lotus are striking in their thin contours of female bodies. On the darkened book cover those strange plants surrounded her name, the name of a poet forgotten by God and man, whose slim book he had somehow acquired somehow by chance and, to his astonishment, inexpensively… This name for quite a long time, from when her poems began to sound in his head, aroused in Boomblyakevych an incomprehensible sorrow, as though it’s the name of a well-known person whom he had met sometime long ago and lost touch with, and now she dove out of the mysterious hazy depths and is enchanting him, squeezing his heart into the silver ring of sorrow.
He had no other pleasure but to rummage through other people’s attics, closets and drawers, looking for books, and swindling people out of them for a trifle, or even stealing them, hiding them under his belt beneath a knitted spacious sweater especially made for this purpose. And when he failed either to swindle or steal them, he had to buy them, sparing nothing, for more than on one occasion he was forced to sell something from his house in order to acquire the book he fancied.
He lived at home in a two-room apartment, completely filled with books, and since they constantly were being added, less and less space was left for them, thus he found shelter for them even in the refrigerator. When his mother was still alive Boomblyakevych was forced to tolerate a great amount of her things that stood in the way of the books, they guarded their territory before them and very unwillingly stepped aside even for a centimeter. And when his mother died, with a tranquil heart he remade all her dressers into bookshelves, even the old bed on which he was conceived right in the year when the NKVD agents arrested his father and dispatched him to the untamed lands, where heavy snows swallowed him forever, he even took apart that bed gnawed up by woodworms with rusted springs and pressed it up against the wall.
When she died, his mother not only freed him from her things, but also from her constant reproaches and grumblings about a wife, and also from the dreams and ravings bordering on madness about a mysterious young woman who was waiting for him somewhere in a park hiding from the rain, and when he appears with an umbrella, her tender and sonorous voice will pour out unexpectedly from underneath a spacious beech tree and tickle his ear, throbbing in his heart—“excuse me, but could you, kind sir, accompany me in the rain, because I have an urgent matter.” And that matter, well, to be sure, was a premier at the theater, and it turns out that there are two tickets, the other was for her girlfriend from work who disappeared somewhere, and there they were floating under the sail of the rain… And Boomblyakevych went to the park, wandered under the beech trees, and waited for her voice… but there was nothing… just a mirage…
Then he related everything in succession to his mother: about their acquaintance in the park, the theater, and how they arranged their next meeting, about all the further meetings with detailed conversations (“I want to know all-all-all of it,” his mother said) that he had played before in his head.
“What’s her name?” She asked him once.
And at that instant he sensed that if he gives her some kind of ordinary name, he’ll really depress his poor mother, he’ll depress her so much that he was afraid she would stop believing these inventions of his, and then he blurted out:
“Malva… That’s her name…”
“Ma-L-va…,” his mother repeated and shut her eyes. It sounded like sweet halvah, that name, and it melted in her mouth, running to her palate.
Rambling through the city in search of his next treasures, Boomblyakevych fantasized about his conversations with Malva, and when he really went to the theater or to the movies, then he discussed what he had seen with her for a long time and even argued with her, so that afterward he could relate everything to his mother.
“How intelligent she is…”
And she really feared he would bring her home sometime.
“Just don’t bring her here… Because when she sees the way we live, she’ll break up with you…”
2
…Boomblyakevych approached the mirror and judgmentally looked at the balding chubby dwarf with upturned radar antenna ears. With such an external appearance he simply had no moral right to steal up to any decent young lady, much less utter his last name.
First of all there is this schizophrenic BOOM, as if someone were drumming on something empty, or maybe on a tambourine—boom, tsik, tsik! It's true that a certain well-known person has already had this BOOM in their last name. Wasn't there a Boumidienne? But further on there was this indecent and scatological BLYA! And though it's clear that the last didn't come from the fact that someone was constantly drumming or occupied with blya-blya-blya, but entirely with something else, for example, with tapping, which is an entirely decent pastime, for in truth, what is disparaging when you begin to tap your index finger on your lips — that is, to drum? But not everyone has the patience to penetrate so deeply into the etymology of someone else's name, and to explain it every time you meet someone would be entirely comical. And nothing remained for poor Boomblyakevych but to glow and to float in a worked up sweat in the presence of an innocent young lady until his ear-radar antennae pricked up even stronger and watchfully would quiver like aspen leaves…
This all was wild and indecent, but Boomblyakevych had never had a woman, and from the realization of his state, he was growing bitter and resentful, as though someone were mocking him. True, he didn't consider himself a little boy, for from the age of twelve, he occupied himself with solo action, and those were special moments of inspiration that he waited for, one can say, all day long. At night before sleep he dove into his dreams and fantasies, in which only bizarre women failed to submit to him, in which beauties nearly had to gasp for breath from those unbelievable splendors, with which Boomblyakevych showered them! Often these were girls and women whom he knew or didn’t know, or just ran into on the street, all of them had to have a round, prominent little bottom: he didn’t like skinny or bony ones! After he read Robert Merle’s novel The Island, he began to imagine himself after the sinking of a ship on an uninhabited island. Only he and eighteen captive girls survived… Oh, what splendid nights they were on that Polynesian island! The captive girls even argued over him, and sometimes even leading to fights. Somehow once one of them was missing. And only after some time had passed, the ocean tossed her body onto the shore in green seaweed… And then one more disappeared… And the ocean tossed out her body… A third was found in thickets, a fourth in a precipice, a fifth under a rock, a sixth in lava, a seventh in the snow, an eighth in amber, a ninth in a bottle, a tenth in the belly of a shark, an eleventh in a coconut, a twelfth in the clouds, a thirteenth in the tears of the fourteenth…
In general, if not for his mother, then who knows how his life would have turned out, because on occasion the opportunity to be with women would come up, but he didn’t have anywhere to take them, and everything broke off after a brief flirtation. Eventually, there was an attractive young woman by the name of Slavtsya who lived in apartment next door. His mother loved to chat with her, but on more than one occasion, she warned her son not to even try anything with her.
“She smokes, she can drink an entire bottle of wine by herself and reads all day. She’s not for you.”
Slavtsia was thirty-two years old and, having decided that she’s already a spinster, gave free reign to herself—she’d eat everything that tasted good and stopped caring about her figure. Boomblyakevych knew her from childhood and treated her like a sister. But on the other hand he caught himself thinking that if not for his mother’s kvetching, then something with Slavtsia might have happened. She’s not stupid, she’s a teacher in fact, and they
have a lot of things in common for conversation. But each time, just as his neighbor would call him either to help her move a couch or to take down blinds, or to chop up a bone for broth, in just a few minutes his mother appeared with her invaluable advice and would not leave until they both returned home together.
His mother looked after him like the apple of her eye. And Boomblyakevych was left with nothing other than dreams and fantastic perversities, instantaneously capable of transporting his mother out of life, if she managed to break into those dreams for even a minute. Though he just dreamt about it — he was the dread of the entire city, who lured little girls somewhere into dark places and made love to them…
The little girls appeared very unexpectedly, just most recently.
One time he went to his cousin on some matter, and right at that moment she was in the bathroom bathing her little one. And she had to get up because the telephone began to ring: her girlfriend was on the line.
The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk Page 25
