The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk

by Yuri Vynnychuk

  And this is how that morning began. I fried the pears in crepes, my young lady was sleeping in my bed, and it seemed that even the rumbling of an empty water truck wouldn’t wake her.

  Life was beautiful. The sunny morning filled my soul with inexpressible joy. I already imagined that after breakfast we’ll again dive into bed, and then we’ll gather up some food and something to drink and start off toward the lake.

  I sifted through all the girls I knew in memory and tried to figure out which of them could have ended up in my bed. So it would be easier to figure out who my young lady was, I took my note pad and on a separate sheet wrote out all the names of my female colleagues, then I began to check them off one by one. Half of them abruptly dropped off the list, because I never would have invited them to my place even skunk drunk. Several other eligible bachelorettes looked at me like a serious target of attention, and to get them to bed I’d just need to put a stamp in their passport. In the worst case – I’d just need to go to the marriage registration office tomorrow.

  I pondered. Did I need to go so far in my thirst for love? Who knows? At times you feel like saying something nice to a young lady. It ends with the fact that one wonderful morning you look into the kitchen and realize you’re already married. Maybe this was just such a fatal morning.

  I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t believe it. That’s why with a light heart I crossed off the eligible bachelorettes. Several individuals remained, whose appearance in my bed would have been most likely.

  Here they are, in order of probability. Olyunya gets crossed off because she took off for the beach. I got into an argument with Maryana forever and we’ll make up in a week when her parents run off to a resort. Vira exclusively spends her weekends with her fiancé. Lida came over last week without warning and ran into Marta, who peacefully was sunbathing in the garden, I don’t even want to bring up how that ended. We’ll cross both off the list. Lesya, Oksana and Ulyana were left.

  On the table a full plate of pears a la crepe was steaming. I made fresh coffee, put it on the tray and concentrated. Who… Who… Who…

  Oksana, may I kick the bucket right now, doesn’t wash floors, that’s already for sure. She’ll sit around the entire evening, staring at the TV. Or she’ll lie around. Ulyana doesn’t undress herself. Not for anything will she do that in her life. Besides that, she always puts on her panties. That’s her style. Well then, I’ll cross them off.

  Lesya’s left. My God! What a scoundrel I’ve been in the way I treat her! How many times I’ve deceived her, led her on, made promises. One time I even prattled on about love. And she believed me. She’s generally trusting and a very kind person. I’m just not worthy of her. I suddenly felt like falling on my knees before her, kissing her feet and begging forgiveness. For just everything. Even for this too.

  She! Just she could be an ideal wife. She talks so little. That’s it, enough of these adventures for me, this disorder, unwashed dishes, scandalous stories and explanations of my relations with their husbands, who, thanks to me, grow buck horns. That’s it. I’ll look in right away and say. What will I say? Damn… Let’s get married, what do you say? No, not that way. First I should repent. I’ll tell her everything. No, that’ll take too long. I’ll tell her in general terms. Without naming names. And I’ll burn my notepad completely. Oh! What an idea! I’ll burn my notepad in front of her. It won’t cost me much because I have one more. And then I’ll tell her, say, let’s… That is, we’ll get married.

  In the meantime the first sounds of her awakening echoed from the room. I immediately felt a fervent desire to end up next to her and embrace her hot, deeply stirred body.

  And here I grab the tray and with a smile from ear to ear fly into the room.

  “Lesya-baby!” I call out, all hot and bothered from the unexpected flash of thirst and love. “Look what I’ve brought you!”

  And it was as if right at that moment Vesuvius erupted under my windows, it would have stunned me considerably less then if from under my snow-white covers there had shouted out to me not the angelic little head of Lesya-doll in golden curls, but the great big shaggy and bearded snout of Stefka Orobets.

  My knees were wobbly and I sensed I was losing my potency for the entire next week.

  “Can you shut the hell up?! Steftsio thundered, scratching his broad chest with all five of his fingers.

  “Ste… Steftsio!” I muttered. “Where did you come from?”

  From my show “For you, Morons.”

  “But… why are you in my bed?”

  “Because you, shithead, got sloshed and didn’t want to put out sheets for me on the couch.”

  “But… why are you naked?”

  “Because that’s the way I sleep, you imbecile! And there’s no reason to feel up my butt, you queer!”

  “But who tidied up everything?”

  “Leska.”

  “But where’s she now?”

  “She left with Orko.”

  “Who the hell is that? Why with Orko?”

  “Because you, idiot, told her you’re getting married. And invited her to your engagement party.”

  “Me?! I’m getting married?! To who?”

  “Ask the champagne. And stop getting under my skin! What do you have there? Some kind of pancakes? What’s with you – you couldn’t fry me some garlic sausage with eggs? And where’s last night’s Salad Olivier?”

  8. Tango of Death

  Synopsis of Yuri Vynnychuk’s Tango of Death

  Yuri Vynnychuk’s new novel Tango of Death unfolds in two segments of time. In pre-war and WWII Lviv as well as in the chronological present. Four friends – a Ukrainian, a Pole, a German, and a Jew, whose fathers were members of the army of the Ukrainian National Republic and who were executed by firing squad in 1921 by the Bolsheviks, experience various adventures: they fall in love, enjoy life, solve the mysteries of an ancient manuscript, look for work, but also work at finding themselves. Despite numerous cataclysms, they never betray their friendship. They grow into adulthood at a time when Europe is already doomed. In lieu of their relatively happy pre-war life, significantly more serious difficulties ensue: the first Bolshevik and Nazi occupations, the war, and the seemingly unimaginable Shoah in these lands.

  Ordeals and a cruel battle for survival lie ahead for the four friends. All four take part in the defense of Lviv in September 1936 against the Nazi army. After the Nazis retreat and “liberators” from the East enter the city, a true Dante’s inferno begins. We find out what the so called “liberation” of the Western Ukrainians looked like, about the suffering they were forced to endure, about the mass executions by the Bolsheviks first of Polish officers and then of the Ukrainian intelligentisa.

  In the novel a number of plot lines are masterfully interwoven: there is a contemporary interpretation of nearly unknown pages of Ukrainian history; an ancient manuscript, in which the mystery of eternal life is encoded; about the pitiful agents of the secret services who hunt for experts on ancient Arcanaumian culture; and about the horrors of the Yaniv concentration camp – an orchestra of prisoners and a tango of death.

  One of the four friends, the Jew Josip Milker manages to survive both the Nazi and the Soviet concentration camps. And now he has just one aim: to convey the truth about the past, to resurrect it and to reunite hearts in love. Because when it seems you’ve survived your adventures for the day, you’ve already made love with a woman with whom you’re once again enamored, that you have a foreboding feeling about future meetings, maybe, in fact, your soul has been reincarnated, and the traces of your former life have remained miraculously in your memory. The encoded Arcanaumian manuscripts will help you remember everything.

  It is important to note that the main hero of the novel is also the multi-national and multi-cultured city of Lviv. In the novel there is a great amount of humor, many brilliant episodes that one can compare to the humor of Jaroslaw Hasek, but also a great amount of pain – because Tango of Death is also about the tragedy of the
Jews of Galicia and the Holocaust. This undoubtedly is the first Ukrainian text that has appeared after Ukrainian independence in 1991, in which the Holocaust occupies a prominent place.

  The Holocaust here isn’t an end in itself. It is the occasion and the possibility to explore the depths of the nature of society, of European civilization, of crucial philosophical categories in general – of all of humanity.

  If we speak about the very nature of the intrigue of Tango of Death, about its mystical overtones, everything is markedly even more complex. The great triumph of Vynnychuk the narrator is in the fact that we literally – to the very final(!) word – fail to understand the author’s convention. We can’t even guess how this finds expression in the end. The finale is unforeseen and striking.

  Tango of Death

  High above snow is falling, crows are crowing, the trees are cracking from the cold, and somewhere far away snow is crunching beneath the boots of the killers. You can sense their approach in everything – somewhere off in the distance you can hear the threatening barking of dogs, which is different from the barking of village dogs; the barking increases in intensity, at the same time, crows, cawing loudly, dart into the air and fly off. Four young men are sitting in a hideout, listening to the barking; then, glancing at each other, they burn some kind of papers; smoke crawls out of the vent. Then they change into clean shirts and pray. They don’t pray together, but each one separately, and their prayers are in different languages. The three of them sit down around a small plank table; a bundle of grenades is lying on the dark smooth surface; the hands of all three of them are lying nearby. They wait silently. There is no fear in their eyes. Each one is thinking his own thoughts.

  The fourth one takes a violin into his hands, stands next to them and listens closely. The sound of the dogs barking is already above their heads; the fire in the hideout is burning out, and tiny sparks jump across the burnt documents and disappear in the air. Upstairs, the command demanding surrender can already be heard. The men don’t react; their eyes are riveted to the grenades. They shudder just as they hear despairing women’s voices appealing to them, cursing them, imploring. Their voices squeeze out tears from their eyes, but they refuse to give in; they know all too well what awaits them.

  A hand with the bow touches a violin, and the melody of a tango resounds. Now the barking of dogs and human voices are forced to burst through that melody, and not only through the melody, but also through the singing – the four men are singing something really quietly. And then the hand of one of them stretches to the pile of grenades....

  1

  When we are young, we all are nobody, not even the greatest geniuses, whose careers and recognition await them in the future, come into this world not overly fit for it, that’s why it’s not unusual that after we get married, we find ourselves in certain ordeals that rarely end happily, and rather more often in the parting of ways. This was exactly the trap that Myrko Yarosh fell right into after he got married to the sweet and warm Roma after graduating from the university. He used to read the poetry of great poets aloud to her, and she pretended to listen, even straining her eyes and pursing her lips; and her face became so inspired that he fell in love with her more and more, thinking that she, in fact, had been created to listen spellbound to everything he would say, that entire heap of words, which he was falling in love with and which he was sinking into, as though into a quagmire, greedily swallowing air; and when during those readings she snuggled up to him and tickled his ear with her hot breath, he thought that the idyll would be eternal, and that both of them simply were destined to be married to each other. Feelings were taking over common sense, and from the moment they married, they started to live at Roma’s parents’ place, and that was the beginning of the end.

  Two years of teaching and then part-time graduate school boded no joy, because if there wasn’t any money, there’d be no money, and Roma’s parents never denied themselves from reminding the young couple on every occasion that they were mooching off them. In the evening, after putting their little son to bed, Yarosh, with his books spread all over the kitchen, was writing his dissertation about the literature of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria, Arcanaumia, and the Hittite Kingdom, but the deeper he delved into the topic and dug up sources, the more his work seemed to be hopeless, because certain sources gave birth to other ones, and those – to yet others, and it was endless, forcing him to get lost in the labyrinths of different versions and often drawing conclusions by groping about in the dark; though everyone, who was working on this topic, was not dealing with a complete panorama of literary life back then, but just with fragments that miraculously managed to make their way to us, that miraculously had been decoded and read, but not all of them, because no one had grasped the Arcanumian language, and an opinion about their literature had been formed from Hittite and Hurrian sources. And it was the latter issue that excited Yarosh so much that he cast aside all the remaining ones and took to decoding Arcanumian texts. Many scholars had tried to do this before him, but failed. Arcanumian cuneiform was unlike any other.

  Finding time for his scholarly work just in odd moments, Yarosh seriously began to contemplate the sense of his family life. The stupid routine of work in school oppressed and tormented him; he was surprised at how it came to be that he had become a teacher despite the fact that he had hated that profession when he was still in school. He would come home tired, and the only thing that could motivate him to do scholarly work was wine. The first glass took away his daylong tension, the second freed his thoughts, tore off all the chains from them, and then his pen would begin to fly across the paper as though it were mad. Only it lasted for not more than about two hours, but then tedium would fatigue him, and he would lie down to sleep with his head filled with ancient hieroglyphs, clay tablets and papyruses; the complete disdain of his wife and in-laws of his scholarly work added to this feeling; they considered his work nonsense, a waste of time, but he would never complete his scholarly work, so he was, therefore, destined to pass through life as a simple school teacher. This became a kind of obligatory ritual to tear him away from his work and to send him to the store for bread, carry out the trash, fill up the water in a portable cistern when the water pipes would be turned off, awaken him before dawn so he can occupy a place in line for milk, ringed sausage, cheese, sugar, and flour – it made no difference; it was just he who was made to run after everything when in the 1980s there was a shortage of nearly everything, and people turned into hunters for goods, scurrying through the city and saving his place in several different lines at the same time so that in each of them he would manage to buy a kilo of sugar or a packet of laundry powder, because they wouldn’t give each person more than one, and he also had to keep vigil over the bookstores, where once a week they used to deliver new books; only a limited circle of people received information about that, so for at least an hour before the bookstore would open up after the “delivery of goods,” he would occupy a place in line, and then dash into the place at the head of the crowd and be the first to grab a Kafka, Camus, Akutagava, Cortazar, Marquez, Borges, and their number was endless. For the sake of his sacred goal, Yarosh even started up a platonic love affair with one of the bookshop girls; he wasn't able to do anything more because she was one of those spinsters, who, as a result of years spent in loneliness in their everyday life, they become intolerable, capricious, and boring. Inviting her out for coffee, Yarosh was forced to listen to her expound on her life motto, an entire heap of those cunning prescriptions, with which he surrounded herself from every direction like warning flags; overall, her entire wardrobe, which was designed to hide all the protuberances of her body like a nun, was a warning flag, because she was waiting for “serious relationships;” “flirting didn’t interest her,” but “Mr. Myrko is a very pleasant person,” “you can trust him,” “it seems to me sometimes that we’ve known each other for a really long time” – and a long, promising smile, one more little flag that began to gleam on the horizon, mor
e, with a telling caution: “No one, no one, no one – just him alone.” Yarosh looked at her pale white arms, covered with fine little red strands of hair, and began to imagine her legs, maybe just as hairy, and this even elicited the desire in him to research this continent not studied by anyone yet with all its hidden nooks; just the fact that he had far too little free time saved him from that research, so just going for coffee with her was entirely sufficient to sustain friendly relations and to acquire information about the arrival of new books.

  Once when he finally went to sleep long past midnight, leaving his papers on the kitchen table, which late in the evening served as his office, and in the morning finding a hot frying pan on his papers spattered with grease, from which his father-in-law was scarfing down an omelet, liberally covered with scallions, blocking himself from the world with his newspaper, this turned out to have been the last straw for him. With unceremonious boldness, which he had never dared before, but with an obliging “excuse me,” he plucked his papers from under the frying pan, shook them over the table in front of the astounded and delirious eyes of his father-in-law and left. Now he realized that he was standing before one inevitable dilemma – he needs to sacrifice something: either his family life, or his academic one. He chose the former. One morning, so as not to arouse any suspicion, he stepped out of the house to go to work the same way as any other day, although he still had to take his son to daycare as one of his regular duties. Parting with his little son was particularly painful for him. He knew he would be losing many pleasant moments in the future; because what he had planned would certainly ruin his familiar existing lifestyle once and for all, but he saw no other way out and, waiting for the house to be empty, he returned, and slowly, without rushing, gathered all his things, packed his books and papers and wrote a letter, in which he announced that he was going away forever. He’ll send money for childcare at the beginning of every month. Then he phoned the school where he worked and announced to the principal that he was forced by virtue of various circumstances to quit his job.