Ladies and gentlemen, problems—are things to be solved according to a set of rules. But it’s precisely those rules that we don’t know, we know only the four arithmetic operations, and we push ahead with them, pretentious ignoramuses, up to precipices and subterraneous caverns of unknown and imagined quantities, and the ground slips out from under our feet, and an echo resounds as through the canyon, and in that rumble you can catch a peal of—laughter (guess whose, come on now?), and a scorching horror takes possession as you suspend your foot over the void from which rise invisible fumes from a slow burn of that devastating sorrow that the Russians define as deathly, which sucks everything out of you till your bones ache: and so here we have—the doors to hell, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, they’re always open, why are you dallying, isn’t this the place you’ve been in such a rush to get to?…
“I’ve always wanted only one thing—to reach my full potential.” That’s what he would repeat, and he spoke the honest truth. “Smell it, come over and smell this—aah, what a smell!”—he would lean over a set of newly acquired paints, lustfully flaring his nostrils, ecstatically shutting his eyes (these American stores are sheer heaven, they’ve got everything, the bastards, look, look!—he surreptitiously stroked a silky sheet of Chinese drawing paper with his fingertip, what does it cost? are they nuts!?—and see this sponge over here, feel it, it’s alive!—and they sell canvases already stretched, this is bloody unbelievable, and what are these? whitewashes? how much? they can fuck themselves, assholes—come on, let’s get out of here—then an abrupt halt, twisting his head back, breathing in the air with the pain of unquenchable passion: can you smell it?)—she enjoyed this animal sensuality even if not directed at her, even if all she got were the crumbs: her love of words was equally sensual—first the sound, but the sound pulled in with it, in its tightly woven trammel, a catch of texture, consistency, smell, and obviously color, too: color imbued not only individual words, it was especially pronounced when switching from one language to another—each, of course, radiated its own, brilliantly shimmering basic tone: Italian—electric violet, ultramarine, the kind of light effect you’d get if you could turn red wine blue; Polish shushed and grated fresh young bitter-tart garden greens; English slowly bubbled something translucent akin to a gentle golden chicken bouillon broth, incidentally a lot more watery in the States, the British variant more intense, thick-and-gooey, richer; obviously her mother tongue was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips)? strawberry blond (smell of hair)?…it’s always like that, the minute you peer more closely the whole thing disintegrates into tiny pieces and there’s no putting it back together; she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it—living and full-bodied with that ringing intonation like a babbling brook at a distance, just a lap—honestly, she’d feel better!—at that moment he remembered, unsmiling, how once, in about fifth grade, he was sitting in a Ukrainian-language class and secretly sniffing some paints hidden in his desk, and the teacher ran over and flung them clattering in all directions down the aisle—well sure, only a Ukrainian-language teacher would pull such a stunt, for some reason they seem everywhere to be the dumbest, most vicious hags (as if specially selected), rabidly faithful lackeys, abundantly loyal sergeants in the Soviet army—you don’t suppose there’s a national inferiority complex rampant there?…So they chatted—when they were still talking to each other, because he opened up to share something inside him only very gradually, creakily: he wasn’t used to it, whatever little internal doors he had in there must have been wedged shut a ve-e-ry long time ago, and the hinges rusted out—God, what kind of a marriage did this guy have, I wonder, huh?…For outsiders, and that means everybody except one or two close friends (they had hundreds of common friends, but she realized fairly quickly that not a single one of that crowd, even the fairly smart guys he’d been friends with for umpteen years, really knew him all that well; he knew them—saw them!—in a much deeper, more penetrating, and at the same time somewhat more ruthless way, when they discussed common friends—which is, after all, utterly essential for every couple, because that’s how the newly constructed world of both is populated, settled, in their case given to them pretty much ready-made, on the Biblical “seventh day”—she was struck unpleasantly by how coldly he dispensed judgments in all directions: X “sees things superficially,” Y is an “extinct volcano,” Z “married that huge babe ’cause he needs a mama”—like driving ash stakes through their hearts: nailing them down, hammering from the shoulder, without a hint of empathy, never actually touching upon their lives with his own feelings, and when ultimately he turned that side of him against her, calmly cutting off one of her “how am I supposed go on living?” questions with a harsh: “I see in you an ability to survive under any circumstances”—she immediately rose up to demonstrate this ability: absorbing not the painfully distant tone but rather the naked essence of what was said: the guy’s tough, and smart, and he’s been around, if that’s what he says then maybe it’s true, I’ll survive?)—so then, for outsiders he smeared himself with a thick coat of an impenetrable, though, one must admit, very masterful sort of chitchat, all kinds of gags and games generously flavored with spicy irony, but she was not one to be fooled by that, she also had her (hah!) elaborate and ever-so-tightly fitted (not to say sexy) linguistic mask, and when he tried to hide behind his—hey, there, if you’re gonna play, no cheating!—she preferred to slice that papier-mâché apart with a knife: and that’s when the hysterics began, night after night, the blade grew notched and dented, practically ended up in a hospital, but she did the guy in, too—God help her: if this is the way it’s gonna be, then fine, I’m not the only one going down! Fuck, how disgusting…“You know what your precious ‘hermeticism’ is?”—because he had named it thus, giving this business a theoretical foundation, fucking deep thinker, a conceptualist!—“Well what? Go ahead, but keep it short, in two words or less.”—“No problem, I can do it in two: a stone egg.”—“Nice,” he pulled in his shoulders for a moment, she got him—“but…well painted, right?”
Try to wriggle out, willow-woman. Catch the air.
Sink your roots deep through the sand, to the moist virgin earth.
GULAG—is when they drive an empty half-liter bottle
Between your legs—after which they address you as “ma’am.”
We are all from the camps. That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.
We search for love and find spasmodic cramps.
GULAG—is when you cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And there’s no-one who gets what that language is that you’re shouting…
Thus she mumbles to herself (it’s just that—is it kórchi or korchí? the language is failing, failing, and don’t try to fool us with that “literature-in-exile” stuff!)—as she drags her disobedient, unloved body up and down the streets of an unfamiliar American city in which she has no friends, not a soul, and at the department she has to smile and answer each “How are you doing?” with “Fine”—yet another of those arithmetical rules, even though what kind of “fayn” can one possibly speak of, where the hell is it, who’s seen it around, that “fayn”—at one of the faculty parties the graceful and composed plump Chris, an administrative genius, mother of an eight-year-old girl, and of her husband, the eternal student (they survive on potatoes for weeks at a time, it’s a good thing they’ve been on sale at Giant Eagle lately, ninety-nine cents for a four-pound bag) confesses—flushed pink after downing the third glass of free wine in one gulp and lighting a cigarette (ready to talk her heart out)—that she’s got breast cancer and has been going for radiation therapy for five years now, and she’s only turned forty-one; while Ellen, always quick and agile, electrically charged with excited laughter whether in shorts, in a light summer dress with a shoulder strap sliding down her arm, or in a tight black skirt with a side-sl
it up to the hip, and a fluffy cloud of sparking deep-gold hair bouncing with every step—she’s almost fifty, divorced and childless, spasmodically clinging to the “one size fits all (ages)” image of a “sexy lady,” from which the march of time is relentlessly dislodging her, pushing her out the door no matter how much she drowns herself in work in order not to notice it—constantly waving her cigarette like a priest his censer, exuberant, shouting how much she loves, just loves her visits to the gynecologist—has an orgasm right in the stirrups, and her listeners laugh along, an echo of her enthusiasm, fantastic, she’s great, Ellen, the cool chick as that man would say—except that perhaps she gives just a li-ittle too much detail about herself: about how she was running late for class but the car wouldn’t start, and how she had to run out into the street and hitch a ride, no-no, she didn’t even need to raise her skirt, and how pleasant the businessman behind the wheel turned out to be, and what she told him, and how they exchanged business cards—all that schlock that one normally dumps on one’s family every evening, because that’s the place where we, girls, recount, to the lovingly sensitive faces turned toward us, everything that happened to us that day, but with outsiders—with outsiders you really need skill to dump this shit and not bore them, you must package it up like candy, in the crinkly gold wrapper of a humorous novelette, to rustle it enticingly—and voilà, they’ve swallowed it, and for all appearances you’ve entertained the crowd—Ellen falls a little short here, because in this you do have to be a bit of an artist or, as some would say, artiste, but aside from that—aside from that she is in perfect form, boisterously dancing on the open platform of the train that rushes her down the tracks to the outer limit of that day on which she finally—flags, sags, stoops, flame extinguished, as though someone has unscrewed all those unnecessary bulbs, and, perhaps, will also begin to frequent the psychoanalyst, just like sixty-year-old Cathy from the department down the hall, whose husband left her a year ago and now it’s impossible to get her to retire, or perhaps she’ll secretly start drinking heavily at home, or get into meditation, or maybe get a dog—a purebred, it goes without saying. And then there’s also Alex, an aging Serbian poet who’s been roaming the world, shuffling from one university department to another, who claims with a dignified air: “I’m Yugoslavian,” as if in this way he, like God, can wipe away the war and everything that came with it, his typical way of starting a conversation—“When I was in Japan…” “When I spoke at a conference at the Prado and the cardinal was invited too…” “When I lived in London, just outside the city, they gave me a whole villa…”—you could burst out laughing at how much this resembles the reportages, in the good old Soviet days, of those rare few “friendship society” types occasionally graced with a trip abroad appearing before a depressed and green-with-envy audience, each member painfully aware that they themselves wouldn’t get “out there” in a million years; however, Alex has no such powers of self-reflection, nor powers to see or hear anything around him for that matter, being consumed as he is by the recitation of an enthusiastic panegyric to himself—to his books that have been translated into English, Spanish, Chinese, Alpha-Centauric; to his interviews and publications in such-and-such editions in such-and-such years; to how much he is paid by the page by Word and how much the New Yorker promises to pay—this monologue inside him seems not to cease for a second and occasionally reaches the point where it requires a set of ears—then Alex calls, stops to pick her up in his “Toyota” (each time inevitably mentioning that back home, in Belgrade, he used to have a “Mercedes”), and they go somewhere for a “dreenk,” two Slavic poets in a foreign land, oh yeah, and this land can be covered with wheat, rye, and gold, inviolable coast to coast, Atlantic to Pacific, there’s no way she’s going to sleep with him and besides, he’s far too much excited by his own oral biography to put the effort into pursuing her, but his poetry, which he’s hauled over by the armload including the translations into Chinese, is really not bad at all—although mainly of the “snapshot” variety, travel sketches, a tourist’s breakfast; still, in practically every poem a line peeks out that’s truly authentic, and before you know it the entire poem has closed in around it: occasionally even, sparks fly from something truly wonderful, one night she asks Alex how he handles the language problem, for years hearing Serbian only from his wife, does he not feel the language resources diminishing—and for the first time a somber, wolfish expression visits his face: it’s a problem, he admits as though forced to confess to a meticulously concealed physical defect—that’s actually why he agreed to work for an émigré newspaper—aha, that would be the same as if she were to take in a job correcting the language of the New York Ukrainian paper Svoboda (ON THE DATE OF 31 AUGUST 1994 RESPONDING TO THE APPEAL OF THE ALMIGHTY CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH SHE LEFT FOR THE UNIVERSE (the Universe! in response to an appeal! is she a cosmonaut, or, pardon me, an astronaut?), LEAVING BEHIND UNSPEAKABLE SADNESS AND SORROW (in other words, she took off without sadness and sorrow?) OUR DEAREST, UNFORGETTABLE, FAVORITE WIFE, AUNT, COUSIN, AND SISTER-IN-LAW (whoa, let me catch my breath!). NOT HAVING THE POWER TO THANK EVERYONE PERSONALLY FOR SO NUMEROUS EXPRESSIONS OF SYMPATHY: TELEPHONIC, WRITTEN, AND PERSONAL (hey, syntax! syntax, oops, sorry, syntaxa!) THAT’S WHY BY THIS PATH (how about trail? back alley? highway?) I EXPRESS TO ALL ACQUAINTANCES AND FRIENDS, AND FAMILY MY SINCEREST THANKS (okay now, try rewriting this thing so it makes some sense!)—and then she understands that this high from his own importance, this puppy excitement at every sign of his presence in the world—this is just one more way of creating in it a home for yourself, especially when there’s no mutual interaction with either your language or your country, and also that it must take some time to reach this condition—and it comes as no surprise to her that after that evening Alex stops calling—probably forever. Oh Lordy, all of it, everything, requires skill—to be ill, to be lonely, to be homeless: each of these things is an art, each requires talent and effort. “Fayn”—we’ll just have to learn.
He couldn’t care less about her poetry, just like he couldn’t care less about anything anywhere and always; he was led by the instinct of his own personal gift, and it was distracted by nothing. Knowing, with that dark, viscid knowledge—tribal and familial, which she carried within her since childhood like a swallowed rock and which, truthfully, drove her forward, forward, forward! by the insane fear of herself, too, falling into the ranks of the ordinary, not making it, going to the dogs like everyone in the previous generation, and the one before that, and the generation before that (those guys really went through hell—better not to think of it!), she spent her whole youth trying to break out of the vault filled with the poisonous stink of half-decayed talents, motionless lives rotting out, mildew and mold, the unwashed stench of futile endeavors: Ukrainian history—knowing, with that bloodline knowledge what kind of trapdoors that instinct of gift of his must have had to burst through, ramming them like a tank, in order to carry him out and up (always—up: his last works were also his strongest, they blazed with a light that was already otherworldly, like a starry sky over the desert—whereas in her own memory there was only row after row of “those who showed promise” who’d be raucously anointed to genius status and then roll en masse into the trodden ditch as soon as they had exhausted the vigor of youth!)—she, who would be overcome by nausea at the sight of the miserable native alkies in the mildewed remnants of their genius (if anybody’s interested, check out the following addresses: “Aeneus” in Kyiv, and “Red Guelder Rose” in Lviv, free admission, feeding, and especially giving drink to the animals is not only not forbidden, but encouraged)—immediately demonstrated with him (the first one in her life!) the capacity to take a back seat: it was the first time that she was dealing with a male winner. A Ukrainian man—and a winner: a bloody miracle, can you believe it? In her wildest dreams she would not have imagined such a thing—the seventies and eighties alone in a provincial town (a.k.a. in the underground) would have been enough to do you in, that same town that her par
ents had to flee, holding her, a seven-year-old, firmly under her arms as they slipped through the KGB blockade; her father, who had served his six (Stalin’s) years in the camps, was pursued, in the grip of terror, like a squirrel for the rest of his life by the specter of “recidivism”—nobody could handle a second arrest, even if they survived it they came out broken, each in his own way—I wonder if it wasn’t those same “inspector-boys” in rustling coats, quick, all with the same standard-issue haircuts, all dark-haired, whose backs her poorly focused, blurred child’s memory photographed as they rummaged through piles of books thrown over the floor surrounded by the all-of-a-sudden bare white walls of her first, no, her only home in her whole life—who later, having earned more stars and stripes, planted their deadly grip around the throat of the rebellious artist?—yes, my dear brother, and this damned blood-brotherhood of ours, like cellmates from the same concentration camp, shit, how many years, really, will that heritage be with us, and how the hell do we get rid of it, bleed it out? cough it out?—how?—my Kyiv friends, all mellow after a few drinks, reminisced on how they met him in 1982: they came out on some work-related trip, landed in one of the local coffee shops, and a baited-looking local approached them: “Guys, are you artists? I’ve got a studio nearby, come, I’ll show you my work, I’ve got coffee too”—well, okay, as long as you’re serving coffee, fine, pal, we’ll have some—but what makes you think we’re artists (they happened to be writers, actors, not exactly chopped liver, eh)?—“Uhm, but your beards”—hah! now that’s something, so having a beard out in that rat hole was enough to put you on the watch list? Really? That’s the way you squeeze your hand through the bars of a prison train-car window, casting a written note into the wind: maybe some good person will notice it and send it to the indicated address—peering out after the fluttering piece of paper, hungry hope in your eye: you’re sure you’re not artists?…And getting to the studio by back alleys, discreetly, circuitous routes: “It would be better if you weren’t seen with me…” Homeland and home, yes: Ukraine, 1982. And no British correspondents, no letters of support from leading figures of literature and art—who was it that got the Nobel that year, Marquez, I think? (Damned good writer, and the fact that rumor had it that he was a good friend of the USSR, well—“who cares?”) That story, which immediately made him so dear to her, so painfully felt from inside those hopeless years (which he overcame, won the match: by painting all that he painted!—while others drowned in drink, hung themselves, or, like her own father, stood smoking by the window for hours staring at the wall of the building across the way, getting lung cancer from the hopelessness of it all!)—that story she heard before the third day of the festival when he, under some lame pretext, managed to get himself to her hotel room, rudely awakening her from her sleep—everything, everything from the very beginning was based on chaos, on a violent break with established routine, on weakened senses, on wavering (like music on dying batteries) reflexes!—and he stood there, in an entryway as cramped as an elevator, his arms crossed on his chest, leaning against the door, his catlike eyes glowing at her expressively, and she was suddenly overwhelmed—she clenched her teeth so that they wouldn’t chatter—by a flood of strange, you wouldn’t say erotic, no!—a different kind of queasy, anxious arousal—like before surgery or a school exam: something thundered and thickened, moving in overtop of her, something bad, dark, and ominous, something autonomous and thus real, she might have still leaned out of the way, pulled her head down and let it pass by, but there was no fear in her, there was—an already switched-on, excited, and vibrant readiness to rush right out to meet life just as soon as it picks up speed, takes off from its well-worn habitual seat: something real is a rare opportunity, it’s something that’s bigger than you, something you must grow to attain, breaking out of your skin to get there, leaving it behind, seven skins, nine skins, just don’t stop! Fine, I take up the challenge, look you in the eye! “Until tonight then?”—“Until tonight.”—“We’ll go for coffee?”—everything went up in turmoil, the whirlwind churned the leaves on the autumn roads and the town in which she was born and which had always been, somewhere at a distance like at the bottom of a lake, preserving her early, hidden, still sleeping childhood was now returning it to her—in an unbearably tender, misty light, this, actually, had begun on the first day already—the growing underground rumble of awakened memory, the recognizing of familiar streets: ah, so that’s what they’re like!—the display windows of the pharmacy on the corner, in the same place as twenty-five years ago—she stopped stock-still, choking on a surge of shining tears: this is where they put up the town Christmas tree, and she had her picture taken then with Santa Claus, a five-year-old girl in a bulky, furry coat, the smell of mandarins and lilac evening snow, its glitter under the streetlamps—and on the other side, a bit farther down, there was a theater, I think (matinee—holding Daddy’s hand—a documentary of some kind, about monkeys?)—Oh, it’s still there, even now, they told her with the forced benevolent smiles that one conjures to demonstrate sensitivity toward another person’s childhood, and only he, whom she dragged with her by the arm—to that place: “Shall we go to the park?”—“Wherever you wish, my lady, I am totally at your service” (an old-fashioned park by the river, and again, the stone steps, as though freshly washed, emerge from the mist after many years, the peeling balustrade, ah, so that’s where it comes from in my dreams!—and, oh dear God, this pulsating color, this languid, underwater lighting, cool bluish-green with walkways, trees, benches frozen in time, receding into the distance—my best poems, those most mine—are, therefore, also from here?)—“There was a birch bridge somewhere around here back then”—“It’s here now, too—let’s go, I’ll show you”—only he alone did not pretend to be appropriately moved, he didn’t pretend anything at all, he merely felt his way through her condition silently, focused and engrossed in his own thoughts, as he would do later at night feeling his way through to the cervix of her womb to exhale: hah, there it is!—they stood over the still pond covered in water plants the color of patina, “Look,” he nodded his head, “what Zen”—and suddenly painfully squeezed her shoulders: “Listen, I love you and your bridge. Can you do that?”—“Do what?”—“Can you say—I love you and your Zen? You can’t, because for you I’m just a person in the landscape: this landscape”—now that would have been the time to ask: and what am I for you? Because she really did let him enter her landscape—every one of her landscapes, consistently, one after the other, ending up finally in Pennsylvania, while he, setting his course after her (“My final love,” he boasted to his friends: they told her—while verses spurted from her like bubbles of air from the lungs of a drowning man:
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex Page 6
