Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Autumn. Early dusk.

  Mire—and footsteps like rubber…

  This love is not final,

  You are wrong to think other)

  —he passed through her territory like the Tatar hordes—with wild whistle and howl scorching out from almost every recess of her memory, from all of its main repositories, that life-giving, secret, shimmering, loving moisture that the soul gathers for itself year after year, for the dry years: subterranean wellsprings, a constant and inaudible slurp and suck, tenacious putting down of tiny, hairy roots into the dark depths of the preconscious, into a corridor, which suddenly opens—into the open space of a memory: a little girl stands swooning in the middle of an autumn park walkway, feeling the drumbeat of the distant horizon for the first time, feeling the world calling her, promising to show her the way, everything begins with that little girl and no matter what else happens to you in your life—it is complete, it holds together for as long as you believe that little girl, as long as you can access the call that she heard way back then—because all those so-called youthful ideals—are nonsense, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, “forget it,” they are brought in from the outside, that’s why only the very few, and rarely, are able to remain faithful to them, so hell with them, not a great loss, wipe up your snot, all you bearded sixties lefties, ravaged and crumpled by time, former hippies who never managed to get it together for your own bungalow in suburbia with a flower garden in the backyard and a two-car garage; and also all you who did get it together, shaved your beards and, unnoticed to yourselves, acquired a rich, glossy luster (like glaze on a ceramic mug) of a life stopped dead in its tracks in peace and prosperity; and all you Ukrainian rebels, once tossed into paddy wagons, pounded to pulp in cop stations and back alleys and now laureates of government prizes, your hands juicy and plump from too many state banquets and your so impressively broad backs corseted in Bloomingdale blazers—don’t dream of your wonderfully turbulent youth even should some losers try to shove it in your faces, all that is nonsense, I tell you this sincerely—it’s fallacy, delusion: truth is found only in childhood, only through it can we find the true measure of our lives, and if you have managed not to trample to death that little girl inside of you (or that little boy standing in the pasture with a stick in his hand, awestruck by the terrifying—because so beyond the human capacity to render—immensity of the multicolored symphony of fire of the setting sun)—then your life has not faltered, it has merely twisted and turned, no matter how difficult and painful the obstacles, in order to follow its own course, in other words, it’s been real, and I offer you my congratulations—and love, ladies and gentlemen, true love—it can always see that hidden little boy (or little girl) in the other: “take me” always means: “take me together with my childhood” (“Over here,” she pointed, her dry voice faltering, as she leaned over in the passenger seat like a jockey on a racehorse—“this is where you turn into the courtyard, this building here”—it was the dead of night, three in the morning or so—he drove in under the arch, circled the car around, turned off the engine, “Those windows right there, can you see, where the balcony is, on the third floor? That’s where we lived”—that’s the moment he fell on top of her and with a long-repressed groan attached himself to her lips, his hands moving busily under her sweater, a little rapacious, but it was what it was, “Let’s go to your place…To the studio…”—it’s there still, somewhere, that courtyard, that balcony, that archway, and the old chestnut tree from thirty years ago still up on the hill—it’s just that the girl who once walked out of that building into a fog wet and heavy with a mysterious hollow din—that girl is no longer there). Not true, you’re still alive, she tries to persuade herself, massaging all the crevices of her memory the whole time, like a skilled surgeon with a body just pulled out of the rubble: what if I press here, can you feel that? what about here?—in fleeting glimpses, twitches of remaining reflexes, some things come forward from time to time—for example, yesterday when she walked out into the street came a painful recollection—a long, lightening-speed incision into the distant past—of the smell of autumn leaves, doesn’t matter what you call these trees—sycamore, Canadian maple—the smell was the same as back home, moist, the aching bitter scent of still-living (living out its last days) vegetation: the sun in the high, thinning treetops, the beginning of the school year, the walk to school through a brilliantly gold-lit park, a small band of adolescents in billowing white T-shirts with strangely articulated quacking (English!) laughter rumbled past—their youthful eyelashes squinting against the sun, their mealy ripe wheat-colored bare necks and swinging arms disheveled by the brisk walk flashed by like behind a glass pane—a thought flashed through her head: none of you puppies have yet been struck by real pain—and who knows, maybe some of you will be lucky and it will pass you by?—and settled on this side of the glass, holding back the sobs pushing up against her throat: God, is it all really over—did it all come to pass, all that was promised at the dawn of life by that advancing rumbling call that had spilled into the universe; had it merely swept by—blowing in her hair, brushing against her lips, without reaching deep inside and extracting the most important?…(how fiercely he had roared: “I’ll rip you to pieces!”—scooping her up under the knees and planting her on top of him—and in the end not a single orgasm, unless this excruciating pain of being ripped apart alive is also a kind of orgasm?).

  At the end of the autumn road flesh wilts,

  And leaves rustle with the scratching of mice.

  The horizon becomes steadily more bare—and The Lord

  Stands among the trees, clothed in white…

  So what now, Lord? What now?…

  “Lord, which way now?”—that’s what was written under a sketch that she spied in his workbook, which he carelessly left out on his desk: at the very tip, on a craggy peak of a mountain a shaven-headed man with dangerously defined facial features (like those of his author) balanced himself on one foot (all his faces were deliberately vague, all in some imperceptible way interchangeable and similar to each other, dispersing like ripples from an original that had been dropped into the water—the self-portrait that he never drew)—the man was holding a ladder pointed to the sky with both hands and asking God which way now, but the sky was empty. “I’ve always wanted only one thing—to reach my full potential.” Amazing coincidence, brother-dear, me too, but what exactly does it mean—to reach your full potential? Once upon a time—still beloved, still gleaming under her loving gaze like a freshly restored canvas: his eyes hard flashing emeralds, that unbearable (oh, I could scream!) profile from an old coin, that silvery, or rather glittery aluminum spiky hair (“You little porcupine!”—she laughed, stroking this dry, noble, sculptured head as she passionately pressed it between her breasts)—pure metal, stone, obsidian!—sitting in her kitchen, arms dangling between his knees, and staring motionlessly at the pattern on the floor tiles (that baggy sweater in which his tight, knotty body simply drowned she also fell in love with) he told her about his father—the old man was getting old out in a village somewhere in Podillia, let’s go visit him together, will you come with me? (and right away she imagined him slamming the car door and proudly saying: “Dad, this is my woman!”—that colloquial “woman” instead of “wife” on the lips of Ukrainian men always jarred her but this time—this time she would not object, she would step out with a smile like from the cover of a woman’s magazine in her gorgeous loose red Liz Claiborne coat and her black gathered boots with terribly high heels, right into the rain-sodden black earth—or what do they have down there? clay? sands?—raising her collar, her manicured, thin, musical fingers with nail polish to match her coat, swinging her long silver Arabian-style dangling earrings: his proudly displayed trophy, total victory, with which a validated life renders an account before its progenitors)—his old man had spent his life in concentration camps, first German, then Soviet, “lapped slops from the trough”—h
e pronounced it like squeezing a pimple, with a certain predatory emphasis and sick pleasure at watching the puss-y core emerge—and finished his father’s story quietly without ever raising his eyes: “Slaves should not bear children.”—“How can you say that, how dare you, it’s a sin!”—“Because that stuff’s inherited.”—“The hell it is—what are you saying, that there’s no freedom inside you?”—“Wanting to break out is not yet freedom.” Break out!—those words shook her to the core, so easily pulled from her own vocabulary, like he’d known for a long time which page to open first—with those words he brought out into the open and thus confirmed, authenticated the infallibility of her tribal instinct that had switched on that first night when she recognized him: my darling, my dear, dear boy, come to me, come into me, I will embrace you from all sides, hide you with my body, let you be born anew, yes, together from today to eternity, obviously we’ll get married, never mind, we’re already married, and we’ll have a boy (“You have to give birth,” he’d said, catching his breath as he tore away from her lips like he could no longer bear to kiss standing up:—“there’s a lot of milk in you!”—in his apparently nightmarish marriage—though he, mercifully, spared her the details, making do with a painful gesture—dropping his face in his hands as though washing it away: “It was hell…”—he did have a son, all grown by now, a student, and rumor had it a super great kid, in general he was the type to only produce boys, this she could establish instantly, with lightning-quick penetrating insight from when she was still a girl—with every man, whether she simply met him or slept with him: who would it be with this man, a boy or a girl, whose sex was stronger?)—a blond baby with fluffy chick-down hair had appeared in her sleep several times already, after spinning around in space it headed, launched by raging power of her passion—toward him: he’ll be a sturdy, wonderful boy, pure as gold (and their whole multifarious tumultuous past, the books they read, his paintings, her piano lessons, God, how much has been learned, how much contemplated!—swirled into the air in a colorful vortex, coalesced, and instantly created in her mind—a nest, became a structure—rounded and complete with a living gravitational center: not bad at all to be born into a world like that, and we—we’ll be able to protect him, right? and anyway, how much of that Ukrainian intelligentsia is there among us anyway, pitiful, forcibly dragged back against the current of history—a tiny group and even that scattered: a dying species, almost-extinct clan, we should be breeding like crazy, and all the time, making love where and when we can, uniting in orgiastic insatiability into one, yelping and moaning mass of arms and legs, extending ourselves and populating this radioactive land anew!—our son, he, finally will be free of that legacy which we spent all of our youth settling accounts with—it’s been so painful, we may have actually paid it off by now)—the fierce, sharp sexual instinct of the breed, once apprehended in its full breadth and magnitude, consumed and propelled her at random, clearing everything in its path—who cares about a smashed-up car, what are distances, whether between cities or continents!—no matter about a fire with summonses and police reports (what a strange fire that was, the investigation wasn’t able to come up with anything, at a winter cottage where he had come up with a group of friends, he was lighting a fire in the fireplace in the wee hours of the morning, insisting on shish kebabs, he took off with his car, not yet smashed-up at that point, to the market, bought the meat—she remembered him carrying a heavy, bulging plastic shopping bag in front of him striped with rivulets of blood: the sleepless night had left her with a cloudy, uneasy feeling—a dry, bitter taste in her mouth, a strangely palpable sense of not having washed and having dirt under her nails, at the time she thought it was because of fatigue, too much booze and cigarettes; however, later, in normal condition conditions [well, not normal, but what you could call fantastic, with all the American consumer conveniences] it became clear—nope, that wasn’t the reason—the feeling was all the more odd because he was so obsessively clean, spending an hour each morning in the shower not counting the shave, she was even curious: what can a healthy man be doing in there for so long, masturbating? she never was able to smell his real scent: cigarettes—yes, deodorant—yes, but what does this man really smell like, the one you’ve been sharing table and bed with for two months, if you’ll pardon the elevated style?—even his sperm, it seems, had no smell, maybe because the second he came he would jump up and tear for the bathroom like a crazy man, hey, am I supposed to come with you, or what?