Out there in Jerusalem, going from temple to temple, she pleaded with God to give her strength—no more than that: the year had turned out to be difficult, lonely (her marriage, which had been decaying slowly for a while, fogging up her soul like a window in a room full of heavy breathing, finally fell apart), but mainly—homeless, full of fitful jumps from one temporary shelter to another, just so she wouldn’t have to remain in the tiny flat with her mother: staying with her had made her hate her own body, its stubborn, insurmountable materiality—it had to, no matter what you did, fill up a certain cubic measurement of space—at nights she dreamed of herself as a man—a tall, long-haired, swarthy male Mowgli who drags an old witch with bluish-gray, disheveled hair into bed and can’t have sex with her!—American psychoanalysts would have a ball with that one if someone were to let them know about it!—and that’s when it began to appear—in tiny flashes and jerks, dashing out and running for cover again—a feeling of all-out complete exposure to all forces: have you come for good or for evil? In her mind she assured herself, clenching her teeth: I don’t care if it’s worse, as long as it’s a change!—and her poems promised:
Tonight, terror will probably come.
Hot shivers—of lovemaking or vomiting—
Foreboding debauched coupling
Or death’s cry—shake the ailing body.
Rupture, rupture—all ligaments, nerves, veins:
My defenselessness is now so total,
Like an overt call to evil: Come!
I’ve already seen myself as a building
In which an orange rectangle burns in the night, a bare window,
With planks across the chest
And bottom of the abdomen, like for an X-ray,
And the rock, the one to shatter the pane
Already lies there, waiting for the hand.
There you go—shit, what else can you say here…But in Jerusalem there seemed to be a bit of relief, after all, the symposium turned out to be kind of interesting, so she was able to swallow fairly easily that bone of personal professional exhibitionism forcibly inserted into her throat: each time demonstrating yet again to grinning Western intellectuals that, see, Ukrainians also speak sentences with subordinate clauses; it’s just that when she was sitting at a table on the open terrace and blissfully stretching her legs during a break between sessions, imbibing sips of coffee together with conversation—they were arguing about Dontsov, please try to understand, folks, that was not anti-Semitism—it was the roar of a wounded beast: let us go, let us live!—and, with a concealed smile, examining her interlocutors through the golden slivers of her squinted lashes, she suddenly heard a sharp, powerful yowl: from out of nowhere a huge anthracite-black cat had appeared on the terrace and proceeded to walk among the tables, tail held high to general laughter and multilingual exclamations, still ripping the air with unrestrained shrieking—a cold shiver crept under her skin: what the hell kind of apparition is this now?—but the cat, bastard, kept heading straight toward their group and, arching its back, jumped straight into her lap, curled into a warm heavy ball and huddled quietly, twitching its perked ears and switching into a deep purr: it found what it was looking for. Everyone had a good laugh then; with unconscious fear, she carefully petted the beast as if to appease it—the tom bared its hard, glassy eyeballs, golden with deep black slits for pupils, like from the bottoms of inverted candles; in her mind she gasped: oh-oh-oh!—you were caught, sweetness, that’s when you were really caught—exactly half a year earlier, half a year before everything was swept up in a deafening whirl and carried you off, not giving you a chance to catch your bearings: and you thought of yourself as some kind of rescuer, a Myrrh-bearing Mary, yes? Well, you got it—right where you wanted it, smack into that yellow-lit rectangle with planks across the chest and abdomen, so don’t go whining now—he did, when all’s said and done, love you, that man. No, it was something else that wanted to love you through that man: a cat in your lap, a cat in your bosom, a flash of eyes and claws, while I, prostrate, am playing the fiddle and screaming: you’re hurting me, my love, you’re hurting me, do you hear me?
Explain one thing to me. Explain it, because I just don’t seem to get it. Do you really think that if you have a hard-on and you don’t come right away this makes you a prince and the woman must kick her legs in the air and squeal with delight every time you deign to touch her—in the middle of the night, after you’ve folded up your little pictures so very neatly and I’m in the grip of my first dream? Although, pretty soon after his arrival she stopped having dreams—or more precisely, she stopped remembering them: some kind of clumps of generally dull, brownish or asphalt-gray tones merged in a cloudy swirl, but not a single plotline emerged into daytime consciousness, like a huge lid had fallen down to divide it from the consciousness of the night—the simple awareness of his lying beside her shut down all channels of connection. Perhaps for the first time in her life she found herself imprisoned in the cage of naked reality—the world became opaque, the second bottom—the flickering, underwater net of secret meanings, which up until now had always shone through in her dreams and poems—switched off and extinguished itself with a click; there were now no more dreams and, consequently, no more poems either: she lost her bearings as though she had lost one of her senses, went deaf or blind. Her body, shattered by night, always felt heavy and awkward, somehow bloated inside, like she really was pregnant—a bag of meat from the market dripping blood, what’s going on, she wondered dully, why am I always feeling so bad—and would fall asleep on his arm like she fainted, while he happily mumbled at her ear: “Hmm, it seems that you’re capable of being an even very ‘delightful babe’—just that you’ve to get this sex thing straightened out.”—“Sex,” she would murmur like a teacher, already half-asleep: her brain still being the last thing to switch off—“is only a sign of deeper disagreements.”—“I doubt it,” he’d cut her off and close the subject. So it seems like you don’t know all that much about this business, my pet—notwithstanding all your extolled experience, who would have thought? Talking about it, to simply reach mutual understanding was impossible—he’d get angry right away, jump into a defensive posture; whereas stretching out her arms to him during the day would evoke in her a lighting-quick queasy feeling of losing balance—like in an elevator that comes to a sudden stop, or when you’re rushing alone against the crowd that has just poured out at the trolley stop—it turned out he “didn’t like to be pawed,” indeed this aversion to intimate contact was plain unhealthy (“Aren’t you ashamed of pawing men this way?” he would sneer, squinting one eye over the pillow)—by that time she was willing to wail, not just talk—in an endless 24/7 monologue (the way undigested food propels itself out of the digestive tract from both ends), to shake him by the shoulders, to shout loud enough for him to hear, what is with you, you jackass—and the jackass, incidentally, arrived with the intention of starting a family, no kidding, just picked up and showed up in whatever he was wearing at the time, that’s love for you!—and kept reproaching her that while he’s hanging out here with her, they’re probably stealing bricks form his construction site back home, “So you what,” she would place her fists on her hips: a witch, a bitch from the prison zone, she had no idea she could be like this—“you’d like me to pay you for the inconvenience?”—ah shit, how is this possible that two not entirely stupid people, who supposedly love each other, right? who overcame so many obstacles in order to be together, what he had to go through to get the visa alone, after all the car crashes and broken ribs, what she went through that winter in Cambridge—that they should be incapable of reaching even an e-le-men-ta-ry understanding—it’s mind-boggling! And—it was probably in such moments that his wife used to throw those knives at him, like against a brick wall, something he once admitted reluctantly—cute, a family sport of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, how about that: and so what happened? she was itching to ask, did she miss? Instead she tried to be r
ational: listen, I’m not a puppet on a string, am I now, why are you treating me this way—he’d snarl back, bent over the desk and glaring from under his brow, like he was releasing smoke rings of his rage: “It’s just that many things inside me have been killed!” Thank you, dear, it seems that from now on I’ll be able to say the same. In other words, it’s contagious, this disease of the spirit? In other words, it’s now better for me, too—to avoid people, better not to get close to anyone? You have taught my body to castrate the perpetrator: all of my feminine strength, accumulated for generations, which has thus far been directed toward the light (the most precious memory of previous loves is the sun against a dark sky: that’s how it’s seen in outer space, it’s from there that my fragile little vessel has filled itself to the brim with streaming joy), with you has turned itself inside out, black lining outward, has become destructive—death-bearing, if we don’t mince words about it and put it plainly.
I’ll kneel where I stand: oh, there’s been
A ter-rible, transgressive sin—
To this day I quake, vomit thrusts at my throat,
Grinding hummocks of frozen ice
In my gut! In my chest!
Whom can I beg: blow it out,
This dry blue blaze
Lift this weight off my chest?
Because, I am guilty after all, because my love stayed behind in Cambridge, it melted in the spring together with the deep snows, and by the summer, by the time of your arrival, only the scar remained—and hope, hope that you could bring it back to life. I should have figured this out sooner: bringing things back to life is not your métier.
An unexpected call from home—from a girlfriend who went into business about a year ago and the only one of all my Kyiv friends and acquaintances who can afford to call the States: “Are you sitting down, are you able to handle some really terrible news?” she asks. “Like what?” There is a short pause in the receiver and then a choked voice: “Darka’s dead.” One second and my legs feel like they’ve just been blasted with hot ash and go numb, and right after that my whole body loses feeling, like anesthesia: No! (But somewhere in the back of my mind buzzes a nasty thought, like an escaped insect on a windowpane: lucky dog, her suffering’s over—because she did suffer really a lot, beautiful, smart, she looked so good in those colorful peasant kerchiefs she would tie back, with tassels over the shoulders of her sheepskin coat—rosy cheeks, high cheekbones, like a dark-red winter apple, a sharp, mouse-like nose, heart-shaped lips, a genuine artifact of folklore, a living illustration to Gogol’s “Christmas Eve,” and she had a great sense of humor, also Gogolian, classic Ukrainian: the type where you’re spinning your tale deadly serious and the audience is on the floor laughing—and yet her whole youth was one of suffering—with her stupid mother who screwed up both her husband and her kids, with her asshole men: her first husband left her as soon as he graduated, as soon as he was assigned to a job in the capital, which was the reason, it turned out, that he married her in the first place; her second marriage ended in a terminated pregnancy and after that there was no end to gynecological problems, straight downhill; and with her third man, mushy as Wonder Bread and always unemployed, she had to work for two while he looked after the kid, at least he did that much—she tutored all the private students she could get, accepted translations, hopped around from one rental unit to another the way we all did, pulling her family behind her on her back, completed her dissertation, and wonder of wonders finally got a job in some newly established Ukrainian-American foundation, got on her feet about three months ago, they were driving back from Boryspil airport—a stone-drunk Lada toward them in their lane, head-on collision: four people, everybody in the car, dead on the spot, good-bye Charlie, and only a high, thin clear voice laments—tearlessly!—like a soundtrack to a film: “oh had I known I’d be dying, I’d have asked you to cut down the sycamore, to build a casket of four sides strong, so it would stand there thirty-four years long, it stood there, it stood there, and began to rot, and the casket turned to the girl and began to talk: either burn me up, or chop me up, either chop me up—or give the body up…”) Standing in the middle of the kitchen with the receiver in my hand, holding on to Sana’s voice asking for the tenth time what will happen to Talia now, what will happen—Talia’s only five, high cheekbones, looks a lot like her mother, nice-looking except for her father’s potato nose, one time when she was still an infant she had struck you with her lost, wavering, questioning, watery look in her eye, which seemed to be searching for something to fix itself to—Darka was changing her diaper, and suddenly this poem appeared, whispered by an invisible wind:
How strange it is—a girl, a child.
An expression of dissatisfaction on her face:
First straighten out this life,
Then call me in.
You little doll, you tiny person, forgive—
A world who-knows-when painted last,
Your parents, who threw you in here
As though to your death on a barren field
—Okay, start growing!
—standing this way she distinctly hears that other, soundtrack voice—not Darka’s, although Darka was a good singer and Ukrainian folk-songs she did particularly well, who knows where she got that natural, chesty, folk intonation—a deep, precipitous wellspring—you can’t fake that if you don’t have it, even the most drunken crowd would melt, curling back in their chairs like tripe, just as soon as Darka took a deep puff of her cigarette—tilting her brow: “nicotine-vitamine”—and began to sing in that incredibly clear voice, her face would clear up with a gentle sadness, flower petals fell to the ground, horses stood quietly, ears perked, boats swayed from side to side in the waves at the shore, splish-splash, splish-splash, splish-splash, grass rustled under someone’s stealthy steps, and the water carried away willow leaves; and everything else, all over the world, was carried away by water, some kind of nameless people populated this world, they yearned for something, they loved and they suffered, and only the scattered wet traces of voices (wails?) were left in their wake—you can only drink from those tiny tracks, you can only feel: that your own suffering, illuminated for an instant by a late, setting ray of meaning—is not the only one out there, not the first nor the last, and suddenly she remembers that in the song with the casket it actually stood empty for twenty-four rather than thirty-four years: that woman, who sang about her death in such high and piercing tones (I’d lay down my husband, but I love him so, I’d lay down myself, but my child is small: lie down, my dear wife, your child will be fine, people will help out…) was in fact a lot younger than us, still a kid—and you (that’s Sana railing at me now), have you gone mad out there, you idiot, making a huge tragedy out of a bad fuck—well, if you put it that way, then it’s not really a tragedy, everything depends on how you tell the story, except that Sana doesn’t know, and nobody knows what Darka told you shortly before you left—that was perhaps the first time she really opened up to you even though you’d known each other since college, a year earlier Darka’s father had died—he was an award-winning musician, a deputy, and in his day practically a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, although, it’s true, even he got into a little trouble for “nationalism,” so he started playing at state concerts, while his wife, who had gotten used to a comfortable life, would nag him to death if ever he tried to give a toast at official banquets in Ukrainian—even if uttered thickly and stupidly, playing the jester with his “howdy-doody” wordplays, the Central Committee official representative—a concrete slab in a gray suit—sat disapprovingly silent: not a single muscle moved on his impenetrable, seemingly waterlogged, face, ai-ai-yai, we’re in trouble now, “and you were gonna go on that trip to Canada,” the wife yelped, taking off her coat in the hall while a pregnant Darka, dying from the toxicity, was grinding up some coffee in the kitchen for her father—“you use that head of yours for thinking, ever?”—and her old man
, after walking into the kitchen and lighting up a cigarette (first breaking a few matches), told his daughter roughly (also, like his wife, in Russian): “I know, I’m merely a sociopolitical buffoon,” and this phrase stayed with her always, a hammered-in nail—she buried him at the exclusive Baikove cemetery, obituaries in all the papers, and the orchestra played, according to the wishes of the deceased, the Cossack farewell—“the stallion bowed his head,” the late child, Darka was a late child, by the time she was born her father was forty, a good-looking, mature man at the height of his fame, how else could you hang on to him if not with another child?—“I’ve just now, myself a woman, understood my mother,” Darka told you with pain in her eyes, “I just got it—I’m the one who shows up at the end of the banquet and pays the bill”—that night she didn’t sing and the two of you huddled at the end of the table and you listened, chilled to the marrow by the blast of brutal courage with which she confronted life, and equally by the bone-piercing draft of at-once established sisterhood: we pay, girls, we do, we pay for everything, down to the last penny!—then we were flagging down a cab, cramming inside like sardines, crackling the thick cellophane of our flower bouquets: it was somebody’s birthday, maybe even Sana’s—someone was trying to squeeze in between the seats, somebody in an awkward fur coat was squeezing onto someone’s lap, giddy-up!—as the first Soviet cosmonaut apparently said—and—you were off, in flight, two sisters, two doves: you across the ocean, and Darka—further still, a milk-white shadow setting out from a pile of crushed metal and on to one of the most distant stars—late child, brought into the world by a mother who wanted to hang on to her husband, and once there was no one to hang on to—life was exhausted, God opened his right hand and released the aching soul: peace be with you, tormented one, go and rest.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex Page 9
