Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  (What Darka herself remembered was her first glimpse, through a crack in the principal’s office door, of Effie’s mother—young and dazzlingly beautiful, sheathed in leather, draped in pendulous Gypsy jewelry, in sheaves of turtledove, grey veils of smoke that swirled like burning incense around an unknown goddess—apart from the brief shock at the fact that someone had the nerve to smoke in the principal’s office, she remembered it as the first time she became aware of a different species of human that somewhere, no, here, beyond the glass wall, though you can’t get there, thrives—a richer-than-rich, glamorous movie idol with an unfathomably intense life who has been given the world for her pleasure forever.) Darka’s mother, however, also remembered the arrival of a detective, something Darka barely noticed (maybe because the children were questioned in their parents’ presence and parents were, to kids at that age, still more important than any strangers, so Darka retained the vague impression that it was her own parents interrogating her). A detective? That means it wasn’t simply a matter of horseplay in fresh air. What else was up? The chewing gum and American jeans (the height of luxury) that were given to or traded by one of the kids near the, oh god, Intourist Hotel (where all foreigners stayed), merited that terrible word—the most terrifying word there was—“dealing” in quite likely smuggled goods, because trading with foreigners was, after all, a crime. Were they setting them up for a later date, to keep the kids from racing into the future with extravagant appetites, teaching them instead to aim lower, and sin in secret?

  You must have seen Skalkovska has (Effie immediately became, and remained, Skalkovska) that pin with the American flag? Did she tell you where she got it?

  Chills, my god, what a nightmare, plus the reek of a political informer—was it the mother of the victimized, skinned, half-circumcised boy who’d used this as a way to break up the group once and for all? What could Effie, her Effie, have to do with this? And above all how could she have maintained her life on such strictly parallel tracks, as invisible as pantyhose without a wrinkle, without ever giving herself away to Darka?

  (There was, however, one moment that Darka, with the sudden jealous clarity of all lovers, did register, one splinter she caught: Ihor M., from tenth grade, in the hallway, among the red-scarfed peons whom the upperclassmen shoved aside blindly like ants, suddenly stops: Fawn, he says, with an unusually intimate, creepy, utterly adult tone, and a strange smile on his lips, and Effie steps toward him like a ballerina, heel to toe—and while they exchange a few hushed words, Darka sees nothing but her bent leg, toes lightly pressed to the ground, and her heart breaking out of the pain of uncertainty, suspiciously asks Effie after she returns, “How do you know him?”

  “We’re neighbors,” says Effie, puckering her plump lips into a chicken’s ass—it was the kind of grimace she put on when called on in class, driving the female faculty utterly mad. This was the single glimpse, quick as a scratch, of Effie’s distant and incomprehensible, beautiful and frightening—and how could it be otherwise—secret: because she was all mystery, that’s what she was, and neither Darka nor those hideous boys whose brains leaked out in their sperm, not that there was much there to begin with, could have dreamed of holding her for more than a moment, a moment brief as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.

  At the time, of course, Darka knew nothing about any foreskin, and for that matter neither did anybody else, except for the parents, among whom the news might even have caused a surge of sexual activity: the atmosphere was electrified. All Darka knew was that Effie had been dishonored, irretrievably thrust into some dark nightmare, into a quagmire, opened suddenly where the ground was supposed to be hard and well lit, and Darka’s parents loudly complained about “the little prostitute” and even went in a delegation from the PTA to the school principal to demand that Effie be immediately removed from school and the rest of the children, implicitly tender and pure, be therefore forever segregated from her immoral influence. (What Bolsheviks they in fact were, what monsters, Darka discovers, with cold surprise, twenty-five years after, that entire generation en masse, the loyal and the dissidents, the thinkers, the free thinkers, and the thoughtless, my god!) And she also knew that Effie had betrayed her, this time not childishly, but in fact.

  Forever.

  (Shameful, and frighteningly obscene, and at the same time so unsettlingly grown-up, the vision made Darka’s head spin: with boys, with the thing that dangles between their legs that just two years ago they’d spied on in gym class, elbowing each other: “You can see everything on B!” And exactly what was it they saw? With big boys who “already know everything,” and therefore must have done to Fawn who-knows-what and she let them, the grown-up strangers, and they look at her as Ihor M. did—none of this associated in Darka’s mind in any way with their own sapphic games, and the only thing that wounded her was this: How could she have done that with strangers? How could she let strangers take off her panties? Never mind what followed—that blurred in Darka’s imagination. But the worst thought was: Effie, what about me? What about me? A mixture of feeling ignored, disrespected for her gender, her age, and of course for her sex: no matter what, Effie had been chosen, this was obvious, chosen by those boys for a different sort of life, while you, Darka, metamorphosed in a stroke into one of those comic, clumsy, hunched honors students escorted everywhere by parents, even to the movies, as if by guards: she didn’t let you in all the way, didn’t let you touch something essential in her, which means that everything about your friendship was a lie because at the bottom of the most luminous, ecstatic explosions of your oneness, which seemed so clear, there was always this gigantic dark cave full of sealed shameful treasures, oh, what an idiot you were!—and nightly weeping into the pillow, deeply buried so her parents wouldn’t hear.

  And therefore, when at the class meeting, as the leader of the Pioneer Council (the comrade leader—the drumbeat as before an execution, the red flag carried in, plush red with yellow fringes) and as a former friend of Skalkovska’s—sure, there was no getting around the need to distance herself, as she was told by everyone, the vice dean, the class tutor, and all the king’s men, otherwise Effie’s fall might drag her down so low she could hardly imagine—when she had to announce the Personal Case of Comrade Skalkovska and take the floor (and again at first the strange resonance of a voice squeezed by your own throat so you can’t swallow, it echoes inside your head, you’re listening to the sound of your own head) she denounced Effie in a way no one would ever have foreseen, she least of all.

  This must have looked like the unbridled, escalating attack of a mean little dog, nipping, drawing blood, and again, to the meat: Remember! Remember what you said about all the classmates, that they’re all narrow-minded nonentities! (Naturally these good-for-nothings closed ranks, and Effie wound up completely isolated.) You put yourself above the class! Above the group! You decided you were better than the others, that you were allowed more than the others were, and look where this has led you—your comrades (that’s right: first you create a group identity, then you speak in its name) are now ashamed of you! And so on, an oration worthy of an A+ with two exclamation marks after it, but alas there’s no such grade.

  And it was not an excess of administrative zeal (as it might have appeared to an uninformed outsider), and even less was it a desire to save her own skin (as it might have been appropriate to say had they not been children) but rather an ardent, overwhelming drive to possess Effie, even if for the last time, to have her back, begging forgiveness, repenting her betrayal. (And because Darka did not have her own power over her, she pursued instead the one offered her by the adult world, that of the Comrade Leader of the Pioneer Council—and the drums beat, oh, how they beat, they sent a chill up your skin, this shaman’s drum, the prehistoric tambourine; that’s right, all turning points in life should be staged as solemnly as tribal initiations, and what is one’s first act of collaboration if not a kind of initiation?) Consequently, Darka’s words should have been read to contain a secret mes
sage, revealed in ultraviolet light: Remember! Remember how you said I was your only soul mate, the only one you could talk to; remember how I said, when we listened to the Doors, that it sounded like doors were really opening, and you knew what I meant, you said, Yes, those cast-iron doors! Heavy as those at Saint Vladimir’s Cathedral. And I really saw them as that, and I screamed with joy that you did, too, you did—we stood before the doors together, we breathed as one, Effie, why did you slam them in my face?

  But Effie-Skalkovska stayed silent. And did not intend to remember a thing, nor to repent, nor to beg forgiveness. She didn’t even look at Darka—she looked out the window, at the playing field lined with poplars, occasionally biting her lower lip, she cried—and it was clear it was something very personal, something a galaxy away from Darka, her fiery speeches, and this endless meeting. The doors, which Darka hadn’t been asked to enter and tried to break down, remained shut.

  What if, Darka speculates now, she was pregnant? That, thank god, she would never know. Because you can’t exactly roll up at the class reunion to, basically, a stranger, with a glass of wine in your hand, and ask, as casual as if you were talking about the weather: Hey, did you by any chance have an abortion in sixth grade?

  Now, from the vantage point of this dull bare plateau that is called experience, Darka could consider something else: namely that Effie with her innate vulnerability, her innate fragility—she was like a package, its contents cushioned in layers of paper, stamped Fragile on all sides in runny ink and sent on its way, yet without an address—this perfidious, secret, gracious, spoiled, truly vicious and irresistibly seductive, inwardly aflame Effie-Fawn, simply had to find, at an early age, her own way of protecting herself, especially from the all-conquering Darka, defending herself with what was most obviously hers, her body. Putting it between herself and the world like a cardboard shield: Take it, take it, feel it, you want it?

  (I certainly didn’t leave her any other options—why should others have?)

  For one, two, or three years after that—in seventh, eighth, yes, and ninth grade, too, they passed each other like planets on distant orbits, greeting each other with a nod, though for a long time Darka avoided Effie’s eyes and was careful not to get stuck alone with her: the awareness of her betrayal, which couldn’t be undone, poisoned her, from the bottom of her soul, where it lay like immoveable rock raising up muddy miasmas so that in the upper grades Darka even had fits of nausea, especially in the mornings, very much like morning sickness, problems with her gallbladder; she got scoped in the hospital, and was advised to swallow a spoonful of sunflower oil before breakfast—and then she noticed, with embarrassed relief, that when they were in groups, Effie would answer her remarks calmly, almost warmly. She did not pretend Darka didn’t exist, so Darka decided finally to risk speaking with her one on one, politely and purposefully—what’s the big deal, really, let’s get over it—asking Skalkovska when she’d be on class duty, and Skalkovska politely answered it would be Thursday, and so it went, sideways, as between strangers. By that time they really were strangers to each other, having outgrown their childhood episodes along with the cotton tights and splayed children’s shoes, snub nosed, which got tossed into closets or attics, where they gradually aired out the pigeon-toed warmth that once filled them, and all the falls, scratches, and bruises they witnessed, the jump rope, hopscotch, the sand carried into the house (while mother scolded), and sticky as lacquer (to be pulled off with fingers) traces of jam, and after some years, when you found them again, amid the dust and the cobwebs, you dragged them into the light to see they had become old rags. No, they weren’t girls anymore, they were ladies and young women, sighing, well, well.

  (This is a lie because in fact nothing passes—no matter how deeply you bury it, what happened keeps growing darkly under the skin of years like an indelible bruise.)

  Somehow, the dust settled. Perhaps an influential parent from the Bad Company managed to turn down the heat, or maybe the school wanted to protect its own reputation—the school had a fine one—and who needs it all, the endless meetings, commissions, inspections, good Lord, enough, and so it all died down. Dried up. For a while Skalkovska suffered her isolation but that, too, slowly dissolved. Only the teachers, or more precisely the female ones, continued to rage (rumor had it only the gym teacher—a man—tried to defend her at that first teachers’ council, but it sounded silly, what kind of defense could he mount?), treating her badly, really badly, which she definitely did not deserve, but she remained even keeled, straight backed, expressionless, a good student but not a star, and was once even sent to the regional academic tournaments for her English, or something. And yet a teasing, seductive odor wafted off her like that slightly cloying yet barely noticeable (except up close, lifted by the body’s warmth) and thus all the more lascivious (so they thought) scent of what must have been her mother’s perfume, it tickled their noses, entered their bloodstreams, darkened their faces: “Skalkovska, leave the room!” (Shaking her head like a pony with its mane, biting her lower lip, whether getting ready to cry or to laugh, she concentrated as though she were leaving forever on packing her books and notebooks into her bag, then her long narrow back with a keyboard of buttons running down it and short skirt would walk down the aisle between the desks to the door, never turning around: Darka could never keep from staring at her back, as though she were expecting something, but her back was buttoned tight as the door that she had just closed quietly behind her, which teachers were eager to take as a provocation, repeating her punishment, again and again: “Leave the room, Skalkovska, that’ll teach her.”)

  And in ninth grade, before the end of her last term, she finally did leave for good. And after her, the gym teacher, an Olympic medalist in swimming, a forty-year-old with thick grey hair (why do athletes so rarely go bald?), with acidy sweat and hair sticking out of his nostrils, was also let go. It turned out that he and Effie had been carrying on an affair all spring. Someone had seen them.

  Heaped in a corner of the girls’ gym room, the old mats, rough to the touch as though steeped a long time in brine, and a dry, sunk-in smell, familiar as the odor of old abandoned stables, the smell of children’s sweat, or not only children’s, but also that other, violent and acrid?

  All the time, somebody is living your life for you, one of its possible, never-to-be-realized versions. All those feelings that really do bind us to others, from love to envy, grow out of this half-secret longing for other lives—intuited, recognized as doubtless ours, lives we will nevertheless never possess. And somebody defends us, something shields us, lives them out for us. And we sleep without nightmares.

  “Of course,” said Darka’s mother, “it’s all the fault of the parents: one look at Effie’s mother tells the whole story.” She said this while cutting her nails with a sharp whipping sound: she was using tailor’s scissors, because they didn’t have a proper manicure pair. Her triumphant voice was a monument to her own motherhood, which was utterly beyond reproach. And something apart from this, which even then raised Darka’s hackles, though she kept it to herself: faceless and impersonal, with all the pressure of the ten atmospheres at the bottom of the ocean, the truly terrible eternal righteousness of the tribe against the individual who broke its ranks.

  Darka’s mother also had her most intense life experience when she was thirteen. She’d stood at the top of a hill with her sled, red and gasping, waiting for her turn to go down—and suddenly she saw how the snow-covered slope flowed down from under her feet in the lilac-colored shadows of the trees: in the sun the snow glimmered with billions of sparks, and each one was a planet. The planets burned, shimmered, and as the poet whom she had not yet studied at school said, spun into alignment.

  The girl stared while the light grew brighter until she could almost hear the ice tinkling. She didn’t know the ancients called that sound the music of the spheres. That this was the voice of the infinite. She knew only that she had to look away, otherwise something terrible and irrevocable wou
ld happen, she’d go mad!—a bolt of black lightning flashed a boundary marker in her mind: Get back, get back!

  And she turned away.

  Everything that followed in her life was fine with her: marriage, poverty, children, sickness, a job she didn’t like, as well as the little joys, like a new apartment or a leather coat. It’s true, the leather was only pigskin, but had been well tanned.

  It could have been worse. Much worse.

  After all, thinks Darka, going through the outfits in her closet: her club jacket will reveal the burn from the iron on her forearm, the yellow dress begs a tan, and I’m pale as a cheese, and so on (it’s fine to laugh at yourself, but a reunion is yet another test, this time of your life-in-progress, which hasn’t exactly fallen into place perfectly but that’s all the more reason to hold your head high, dress to the nines, flawless makeup, silliness, but there it is, and what for, what’s the point?)—after all, you can’t have infinity, can you? Yet that apparently was what Effie wanted—but this second idea, following the first, plays over the surface of her thoughts, never sinking in: Darka sees herself in the mirror holding up a long silk dress on a hanger, and her expression is unexpectedly stupid, entirely childlike—what an obvious discovery, you can’t have infinity. And all our striving to gather up more—money, men, impressions, diplomas, dresses, cars—is nothing but our pitifully meager effort to reach infinity by adding one thing to another and then another. There has to be a better way, but what is it?