At the entrance to the restaurant they were figuring out who wouldn’t come, for whom not to wait: Misha Khazin emigrated to America, long ago, back in the early eighties, Kraichyn’s in Paris at a conference, Artemchuk is somewhere abroad as well with a sick child—thyroid problems (Chernobyl)—and Soltys, well, they’ll commemorate him separately, and it would be good to someday make a trip to the cemetery, absolutely (at this moment everyone is confident that someday they’ll certainly go)—at Berkovtsi, in that unfenced area where row on row of short pillars topped with red stars stand at attention, announcing that they all did their noble international duty in Afghanistan, though they say it’s permitted now to put up crosses. That overwhelming feeling at the very first moment—of a group of strangers, unusually quiet (everyone overwhelmed by the same feeling perhaps), greying, balding (men), and decked out (women)—and then at the next moment, as though the film projector begins to rewind, there begin to emerge from them the figures of children they were twenty years ago until the two frames, the past and the present, finally click together and then from their lips come the sincerest of cries: You haven’t changed! You too! You haven’t changed a bit! (Who but our classmates will give us back those selves that no longer exist—not for anyone, hell, not for anyone? Of course, if you don’t count your parents, but then, that’s why they are your parents.) So who else are we waiting for?
Holding out her bent finger: Khazin, Kraichyn, Artemchuk (the Soltys forefinger remains half-bent and uncertain: where should it go?). Hey, look, Sashko Begerya’s here, too, though he didn’t graduate with us—he went to the technical school after eighth grade—at last Darka gets up the nerve, as though she’d just remembered:
“And Skalkovska?”
You know, what’s her name. That’s how it comes out. And yet she thinks that for a second everyone falls silent. Your sin is a sin, my dear Darka, and there’s no statute of limitations on it.
But no, that’s not why. Almost immediately Darka realizes that none of them really remembers the incident from all those years ago. Nobody remembers Darka’s speech at the meeting, and even if they do recall something, nobody gives it the weight it’s gathered for her over the years (one may say over her whole life, because she never did anything like it again, maybe cruelty too requires a single vaccination, though vaccinations sometimes also prove deadly). Dear Effie, my beloved golden-legged girl, my lost sister, with an addict’s blazing pupils in which tears burn like candles at the impossibility of taking the whole world into yourself, or all the men in it, what are they saying about you?
Because they are talking, they are lively, the ice of estrangement melted by the insatiable human craving for sensational stories: You’re kidding! No! Really?—the way they’d suck onto a plane crash with two hundred dead, preferably with a list of passengers along with their ages (taking special note of the couple with a baby who were going to show him off to his grandparents), onto all the mighty who have fallen and now allow us to pity them: presidents caught with their pants down before the entire planet, bankrupt oil magnates, pop stars busted for drugs, and the one who yesterday was crowned the king of the Jews and who today appeared humbler than the humblest of us, thereby revealing how he’d cheated us and so we with all due rage shout, “Crucify him,” asking for revenge for yesterday’s humiliation.
They are talking, or rather it’s a little plump brunette with a dark mossy mustache talking, who turns out to be Marinka Weissberg, while the others around her chime in with their, What? Really? And then?
Last summer, Marinka says, by accident, on the street, “I didn’t recognize her.” She says that you, Effie, now weigh about 190 pounds, huge, a barrel, because they gave you insulin when you needed lithium—“But lithium also adds weight,” one of the boys, now a chemical engineer, says authoritatively, while another, a doctor, though not a psychiatrist, in the same professional tone, interrupts him (oh men, how hard you work to earn your self-respect from us!), taking an interest in the diagnosis: “If it’s lithium, then it’s manic depression, and that’s the end of the story, you spend your life on medication.” “Oh my,” coo the girls, a gust of self-satisfaction (or does Darka imagine it) wafts through them, the whisper of wind in the treetops, then gone—but does Marinka know the diagnosis? Did she tell her why? She told her she’d had a miscarriage after which her husband left her; they’d just come back from vacation, from where, from Switzerland (another round of leaf rustling, this time sharper edged, and Darka sees a few suppressed sarcastic smiles), where she swam in a lake where there was a sign, WATER POLLUTED, and must have caught something there that caused the miscarriage. The pseudopsychiatrist, also Vovka Lasota (former nickname: Bucks, who knows why, but nicknames no longer apply), now claims the stage (one of two: either he’s a decent doctor, or this is his only way of asserting himself because there are no salaries being paid and his wife at home nags endlessly) and declares, casually and patronizingly (for which Darka quietly begins to loathe him), that mental illness doesn’t necessarily depend on specific causes, they, meaning not us, those other ones, separated from us with a tall wrought-iron fence, are always seeking a cause, often making it up, and they’re good at it. (But you, Darka sends him angry pulses, of all people should know that that fence is no boundary, that tomorrow you too might land on the wrong side of it in a washed-out dark-blue robe like a marine uniform and even more washed-out pants with your aluminum bowl for food and a dazed, drug-clouded gaze, don’t you?) And if it’s really serious manic depression, the guy blathers on (with a touch of skepticism about the diagnosis, as though to say, I’m not sure of course, I haven’t seen the patient myself), if that’s the case, then it’s not psychosomatic, it’s organic, like schizophrenia or petit mal epilepsy (in a minute he’ll rehearse everything he’s learned at the institute, what a good boy, wait, he isn’t married, where’s his wedding ring, how is it possible such a catch is still available?), in such cases, the etiology isn’t clear, the disease surfaces only later, usually after thirty (once more the female rustling, bees, on and on, Just imagine, you’re just going on with your life . . .). “You go on and on and never even taste it,” Darka says aloud, trying to derail the conversation, and the conversation turns, your school-age authority hasn’t faded, and defrosts immediately into its fresh power, along with your public persona from back then, but the tracks turn unexpectedly: “You know,” says one of the girls, “it’s a nightmare, of course, it’s awful, but she, Skalkovska, was always, well, weird, wasn’t she?” Everybody nods in agreement, gathering together defensively, hastily erecting between themselves and Skalkovska that wrought-iron fence with the sharpened pickets at the top, hammering them in one by one, as though it might really protect them from something: someone with servile readiness remembers the time she danced a rumba on the chemistry table, “Girl on a Ball,” of course, she took ballroom dance lessons, and at that moment everyone was having all kinds of fun, until the assistant principal walked in, but there was something odd in that dancing, and the speaker, the farsighted sage she is, noticed it.
“Then you should have said something then, why did you keep it to yourself all this time?” Darka grins through her teeth. “You might have saved her life.”
They fall silent and embarrassed. They are in general not bad people. We are all of us not bad people. And yet why is it that, no matter what we turn to, it all goes so rotten? Marinka comes to the rescue: it turns out she hadn’t gotten to the end of the story because she then invited Skalkovska over, it was nearby, they’d just moved uptown, finally leaving her parents, and it worked out very fine, they now have a two-bedroom apartment on Mykilsko-Botanical Street with windows facing the botanical garden; the subject is a live one and everyone has something to say, especially the girls, who immediately take a warrior’s interest in the details of the trade-up: what kind of apartment did they leave, from what neighborhood, how much more was it, Marinka is puffed out with the pride of responsibility, she promises a few interested parties her top-not
ch real estate agent’s phone number, Tell him Marinka and Vadik sent you. Vadik, then, must be the husband, and it was this fine upstanding Jewish husband, can you imagine, that Effie attempted to seduce when Marinka, a good-hearted soul, went out to get a snack, leaving them tête-a-tête. “He told me later, I literally didn’t know where to hide.”
Literally. Nymphomania, Vovka Lasota delivers the new diagnosis—and why nymphomania, Darka wants to object, why not the hysteria of an abandoned woman, and quite possibly the habit of being an easy one to get, with that instantly recognizable defenseless fragility of hers, which not even two hundred pounds can hide, and which for many, and above all for men, is balm for all their wounds at once, so that our upstanding husband may not be the innocent lamb that he convinced Marinka he was, or what if Marinka convinced herself, because what other choice would she have had? And what’s left for Darka but to force out what she intends to be a caustic remark but which instead comes out mumbled and pathetic: “Isn’t it nice for medics, you have a diagnosis for everything, and here, have some pills.”
In response Vovka Lasota winces and asks her not to refer to him as a medic since he is neither a male nurse nor an orderly but a doctor, and the head of his department, and as a matter of fact he specialized in gynecology and would be happy to share his phone number. “Thanks,” laughs Darka, and it comes out in a bass, otherwise her voice would have betrayed her. “Thank god, I’ve no such need.”
Meanwhile the crowd has begun moving to the tables, which glimmer from afar with coquettish kitschy bouquets of white napkins blooming from the glasses, Why the hell did I come here, and what am I to do here, god, what emptiness—get drunk, maybe?
Vovka Lasota sees Darka home. In the taxi she notices that his Chekhovian beard smells of cologne, Givenchy she thinks. He kisses her under her dress strap, mutters something about his divorce, Darka says, “Be so kind as to shut up,” and wants to add, Or I’ll scream, it’s the last thing she needs at this moment, another male confession, but she decides to leave such a complex sentence for better days, focusing herself instead on getting her key into the lock, which she manages on the third try. The worst thing is that she remembers everything, even more clearly than before: instead of drowning in the drink, it rises to the surface and swirls through her mind, and it sucks. Lasota meanwhile has turned into a hot bumblebee and buzzes in her ear how he’d wanted to approach her since they were in eighth grade but was afraid, attacks her from all sides with his heavy breathing and the pressure of a strange body under the bulging, already superfluous clothes, so okay, actually it’s not okay, and it won’t save her from anything, and she can’t even focus, but she’ll try, she’ll try, why not—the beautiful dress drops unceremoniously to the floor, and when he enters her abruptly, with a groan, and the familiar warmth inside her awakens the body’s previously stilled memory, which grows instantly louder than everything else, she surrenders herself gladly, out of genuine gratitude to Lasota for this brief respite, which he naturally takes as a sign of his own male irresistibility and so encouraged, he does it well, yes, quite well, and Hey look, it’s getting really good, oh, oh god, oh, and then she lies like a stone with her face buried in his shoulder, and he asks her above her head, in a voice so deep with emotion she is ashamed of her utter lack of any reciprocity:
“Did you know I loved you?”
It looks like he also needed revenge. Isn’t it convenient? Men indeed. How one dimensional they all are, how linear, like a simple arithmetic (x:y=z; z+a=b). Slipping into sleep, as consciousness loosens its bulldog grip, she remembers how Lasota, who himself was not the worst of students, once asked timidly for her help with math—the only time she might have discerned his wish to be alone with her, and with this pleasant thought, or rather, using it to squash, like a beetle under a saucer, a different thought, the dark and formless one, for which she has no more energy, Darka finally falls asleep.
She awakens instantly as if shoved and pops out of bed, where, shamelessly, as though he belonged there, lies a loud, breathing, snorting man, along with all the bed smells of a stranger. What was it, a fit of nausea? Sour mouth, room dark, in the window a lone streetlamp burns, what time is it? She’s prodded by some internal physiological fear, but her foot gets caught in a cold pool of silk, her crumpled dress on the ground, her best one, she picks it up, shakes it out, tosses it in the direction of a chair (it rustles, landing), god it’s cold, she’s trembling, her teeth chatter, goose bumps on her forearms, large and wide spaced like scattered grains; of course, she fell asleep naked, but that’s not why she’s cold, could it be the alcohol, it’s bad—she wraps herself in her disgusting husband’s robe (when will that idiot finally get his things?), and stumbles, blind and uncertain, toward the kitchen, where the digital clock says 3:30 a.m., holy shit, and she lowers herself down to the edge of the seat carefully as though she were made of glass, trying to breathe evenly one two three inbreath one two three outbreath, a meditation session, almost fucking yoga, ah, okay, now she can put on the kettle, a few familiar stabilizing gestures, and the blue flame flickers peacefully below, very touching. No, it wasn’t her teeth that were chattering, it was something rising from within, a clatter of the castanets—this line of poetry, which repeats itself mechanically as if the needle were stuck on a spinning record: “So long had life together been”—Brodsky, stupid verse, stupid as green firewood and crackling just the same, and yet it stuck—and suddenly, hands leaning on the stove, Darka starts to cry, the sob coming not from her throat but from her belly, like a groan, and she again has to hold her breath one two three so that she does not shatter: Why, why, what is all this for, this fucking life, my God? And it’s no longer clear whose life she’s weeping for, only that she needs somehow to endure, to survive this terrible unfairness, somehow digest this burden of injustice, this eternal human scream to heaven: My God, why me? and her grief, alive and burning, is for everything we did not become and never will.
Blotting her eyes with her fingers, she reaches for the cigarettes on the table, strikes a match, and standing there in the kitchen with a cigarette in hand, she seems to herself larger than the darkness. Okay, let’s sum up, and what have we got? A certain reputation in her field, a modicum of financial security, provided such a thing is at all possible under our circumstances, and two published books, one of them based on her thesis, plus a university textbook, plus two divorces, and honorary membership in three Western academies, which is worth exactly shit but will do for an obituary. E la nave va. The show must go on.
Why the hell, of the two of us, did I have to be the survivor?
And here this disgust with herself, this nausea, the toxicity of the self—the eighth grade, the scope, a spoonful of sunflower oil, yes, then, just like now—in a lightning flash reverses itself, and Darka is at last rattled to the core, she is turned inside out like a sock, her stomach in her throat, she barely makes it to the bathroom and there, leaning against the cold tiles above the toilet, with more and more tremors, doubled over from a silent cry, half falling in a cold sweat, no longer a human figure but human-size intestines pumping backward, she throws up last night’s dinner, and herself at the dinner, and the night with Vovka Lasota, spasm after spasm, a brown sharp-sour stinky mass of life’s undigested garbage spilling over the top, how does it all fit inside us, the decomposing corpse of her last marriage, all the scandals and humiliating settling of scores, all the pent-up hatred for the world and herself, a hot burning spray of hard bits through her mouth and nose, she can barely take a breath between fits of heaving, her knees buckle, but this is right, it feels right, this is how it should be done, to the bottom, to the scraped-out dregs, to childhood, to those first jealousies and first betrayals, to become sterile, pure, and immoveable, like the white tiles that hurt the eyes in the blazing light, because nothing either very beautiful or very terrible, nothing like this ever happens to us, you poor child, you still have to work really hard to get either one of the two—and here again Effie made it, everyt
hing came out as she had predicted—while normal life just rushed through the rest of us with this jiggly, thick brown stream, just look how it glistens in the toilet, even the walls are splattered brown, and the flushed water roars like Niagara, and you feel this otherworldly cold because your whole life has been cast out of you, and you are standing in your bathroom like a Jew in a gas chamber, leaning against the tiles exhausted, covered in tears and your own shit, your fingertips blue, empty, empty as after an abortion, and those you loved have been flushed out of you down, down the sewer pipes.
Later she takes a long, thorough bath, and brushes her teeth three times because the odor seems permanent, and when she steps out of the bath, it’s starting to turn grey outside. Vovka Lasota lies in her bed with his head wrapped in the sheets like a Bedouin corpse ready for burial, and just like the dead Bedouin, he has nowhere to go (sure, divorce isn’t easy on anyone, especially on men, who soon seem like abandoned dogs who’ll lick anyone, seeking a master). At Darka’s appearance the corpse shows some signs of life: he pulls his head out of the sheets and smiles, somewhat like a victorious man after a successful night, and somewhat like that boy who approached Darka during recess and, looking past her, ears red, asked her to help him after school with this math homework. Which, in fact, she never did.
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