“You have such delicate hands,” he explains, as if trying to justify himself. My laugh is loud and exaggerated—mainly from the relief of finally landing on my own turf: “Is that a diagnosis or a compliment?”
The instructor is flustered like a kid: word games are my Wimbledon, now the best he can do is follow the mean slice of my serve with his eyes—clearly he’s not in the habit of returning balls like these, and I have no good reason to make the guy blush this way. I fell for Oleh precisely because almost from the minute we met, he rushed fearlessly to meet my every serve, showing himself to be a true partner, capable of staying the course. Having let his mind go inert at monotonous office dealings, he clearly savored exercising those stiff, inactive parts of the brain, returning most of my balls with growing enjoyment, and responding with an unselfish and sincere admiration to those he’d miss, pushed far off the court—almost like he was about to applaud me, the way I want to when I watch my tennis instructor play from the bleachers: there’s an ecstatic, quasi-religious awe in the face of pure artistry. It was precisely during one such moment that Oleh burst out with a confession of his love—I still remember his mesmerized gaze in the moment just before he spoke—it was only later that I realized that was probably the most spontaneous act of his life, which was otherwise rather rigidly planned and controlled, but at that time we were still genuinely happy. You have to give him credit, he’s got that athlete’s staying power: Oleh’s been playing tennis since childhood, hasn’t he, and it gave him an education. And in this case, too, he’ll get his way: after many hours, this poor fellow here will manage to drill “Mrs. Martha” (as he addresses me, although this form obviously makes him uncomfortable, he’s not used to it, it feels foreign, but he doesn’t dare simply switch to the first name, and so both of us, by silent agreement, teeter politely on the impersonal Mr. and Mrs.) into a state where she will be capable, albeit without particular relish, of accompanying her very own husband to the tennis courts in the role of a rather useless partner, but a hitting partner nonetheless, a squire. They say it’s good for the marriage. It strengthens the family, they say, when the husband gets the opportunity to demonstrate to you, to the fullest extent, how pathetic you really are. What a hopeless squid of a klutz you are, for example—and he still loves you: you may not be much, but you’re all his. I can see it now: In six months or so, come early fall, I’ll be scrambling in confusion all over this court, unable to return Oleh’s fierce, merciless serves—he can be vengeful, he can derive real pleasure from someone else’s humiliation. I’ll run after the ball when it’s hit out of the court like a puppy and dive into the bushes to retrieve it while Oleh assumes an Olympian pose on the other side of the net and waits, slapping his thigh with the racket and smiling indulgently. And then we’ll drive to a restaurant where he will clear his plates like a ravenous teenager and observe, before dessert, as he wipes his mouth with a napkin, that I smoke far too much, which will be true, I’ll be smoking like a chimney. We’ll talk little, because what’s there to talk about anyway?
As God is my witness, I am always happy to play along, to deliver, in the course of any shared venture, a small, inconspicuous blow job to his erect ego, to underscore deliberately, occasionally with a touch of outright grotesque, my own ineptitude in all things in which he indeed surpasses me—to present myself, for example, as an oh-so-impractical scatterbrain with two left hands who can’t even set the table properly and before the arrival of guests gladly turns herself into her jack-of-all-trades husband’s gopher who brings him this, and gets him that, That’s beautifully done, Oleh darling, where do you want me to put the flowers? I gladly delegate to him matters of personal management, as if I were indeed so frightfully disorganized that without him I literally wouldn’t be able to catch a single flight (never mind that I lived alone for the four years that proved crucial to my career and managed perfectly to keep every appointment and meet every deadline), and that’s fine, I don’t mind, why should I care, after all this is the usual system of worked-out compromises, like a set of mutually interlocking gears, inevitable and unavoidable if you want to have a man for more than your bed, because victories in bed are never enough for them. So okay, fine, but goddamn it, I told him about my little bicycle, and about my torments in the school gym, I explained how horrible it is for me (Do you hear me? Is this really so hard to grasp?) to be anywhere, anytime someone is telling me how I’m supposed to hold my arms, my legs, what to do with them and in which order, it’s like being gangbanged, if that’s an analogy you can understand, or pick something equally traumatic, just for God’s sake, leave me alone! I told him this, or rather I screamed it at him—screaming being the last weapon of the weak—all in a single breath, passionate and inspired, and my entire raging torrent, that fully constituted summer thunderstorm of emotion, crashed against Oleh’s imperturbably and victorious smile like Comrade Stalin’s on an old official portrait. “So here’s a chance to overcome your problem,” he said, and it sounded so persuasive coming from him, just like from the wise Father of All Nations who knows for certain which medicine his people need even if the people, like foolish children, think they are bitter (the Gulag, for instance), that I hesitated for just a moment, and it’s because of that moment of hesitation that I’m stuck here now like a leper in the town square—What if, I thought, he’s right? Oleh plainly enjoyed this setup—he was tickled by the feeling of his power over me, real, for once, achieved without me playing along. That his power was real he sensed instantly, and it revved his instinct, absorbed once and for all from his business world, not to let anything, once won, out of his hands. Never loosen his grip, so to speak. In fact, his bulldog-like grip used to excite me—as long as other people were caught in it, and I could stand back and watch.
It’s my own fault: you can affect helplessness all you want, but under no circumstances can a woman reveal her real weaknesses to a man—sooner or later, he is certain to use them as a step stool to his own pedestal. You’ll not get much pleasure from it, unless you’re a masochist. And I, sorry to say, am not.
The only thing I do enjoy about these lessons is the courts themselves first thing in the morning, their scent of dampness and fresh paint and the surrounding stillness of the park disturbed only by the chirping of the birds, which, for some reason, is especially resonant in these old alleys between the trees, like a child’s water whistle, and by the nearby thump of a tennis ball: someone got here even earlier and is already practicing, and, by the sound of things, is much better at it than I am. I would love to just sit on the bench and watch my instructor play, absorbing nothing and remembering nothing, mind blank, relaxed, like watching the waves roll in at the seashore until they lull you to sleep—it’s especially nice to see how deftly he uses the tip of the racket to roll the tennis ball up his leg and into his hand: his motion is so balletic—it makes me wonder how many beautiful things there are in the world indeed and what superhuman effort we put into spoiling them all as soon as possible. Whenever I try to pick up the ball without bending, I only succeed in scratching the racket. In the short moments of respite from my torture—when I have to run to get the ball—I can feel the eyes of my instructor fixed on the exact shape of my legs and my buttocks, and for a spell, this returns me to my disrupted sense of composure, like the reliable trick I always pull when I’m feeling down: apply the radical makeup, one-two-three, with the firm hand of a master, a few avant-garde brushstrokes, march out defiantly into the street—and, by the time you click-clack your way to the subway with your proudly pursed lips, catching half a dozen looks from the male bystanders, you decide that things are not as bad as they seemed at home or in the car next to your dear husband, and in another ten minutes you are restored in your appreciation of your own professional accomplishments, and you tell yourself that you, damn it, earn your own living, and not a bad living at that, and that you are valued, sometimes even highly, for more than your legs and buttocks! And once everything falls thus back into place, your inner bitch is
ready to go again—meaning, in this case, that the racket is in your right hand, the ball firmly in the fingers of the left, the left foot is parallel to the racket, and you’re putting your weight on the right leg. Whatever the coach says, if it’s right, let it be right, although I think the only thing I’ll get for sure is being sore in that one thigh only, and won’t that be a hoot.
“Let’s try one more time.”
He’s practically begging me.
Nodding obediently, I freeze in the preordained pose, ready to stand for a hundred years like a character from Sleeping Beauty, as the instructor walks to the other side of the net—a well-made man, light footed as a mountain lion—and then stops, assesses the mise-en-scène in a split second (so, maybe my deliberate surreptitious-hunter’s crouch doesn’t look so bad after all), flashes his teeth in an affirmative smile, and waves to me: Go ahead!
Unexpectedly, the ball shoots into the sky like a slender candle—at the same time with a war cry from my instructor—“Yeah!”—who, with an extrawide swing straight from the shoulder (did my serve make him do that?) slams the ball back to me with hearty delight. But I’m not ready for it: I’m standing still, stunned, contemplating what I’ve just witnessed, processing the intoxicating taste of connecting to the ball with my right hand, feeling the resonant quiver of the racket’s tight strings as a sympathetic tremor of my arm muscles—so this is what they mean when they tell you the racket is an extension of your arm! This is it! The phrase runs through my brain over and over. So that’s how you do it. This is it.
And, just like that, I know it—clear as in a flash of lightning: I will beat Oleh at tennis. By September it will be me, not him, who will run the opponent ragged. No matter that the experience and expertise are on his side—I’m quicker than he is, more agile, and I don’t carry extra weight while he’s been getting rounder as fast as and as suddenly as he’s been going bald, and that’s why he’s begun losing against his regular partners and hoped to replace them with me. And finally, I’m also stubborn, no less than he is, especially when it comes to defending myself.
“There, you see! You can do it.” I hear the instructor’s voice over my head as though he’s overheard my thoughts, a gentle, soothing voice, the way you speak to a child. “Just don’t get so tense, it’s not like someone’s after you, you know.”
Suddenly my vision is cloaked with tears, an undulating translucent shroud that I must blink to remove instantly, I must turn my head away and hold my breath and not burst out crying here and now, while a heavy tear makes its way down my cheek slow and willful as a snail—and while a man’s heavy arm envelops my shoulders and muffles my hearing with thick, soft, warm, mumbling cotton:
“It’s okay. It’s okay.”
And so they come, these tears, making the world and my face lose shape. I bury my head in the tennis instructor’s shoulder, with one convulsive sob, ready to cry all at once for all the wrongs done me throughout my whole life, as if it were perfectly natural to be standing on the court in broad daylight in the arms of a stranger and crying the way I could not all those thirty years ago. He gently strokes my hair, then draws me toward him firmly, in one swift tug, so I know right away how long he’d been wanting to do just that, and in response I gratefully press my whole body against his, feeling his lust through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, like I have no man closer to me in the whole wide world right now, and that, quite likely, is the case indeed. We kiss greedily, like schoolkids, swallowing the salty taste of my tears, which he then wipes away, carefully passing his finger over my cheek and smiling, his lips trembling slightly, and then again presses the full length of my torso against his until it hurts and he lets out a muffled groan, and that same subterranean groan echoes from me as well—the sound of cavernous depths bursting open to reveal the path to my complete and ultimate freedom.
I wonder if those two girls on the next court can see us.
“Well?”
His arms slide slowly down my back, he pulls away slightly and looks at me attentively, full of his man’s privilege of expecting something to come next, but also adoringly, as at something he has created. “What shall we do?”
What indeed.
I sniffle guiltily, unable, nonetheless, to take my guiltless eyes off him: we touch each other with our eyes as physically, as clearly felt as if we were naked. No, we are more intimate yet, like a pair of conspirators who just sealed a secret pact against the world. That pact has already come into effect, it is valid, so I draw a blissful, postlovemaking breath, deeply, so as to slow my racing heart, and mean it when I say: “I’d like to give it another try. I think this time I’ll be able to do it.”
NO ENTRY TO THE PERFORMANCE HALL AFTER THE THIRD BELL
TRANSLATED BY HALYNA HRYN
From the smallest thing, it always begins with the smallest thing—with a speck of dust in your eye, a crappy mood, a suddenly remembered insult from one screwed-up Gavrilo Princip (you really shouldn’t have made fun of the little shrimp), and before you know it, bam! there’s a cosmic catastrophe on your hands and just you try to stop it now. Would you mind rolling up your window? was all she said to the kid as the car turned up Saksahansky Street—she remembered her words as precisely as one remembers the pattern of the wallpaper on the wall the moment said wall came crashing down on one’s head, as she remembered every detail of that instant: the leady breath of the street through that window, and the sudden whip of the draft that lashed her ear, and how just before that moment she was looking to her left, where two women with identically windblown blonde hair stood at the crosswalk, one older and the other younger, gesticulating with great abandon—as seen in a film with the sound turned off: she couldn’t hear them through her own rolled-up window—but it was clear they were a mother and daughter and that they were happy together, and perhaps it was this last part that prompted her to call out from her back seat to her own daughter in the front—okay, maybe a touch more tensely than was necessary, but still with plenty of self-control, Would you mind rolling up your window? She remembered the way she said it, and would admit honestly, yes, the words were a release of long-simmering irritation, an undisguised reproach that communicated, You don’t give a moment’s thought to your mother, do you, you wouldn’t care a bit if I caught a cold and lost my voice, never mind that my voice is what puts bread on the table, I feed you with it like a pelican with the flesh of her breast, and it’s about time you stopped taking that for granted and showed some appreciation, you’re not a baby anymore! Yes, that’s what she really wanted to convey to her pouting child, who stubbornly treated her only to the view of her delicate newly cropped crown and hadn’t turned to face her once during the whole trip—a child with whom she could no longer imagine standing just like that in the middle of the street, both of them waving their arms and laughing (the young woman was imitating someone to her mother, she wondered if it was, perhaps, her boyfriend?)—and that reproach was meant to ricochet and reach her husband as well, at the wheel, in his favored position of radical noninterference, for whom both of them, at that particular moment, were no more than precious cargo, chattering about their things, it’s nice, like a radio, classical or jazz lounge. Yes, there’s no denying it: at that moment, she was feeling truly lonely and neglected, a stranger to the two people in the front—it felt like they had written her off long ago and now merely exploited her, each in their own way, what a nasty feeling, a truly childish sense of grievance, an injury with no one to tell, an orphan-like, little-girl-crying-in-the-bathroom-like hurt—although, come to think about it, how would she know how orphan girls cry in bathrooms?
Maybe it was all because of the war, she thought later. Maybe the war was to blame for everything, and it was the irritation of the three years of this war, accumulated under the skin, that was beginning to show itself. Like we all silently agreed that there are people among us who are fated to be killed by Russian bullets so that the rest of us could go on drinking mojitos after dinner while watching soccer on TV—an
d we’d just pay them for dying. And their families, too, once they’d been killed. Because we are not doing anything else, are we, no matter how often we tell ourselves we are “supporting our troops.” Over hill, over dale, Helpful Billy hits the trail. A whole country of such helpful Billys, and each of them finding it harder and harder to respect themselves. Her husband has made it a habit of beginning each day by checking the Facebook page where they publish pictures of children who lost a parent in the Anti-Terrorist Operation, as the government euphemistically called it (Olha herself could never look at them, she’d burst into tears at the first one and then have to go to the kitchen to pour herself a drink)—he’d copy the banking information for donations into a spreadsheet and regularly wire small donations, tens of dollars, to benefit each—Taxes on our conscience, Olha would think but never say aloud. There was much they had stopped saying aloud to each other over these three years, the war taught them that, too: that words could destroy things much easier than bullets did, so it was better to treat them gingerly and not to waste them. And that’s why all she said to the kid was, Would you mind rolling up your window, one sentence, and look what came out of it.
True, in addition to words, there was also her tone. Tone is music, and she, of all people, knew very well what a terrible force it can be—the human voice.
Ulyanka reacted as could have been expected—like something bit her: she huffed, puffed, snorted, and squealed that it was hard to breathe in the car already, that Olha’s perfume was making her sick (meaning, it is she and not her mother who is the little girl here who needs to be taken care of), which annoyed Olha all over again, a degree worse this time (every one of their fights went in waves like this, like a multiple orgasm), all the more so because her husband remained silent rather than speaking up in her defense, saying, for instance, he enjoyed the perfume, and thus putting the kid firmly in her place, because, consciously or not, Ulyanka took aim straight at her mother’s preeminence as a woman. For the first time, Olha wondered if she had somehow missed the moment when she stopped being a style icon for her daughter—and the idea made her stomach flip, like on a plane flying through turbulence, which was unpleasant and humiliating in its own right, as if her body obediently, against her will, reacted to Ulyanka’s It makes me carsick with a fit of solidarity, the same as it used to leak milk at the sound of her baby’s crying. Except now Ulyanka was becoming more powerful and was testing her new power on her mother the way she used to bang on the piano keys while simultaneously trying to reach and hold down the right pedal, and that’s why Olha raised her voice—she did it instinctively, just someone trying to regain control, Quit it right now! as she would’ve commanded at the piano, that’s what her tone meant. It was unpedagogical, yes, she was ready to admit that, she should have taken an entirely different key, her confidential one, lower by a third, the one that worked without fail on men, and with a few smart, well-aimed phrases squish the nasty little frog so she’d shut up and spend the rest of the trip thinking about how young and foolish she was—but alas, everyone makes mistakes, especially with a creature that is closer to you than anyone else in the world, and thus knows perfectly, by ways of blood and womb, where your weak spots are—where to poke the needle so it will hurt for sure. And it did hurt, no point denying it. She was ashamed to remember the stupid, intense way it hurt, how it nicked the nerve of her female vulnerability—she’d never have expected that.
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