Nobody knew of what Odainyk died, and there seemed to be no way to find out: after three years of war, a death from disease, even if it befell a public figure, had ceased being an event worth talking about. Anyway, Olha did not have anyone to talk to about it: the old circle of friends they hung out with in the nineties had long fallen apart, and when she did happen to see one of them—and there had been a few times when friends from her youth popped up at her shows and came backstage afterward (to network, she always thought, suspicious) they, of course, acted like old friends, exchanging telephone numbers and old resuscitated jokes that had long since stopped being funny, but no one dialed those numbers afterward. Olha did not like to think of herself as a woman who, in the course of climbing the ladder of success—for example, after her successful marriage (after an initial period of doubt, she decided to view her marriage as a success, even before Ulyanka was born), or after her solo album (how many Ukrainian musicians in those prewar years could put out a solo album?)—discards her old friends at each successive rung like worn-out shoes, that wasn’t true about her at all, she hated throwing anything out (as she had once told her husband’s friends and realized right away that wealthy people did not brag about things like that), and in fact she still had friends from her music school, from kindergarten, and from the neighborhood where she grew up, she was even godmother to some of their children, so the problem, she finally convinced herself, did not reside with her: simply, that whole crowd was infected with Odainyk, and everything that was infected with Odainyk was sooner or later meant to fall apart—the way he himself fell apart over the years. She was no longer obligated to watch it happen.
Kyiv was a damn big city, and unless you belonged to the same professional circle, you could go for years without running into each other and without knowing about each other. Olha knew that Odainyk had gotten married, that he had a daughter, in fact had the daughter first, and then got married, “shotgun-style” as whoever of their friends who told her the news joked (even back then it was not funny)—it wasn’t someone from the core group, their nucleus, but one of those electrons that gravitate toward every strong social group with powerful men and beautiful women, who flicker on the outside orbit for a while, doing favors, going to big parties, until they break away or, conversely, get pulled into the denser layers of connection—so Olha did not remember the person’s name, and their conversation left her with an awkward feeling, like a tight shoe, mainly because of the need to avoid addressing the man by name, and given that she was completely absorbed in her own family at the time, all she retained was: Huh, so Odainyk also has a daughter, as if he were aping her life. In other words, she felt a scratch but no pain—water under the bridge, good riddance, and so on.
That the water, in fact, had not gone under the bridge at all she learned that night at the opera, at the concert in honor of the king of Sweden. Olha remembered neither the king nor the queen (of far greater interest to the womenfolk), and she even had trouble remembering the program after the intermission, even though it featured her conservatory classmate who procured an invitation for her in the first place. What stuck in her mind from that evening was the smell of sweat—the heavy, homeless, railway-station stench of unwashed women’s armpits that followed her in the foyer and in her box, so much so that in the second half of the evening she snuck out a perfume sample from her clutch purse and kept it by her nose, until it suddenly occurred to her that the source of the smell might be her. But she didn’t remember breaking into a sweat. She could have sworn that at first she did not even recognize the unpleasant burly man with a big gut with a sharp penetrating look when he approached her husband during the intermission together with a few other expensively cologned men to exchange business cards and exploratory pleasantries—this was exactly the kind of event where people went to make connections, set up meetings, and demonstrate their proximity to power, and the entire opera house, from the orchestra seats to the third balcony, truly stank of money, dirty and putrid like a used menstrual pad, money from the meat markets, illicit card tables, and security services’ conference rooms, from “sperm, oil, and blood,” as a poet wrote—and was right, bull’s-eye right, it just took Olha a while to learn about the oil and blood parts. The sperm, though—that smell was obvious, like on Odainyk’s old briefs, which she, mad with love, once stole and kept in her lingerie drawer unlaundered; later, of course, she threw them out, maybe even burned them, but looking at that beer-gutted man was like having those sperm-stained briefs turn up after all this time, after she’d forgotten all about them, and make her cringe—What is this? Who is this? The face seemed familiar, where could she have seen him? The look the man gave her when they were introduced—like a handful of spiders—was deliberately indifferent, a see-nothing, hear-nothing, say-nothing kind of look, like in Mafia movies, but at the same time self-congratulatory in that implied way a man has of showing a woman he hasn’t forgotten what she’s like in bed. Olha, in her best black sequined gown, splendid and statuesque, like a monument to her own bust (forget the queen!), dug into her dear husband’s elbow while he kept nodding at that bastard, Yes, please stop by . . . I’d be happy to . . . (so the man needed him, and not the other way around!) and suffered feeling that all her carefully constructed armor, all the defenses that she spent years raising and was so proud of, could no longer protect her—unless she remembered who this man was, and what evil thing transpired between them that he dared look at her like that.
She remembered him when he laughed. A sparse, beady laugh, a little staccato, strangely incongruous with his size. That must have been when she broke out in a sweat. Twelve years ago he had the same laugh.
The second man she ever had sex with in her life. And he didn’t have to be; the choice was hers to make. He did not rape her—though in fact he did, she was the only one who knew this, and she never told anyone, she wouldn’t know how. Theoretically, she could have said no when she realized what was happening, realized that this predatory-eyed gangster (without the belly back then) whom Odainyk introduced to her as his business partner and her future record producer was telling the truth, and Odainyk indeed had made an arrangement with him, wherein Odainyk let him have the apartment with her in it, and vanished—she could have said no, packed her things, and left. (She would have many months to consider why she hadn’t done precisely that, and those indeed were the worst months of her life.) She knew everything about Odainyk’s debt, or so she thought; she was the first to suspect he had been set up, deliberately, in such a way that he would have no other option but to sell his business—and sobbing, on her knees (she remembered the sound her knees made when she dropped on the freshly laid oak floors), she begged him not to get involved with those people, who were dragging him deeper and deeper into the heart of an incomprehensible dark forest, but Odainyk was growing distant, alien right before her eyes: the new evil thing that came into him together with the big money grew like rapidly progressing schizophrenia. For an entire year she watched, with a sick emptiness in her stomach, as he struggled like a fly in a spiderweb, no longer even attempting to repay the loan, but at least to push it back a bit so that it wouldn’t topple over and crush him with its full weight immediately. One by one he sold off, for next to nothing, the office space he’d bought with the loaned money, and the brand-new car he’d fawned over, saying he had no need for them, or he would suddenly throw a raucous party, with her singing the blues and everyone else smoking throat-scratching Crimean weed that made your mouth go numb, or he would take her off to Austria to ski, which she didn’t know how to do and spent half the trip at the hotel crying—looking back, it seemed like she was constantly crying back then, that entire year, even more bitterly than the year before, when her mom died, although of course this couldn’t be true, it was just the way she remembered herself—a helpless, weepy hen who was somehow to blame for the fact that her man went bankrupt because how could a dumb hen like her bring anybody good luck? One depressing night back then, she said to him, des
perate and earnest as in church (they never did get wed as they had planned to do), I will do anything for you! so that he would know that she would not abandon him in poverty, nor in sickness, until death do them part, and that he could always rely on her—and he said nothing, she remembered that—he stayed quiet: as though what she said no longer mattered. As if she were nothing and could not fill the abyss into which he was tumbling. Only when she was being raped by that man—a rape to which she, no denying it, consented because it’s like war, either you fight or you surrender, you give or you don’t, there is no I-don’t-care-what-you-do-to-me-because-I’m-already-dead option, especially since, as it turns out, it matters very much—it was only when she, motionless and hard as a rock, shook, rocklike, from the shoving of the hateful alien appendage inside her, knowing at the same time, with clinical clarity like at the dentist’s, that with each shove he was shoving Odainyk out of her, erasing, physically eradicating their love and intimacy, sending them to the irretrievable past—it was only then that it dawned on her, under the (quite literal) pressure of this new experience, that Odainyk, who was incapable of thinking about anything other than his debt, interpreted her puppy love I will do anything for you! to mean exactly this, an offer to pay off his creditor with sex (because, what else could she do for him—sing?), and that’s why he didn’t say anything right away, he had to consider her offer. So, again, the fault, as always, was hers, her incompetence at communication—and thus she had to take it, simply endure it, like standing in a downpour without an umbrella (it’s funny, it seemed important to her in the moment that she’d made no motion to aid her rapist)—silently, obediently, like a clump of food under the masher at the bottom of a feeding trough, not entirely comprehending what exactly was being squished out of her, up to and including smeared shit and vomit on the sheets, to the several months of disgust and hatred of her own body, which tolerated and accepted all that. Her morbid rigidity did not cool or discourage Mr. Corpse-Fucker, as she named him in her mind—on the contrary, it seemed to be precisely what aroused him, her lack of resistance and the knowledge of his full power over her; until then she could not fathom something like this, although she’d read about it, and here was a man from another reality, straight out of that dark forest that dragged in and devoured her beloved, so perhaps she ought to have been scared—she couldn’t have lost all the instincts that enable a woman to survive!—and have done something, found within her a motion she could make, a maneuver that might have at least abbreviated her physical suffering, if it weren’t for one clinical detail, which turned out to be the single thing she remembered about Mr. Corpse-Fucker twelve years later: he had a small dick—about half the size of Odainyk’s, judging from the sensation, and its swishing about inside her, like a swizzle stick in a cocktail shaker, completely eliminated in her any feeling of danger. She felt endlessly disgusted (and suffered fits of dry-heaving for weeks after), especially when after everything he said to her, “Good job!”—in Russian, of course—and laughed his bleating, staccato laugh. She threw up then.
Olha had time to recall all this—as if buttoning up her clothes—before the bell that rang the end of the intermission (since she was a child, she had a deeply anxious response to the grave notice, like a storm warning—“After the third bell there is no entry to the performance hall”—in her worst nightmares she was late for her own concerts and left standing in front of the locked door, trying to peer in). The men were still exchanging business cards and the hot sweat on her body was cooling down, because this time, twelve years later, she did get scared—scared that the same dark forest she managed to evade once (barely!) caught up with her again in order to claim her husband, the true one, the father of her child—and forgetting, erasing from her memory the face of Odainyk’s creditor did not in itself protect her, and did not cancel the past. In that half minute when everyone said their goodbyes before going back to their seats, she instinctively grasped for the only advantage her body had in regard to this beer-bellied animal: she looked back at him—with the calm, open, mocking gaze of a woman who can see the tiny dick under his clothes, and dismissed this deficient male like a doctor sending home an athlete that has had his day, go on, take it easy, button up your pants, Godspeed.
To her surprise he turned away. Put away his spiders. And never again showed up at her husband’s office, disappeared without a trace. Did not need the business card after all.
She warned her husband to be careful—told him she thought the man may have been Odainyk’s creditor, the one to whom Odainyk planned to give her in repayment of his debt. Her husband knew the story up to that point, and that she packed up and left, not waiting for the “audition” she’d been promised; this was enough to orient him in her past. The rest—what happened before she left—she did not tell him, and it sat petrified inside her into a solid layer of immovable rock. Olha cherished her husband: in that most difficult period of her life, when she was learning how to live alone—how to support herself, how to love herself, how to decide for herself when to say yes or no—he restored her sense of physical freedom, gave her back the sense of her own body as a source of joy, and in that way seemed to rehabilitate her, purge her of the evil. This was more important than if he had been her first man and in and of itself sufficient cause for the eternal warmth of quiet gratitude that burned steadily in her heart year after year. Aside from that, what drew them close in the beginning was that as an attorney he knew loads of much more terrible tales of debt: with murders, trafficking into slavery, and not just of the sexual kind, but whole families sold into indenture—she had no idea what kind of medieval barbarity roiled all around under the guise of outward normalcy, and thanks to her husband was able to look at what happened to her, for the first time, from the vantage point of an outsider, like stepping out from dirty clothing and leaving it on the floor, and honestly appreciate how much worse things could have turned out, and how relatively easily she got away, thank god! Her husband felt it was her achievement, and Olha wanted him to continue to be proud of her. Inside, of course, she knew there wasn’t much to be proud of: she was Odainyk’s accomplice—from the very moment he asked her to dance, and seeing her tremble, held her close and whispered, What’s the matter, baby? and she was ready to faint from the idea that he could release her from his embrace, and what would she do then, what would she be good for? until that night almost six years later, when she obediently, like a beaten-down whore, allowed herself to be fucked by devil knows who, because a sliver of her submissive self still did what Odainyk told her and continued to believe, like a fool, that he knew better, that he knew how things should be done, even when that meant throwing her into another man’s bed—she spent her youth infected with Odainyk, and decayed together with him, and the fact that she was able to keep her balance on the edge of the abyss, into which she was ready to fall headfirst together with him without a second thought, was nothing short of a miracle. She just was lucky that Odainyk let her go.
And now, after his death, when she honestly tried to retune herself to a lyrical key and recall what exactly was so wonderful about that relationship that she had pined for him so much (she remembered most strongly her girlish, roof-blowing sense of bliss when she already knew for certain that he would make love to her, she just didn’t know yet where and when) what her memory summoned, repeatedly, was his false confused grin and guiltily shifting eyes with which he presented himself to her after Mr. Corpse-Fucker—not to apologize, not to explain or justify himself, not to console her, but to pretend that none of it had happened and to persuade her to accept this version of events, which would require her to pretend that he knew nothing, and that overall nothing exceptional had happened to her, nothing worth telling him about. That’s what she couldn’t take. Perhaps, if he had behaved differently—if he had returned drunk and fallen to her feet, if he’d said it was all a mistake, smashed dishes and screamed, if he had had the guts, the wits, or the cynicism to behave differently, given her anything but his backstabbe
r’s shifty eyes (not once during that conversation did he look into her eyes) and his cowardly hope—no, faith!—that she would indeed be silent and thus relieve him of the burden of what he’d done—perhaps then, Olha thought, shuddering at the idea, as if her body again rehearsed the dry heaves, she still might have forgiven him. She might have forgotten that mobster, and his two used condoms that she personally threw down the garbage chute (and dreamed about for years) and would have gone back to Odainyk’s bed as he had hoped she would. Like that dirty joke: “And then the husband came and fucked everything back the way he liked it.” It’s been known to happen. Whores live with their pimps; it’s a version of family harmony. She simply didn’t know, didn’t have an answer to the question of how her life would have turned out if he hadn’t, in effect, broken his embrace. If he had kept holding on to her—as from that first moment of their first dance, all those years that she was “his little girl” and would have gladly danced not only as her beloved Cohen sang (and as she too sang, brought the house down at every party with that song) “to the end of love”—but further, over the edge of love, into the dark forest full of beasts, into the world of big money and little dicks where the invisible majority of Ukrainian musicians had already drunk and drugged themselves to death, and only the freshest new meat from the visible minority were made “stars,” to be rented out by their Moscow producers to their sponsors’ beds at hourly rates.
Had Odainyk behaved differently, he might have still had enough power over her to persuade her to remain with him and pursue precisely this kind of a career, but he left her no choice. She was as disgusted as she had been with Mr. Corpse-Fucker. She wanted to hit him. But all she did was ask, in her new voice, calm and mocking, how much that little favor shaved off his debt—You didn’t charge too little, did you, dear?
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