“I don’t know anything about any Andriy. You haven’t told me.”
“Oh, this is rich! Talk about fake news. You don’t know the Nazarenkos now?”
“The Nazarenkos?” Of course, Olha remembered, their boy’s name was Andriy. “You mean their son? The one who came back from combat? So, are you . . . dating?”
Dear god, how old is he, that Andriy, he’s an adult, he was in tenth grade when Ulyanka started school, no, wait, she was in second grade then, they went to a birthday party at the Nazarenkos’, and he played with her, the good teenager with the little girl, told her stories, god, he’s a veteran, a grown-up man, a year at war is like ten at peace, they say it takes months to get the grime out from under their fingernails, the things he must have seen out there, they say PTSD lasts years, oh Ulyanka-baby, you little duckling, a homebody girl with delicate hands, wait a minute, Mrs. Nazarenko said—so is it her he is planning to marry?
“We love each other!” Ulyanka exclaimed pathetically, and Olha thought—under different circumstances, she would smile: the declaration was so unnatural, as if in a foreign language; Ulyanka sounded like a child invited onto a chair to declaim a poem. But she did not smile. The Nazarenkos’ son was older than Ulyanka by exactly the same number of years as Odainyk was compared to her, and there was something inexplicably horrible about this—something that shot heat into the base of her skull, like a signal flare, goose bumps running down her arms and legs, while Ulyanka, guessing nothing, kept plowing through her speech—clearly prepared and rehearsed with diligence to rival her mother’s.
“And do not think for a second that you can talk me out of it, I know all your arguments in advance! I’m not afraid of his stump; I’ve seen him without his prosthesis, and we’ll be ordering a new one, they make very good ones now, with sensors and stuff, not like the old hook, it’s like an artificial hand, really cool, like a cyborg, and I told him, you’re Freddy Krueger now, but you’ll be Luke Skywalker.”
Ulyanka giggled, and Olha, going numb, saw her daughter’s face, wet eyelashes stuck together, lit from inside by the memory of that conversation—who she was talking to, who she was looking at at that moment—it filled with misty tenderness, aglow, as if it had finally found a source of light. So it’s true, then—Olha believed her daughter, believed everything at once, in one leap, it was only her physical inertia that begged for one more minute, just two more clarifications, a reprieve, like the last cigarette for a man at the gallows.
“His hand?” she asked blankly.
Ulyanka rapidly—presto, presto, drumming on the keys—chattered about muscle engagement and the prosthesis’s twelve functions—or was it twenty-four? Olha stopped understanding the words; she only saw Ulyanka’s thumb held perpendicular to her hand—she was showing how it bends, then took the martini glass and held it, to make a point. Olha felt her forearms ache as though she grabbed and lifted an apartment building.
“So he . . . doesn’t have an arm?”
“Only the hand,” Ulyanka showed. “A grenade went off in it when he was tossing it away.”
“But they said,” Olha recalled, as if through deep water, “that he was fine.”
“He is fine, Mom. He only lost his right hand. Things like that happen at war, it’s normal.” Jesus Christ, Olha thought, normal? “That’s what prostheses are for.”
And there I was, wanting to tell her all about loss. Olha hid her face in her hands. The sense of guilt that powered her shrieking among the cars on Saksahansky Street while the Tiffany-colored raincoat drew away from her, zigzagging through the traffic, came over her now with such force that she plummeted into it without a sound, like a rock to the bottom of a sea. Didn’t look to it, popped up the forgotten expression in her head—what Grandma Hanna said about letting dough rise for too long. Seriously, how could she not have noticed, when she loaded the washing machine, that the sweat on Ulyanka’s T-shirts started to smell different, a woman’s sweat—sharp, musky, seductive? But no, she did notice it, she just stopped herself from thinking beyond this fact, was afraid to think forward, and blocked it. She was afraid of a lot of things in this life, that was the problem.
That’s what Ulyanka, without even knowing it, is rebelling against—and her Andriy too. Something they’ll never understand, and I can’t explain to them: what it means to live in fear. To live with fear, like a member of your own family. I can’t even explain it to Hanka Odainyk: that this was her father’s greatest mistake—above all else, he wanted everything to look good, he bet on it, and was terrified of missing the mark. He listened to his own fear, and that’s why in the end everything turned out so ugly for him, as only could happen to a man at his time and in his place. But this is something that his daughter will have to discover for herself—after she repeats, in a different key, a different arrangement, the main theme of his mistakes in her own life.
They have no fear, these children, Olha thought with an unbearable surge of tenderness—of her Ulyanka, and at once, through her, of the Nazarenkos’ Andriy, and of other invisible children, myriad of them, who have suddenly stopped being children. When something frightens them, they do not run but go to face it. They take up arms and go to the front. They are not afraid to live, and to die, too, if they have to: they already know that, too, is a part of life. My girl, my dear little baby girl.
Tears streamed down her cheeks like from a poorly shut-off tap: as soon as one rolled down, another one took its place. There’s nothing I can warn her against, Olha thought, as she automatically licked the tears off her lips, like salty raindrops. She’ll go through everything I went through, but in her own way. My experience is of no help to her. I can’t help her. She simply won’t recognize it, she won’t see when she is walking in my steps—at least not until she reaches my age. Until she catches up to me at precisely this point—but I’ll no longer be there.
But then—there’s still a chance then: as long as I’m alive, and in possession of my faculties, like Grandma Hanna, lucid till the end, we will be able to meet up again as equals, and in that narrow strip of time (a narrow beach, a sandy spit) speak to one another, and hear each other. Then we’ll have lots to talk about—in just thirty years, it’s not that long to wait. And that will be our last time, kiddo. We had one such time, we were lucky. With more luck, we might have another one. But we won’t have the third—no one has the third chance while alive.
Olha raised her head and looked at her daughter through all her tears at once.
“To the end of love,” she uttered, in a voice heavy and moist as a soaked quilt. “That’s what it is.” She wanted to sing a bar from Cohen’s tango, but her moist voice faltered, and she was afraid that she’d start weeping for real, knocking head against table. “You are right. At your age, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had it in me to love a cripple. You are very brave.”
Ulyanka made a confused noise:
“There’s a war on now, Mom. You can’t compare . . .”
“I know. That changes a lot. But not everything.”
“Come on, give me your glass, it’s long been empty.”
“I could use another drink,” Olha said.
“I’ll make you one.”
“Make one for yourself, too, as long as you’re up there.”
“I will.”
Ulyanka got up, a dazzling wavering shape in the tears still perched between her mother’s eyelids.
“Just don’t cry, okay, Mom?”
Olha smiled. A child is always scared when Mom is crying; a mother is not supposed to cry. Mom can do anything—yell, curse, nag, grow old, grow strange—but not cry. No child should be afraid, not at any age.
“I won’t,” she said. “You know what I just thought of? Why don’t you invite Andriy over on Sunday? And I’ll sing Cohen for you? Would he like that?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Pavlo Botanov
Oksana Zabuzhko is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated contemporary writers and the author of more than
twenty books. She graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Kiev’s Shevchenko University and obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts. Since publishing her influential novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996, published in 2011 in English translation by Halyna Hryn), she has been working as a freelance author.
Zabuzhko lives in Kiev, where she and her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetskyy, operate a small publishing house.
Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into fifteen languages. Among her numerous acknowledgments are a MacArthur Grant (2002), the Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Order of Princess Olga (2009), and the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019). Her magnum opus, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2010, published in 2012 in English translation by Nina Murray, won the Angelus Central European Literary Prize (2013) for the best novel of Eastern and Central Europe.
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