“I’m busy anyway . . . But, yes, well, Hanka, our old secretary, she just asked me . . . She knows where we used to procure things, and that sort of thing.”
“Yes?”
“But . . . along with her, we need another support person, younger, you know, for work on the computer.”
“We’ll decide on new hires in a couple of days. Sorry, my phone’s ringing.”
Sobotka left, and Oleg was already waiting on the line.
“Stuck in traffic?”
“Yes, I’m seriously stu . . . it’s a traffic jam, man . . . Sitting here in this cab. These things always happen at the worst possible moment!”
“Will you make it for the tennis game?”
“Barely! Like that time before. You know?”
“Right. Make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“It won’t. How are things going at your end?”
“Don’t know. I’m just saying ‘You betcha’ over and over. I’ll email you the new list.”
“Hold your horses. I need to take care of this and then we’ll be all set.”
“Just do it. Hitch a ride with an ambulance if you need to.”
“Did I ever tell you how I once hitched a ride with a garbage truck?”
“No.”
“Get a load of this—a Swiss city, a smaller town in fact, very highbrow, where everything is so expensive, a village actually, and I didn’t know there were no cabs around at night. I was freezing in the fog, no idea where I was, when I saw a garbage truck picking up trash. Down the block it had just emptied the trash cans and was coming my way so I stepped into the road and waved with both arms. I asked, ‘Do you know where the Ambassador Hotel is?’ They stared at me, so I asked, ‘Could you take me to the Ambassador Hotel?’ I spoke in German, but they looked at me as if I were from another planet, because, you know, I was wearing a suit, tie, what all. A glance at their faces had me thinking that at least one of them could be from back home, so I asked, in our language, Do you understand? One of them nodded, so I continued: I’ll stand on the riding steps and hold on. For fifty euros! And then, you see, the two holding on to the back of the truck gave me some space, laughed, and I stood on the riding steps and held with them on the back. The trash reeked and the driver stepped on it so I had to hold on tight. They left me right smack in front of the Ambassador Hotel, in front of the valets who were standing by the door in their white gloves. The valets couldn’t believe their eyes. I entered the hotel, and the receptionist must have seen all this as well. I said, ‘Room 512.’ He just stared. ‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’ I asked. And he said, ‘Did you just arrive with the garbage?’ ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘With the garbage! I came with the garbage!’ Then I realized he thought I was in the wrong place; he must have seen me saying goodbye to the garbagemen, we almost embraced—hardly surprising as I’d given them a hundred euros. I was mildly euphoric, you know . . . So, the receptionist looked me up and down, and I lost it. ‘By a garbage truck, sir! There are no cabs! You might consider suggesting to your other customers that they come by garbage truck. Why not give everyone their number!’ The receptionist was offended, he was shocked, and this infuriated me even more, so I told him, ‘Could you, please, book me a garbage truck for eleven a.m.? I’ve decided to boycott your cabs and take only garbage trucks!’ By then the man was alarmed, as if afraid that one of us had lost his mind, because by then he’d seen that I did have a reservation. This was a fancy hotel, and the man had to be careful. He was already confused, and so he asked me, ‘What is the garbagemen’s number, sir?’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, don’t you know the number of the garbagemen in your own town?’ ‘I’m not from here,’ he blurted, spreading his arms wide. ‘From where, then?’ I asked. I was already teasing. Look, we were speaking German until then, but at that point he said—well, muttered actually, because he’d already lost it—in our language, Why do you give a fuck! I laughed soooo hard. Then I took the key card and told him, ‘Don’t worry about the garbagemen, bruder. They’re all from back home.’”
Oleg paused for a moment, and then looked at the phone and realized they’d been disconnected while he was busy telling the story.
“Fuck, no signal.”
At that, the taxi driver burst out laughing.
Finally, the traffic began moving and the cab turned toward Mrok.
As they were approaching the club, Oleg checked his watch.
His Mrok story was different than Nikola’s.
Oleg played tennis there for the first time in the eighties, after moving to the city from his small town to study at the university. Oleg’s mother and Nikola’s father were siblings. After Oleg’s father, who had Ukrainian roots, died in a car crash, Uncle Martin was a second father to Oleg. When he came to study in the city, Oleg lived at his uncle’s, so he began to play tennis with Martin and Nikola. He had a natural flair for the game and in just a couple of years he was playing as well as Nikola, and later, even better.
Oleg knew he had to put a bit more effort into providing for himself, and he made sure to earn his own pocket money very early—he became a freelance journalist for a student paper and eventually he became editor of the culture section, which interfered a bit with his studies. His final year became a never-ending slog, and he never completed his degree in English and German. It was his uncle who’d advised him to study the two languages, saying, You already know Russian, now learn these two and you’ll be all set.
In the late eighties, Oleg moved from the student paper to literary publishing, and was made bookstore manager at a big publishing house which, after the political changes, underwent hasty privatization and gradual liquidation. Most of the company’s bookstores soon became prime real estate for new businesses and were transformed into boutiques, shoe stores, and gaming parlors with poker machines. The new owner, who loved national culture, but only if it was more than five hundred years old, undoubtedly repaid the loan in no time, which had enabled him to buy the company, sold the real estate, and had money left over. Only one bookstore was left. The publishing sector was in collapse; the competitors were closing their bookstores, too.
Oleg was out of a job, and so, while still young, he could already feel the spirit of the times running against him, but didn’t dare fight back. He was angry at himself for not having gotten the drift of what was underway and for not having tried to privatize the publishing house himself because, he later thought, he could have swung a loan through his Mrok buddies and paid it off later by selling the real estate. Maybe he could have, but he didn’t—he was out of a job and had no university degree.
To make matters worse, he was, meanwhile, moving out and settling down. He needed his own place even more after his mother found her soul mate, where else but at the spa her doctors had sent her to, where she immediately began feeling better. She remarried, the man moved in, and even though Oleg was no longer living there, he still felt he’d lost his home. This probably also had to do with the fact that, just before he was fired, he’d suddenly fallen in love with Anita and married her; they planned to have at least four or five kids. Anita was a voluptuous poet. He’d met her when she published her first book for the publisher where he was working. He liked the book and liked Anita even more; he loved her aura of ease, which made everything seem right and everybody—good-natured. She relaxed him.
But after he lost his job, he and Anita argued a lot over small things, maybe partly because they were barely able to pay the rent. The aura of ease was gone; their relationship floundered in its encounter with capitalism. She decided to move in with her parents, and he, again, with his uncle. This was only supposed to be temporary. But it turned out to be the end of their relationship: their marriage depressed him, and he was in no rush to go back to living with Anita again. Somehow, he could feel in his bones that Anita was not supportive, and he’d find it easier to make it on his own under these new circumstances. He was not
conscious of this, but later, when talking to himself in moments of drunken candor, he admitted he was the one who’d given up, not she, though one day she’d told him it was over, she had been dating a clownish literary type who was both poet and critic, who’d written a panegyric for Oleg and Anita’s wedding, which they’d read together. The clown bided his time and the romance between the two poets was born; all Oleg had to say was, I wish you all the best surviving.
Alone and unemployed, he was humiliated, partly by a feeling he’d never known before, a little like being lost, or maybe shut out—because ethnic origin was, by then, front and center, and, while Nikola cared nothing about his background, Oleg began to ask himself who he was. Moreover, other people would ask him this, too—“Well, who exactly are you?”—because his father was descended from Ukrainian Cossacks who’d fled after joining the White Army following the October Revolution, and then never returned. His surname sounded foreign, and Oleg felt he belonged to others, not exactly one of the enemy against whom the war would soon be fought, but not so far from them, either.
His mother and Uncle Martin always gave him contradictory answers to questions such as, “What was their faith?”
His mother would say, “Catholic.”
“Catholic? Cossacks?”
“Yes.”
“And they fought for the Russian Tsar?”
“Well, yes, but for themselves, too.”
Uncle Martin used to say, “With your grandfather it depended on how much he’d had to drink. When he was relatively sober, they were Greek Catholics. That’s what my sister heard, but she doesn’t pay much attention to the details.”
“When he was relatively sober?”
“Well, yes, but when he was really drunk—they were Orthodox, not exactly like Russians, something all their own. He really wanted them to be different from the Russians. Now, there might have been ulterior motives for that. With Russians you’re always part of a bigger story, and you may end up in a dark place.”
“My old man still taught me Russian.”
“Plenty of the Ukrainians back home speak Russian.”
All this was distant for him. Although he was totally assimilated and didn’t feel Ukrainian, or Greek Catholic, or Orthodox, this didn’t help Oleg, just as those who didn’t care about ethnicity and faith still became ideological outcasts, a kind of substitute for Communists, all of whom were gone. There were only leftovers, people like him, who had no new way of identifying themselves. Everybody else was putting real effort into this, and even those who’d left the Communist Party only the day before made up for what they’d missed, going so far as to baptize their adult children. Was there a discount offered for these family ablutions? Oleg couldn’t tell for sure, as the arrangements were taken care of in secret and people spoke of them only when drunk.
So Oleg became a collateral victim of the Fall of Communism, a lost character who was shoved aside; the symbolic divisions relegated his identity, against his will, to a drawer, stirring in him a sting of dismay with an occasional episode of depression when he drank too much. At the time he grew closer to his uncle; they sat together like a couple of misfits and conversed about the paradoxes of their family history and history in general. His uncle had a lot to say about this.
“Take, for instance, your great-grandfather, a Cossack, a Ukrainian, a defender of the Russian Tsar, he fought against the Communists and came here after his side lost. Then, your grandfather, who remembered nothing of Ukraine, fought in World War II. I think he was pro-German, because the Germans had something going on with the Ukrainians and Cossacks. He probably hoped he’d march back as a liberator into the homeland he’d never known. Later on, of course, he kept this under wraps. But I have an ear for stories; I notice when details don’t cohere. I have the feeling he joined forces with the Cossacks and Cherkess, and later managed to extricate himself. His war stories were on the vague side. Supposedly they moved him around a lot, but I remember once I mentioned a place in the middle of nowhere where I was shooting a film, and he, while drunk, said, ‘People lost their souls there.’ He said this as if speaking from experience. For a moment, I even thought he, too, had lost his soul there. I’m not likely to miss a sentence like that, I’m a filmmaker after all. So I went to the village and saw a memorial plaque; the SS and Cherkess, and there were Cossacks among them, see . . . They killed three hundred people in one day, even children. Every single person they caught.”
“Wait, you think he was with the SS? Are you kidding me? You never told me that!”
“I can’t know for sure, but . . . Maybe I wouldn’t be telling you this if the system hadn’t collapsed. It would’ve fucked you up before, but these days not so much, I suppose . . . Let me finish. . . . The next time I was going to the village I asked him to come along, to keep me company, but he froze. While he was staring at me I kept thinking about whether he was looking at me as if he knew I knew. ‘No can do, bad back,’ he said. I said, ‘Your back? Bad?’ He just kept staring at me. Then I said, ‘Hey, I’m not judging, I’m an artist.’ It would have made sense for him to ask me what I’d meant by that. But instead he said, ‘I had nothing to do with anything, my dear Martin, that was my problem. I thought I was a part of something, but then I realized I had nothing to do with anything.’ I wrote his words down later, because I saw a whole movie in it.”
“I remember him a little. And my dad, he died too soon,” said Oleg.
“I believe your dad knew nothing about this. Later, your grandfather really didn’t want to have anything to do with anything. Like a runaway, when you think about it,” said Martin.
“So what do you think his story is?”
“He had a secret, that’s for sure,” said Martin. “I think he joined them, thinking, I’m one of them, a Cossack. And let’s say he was in that village and saw what he saw . . . Then he tried to get away. He said he moved a lot, maybe he meant he ran away. And later, nobody knew where he’d ended up. He was an ordinary citizen, but with a secret. That’s how I’d make the movie about him. But who knows, I see things with the eyes of a filmmaker. Still, what he said—that at one time he’d thought he had something to do with something, but then realized he had nothing to do with anything—that sentence didn’t come out of nowhere. He was embroiled in something, and then realized it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. Okay, many of us were embroiled in things. From the way he kept his secret, it would seem clear whose side he’d been on. And look, even if that was all true, the fact that he pulled out may mean he had a conscience. This is what I wanted to believe, and after the conversation he didn’t open up about it anymore, though we still had a drink together sometimes, but then he’d just sing songs, sad songs, in Russian or Ukrainian, damned if I know which. He’d sing, not as a drunkard, but really nice and soft. Then he’d lose himself in his sorrow, and that probably meant he was not a bad person. That’s how I saw him, maybe because I wanted to. If he knew he was guilty, that would mean he wasn’t bad. See?”
“I guess.”
“After the war,” said Martin, “he decided to put all that behind him. Not like a runaway, chances are he was sincere—it had been wrong, he had nothing to tell. Seeing that Grandpa had given up on his background, your dad actually wasn’t Ukrainian or anything, and, since he didn’t know how to define himself, he became a Communist, although I doubt he’d read Marx. But the Party gave him an identity. What I mean is that, today, maybe he would want to be something else, because he was not a prewar Communist, one who would risk his life for the cause, but a product of the system. All he wanted was a better life. These are two different kinds of men. Should I be frank about your dad?”
“Be frank, we won’t lie to each other.”
“He was nice, jolly, an off-we-go-wherever-the-road-takes-us kind of guy. If he were still alive, who knows what he’d be today. Maybe he’d play tennis.”
“But he died. That’s the end of t
he Cossack story.”
“See, just when you Cossacks got rid of anti-communism over three generations, it all collapsed.”
“Right onto my shoulders,” said Oleg.
“You’re not keeping up with the course of history,” said Martin, laughing.
“And now I should carry this burden of meaninglessness around the world as my heritage?”
They drank quarts of beer while talking; the cans clattered as they tossed them into the trash can. If only I were an American so I could forget about all this, thought Oleg. Why didn’t this great-grandfather go to America if he was so anti-communist, dammit!
“I know. It’s stupid. But there are ones which are stupider yet. For instance, the island where I was born was occupied by the Fascists, who made our lives a misery for years. After Italy capitulated, the partisans came and took over, and I, a fifteen-year-old kid, hung around them. They made me a sentry but gave me no gun, and then the Germans came, and we had to hide. I moved up to messenger. Then, after the war, they sent us young fighters to school so we wouldn’t go wild, and I came here and then later, almost by accident, I found myself in film. The local school of animated film was doing really well. I didn’t know how good we were until I won a Grand Prix. A colleague from our group won an Oscar. We were a team with more than one genius. What we did was different, probably because we were from the sticks, we had no traditions, we were openhearted, doing things our way, and our way was novel. Then I got the chance to make movies. I was included in the regular program at Cannes, and received that little award in Venice. And my movie, when I watch it now, was about the impossibility of socialism, how people don’t follow your ideas and you can talk till you’re blue in the face but no way will they follow you. The authorities here said the movie was decadent—though they didn’t attack me openly because I’d been a partisan—and there was truth in what they said, I was moved by my disappointment. Okay, today others are eager to say they defied the system, but I’d be lying to myself if I said that was what I’d set out to do. Mine was an act of resignation. Here, they considered me a problem; I was a partisan who was not in the Party. Where I’m from, they thought of me as a gentleman who’d moved into the upper classes. The movie was actually a product of all of this. But still, it was a success, so I was given the keys to an apartment by the film company. That’s how things worked then: people were given apartments, and after the award my reputation soared. So I, a minor international star, began playing tennis, because there was a tennis court in the neighborhood. I became part of the bourgeoisie in a way, despite the fact that I was making movies about social issues. Looking back on it all now, I can see this puzzled me—I didn’t know what to make movies about anymore. I returned to animation, made a short film, dark and absurd, I thought nobody would like it, but the Germans gave me a prize. After that, I made a feature and told myself it was my last, and it was acclaimed abroad as high modernism, but here at home nobody watched it, so they told me: you’re our film director for festivals. And I thought, No I’m not, and withdrew my registration. All of that was read as defiance of the system, and I saw how, here at the club, both the nationalists and the dissidents greeted me warmly, and so did the bankers and businessmen, because I’m a man of the world. But let’s be frank, I, too, was a product of the system. First, if I’d been the son of a peasant in another country, I’d never have thought of making movies. Second, my movies weren’t to the taste of the American producers. So I can play stupid, but I know what I know. Now, when I look at them playing stupid, taking what isn’t theirs . . . The Communist elite was child’s play compared to this new elite that has evolved from the new and the old who changed their tune. The elite in the old days were managers without ownership, while the elite today are becoming property owners. Overnight. This is something different, my friend. They’ll become owners, and you’ll never be able to get rid of them. You can hold elections but you’ll never oust the owners. They’ll still be the owners, the people in power, no matter who you vote for. It suited the mob of schemers to have one ethnic group pitted against the other while they divvied everything up. They’re surprised at me for not wanting to play tennis with them, because only the hard-core Communists aren’t playing anymore, and they didn’t peg me as one of them. But now as far as they’re concerned I am an old Commie, after everything fell apart. But believe me, I cannot go there and play anymore. Bad back, like your Cossack would say. So you see, my story is funny like yours.”
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