Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  “We have little tables in the back,” she said, pointing around the corner of the rear of the store.

  “But no trays,” I said, trying for a joke, but she only nodded gravely again. “Usually, no one . . .” she started, and pointed at my preemie sextuplets. She straightened. “Maybe you want a pastry?” she said. “We baked them this morning.”

  “I’m watching my figure,” I said. This time I got a fearful smile out of her. Those words had not emerged out of a Ukrainian man’s mouth in the country’s millennium of existence.

  On reaching, alongside me, the plywood tables in the back room, the young saleswoman seemed reluctant to abandon the American who’d surely taken a wrong turn: This was where people drank before going to work. But it was a peaceable bunch. The solitary men smoked and pulled silently on their fifths of cheap vodka; an older couple of radish-nosed alcoholics cursed amiably at their cards while they worked on a bottle—I recognized proudly—of Zhan-Zhak. Everyone cast me a long look, then turned back to their liquids. I looked down at mine. With my cardboard tray of six cups of sugar slightly diluted by small spewings of coffee, I must have seemed no less odd to them than they did to me. “Come back!” the young saleswoman waved in huge semicircles at me when I made my way out. In retrospect, it seemed clear that she’d been sincere the whole time. Or maybe she was just relieved to be rid of me.

  I decided not to return to the church. Doing so would force Oksana to mind me instead of the service. I wandered without aim—an unfamiliar experience, my hours divided strictly back home. Before long, I’d made it to the city center, a holdover from the Hapsburgs. First the city was Polish. Then, when Poland was partitioned, it became Austro-Hungarian. When Austro-Hungary dissolved, it became Polish again. After World War II, it became Soviet. Possessed of nearly four hundred years of history, Ivano-Frankovsk was starting only its third decade as a Ukrainian city, much as the rest of the country it belonged to had spent most of the past thousand years ruled by others: the Mongols; the Poles, who sapped the proto-Ukrainians of their brightest and most skilled through assimilation and persecution, much as the Poles themselves would be by Russians and Soviets; then Muscovy, which took over in 1654 and didn’t let go until 1991.

  Everyone around me seemed lost in thought. The bundled woman in high boots striding past a teal-colored building. The aproned woman flinging sheets in the second-floor window of a laundry operation—I peered at her from the sidewalk for minutes, but she never noticed. The young man in the window of a boxy yellow city bus—he was close enough for me to make out his green eyes, an aquiline nose, and cheeks rosed up by the cold. But he didn’t see me. As in a fairy tale, I was invisible.

  What if I’d never left, like Oksana’s son, like the young man on the bus? Would I be married and a father by my early twenties, like most of the men here, or was my untraditional living—untraditional by Oksana’s judgment, at least—an intrinsic quality, and would it be my destiny anywhere? If the latter, what kind of outcast would it have made me in Minsk? Or would it have been rubbed out of me the way it had been rubbed out of my father?

  I came around to a makeshift outdoor book stall—dozens of books with foxed, yellowed edges, organized neatly on a pair of tables that looked like they could go at any moment. Their peddler wore the mismatched uniform of this part of the world—a leather driving cap; a shirt with weak collars peeking out over a ratty sweater festooned with rhombuses in five colors; trousers once meant for a more festive occasion, even if ill-advisedly so; and thick shoes ready for snow. There were two pairs of socks wedged into them, I knew without checking. And I knew without seeing inside his mouth that he didn’t have all his teeth. And he probably had a limp, from a war injury or bad local medicine. I knew all this as I knew what preoccupied the people I’d seen on my walk: The laundrywoman was thinking about her daughter’s husband’s drinking; the young man about having to return to a home he shared with too many people; all of them about living in a country run by crooks and having to work much harder than was fair; about having to leave Ukraine to make money—if they could manage to get out.

  The books were in both Ukrainian and Russian, but the man was speaking the latter. I pretended to flip through a volume of Hemingway—though Russian has an “h” sound, it becomes “g” in translation from another language: Gemingway, Gitler, gomoseksual, Alzgeimer (ahlts-GAY-mer)—but it was a decoy; I was savoring the sound of the man’s talking. I’d been speaking only Russian since Oksana and I left JFK, and, to my delight, it was loosening despite thirteen years of my not having used it exclusively. He spoke with erudition mixed with the plainest village expression, and a small dictionary’s worth of word-free sounds and gestures, to me instantly comprehensible but so difficult to transliterate.

  “Aficionado?” I heard in my ear. I came out of my reverie to find him standing next to me. He was pointing at the Hemingway. I wasn’t an aficionado. But I wasn’t sure what would work here—the truth, or politeness.

  “Sukhovaty,” I said, finally. “A bit dry.”

  “Sin to eat dry meat,” the man nodded and moved away. He did have a limp. He came back with a detective novel by a Russian writer. “Moist as a swamp,” he said, pressing it on me.

  “Thank you, no,” I said, smiling and shaking my head.

  He picked up the Hemingway and knocked its hard edge into my chest. “Then we must lubricate. Teplenkogo ne zhelayete?” (“You don’t wish for something a bit warm?”) He had said “you don’t wish” rather than “you don’t want,” its courtliness an honoring of his visitor, though by virtue of its archaism it carried a faint note of ridicule, too. He had reduced “warm” to a diminutive—it was all but law if you were talking about food or drink. And he meant drink. There was an unmarked bottle amid a forest of cheap plastic bags under the book table. He scrubbed at two plastic thimbles with a rag that seemed like it could only make them dirtier. Seeing my expression, he said, “Alcohol kills all germs.” Then, in open view, he filled the thimbles to the brim—the liquid was clear, like vodka—and touched the edge of his to mine gingerly. “To the friendship of the nations,” he made the old Soviet toast, and threw his firewater into his mouth. I did the same. It burned my throat, but then seemed to go up rather than down, heat rising into my brain. His teeth were as crooked and gray as the columns of Oksana’s apartment building. For lack of a chaser, he sniffed his sleeve as I’d been taught only gauche people did, then stuffed one fist into his flank and leaned the other on his precarious table. Miraculously, it remained standing. “Where from?” he demanded.

  I wondered whether to deploy the saving answer of all Americans on sensitive ground: Canada. “America,” I said, chancing the truth. I braced for the next question—“Jew?”—but he only made one of those untranslatable sounds—gaw-gaw-gaw, like a long-necked bird disturbed by intruders. It meant something like “A prized guest is among us!”

  “I’m from here,” I clarified. “Not here—but close.”

  “Well, fuck, we’re all . . .” he started to say, then just shook his head, pulled out a pack of cheap cigarettes, offered me one, then withdrew them before I could reply—“No, you’re a healthy American”—and lit one for himself. He smoked silently for a minute, undisturbed by the silence, sucking again on the cigarette before he’d exhaled the previous drag. He took care to blow the smoke away from me. “Read, young man, read,” he said finally, pushing the Hemingway into me. “Young people don’t read enough anymore.” I reached for my wallet, but he only held out a finger to say no.

  Part of it was the home brew, but as I walked on, I was filled with a warm feeling—for the man, for the people around me. Why? I had been expecting insult from him only a moment before. The relief of not hearing it? In her eloquent, knowing survey of Ukraine, the British journalist Anna Reid writes about the different kind of person visitors across history have encountered in Ukraine as opposed to Russia. It was in what would become Ukraine, not Russia, that Slavic Orthodoxy was born. The Vikings came to trade, in
termarried—Waldemar became Volodymyr—and brought Christianity back from their encounters with Byzantium. (Volodymyr, the ruler responsible for the conversion to monotheism in 988, bid out the contract to all the religions, but Muslim teetotaling would not work, for “drinking is the joy of the Russes,” and neither would the Jewish and Muslim objections to pork.) Christianity gained a high-end recruit: The Kievans, as they were known, constituted one of those advanced civilizations—the Aztecs, the Abbasids—now lost to history: They didn’t allow corporal punishment, maintained courtly manners, and, in general, were “more unified, happier, stronger and more civilised than France herself,” as a French observer wrote.

  This glory soon came to an end, for the old, tiresome reasons: first, infighting; then the Mongols, who turned Kievan Rus back a thousand years and left it to languish while the more northern lands that would become Russia persisted because the Golden Horde allowed the local princes to govern on its behalf. Perhaps this was fortune, of a kind. Later, visitors kept seeing a difference in the inheritance. In the middle of the seventeenth century, an Orthodox cleric from Aleppo reported that “anyone wishing to shorten his life by five or ten years should go to Muscovy.” The monasteries there forbade laughter, religion police inspected the faithful for proper devotion, imbibers were exiled to Siberia, and users of tobacco got death. The cleric, a user of tobacco, wrote that “during those two years spent in Muscovy a padlock had been set on our hearts.” Ukraine’s sins—mosquito infestations, interminable religious services—seemed mild by comparison; its inhabitants “were to us boon companions and fellows like ourselves.”

  Nearly three hundred years later, Robert Byron, the great British travel writer, found in Moscow “a stifling air—how stifling I only realised on reaching Kiev, which preserves in some indefinable way its old university tradition of the humanities and allows one to breathe normally again.” John Steinbeck, traveling around the USSR with Robert Capa after World War II: “Everyone had told us it would be different once we got outside Moscow, that the sternness and tenseness would not exist. And this was true . . . the people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the streets.” And this was after Ukraine spent the 1930s enduring a Moscow-manufactured famine that starved millions, while millions more, most of them middle-class farmers, were forcibly collectivized, killed, or deported to the Far East; and then, in the 1940s, World War II. Steinbeck thought the Ukrainian women were more attractive, too.

  But what did I share with these people? Was it that I felt more at home with their sorrow than with all the diversion I had in the States? In coming back to the places that reared me, I could never reconcile with the feeling that here were grown men and women living, if not like animals—the competition for limited resources, the readiness for violence—then like children of bad parents; like people dependent on usually unaccountable forces; like people without much of their own. But that helplessness coexisted with a ferocious aptitude for survival that dwarfed that of any “independent,” “self-directed,” and well-appointed life I knew in New York.

  That was the true resourcefulness of my father and grandfather—in very different ways, they knew how to do whatever it took. I had never been tested—a privilege, but also a corner of myself roped off in darkness. My elders wanted me to never have to know how to be so resourceful, but in removing the “have to,” they’d thrown out the “to be,” too. My grandfather managed to withhold his secrets until well after I’d been shaped as a person. And my father had been sending me and my questions away from the time I was a child asking what he was up to on the stepladder from which he always did his painting. They’d won—I was so much not like them—and they’d lost, for the same reason. But for all the American blessings I’d reaped, I couldn’t make myself come around to my new country. America was like a person who had given gifts of great generosity—support where others wished to knock down, protection where others wished to attack, opportunity where others wished to deny—and my heart was beyond full with gratitude. But it wasn’t love. Try as I might, I could not make myself fall in love.

  Maybe I recognized something in Ivano-Frankovsk because it had barely changed in two decades of freedom, the same reason my grandfather felt so at home with Oksana: Here, they remained Soviet creatures. (They did in Belarus, too, but I had no one there anymore.) Having savaged for so long all that remained Soviet, the detection of my own lingering Soviet self, like a bad spot picked up on an X-ray, was bracing. In one thought, I was implacably American; in the next, irredeemably Soviet. I felt hopelessly sundered.

  But it wasn’t as if I wished to live here. Perhaps the only way for me to be in Belarus was to be in Ukraine, but even here I could feel close to the people around me only as a visitor; if I came any nearer, the connection would dissolve. It didn’t exist outside that fleeting, precarious moment. Meanwhile, if the Ukrainians around me had American passports, they would probably settle into American lives as self-accepting and unruffled as those I observed in south Brooklyn, whereas when I returned there, it would be to the old emotionally stateless solitude. My nation was neither old Soviet territory nor America. It wasn’t on the map, had no place to gather in numbers. It was among those who couldn’t, for whatever reason, ease into an answer. Sometimes one met a kinsman or kinswoman, in life or in the pages of a book, and one tried to create them between the pages of one’s own writing. But that was as good as it got. It had never occurred to me that these pieces could be enough. All my attention had previously been on recovering the wholeness that had been mine until nine. Anywhere would have done. But it had to be wholeness.

  It was cold, and I decided to find a place to warm up. Down an alley, past an only-in-that-part-of-the-world congregation—boxy sedan, one man in a black leather jacket, another with a man purse and trousers bunching over his pointy-toed shoes, a young girl all in pink prancing around the trunk, and a third man dressed either like Elvis or merely like himself, in a nearly fluorescent cream suit over a high-collared shirt of silk periwinkle—I found a belowground bar called Bunker. The hour—late morning—hardly precluded the presence of tipplers, but Bunker was polished and themed, the kind of nod to upscale clientele that kept away career drinkers. My only companions were three businessmen in suits that shone brighter than the lamps. They huddled over a huge Dell laptop, an early lunch and shot glasses around them.

  Behind them was an engraved map of the territory in western Ukraine controlled in 1944 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which welcomed the Nazis as deliverers from Soviet rule. The bar, I realized, was made to look like a UPA bunker. Historians differ about the degree to which the UPA and other nationalist groups participated in the mass murder of Jews. But the city I was visiting, in which virtually no Jews continued to live, had been more than 60 percent Jewish in 1941. Its location on the railway line west to Poland, in whose death camps so much of European Jewry perished, made Ivano-Frankovsk the spout through which Ukrainian—and non-Ukrainian—Jewry was funneled. Sixty or seventy thousand died in the city itself; the rest were sent to the camps. (Ukraine lost 60 percent of its Jews, 1.5 million out of 2.5 million, a comparatively fortunate ratio. Poland lost more than 90 percent of its 3.5 million.)

  Oksana’s mother had seen it herself; she’d told her daughter about it. I’d asked Oksana once, back in Brooklyn, if she’d known any Jews. She named several distant acquaintances—a fellow counterwoman at the supermarket, the man at the recycling depot—but she also understood the drift of my question. “We were ordinary people,” she said. “We weren’t nationalists or the opposite. We went with the flow. No one talked about the war.” I wondered what all this came to in practice—whether, if she had heard someone at her supermarket say what my grandfather had heard (“Quit pawing that bread with your grubby Jewish fingers”), she would have spoken up in his defense or remained silent. I was afraid to ask. There was no reason to be—she wouldn’t an
swer me the wrong way. This truth was lost, too.

  In all my walking that day, I didn’t see a single commemoration. Many people in the West make the mistake of interpreting this as evidence of active anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t feel that way when you’re there. The citizens of Ivano-Frankovsk were guilty of doing nothing to commemorate the extent of specifically Jewish murder during the war. But they had been unable to do so during the Soviet period, when the required emphasis was on overall Soviet suffering; often, to save their children the trouble, the older people didn’t pass on the information that Oksana’s mother valued enough to pass on to her. And now, with more freedom, the focus was on Ukrainian aspirations and Ukrainian losses. Was this anti-Semitism? If so, it was passive. It took a great deal of consciousness, humanity, and education—and, perhaps, prosperity—to become the kind of person who wished to commemorate outside the tribe simply because it was the truth. The people I saw in Ukraine seemed to overflow with humanity. The consciousness seemed to have been whipped out of many of them. And the education was often withheld. All the same, how could I feel so at home among people who ignored—and had aided—a genocide that took hundreds of relatives and left me an extended family of fewer than a dozen?

  I returned to Oksana’s with frozen feet. She greeted me with the same reprimand and relief that must have greeted my father after he took too long on his first shopping trip in Vienna. She couldn’t scold me like her own child, but she also wouldn’t scold Misha if he were late and didn’t call—I required special attention. Nothing mattered more than looking after one’s own, at the expense of others if needed—unless one of those others was placed in one’s formal care, in which case appearances took over, and a whole dinner could burn if it meant the guest was well looked after. Or so it was in my family. That Oksana was not part of it, no matter her ubiquity and closeness with us, meant that sometimes I was more polite to her than to even my own, and that sometimes I could be more honest. It wasn’t a bad bargain. I thought of the way she and my father had never moved on from addressing each other by the formal “you,” now understanding it in a new way. There were things better than closeness. Her status created boundaries in a family that had none. “What am I supposed to do with you, tell me?” she chided me indulgently now, and steered me to the dining table.