Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Forthcoming titles by Oksana Zabuzhko:

  Museum of Abandoned Secrets

  Oh Sister, My Sister

  Text copyright © 1996 Zhoda

  English translation copyright © 2011 by Amazon Content Services LLC

  Cover art © Rostyslav Luzhetskyy

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko was first published in 1996 by Zhoda in Kyiv as Pol´ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns´koho seksu.

  An excerpt from Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex appeared in AGNI 53, Spring 2001.

  Translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn.

  First published in English in 2011 by AmazonCrossing.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611090086

  ISBN-10: 1611090083

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010918615

  CONTENTS

  Not today, she...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Not today, she says to herself. Not yet, not today. In the kitchen—a tiny, “eat-in” kitchen (refrigerator, hotplate, cupboard with carelessly tacked-on doors determined to open every time you turn your back like a loose jaw on a paralyzed face, and all this separated off by a medium-height stand made of wooden planks that looks like something you might normally find in a bar—this “counter” allows you to serve meals directly from the narrow enclosure into the room—sure, why not!—like morning coffee, for example, or a little roast chicken for lunch, just like the ones in the television commercials: golden crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside, legs playfully tucked in and presented on a bed of lettuce—these chickens always look much happier than live ones, simply radiating a deep blush of pleasure at the prospect of being eaten—you can also serve juice, or perhaps gin and tonic in a tall thick glass, you can add ice, the cubes sound so funny when they rattle as you pour them into the glass, or you can do it without ice, and in fact the possibilities are endless, but you just need one thing—for there to be someone sitting on the other side of their fucking counter, in which, incidentally, a colony of ants seems to have made a home, because every once in a while you’ve got something crawling around on the Formica that really doesn’t belong in a hygienic American home, nor in a non-American one, come to think of it—someone to whom you could serve all this good stuff as you smile your cover-girl smile. Since, however, there is no one sitting there, nor is there about to be, you’ve gone ahead and decided to create an improvised winter garden on that counter comprising two innocent potted plants—three weeks ago, when you first moved in here, they were: a luscious, deep-green clump topped with orange flowers—that’s one of them—and a thick necklace of shiny, kind of plasticky red nubs on tall stems with elegantly tapered leaves—that’s the other. Now both plants have the appearance of having been watered with sulfuric acid for the last three weeks—in place of the rich clump only a few yellow leaves with unevenly singed edges hang like dog ears, and the former tight red beads more and more with every day resemble dried rosehips that someone has decided to stick on burned-out spikes for some unknown reason—the funniest thing is that you deliberately did not forget to water your “winter garden,” you nurtured it just like Voltaire had taught, you bet, you wanted for there to be another living entity in this apartment, the last of hell only knows how many, your temporary home, where the filth of all previous inhabitants has indelibly settled into every crack so that you didn’t even try to wash it out—however, the damned American weeds turned out to be too delicate to withstand your depression, which thickens, unstirred, inside these four walls day by day, so they went ahead and died on you, and you can water them or not water them as you wish—and you still have hopes of keeping people in here!)—so, as I was saying, in this kitchen you’ve got water dripping from the tap into the sink with a taunting dumb burble and there is no bloody way to drown out that sound—you can’t even play a tape because your portable cassette player has gone on the blink. True, somewhere outside the window, which is as narrow as those cupboard doors that keep opening, and quite dark at this hour (you don’t bother lowering the blinds, because across from you there’s a dead wall anyway), on the other side of the screen an invisible grasshopper chirks like a distant telephone, as though it’s stuck right in the screen itself—just the same way that that thought keeps chirking inside your head, or maybe that’s in fact the only thing that’s chirking—why not do it today, after all, why wait, what for?

  If you think about it logically, there’s nothing at all to wait for. Nothing whatsoever.

  Half a bottle of sedatives plus one razor blade, and—please forgive the unsuccessful debut. I tried my very best, with best of intentions, and since the result was a total disaster the honorable thing is to do is fold your cards—I’m not much of a player even now, and it’s only going to get worse from here on in: no relief in sight, and my strength’s not what it used to be: not a kid anymore.

  And yet—no, not today.

  Wait a bit longer. See how this film ends. Unlike those that they broadcast here on “public channels,” where in the tensest moments as you watch, with involuntary chills of fear, as the hero races down an empty tunnel where from around the bend the most frightening of monsters is about to pounce on him, it suddenly hits you—shit!—everything’s going to turn out just fine—another two-three minutes, a confrontation, a pile of swinging limbs, some rolling around on the floor, and the beast, with an outlandish cry, by some miracle transforms to dust, while the masculine and only slightly ruffled hero, enveloped in smoke from the conflagration and breathing heavily, draws the rescued Sharon Stone to his chest, or that other beauty, what’s her name, the brunette—and your overwhelming surge of fear is suddenly revealed in all its ridiculousness: once again those Hollywood guys have succeeded, if only for a moment, in suckering you—unlike those, the film that you still can’t bring yourself to shut off does not necessarily have to have a happy ending. Still, turning it off is unforgivable bad taste. And foolishness. And childishness: I’m not ready for the test, so I won’t go to school. No, sweetie (“sweetness,” she ironically corrects herself: that’s what that man, who’s probably feeling shittier that she is right now, used to call her, but that doesn’t matter anymore), you’re not allowed to duck out, you deal with this properly, step by step, and then we’ll find out what you’re really made of. Got that?

  Write down those words, I’ll tattoo them on me, a rough, surly voice pipes up from within, a very different woman, cynical, with in-your-face street-smart mannerisms picked up “on the inside” somewhere, quite capable of knocking you off your feet with curses should the need arise: if a person in general (every one!) is one big prison, then up to now this bitch inside her has lived tucked away in the remotest cell, coming out rarely, only when things got especially bitter and tough, and even so mainly for show: P-pisses me off—she’d hiss at moments of irritation, shaking her head and calming herself with an acrid smile; or else, digesting the aftertaste of the latest put-down (of which there was an overabundance lately) she would relate to her friends, her eyes wide with anger: Trying to make me a patsy—I don’t think so!—right palm slapping hard against the crook of her left elbow as a clenched fist flew up—in America the prison hag learned how to swear in English and was especially successful at rendering the word
“Shhiitt!”—a hiss off the arched back of a cat, and also the contempt-laced “Oh come-on, give me a break!” with which she once lashed that man—all in all, it was with that man that this disheveled witch with strangely unhealthy glistening eyes and teeth and some invisible but suspected criminal past would periodically run out to center stage, boldly smashing the fragile vessels of unfulfilled dreams; that man would liberate her, call her forth from the remote jail cell—as soon as she heard, during their first fight, that brutal, fist-swinging intonation of his: “You tell me—what the fuck did I come way out here for, I had enough of this same shit at home—up to here!”—the bitch eagerly rushed out to intercept him, she recognized a worthy partner, it was only here that they were truly partners—and then there was no stopping her as she spread her wings in previously untasted freedom: “I started working on a head yesterday,” he would try telling a fellow sculptor in her presence, and the bitch would tear out ahead, dropping buttons and pins in the insuppressible excitement of verbal excretion: “That’s wonderful, dear, you do need a head—it can only help!”—he’d turn a hue so dark it seemed as though ink rather than blood flooded his face, whispering into her ear, “Stop fucking me up!”—the witch, exhaling cigarette smoke, laughed heartily from deep inside as she felt at least slightly pleased about something for the first time in a while: “Now, now, dear, where’s your sense of humor?”—“I left it back in our old apartment,” he’d mutter (they left that apartment, thank God, and it would be best if the owners could seal it up for about half a year, until the smell of plague had dispersed)—“Well why don’t you run back and get it,” the witch grinned, “I’ll wait here.”—“I’ve turned in my key,” he’d mutter again, thinking that with that he’d put the issue to rest, but he was mistaken: “I was the one who turned in the key, you still have the duplicate,” she shot back: the power and lightning speed of their fencing with clubs was not to be apprehended by an outsider; no, say what you may, but they made a good pair, that much can’t be denied! And now, when the time has come for that bitch—cursed and abused, scorched by misfortunes to the core, with a converted-to-acetone-but-still-extant spirit of survival (where in God’s name does it come from?)—to accede to the throne and assume full reign of the prison, taking responsibility for the further course of whatever life may still smolder in it, dispensing orders all over the place: that door—do not enter, and this trash—get it the hell out of here right now, and that section way over there—air it out, we’re converting it into a museum, and who’s this loser dragging her ass and slobbering up the place, get her out of my sight! (That’s wonderful, dear, you do need a head—it can only help!)—that bitch (and bitch she is!) has abdicated, turned into a smear on some distant wall, neither hide nor hair, and in all the caverns of the now empty prison an entirely different voice sounds, shuttling back and forth with uneven step: pitter-patter-pitter—then silence, and throwing itself against the walls, the same place time and again, each time weaker, while a poor, unloved girl abandoned at a rail station wails, and wails, and wails, eager to take the hand of anyone who says to her, “I’m your daddy,” except who’s going to say that to a thirty-year-old broad—that’s the girl that you yourself hate inside you, you’ve tried to keep her under lock and key since you were an adolescent, in the dimmest, furthest basement chamber, without bread or water, not letting her move a muscle—and still she somehow managed to survive and there’s no shutting her up now—now, when it seems that there’s no one left except for her, that there is no other you.

  You’re messed up, “sweetness.” You are really messed up. You’ve hit the end of the line—three months now that tremor has not left your body; in the mornings when you wake up (and especially now, when you wake up alone), the first thing you feel is your racing heartbeat and there’s no putting it down—at least now you’re sleeping without pills, and those horrible attacks of dry heaving you’d get at night remind you of themselves perhaps only when you’re brushing your teeth and accidentally shove the toothbrush too far in—a swift nauseous gag, a subconscious repressed memory of your own dumb submission to those immediate, from the very first time—initially aroused, passionate whispers but after several weeks merely dry admonishments: “Take it in your mouth…Take it in deeper…More, come on!”—a dry spoon scratches your throat, the philosopher once said—here it is, right here. In the beginning she would still try to come to some understanding, to explain that she too may have some preliminary requests, and not just “down there:” is there nothing other than my sex organs that interests you? And: if you had plans for tonight, you might have let me know before I went to bed rather than sitting there scratching away at your engraving, and anyway, you know I don’t like to get undressed by myself…Okay—he cheerily promised—we’ll whip up such a grand overture for you tomorrow!—tomorrow, however, never did come. Come here—but I just took my sleeping pills—so, great, you’ll fall asleep with “him” inside you. God, what a nightmare it was. How is it even possible to comprehend the world of those who contemplate their own sex organ in the third person? When they say to you, and that’s the only way that man said it—“Open ‘her’ up,” all your senses are immediately transported to the gynecologist’s stirrups—because it’s not “she,” it’s you that’s opening up—or in this case, rather, locking down with a dead bolt. You know how many women I’ve had!—and not once was it bad, just plain bad! Sure, not for you, but what about them, ever think of asking? I also never imagined things could be like this—but just how bad it is, sweetheart, if you only knew. Did you just bite me, he asked, fixing you with a strange, glassy stare, as on one of your first nights, after lovemaking, he sat smoking at the foot of the bed, what is this—meanwhile you were sprawled back on the pillow giggling and feeling safe and stroking his head with your outstretched foot, you had lovely legs, all the Dior–St. Laurent models on their spikes would have to run out and drown themselves immediately at the sight of legs like that; it’s only now that you’ve been wearing pants for two months because your calves are decorated like a map of an archipelago of multicolored, reddish and brownish, peeled and peeling spots—scars, cuts, burns, a visual manifestation of your nine-month (that’s right, nine months!!!) “mad love,” from which you emerged as madness itself, but back then you were simply stroking his head with your foot, overcome with tenderness, drooling idiot, the rough masculine “hedgehog” haircut felt good as it prickled your foot—when he suddenly turned and deftly pinned your leg to the bed: Ah-hahh? So you like to bite? And what if I like to set you on fire, what then?—you saw the cigarette lighter pressed against the inside of your knee and, rather than freeze in terror—as you stared down the barrel of that first apprehension of a steady, inhuman, somehow different, malevolently and madly searching gaze, on the edge of a grin of bared incisors protruding steeply from the upper lip, from which you afterward always defended yourself with laughter—you were only mildly surprised, and not all that consciously either—it’s strange to what extent his presence, like dynamite, silenced in you all the previously not-too-badly developed instincts of self-preservation, which all floated to the surface belly-up, while the river kept on convulsing, blast after blast.

  No, the premonitions were there; premonitions never lead you astray, it’s only the determined force of our will that muffles their voice, interferes with our hearing them. The very first evening, at the arts festival where it all began—it was then that he rushed toward you as though you were all he’d been waiting for, “Oksana, I’m Mykola K., perhaps I can show you the city, perhaps I can take you to the castle, I have a car”—it was a ten-minute walk to the fabled castle up quiet, cobbled streets planted with plump baroque churches on each side; small-town seducer, you thought to yourself suppressing a smile, provincial dandy in your narcissistic get-up—tiny white collar peeking out from the sweater, manicured nails (and he’s a painter!), an appropriately faint whiff of cologne—a feral cat with a gray buzz cut and roguish green-eyed squint, a slightly worn, thread
bare artist’s charm, dry wrinkled smile, furrowed bags under the eyes—“and you said,” he recalled later, when you had entered the phase of creating the common mythology that no couple can do without (together with the legend about the Golden Age of their love with its own petty customs and rituals), the phase ended as quickly as it began—“you said, hit the road, Jack”—well, maybe not like that, or rather not exactly like that, but you showed no interest, that much is true—so it was all the more strange when on the evening of that same day you were visited by a glimpse of clear, penetrating insight, which, it would be a crime to say otherwise, has never stood you up in a tight spot, but you tried to smother it, didn’t you, many times, many! That evening, when the program was in full swing and you descended into the thick vapors of sweat and alcohol after reading your piece—two poems, two damned good poems projected straight into the intoxicated din of splotchy yellow faces congealed into one encompassing mass of flashing lights, or, more precisely, projected straight over it—holding on to the sound of your own, oblivious-to-all-around-and-subservient-only-to-words voice, a public orgasm, that’s what you call this, but it does it for the crowd—every time and every place, even when they have no clue what the words mean, even in a foreign-speaking environment. You first discovered this at a writers’ forum in one Far Eastern country where out of politeness they asked you to read in your native language (“you mean, it’s not Russian?”)—and you began reading then, in insult and desperation listening only to your own text (you were sick to death of their “Russian” even then), concealing yourself within it the way one slips into a lit house at night and locks the door behind, and midway you suddenly realized that in the frozen silence you were being heard: mova—your language, even though nobody understood it, in full view of the public it had concentrated around you into a clear, sparkling sphere of the most refined, crafted glass inside which magic was happening, this could be seen by all: something was coming to life, pulsating, firming up, arching into broad billows of flame—and then misting up again, as happens with glass that is exposed to heavy breathing; you finished your piece—enveloped, crystal-clear, protected, now that would have been the time to realize that your home is your language, a language only about a few hundred other people in the whole world can still speak properly—it would always be with you, like a snail’s shell, and there would not be another, non-portable home for you, girl, ever, no matter what you do. And afterward all those people—round-faced, balding, dark- and curly-haired, with turbans and without—shook your hand long and with feeling and not letting you, incidentally, get to the bathroom (your stomach was giving a decided thumbs-down to their musky-spicy cuisine and was trumpeting, the bastard, precisely at the moments when gracious thank-yous were called for)—after that there was no audience you couldn’t handle, even hardened criminals!—whether you call it exhibitionism or not, it was your own text that would always protect you from abuse and humiliation, you read it the way you wrote it—out loud, led by the self-propelling music of the verse, one normally does not allow witnesses to this process except in the theater, and that’s why, in fact, it’s so powerful. And that festival rabble, too, piped down somewhere in the middle of your reading—it surrounded the glass sphere and breathed in unison, and then when you, cooling off from the applause, were no longer on the platform but down below in the half-darkness in some tight, friendly circle: it’s humid, smoky, someone was pouring a glass, someone was laughing, faces flashed by like film frames—you were stretching out your hand to get either a cigarette or a wineglass, that man appeared beside you for an instant as though he’d tripped over you accidentally, cat-eyes gleaming in the dark and excited whiskey-breath whisper: “You were great!”—and, equally casually, without pausing, he tried to squeeze your hand, reaching for it as it stretched toward the cigarette (or wineglass)—and you remembered this because (after all, who didn’t shake your hand in that teeming multitude!) with that awkward grasp, that perpendicular chop across the thrust of your own arm, the same way he later raced up a one-way street the wrong way and got the police sirens after him, he managed to bend your thumb back in a particularly painful way, and your sirens also instantly started screaming—a lightning-quick flash through your consciousness—strange, how in that confused moment the message was so clear and you knew, as if some bystander in your head uttered a calm, meaningful, grammatical sentence: “This man is going to hurt you.”