Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Precisely in this way, in other words, it was not the hurt thumb that was at issue, and you understood that perfectly. And that’s the point, my dear—you knew everything right from the start; no, you knew it even before the start: about a week before that trip to the festival there was one evening when your bared nerve ends, painfully-thirstily, as only happens in the fall, exposed to the outside world—out to meet its faltering autumn colors and mysterious rustle in sleepy leaves—captured this passage, which you didn’t grasp then and so left it unfinished:

  Something has shifted in the world: someone was crying

  Out my name in the night as though from a torture chamber

  And someone rustled leaves on the porch,

  Tossed and turned, and could not fall asleep.

  I was learning the lessons of parting:

  The science of differentiating the pain of illness

  And the pain of affirmation (someone was writing me letters

  And throwing them into the fire,

  Unable to finish the line). Someone was waiting

  For something from me, but I was silent:

  I was learning the lessons of parting

  —and now it has all come to pass, down to the very last word: go ahead, learn, learn now the lessons of parting—with life, with yourself, with your ill-fated gift, because it’s unlikely that you’ll now be able to raise it up—you’ve never yet managed to raise this barbell to full extension anyway.

  Ah, damn it all…

  No, I would really like for someone to explain to me: why the hell would one come into this world a woman (and in Ukraine, yet!)—with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the earth’s surface (always, always liked the bottom position—sex from below, flat on your back: only then could she be eliminated completely, merging with the rhythm of her own body cells and the translucent pulsation of universal expanses—nothing even remotely like that ever happened with that man; at the moment when it seemed that she was just about to take off, he, without stopping, would awaken her from above with the harshly exhaled: “Hmm-yeah, you’d need an infantry platoon to finish this job!”—she had found this funny, but no more than that: “What kind of talk is that?”—she’d be offended: not at the words but at their detached tone—“Silly, it’s a compliment!—you should really consider trying it with two guys, you know what kind of rush you’d get?”—it’s quite possible that she might, she did, after all, like to bite during lovemaking, to suck hard at either a finger or a shoulder, to inhale a kiss until it made her head spin, a temple whore—that’s who I must have been in my previous life, but in this life—in this, my dear, it is so much not all the same to me who I’m with: I remember sitting on a New York subway once, my head stuck in Toni Morrison’s latest novel, and someone flopped down on the seat next to me pressing my whole body to the metal bar—and instantly I was electrified with a pure charge [like a high musical note] of such a powerful erotic urge that my body responded with an aroused swell, all buds bursting open inside like a tree in springtime: simultaneously I realized that this man had been hovering over me for a few subway stops already and had we not been people we’d already be fucking on this spattered floor, lovemaking for real, fusing not with your partner, no—with that wild, anonymous force that penetrates all living things with its current, you plug into it in order to, if only for a moment—aahhh!—catapult into the fiery-contoured darkness that has no name, no limit, on which all pagan cults lay their foundations, it’s only Christianity that has classified this as union with the kingdom of the black god, sealing all exits for humans except for one—through the top, though not for our age, already essentially post-Christian, already cut off from the path of return back to the orgiastic feast of universal unity: we, each on his or her own, hopelessly infected with a cursed consciousness of the heaviness and density of his or her ego, and that is why the victoriously pure, loud, and high musical note broke off and extinguished itself in my body at the very moment that he, the one on my left, began talking: he spoke up after about one subway stop, some kind of uncivilized accent, asked what I was reading: am I in school or something, a student?—that’s when I first looked at him, he was a young man in his late twenties, not tall but compactly built, a “Hispanic” hewed from a single block of wood, his gorgeous eyes the color of dark plums softened by a sensuous grayish mist, that’s the way hundreds of men of different nations and skin colors have looked at me, each one from behind the bars of its own life, one can get out for a while, but not for good; “Pardon me?” I asked with that deliberately sharp voice one uses to dispense with insolents, and that Juan or Pablo or Pedro immediately realized that—it’s over, the line’s been cut—“Nothing,” he blurted and continued to mumble something under his nose, now in his own language—the powerful animal voice of his body wilted, contracted, quickly-quickly went out, and beside me sat an ordinary immigrant lech—and anyway, he soon got up and headed either for the exit or elsewhere, I was no longer looking and back to reading to my book: the person, having peered out, broke the spell of the sex. Perhaps, really, the only way out of this prison is to go out at night, hiding your face deep in the hood of your coat, to get into strangers’ cars without giving your name, the hand of the driver on your knee, a low, husky chuckle, a feverish rustle of excess clothing, no need to turn on the lights, just listen to the rumble of your blood, the male percussion part and your no-longer-your-own dissolving, dispersing, spreading, ah, you’ve opened up so nicely, yes! yes! more! more!—it’s just that they all want to talk, splattering saliva and sperm they want a gulp of you: what are you reading, where are you going, are you married, you have to dream up a story—What’s your name?—Irina—there was one incident when after locking into a strong deep steely kiss in an apartment entryway she slipped out and ran away, chuckling to herself, they all need to vanquish, that’s the point, the give and take of a fair exchange like carbon dioxide–chlorophyll–oxygen is not for them, they don’t know how to do it, and that man who’s about to croak somewhere out there in the Pennsylvania wilderness currying favor with his diaspora blood brothers without a penny to his name or a word of English [which he was supposed to have studied up a little before coming, moron!]—boy, did he ever jump up, did he ever jerk his face up like a damned horse that’s just been lashed when you finally sat him down in the coffee shop and, summoning all your fortitude to your aid, tried to introduce at least some kind of therapeutic clarity into your mutual physical and mental sickness—yes, everything you say is true, dear, and the fact that I no longer love you is also true: “So you—what,” the click of a jackknife blade popping up: “feel like a ‘victor’ here, that you’ve won?”—I think you just sat there with your mouth wide open: Mykola, you think we’ve been playing tug-of-war?…“You know,” again that steady ominous stare as though something else was peering through those eyes, rimmed by swollen red eyelids, like through the slits of a mask, “if you were a man, I’d smash your face in!” Very charming of you, dear—I, too, oh so often regret that I’m not a man).

  You’re a woman. And that’s your limit.

  Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure.

  Like spices off the edge of a knife

  Dependency sprinkled into your blood

  —so she murmured to herself during those frightening winter months, frightening in a different way from these-here autumn months: the middle of January, February, March—no news and no way of finding anything out between Cambridge—and a small Ukrainian provincial town, a studio heated by firewood in the attic of an abandoned house without an address or telephone, without a toilet or hot water, with only a bare lightbulb strung with a cord from the ceiling, with a stick of sausage and a jar of instant coffee on a low table greased with paint, would you like a sandwich? oh, and I’ve got a tomato here, too, would you like some?
My God, the man lives like a stray dog, stays up until six in the morning checking out the window on that fancy automobile of his (sans garage) from behind the easel, at twenty-five or thirty you can still handle that kind of life, driven by sheer animal energy—but at forty! Meanwhile back at the Cambridge apartment, crisscrossed God knows how many times from one end to the other by senseless pacing—from the main door through the bedroom to the kitchen (the work that she purportedly came to the States to do collapsed like a crudely assembled house of cards)—something incomprehensible was happening with the phone: time after time she was awakened at dawn by random calls, she’d jump up and rush for the receiver: “Hello!”—somewhere in the distance on the voiceless line a wind howled and an ocean roared, for a few seconds the uninhabited, unpopulated space over the northern hemisphere announced itself as if in fact “someone was crying out her name at night as though from a torture chamber,” and the cries did him no good, after which the mute signal would cease: the eyes of the buttons on the receiver lit up with a green, underwater glitter and from its mouth bubbled up a soulless dial tone—ah, you both had enough will to screw up all the phone lines over the Atlantic, that fierce, hungry force stormed out from his paintings and from your poems, you recognized his at once as soon as you ended up in his studio, put on your thick glasses, and stood before his canvases, and likewise he must have recognized yours—yours, which during those winter months was so unexpectedly and totally knocked off its newly discovered axis (because you were a woman, and a woman, damn it, is a climbing plant that without a vertical support, even if it is imagined—without a love with a concrete living face to it—falls to the ground and wilts, losing all inspiration for upward momentum: every poem was a delightful bastard baby of one prince or another with a bright star on his forehead, the star, of course, inevitably went out, the poem remained)—abandoned on its own, that force tore you to bits from within, fiercely scratching at the walls of your being and bursting out in desperate freefall—

  And suddenly again I wanted to scream

  Howl at the lamp, claw at the

  Wallpaper—from the reality of loss

  From knowing there’s no purpose to waiting for you

  —until one March day your whole insides were scalded by a frightening thought: that he’s dead, that he just “hit the wall” the way he wanted to (he confessed this to her practically at the beginning—smiling a crooked smile as he hit the gas, racing the car like a plane on the runway, on a country road in the middle of the night, and the wet streetlights in the fine-needled silvery frames, and the black olive flash of the approaching puddles—everything merged, rushed forward in a race against itself, taking your breath away, one hundred, one twenty, one forty, one…one hundred and sixty?—you’re not afraid? don’t you get the desire to—hit the wall?—no, I’m not afraid, I never really experienced real fear and truthfully, I don’t feel it even now—strange, incomprehensible actually, especially if you take into account my whole, damn it to hell, slave-gang life, no wonder it began with a clinical death at birth, Mother even recalled a piece of feces hanging from my bottom, and the tiny body had already turned blue: the poor soul poked its head out into the world and lost its nerve—Hey, no way, let me go back!—but thanks to some kind folks it was revived, quite quickly really, no need to snivel, there are things scarier than death, I know them, it’s just that that fear—seductive and dark, the bewitching, intoxicating excitement of perdition that lives inside him, and I’ve discerned it in others, too—that I don’t have, period, that’s why he would look at me with that spark of unconcealed excitement in his eye, even when it was all over: “You’re a brave woman!”—and that “wall” jumped past me then without scaring me)—but this thought—that he died, that those mysterious phone calls really were from him: from “the other side,” and that means then that her love did not protect him, that she herself, she herself, narcissistic egotistical bitch with her stupid pride, her cheap pomp, her empty strutting had pushed him toward that “wall”—a princess, no less: oh, so that’s how it is? Fine, then I’m off—America, as everyone knows, is “the land of opportunities,” half of Europe, and not just our godforsaken part but the purest, from Britain to Italy, is dying to get over there, money, career (“Music, women, champagne…” he had ironically echoed then), and what is there in Ukraine, Ukraine is Chronos chomping away at his children, tiny fingers and toes, I’m supposed to sit and wait for what, to suck a frog’s tit, or rather that of a menopausal diaspora gramps—the Antonovych prize? Oh my God, what the fuck is all that to me if he’s dead, what, what, what has happened to him?!—the thought was so unbearable that jumping out to the back porch and raising her face to the mutable, rapidly darkening Cambridge sky that was thickening into a cloudy gouache, opening her lungs, sticky from motionless sitting and cigarette smoke, to catch the barely felt ocean breeze, she started to pray—yes, the way she had only prayed twice before in her life, once for her father, who was spending his last days lying in a hospital after the by-then-unnecessary operation, convulsing for hours from the metasthasis-induced stabs of pain (they had not yet put him on the narcotics)—for God to send him a speedy end, and then a second time, embarrasing to recall—for independence, then, on the twenty-fourth of August 1991, when everything was decided in hours, as generally happens in the lives of people and nations: Lord, she begged, trembling—help—not for our sakes for we are unworthy, but for all those who have died before us in this cause, of whom there is no count—and both prayers were heard, prayers like that always reach their addressee; and here now she was begging: Lord, please make him be alive!—he can forget me, he can return to his wife, he can betray me with whomever he wishes, I don’t have to have him for my husband, and I don’t need anything at all from him, and if it is your will, Lord, I will love another, I’ll have children with another, just—O Lord, let him be alive. And healthy. And happy. Only that, Lord. Only that.

  Well, “healthy and happy”—that would be kind of pushing it, sweetness, because not even God can force somebody to be happy, so the final version of your desperate telegram had to have been accepted without those two words—it’s not like God is going to take orders from every fool! (And I wonder, how do they run this business up there—is there an angel-secretary selecting these earthly messages as they come in, retrieving the sincere ones from the stream, the hot and the heavy, and calmly dropping the incalculable masses of empty words into a black hole?—poems work pretty much the same way: you’re disgusted as soon as you feel the empty sort coming out, you drop the poem without finishing.) And there was one other point where you lied— “he can forget me,” you babbled half-consciously, knowing firmly all the while that never will he forget you, not now, not for as long as he lives: pinching a cigarette butt between finger and thumb and flicking it backwards so that it lit up an arc through the air: “And have you considered how long it’s going to take me to get over you? Huh?” he hissed, barely holding himself back from hurling her after the cigarette butt (“Keep in mind, the flesh is weak, I could hack you to bits before I know it,” he had once confessed, and your lightbulb went on: watch this, watch this! he’s not lying, this is the truth!—and, with an instantly switched on impersonal interest—invisible wires hummed, droned, nimbly transmitting information—you squeezed it out of him that time, despite his iron-clad resistance to all kinds of cuddly, mumbly, purring, come-on-tell-me boobie interrogations—a taut, point-form account of how, a long time ago, when he was decorating a church together with a “fucker who was really getting to me,” he got into a state where he was chasing the fellow around the grounds axe-in-hand—really, around the church, you wondered, somehow imagining that this must have taken place in the dead of night, because there is nothing more frightening than a church at night with a full moon reflected in the dark windows high above—and it’s since then that he’s always been on guard, ready to run at the first sign of that particular mood coming on—I see, you hm-ed, interesting, althoug
h the only thing interesting about it was the total absence of fear on your part, dope—it’s as if it were all being told to you through a window in the visiting room of a prison or an insane asylum: you hear it out, and then you leave, and behind you the leaden doors screak violently as they close shut, as the dry clicking of the key turning in the lock showers your back, injecting itself under your skin). How long will it take me to get over you, how long for you to get over me, “How much longer are we to walk thus, Father?” asked the wife of the defrocked Avvakum trudging behind him, outcast and banished, across the endless plain, and sitting down on a hillock, exhausted by the pointlessness of the trip, she heard in reply: “Until death, Mother.” Eastern fatalism, oh yes—the Russians have it; we’re in worse shape, we, actually, are neither here nor there, Europe has managed to infect us with the raving fever of individual desire, faith in our personal “Yes I can!”—however, we never developed a foundation for such faith, those structures that might support that “I can!” and thus have tussled about for ages at the bottom of history—our Ukrainian “I can!” helpless and alone. Amen.