Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  What is it that made you think that you can pull him out of that hole into which he (it was obvious!) was so determined to sink? Actually, you should have taken heed on the first night—when, still undressing, he squinted attentively, as if determining a price: “Can you come before I do?”—you laughed, overflowing with frothy confidence like a bottle of young wine: “I can do anything!” Fool, you should have seen right there that he was no partner for you, that, petrified inside from years of permafrost, he was simply incapable of being not alone—even in lovemaking (“You’re such a good fuck!” was all he could squeeze out of himself after a long and cumbersome back-and-forth, after tortured convulsions, after all those pathetic lamentations—“Oh, why did I drink so much!” and “Ah, damn, I wanted you so badly!”—after falling into a momentary sleep, a solitary sleep, deadly removed from her presence beside him: he never moved once as she strained to extricate herself from his embraces, so fuck you, you miserable impotent, I’ll get up, get dressed, make some coffee, the buses will start running soon, and I’ll get back to the hotel, in the windows of the studio the blue tint of dawn grew inescapably paler, more watery, contours of angular piles of canvases stacked up against the walls emerged from the quivering protoplasmic twilight, a terrible hour, hour of the ill and the forty-year-olds, it is probably in this kind of gray murkiness that dead souls are tormented—that’s when he woke up and hurt her, hurt her for real, forget the pain of losing your virginity, painful intercourse, that’s how the phenomenon is defined in the medical literature which she, the browbeaten Soviet dolt, began studying only in America, she even went to see the doctor, swallowing utter humiliation, to find out whether there wasn’t something, Dear God, wrong with her sexually, and bugged out her eyes in disbelief when the doctor shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t see any problems”—but back then, as she shrieked wildly and jerked back, kicking out her legs [her battered uterus ached a full twenty-four hours afterward, like bad menstrual cramps]—“You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, you hear me?”—she also felt, over his fierce and victorious cry: “And how about marrying me? And how about having my child? You silly girl, can’t you see I love you?”—his moist, swollen hotness kindling and distending inside her, yes, this moment is everything—and for its sake stay, oh please stay a bit longer, don’t go, deep sighs, he emerges from her with so many years washed away from his face, smoothed with a moist sheen of happiness, her own eyes misted over by involuntary tears of tenderness and in those tears his thin, sharp features, pointed ears and cheekbones of a postwar village urchin [father liberated from a Nazi POW camp and off to the Gulag, mother working the beetfields on the collective farm] standing in the pasture with a stick in his hand, dumbstuck for the first time by the crimson gold swirling over the horizon as far as the eye can see amid smoky-gray clumps of clouds, the world was on fire, ever-changing, all this was in his paintings, oh to free that lad from this taciturn, thin-lipped, carefully groomed and clean-shaven man—“You’ve never given birth? Your lips smell of fresh milk—I’ll give you a child, you hear? A little boy”—that in itself was a completely satisfying work of art in which your personal physical dissatisfaction did not weigh all that heavily—left alone, because he, wrapping himself into a long-flapped robe resembling a trench coat took off right away to wash up: the ritual of an asshole, if you stop to think about it, but even that didn’t particularly jar you then—you purred and stretched, cracking your entwined arms over you head and admitted to yourself with a raspy giggle—well, you’ve finally been properly fucked, girlfriend, uncensored version—properly fucked for the first time in your life, because until now it was more like a service, aimed to please, fussed over you like over warm dough, asked what kind of words you liked to hear in bed, but here someone just took you and screwed the living daylights out of you like a thug, no dither—and strangely, this thought, too, was not unpleasant, and when you pulled your compact out of your purse frightened of what you’d see in there—after three nights of no sleep, countless cigarettes and midnight cognacs, very successful arts festival!—you found yourself flushed with pleasant surprise: a clear, suddenly youthful and doing justice to your authentic beauty, delicate, thin, almost childish face peered out at you, dark eyes darting out ahead, a face you always knew was in there somewhere but hadn’t seen in the mirror in God knows how long: you had come home, you were home—and he sat at the foot of the bed, smoking and watching, his luminously enchanted face, riveted on you, lit up the still dim studio—occasionally he would lean over you gently, concealing a smile, in order to kiss your nipples poking up from under the rolled-back plaid blanket, and to carefully, slowly wrap you up to your neck again, like a peasant tending to his property, and to bring you a cup of coffee, “be careful not to spill any,” and you immediately spilled some as you shook with laughter, “I’ll put this plaid out on display with a sign saying who splattered it,” and unexpectedly his “Why were you crying?”—I won’t tell, I won’t tell you yet, I’ll tell you in time, and once said, I’ll be repeating it almost every minute: in the absence of any other, more potent words—when there’s no cistern large enough to scoop out the bottomless well, one is left to lower and raise the same childish pail over and over—the monotony of repetition, the creak of the crank: I love you. I love you. I love you).

  So there it was, girlfriend—you fell in love. And how you fell in love—you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you—although it should have—but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with all their red lights flashing and screamed “meltdown”—like before the accident at the atomic station—and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of—hell, and death, and sickness,

  And the yellow sea of days, and the gray sea of dreams

  In the reflected colors of the dying sky—

  And I’m still swimming—but you’ve hit bottom

  And it’s frightening for both of us to watch ourselves.

  “In other words, you knew?” he snapped, lighting that wolfish glare in his eye, when she—there was nothing to lose anymore, gathered the courage to read him some of that poetic stream aloud—“you knew this would happen? So why the hell?…” Uh-huhh, my dear, that’s the point…

  N-nope, you weren’t a masochist, you were a fucking normal woman whose body took pleasure in giving joy to others, what can I tell you—you were a cool broad, “sweet baby,” “phenomenal lady,” “stud woman,” mull it over and over again in your head now, this guest-comment (commendation) book—made up of those moments when men don’t lie, maybe you’ll get a drib of balance back into your life: it did happen! after all—but no, it’s not coming back to save you—so what, if it’s true, if you always felt, sometimes with more, sometimes with less dark residue of unfulfillment, how much better you still could be—because there are things in life independent of us, because I am as you are with me—it’s a little different with men, but for women, unfortunately, that’s how it is—and, unfortunately, in all things; and no matter how many bras are burned by American feminists, masturbation—whether with a rubber penis or a living person, because with a living person it’s also no more than masturbation if it’s without love—will give you neither poems nor children. And that’s it, period. “That’s you limit.” How was it that Cambridge poem ended?

  A field that yearns for the harrow,

  And the wet, tearstained ravens—

  And the man, who could not protect—

  But wanted me to protect him.

  Yep, exactly, or bien sûr, if you prefer. Yet another reason why this foreign country is doing you no good—it’s clogging up your brain, your nose, with the lint, down, and powder of foreign words and phrases, clogging all the pores and rudely shoving them into y
our hand even when you’re alone with yourself, and before you realize it, you’re beginning to speak “half this, half that,” in other words, the same thing that happens at home (home? get a grip, woman—where is this place, your home?), fine, okay, I mean in Kyiv, in Ukraine—with the Russian: it seeps in from the outside in tiny droplets, becomes dried and cemented, and you are obligated—to either continuously conduct a cleansing, synchronic translation in your head, which sounds forced and unnatural—or else to role-play, like we all do, using your voice to take the foreign words into quotation marks, place a kind of clownish-ironic stress on them like they were a citation (a good example for students in tomorrow’s class, for instance, would be “So you—what, feel like a ‘victor’ here, that you’ve won?”).

  And you also might say—appearing with a lecture at some American university, or at the “triple-A, double-S” conference, or at the Kennan Institute in Washington, or wherever else the ill wind blows you, an honorarium of a hundred, two hundred bucks max, plus travel costs—and thank you very much, you’re not Yevtushenko or Tatiana Tolstaya to get thousands for each appearance, and who the hell are you anyway, backwater Ukrainian from the Khrushchev communal housing projects that you’ve been trying to break out of your whole damn life to no avail, Cinderella who crosses the ocean to grouse over dinner at Sheffield’s with a pair Nobel prize winners (radiating in all directions, juggling four languages at once across the table) about the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary civilization, after which you return to your six-square-meter Kyiv kitchen to fight with your mother and be humiliated by having to explain to various editors that “my homeland will be where I am” does not at all mean ubi bene, ibi patria—not least because with this fucking patria it will never and nowhere be bene for you, neither at Sheffield’s, nor at Tiffany’s, nor in Hawaii, nor Florida—because your homeland is not simply the land of your birth, a true homeland is the country that can kill you—even at a distance, the same way a mother slowly but inexorably kills an adult child by holding it near, shackling its every move and thought with her burdensome presence—ah, to make a long story short, the topic of my lecture today, ladies and gentlemen, is, as noted in the program, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” and before I begin I would like to thank all of you, present here and absent, for the completely unjustified attention you have given my country and my humble persona—because if there’s one thing that we haven’t been spoiled by yet it’s attention: to put it bluntly, we’ve been lying there dying, unnoticed by bloody anybody (and I’m still in a rather privileged position here, because if I were to really have the guts to say fuck it and pour the rest of those tablets in the orange bottle down my throat, my body would be found relatively soon, I’d say, probably within three days: Chris, the departmental secretary, will call if I don’t show up for class, therefore, it would be a crime to complain, the spider web–thin thread, slight as it is, still hangs there and I could pull on it to let the world know about my next, this time my final, departure, I do have it—and if something were to happen with that man in the Pennsylvania wilderness—although I really doubt that anything should happen to him, he’d never do it himself, too much rage for this kind of business—then he’s got Mark and Rosie checking in on him daily)—so, ladies and gentlemen, please do not be in a hurry to qualify the presented case of love here as pathological, because the speaker has not yet stated what is most important—the main point, ladies and gentlemen, lies in the fact that in the research subject’s life this was her first Ukrainian man. Honestly—the first.

  The first one ready-made—whom she did not have to teach Ukrainian, to drag book after book from her personal library out on dates with him just to broaden the common internal space on which to build a relationship (Lypynsky, Hrushevsky, and he hadn’t heard of Horska either, nor Svitlychny, his idea of the 1960s dissident movement was completely different, good, I’ll bring it for you tomorrow!), or if in bed after lovemaking you inadvertently quote “nor dreams’ abode—the sacred home,” you have to immediately launch into a half-hour commentary on the life and works of the author—oh, there was this writer in Western Ukraine in the 1930s—and that’s the way it was your whole damned life!—professional Ukrainianizer, like growing a whole new organ for each of them, and if some day our independent, or rather not-yet-dead country, if it doesn’t die by then, should institute some special award—for the highest number of Ukrainianized bed spaces, you’d surely sock it to them with your grand list of conversions!—but this was the first man from your world, the first with whom you could exchange not merely words, but simultaneously the entire boundlessness of shimmering secret treasure troves, reflections from inside the deepest wells that are revealed by those words, and therefore it was as easy to talk as to breathe and to dream, and that’s why the conversation was drunk eagerly with parched, dry lips, the intoxication ever more dizzying, ah, this never-before experienced total freedom to be yourself, this four-hands piano playing, at last, across the entire keyboard, inspiration and improvisation, so many sparks, laughter, and energy suddenly released, when each note—ironic hint, nuance, wit, touch—resonates at once, picked up by your interlocutor, somersaults in the air for no reason other than excess of strength, a casual touch of the knee—a little closer: may I? and now a little more ambiguous, more risky, and now—up close and personal, and finally, turning off the car engine (because you did end up getting into that stupid car of his after all—after visiting his studio, after you saw with your own eyes who he was)—an abrupt switch to a different language: lips, tongue, hands—and you, leaning back with a moan, “Let’s go to your place…To the studio…”—a language that drastically shortened your path toward one another, you recognized him: he’s one of yours, yours—in everything, a beast of the same species!—and in that language there was everything, everything of which there would later be nothing between you in bed.

  “Gosh, if only he weren’t such a damned good painter!” you were saying, sitting in a bar called Christopher’s in Porter Square, you had drunk two glasses of cabernet sauvignon on an empty stomach and it relaxed you a little—for the first time in all those Cambridge months, giving you a lightheaded audacious uplift, “bottle of wine, fruit of the vine…” ah, too bad nobody to break into song with—Lisa and Dave sat listening like children being told a Christmas story, forgetting all about crunching their chips, “Slavic charm,” that’s what they would call it—you used to like that bar, the dull bottle-green of the décor that would bring card tables to mind, and also the low-hanging lights that drew faces into the shadows, and the men crowding the bar watching the baseball game, and the din of voices, the night outside the distant windows, its thick, brown murkiness melting the candy-yellow street lamps—everything at once, because only thus can you enter an alien world: accepting everything at once, with all your senses, and you know how to do that, you had simply grown tired, after all these years of homeless wandering, of loving the world all alone—of passing, anonymous and unrecognized, through all the dusky airport terminals, the restaurants and bars with their warm lights, the seashores with their shuffle of incoming waves against the rough sand, the early-morning hotels with coffee in the lobby—“Where are you from?”—“Ukraine.”—“Where’s that?”—you had grown tired of not being in this world, tired of dragging home in your teeth the bundles of beauty that you had thirstily sucked in from it and shouting happily: “Hey, come see!”—but at home, in your poor beaten-down country, a country of government officials with sagging pants and generous sprinkles of dandruff on their jackets, greasy writers adept at reading in one language only and not partaking of that ability all too often, and shifty-eyed, cockroach-like businessmen with the habits of former Komsomol organizers—none of this seemed to fit in anywhere, it just hung there aimlessly and was only capable of irritating up to inducing an attack of bile with its foggy, coded inaccessibilty of unfamiliar names and customs, its fat, homegrown, self-taught dilettantes (and for some reason inevitably on short, bowed legs, l
ike jockeys: a special breed or something?) pickled somewhere in a provincial public library bearing a forsaken commissar’s name, and here you had the gall (or perhaps dumb blind luck, they thought?) to hang out at Harvard’s Widener Library or wherever else—you had grown tired of the inability to share your love for the world and in that man—as soon as you stepped into his studio and stood (donning your thick glasses) before the canvas upon canvas facing you, propped up against the walls gathering dust, you knew at once that you had found your only, one-hundred-percent-assured chance not to be alone in that love—precisely because he was “such a damned good painter”—but this much it was hopeless to explain to Lisa and Dave, and you didn’t even try, Lisa was smiling, moved, with her unrealistically bright mouth looking like an aroused coral mollusk, her eyes shining mistily: “What a story!” Oh, yes, a terribly romantic love story—with fires and car accidents (because one night he went out and crashed that celebrated car of his, totaled it, as he told her), with the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist and the departure of the heroine across the ocean, with piles of poems and paintings, and mainly—with this persistent irrational omnipresent feeling that ultimately seduced you: the feeling that everything is possible: the man played without rules, or rather, he played by his own rules like a true Kantian genius, and in his magnetic field any kind of logical prediction of events was doomed to failure, thus he was his own “land of opportunities,” and whatever there lay hidden for the future among those “opportunities”—death in the next of a series of auto accidents (no, God, only not that!) or a triumphal march through the museums of the world—it didn’t matter, who the hell cares, as long as we can break out, tear ourselves away from the beaten track—from that eternal Ukrainian curse of nonexistence.