Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Listen,” she was saying toward the end, timidly extending her voice toward him, like her hand under the covers during those oppressive silences at night when he lay beside her wide-awake, hoping she wouldn’t notice—“maybe you just simply never loved me?” Because then everything really would be simpler: easier. But he would turn his face, cracked with a bitter smile, toward her—my God, what painful, unrelenting thirst this profile used to induce in her: like staring through a thick glass pane at a glass of ice water coated with condensation after not having a drop to drink all day; and now that glass pane was all that remained—he looked at her with the eyes of a sick animal: “You’re starting that again?” Forgive me. I know you loved me—you loved me as best you knew: inside yourself, not outside yourself, I got the crumbs under the table, just like that little mouse—just a glance radiant with excitement, which sometimes broke out into a brief, reserved hug, an almost shy, crudely boyish poking somewhere at the side of the neck: “You’re a cool chick!” and still yet eruptions of unfeigned joy at the sight of me, even when I’d pop in off the street and catch him at his canvas, and this was the same as throwing a bucket of cold water at a person fast asleep: he’d jump up wildly from the canvas like a startled colt, with a neigh of terror, instantly winding himself into a defensive pose, fist ready to plow you in the mouth—and a second later—ah, it’s you!—his twisted face would change, shine, becoming the way it was that night, and also the way it would be when he removed my Post-it notes from his still unshattered windshield, because I bestowed them feverishly, with the speed of chattering teeth, I scattered them everywhere, eagerly polluting his entire space, little yellow butterfly squares, long fluttering handwriting like loose hair in the wind: hold on to me, hold on to me tighter, don’t let me fly up to the sky!—and he did hold on, and he did carry around in the pockets of his winter jacket packages of notes resembling autumn leaves, some of which, the more important ones, he would paste into my books (my first autograph was from my first visit to his studio: I signed as though already predicting the inevitable collision of two avalanches: “sincerely conquered”—and right after came the first poems “from him,” because my poems—I repeat, in case anyone failed to note it down the first time—were always from someone, even if that someone hadn’t the faintest idea about it:

  More than a brother, you’re homeland and home.

  (Hungry arms, hungry lips.)

  Neither of us died young

  Only to meet today:

  “You know,” she blathered so very naively one night—“I think we shouldn’t get married after all!”—“Why?”—he froze in the middle of the kitchen as though struck by an electric current, the Turkish coffee pot he was carrying toward the stove still in his hand: my poor darling boy, scared to death! “Let’s be blood brothers instead”—she reveled with her whole heart at his fright while he noisily exhaled: it was a joke, of course, it was a joke!—by the way, we became brother and sister long ago, long before we met, because it was in search of you, my love, clearly in search of you that these incomprehensibly opaque lines of poetry rushed out of me, barely catching their breath, through all the years of my chaotic youth—I never allowed them to be published!—lines in which a “sorcerer-brother” peeked out here and there unexpectedly, lifted to the surface by some submerged force, a brother I’d never had: what I did have were friends, lovers galore, a wonderfully high-bouncing trampoline [albeit with holes all over the place] of social excitement: cool chick, you bet!—I had a husband, who taught me to accept and respect real love—my gratitude most profound, no joking!—the kind of love that grows with years and becomes the equal of life—but underneath all that churned a deep, persistent reverberation in the blood, threatening to materialize:

  My sorcerer-brother

  Where art thou now?

  They will judge us without compassion

  “Such are the times”:

  Not the ones in black cassocks

  Not the headsman with reddish blade—

  But the ones who come after us

  Once the smoke clears.

  Blades of grass will poke up

  Through our dead, gaping mouths,

  In my dead, charred bones

  Demons will play sitting ’round,

  And the place of my execution

  They’ll enclose with a sheer steep fence.

  What kind of posthumous judgment

  Awaits us, my brother, then?

  Interesting question, no? There you have it. “More than a brother,” turns out to be that same “sorcerer-brother”: should have recognized him straight away, but why beat about the bush, I did recognize him—the minute I saw that series of witches’ drawings: green-faced, should have been moonlit, but actually in the middle of the day, because the background is ochre, because the background is gold, a ritual song in a circle, but actually a wild dance, a “rite of spring,” spreading smoothly from canvas to canvas—women with flowing hair in full-length white linen robes, arms waving, the dry crackle of hair [my own hair would also give off sparks when I brushed it hard!]—what are they doing, plowing a circle around the village to avert the plague? No, something darker, riskier, the goal is unclear—menstrual blood gurgles, trickling into the large bowl, a cock violently flapping its wings, no, that far I myself have never ventured: perhaps walked up close to it, but always backed away quickly, fearing insanity because there’d be an occasional howl or owl’s cry in the dark, but this guy was digging the same grounds as I was, and the only one I’d ever known to do it, ah, shit—I sucked the saliva back through my teeth with excitement!—better than me: deeper, more powerfully, and damn, just plain fearlessly: full steam ahead, lungs full to capacity in rhythmic breathing—canvas after canvas, systole-diastole—he simply floated along in the stream that I could access only occasionally—only as a breakthrough, grabbing and carrying off a single poem in my teeth, my God, how truly wonderful it is to see someone stronger than you!—“So, Mykola, so what does all of this mean?” whined an “art expert” who, like yourself, had come up here from Kyiv, moistly sliding over her badly pronounced Ukrainian sibilants, though not slipping into Russian “out of respect for the guest of honor” and occasionally pulling strands of hair back behind her ear with trained, truly beautiful fingers—not a single art event could get by without these piranhas especially when horny bohemian artists were involved, or so you muttered to yourself, all irritated, because you were already drawn in, because you already desired his undivided attention, but then you couldn’t run up to him squealing like this little fool—“Is this some kind of folk uhm…ritual? A supersition?” He gave a reserved nod—and thus seemed to be entering a secret pact with you; “What kind of ritual?”—“You can’t talk about it,” he replied solemnly: yes, brother, precisely, you can’t, it’s our secret, yours and mine—a seal on our lips like a dry kiss: turn the lock, hide the key, silence).

  “You see”—in one of their first weeks of living together—new country, new continent, now everything was sure to be different, turning over a new leaf, yeah right—he was showing her perhaps the first of his new sketches, one not from the “reserve,” an ink drawing—“take a look, baby, this—is love.” Love looked like this: “baby,” a rather abstract naked woman, was lying in bed (“You slut, dumping your tits out for all to see!”—but that came later…) and playing a violin (“What’s this”—she exhaled a sardonic laugh: sex was painful again last night, not that he noticed—“a metaphor for masturbation?”—“Could be”—a carefree nod of agreement, her reproach passing over his head: far too focused on the sketch to notice—“it’s from a Polish ditty I once heard and happened to remember”); the woman’s bottom half was modestly hidden by a sprawled-out, richly textured cat. Well, no mystery there, he was the cat. (“Aha!—now you’re caught!”—his eyes glistened almost gleefully when he heard that according to the Chinese horoscope she was a Mouse:—“
Because I’m—the Cat!”—Hmm, she didn’t particularly get along with cats, and in general she preferred dogs, never missing a chance to pat even the mangy stray on the head, but at that moment—at that moment she was overcome by a strange, paralyzing ache of the already-present danger, it was both sad and sweet: yes, she was caught, and there was no getting away, game over—it’s just that as she looked at the sketch she thought, with an internal shudder: what if that cat were to arch his back and sink his claws in there?…); at the foot of the bed stood a leafy potted plant of some sort, and on top sat a bird with a wedding band in its beak (“Hey, when I get there—we’ll get hitched!”—he had hollered happily and offensively into the phone when she was finally able to get through to him—after that awful Cambridge winter, when her love slowly froze out of her, freezing into those impenetrable snowbanks, flowing out of her like bodily fluid from a skillfully punctured torso until it gathered in only one fiery point: just let him be alive!—and when she managed to find, finally, through networks of common acquaintances, some kind of phone number, and heard that familiar voice, which cooed in shameless satisfaction: “So delighted to hear from you, my lady”—she exploded like a Fury, barely containing every expletive she could think of—and he, as it turned out, had had yet another accident, right before she left, fell down the stairs at night and landed on a pile of rubble, broke his ribs, is still walking around in a brace, oh no!—she covered her mouth with her palms remembering in a flash a physiologically revolting dream she had had: like she was holding a sculptured bust of him in her hands, so frightening in the way it moved its lips, what the hell was that about, really! Okay, okay, I’ll make it up to you, fella, you’ll get a trip to America, a stipend, an exhibit in New York, wine-women-song, you’ll have it all—only that “get hitched” lashed her like a rough screech, a solo part on a handsaw in the middle of an opera overture: wrong, wrong—the words all wrong!). Violin, cat, potted plant, bird, wedding band—“they’re in love,” and the sketch did emit, it seemed to her, some kind of feeble warmth (in its final form, on canvas, painted after the breakup, this warmth had dissipated completely—the woman in bed ended up in the middle of a bilious-yellow desert, and after the painting spent the night in the basement belonging to poor Mark, totally discombobulated from dealing with psychotic Ukrainian geniuses, they found on it a dead spider—the best thing to do would have been to attach it to the painting permanently, somewhere between the kitty and the birdie, it was the only thing missing!). Several weeks later, however, a new sketch appeared—same woman, facing in the diametrically opposite direction, stretched out on a gigantic bone that had been gnawed white: “That was her last man,” he commented balefully—“she ate him.” The background came out black, the bone glimmered against it with a sickly phosphoric paleness, and the woman’s hair—standing on end as if raised by an invisible vacuum cleaner—was a fire-engine red. A diptych of sorts. A history of a love affair, if you will. “This our love affair,” she once blurted casually, still back home; and he, without shifting his eyes steadfastly fixed on something straight ahead, shook his head firmly: “This is not a love affair. This is something else.”

  Ladies and gentlemen, I can see the bored expressions that have settled onto your faces; in your minds you’ve already established the diagnosis: “severe psychological problems” on both sides—a nationalist-masochist (although this particular disease you’re probably unfamiliar with…) and an autistic maniac (this one is simpler because in addition to purely communication issues, that inability to connect or whatever you call it, one might mention a few milder though clinically more significant symptoms—for example, the impossibility of keeping a phone number in his head long enough to write it down, and the especially characteristic, strangely awkward calligraphy—unexpectedly skipped letters, or a sudden capital in the middle of a sentence, or those illiterate “J” or “Э” that somehow wandered in from foreign alphabets, supposedly in order to make the written line more balanced graphically—bad things, troubling, and then if you were to recall those suspicious migraines of his that he boasted of fainting from occasionally, the case begins to look very serious)—no denying it, that nice, handy word problems; it can mean a math question, and breast cancer, and loss of love, and in every case there is always someone who can help: a professor, a doctor, a psychoanalyst—assuming, of course, that you have something to pay them with, and if you don’t, then you’ll just have to try and get it, go digging through all your socks and mattresses, nothing to be done—life is expensive: like Rosie, for example, Mark’s wife, going to see a psychoanalyst for seven years straight, two sessions a week, which poor Mark (an oversized schoolboy), not yet even a full professor, is obviously unable to pay for, therefore every once in a while Rosie, the forty-year-old girl, the mother of a grown child but tiny and thin as a sparrow (tight-assed sparrow with thick werewolf browns meeting on the bridge of her nose), invariably ill either from a chill or too much sun or at the very least from exhaustion (hand on forehead like a collective farm worker, a crumpled wad of Kleenex by her nose), must go looking for a job, and she finds something for a month, or two, or even three—and all so that she could go lie down on that couch twice a week and tell someone who’s willing to listen to her how unhappy she is—after six years of this she and Mark stopped having sex and this is obviously progress: now they’re both gritting their teeth on account of this abstinence, fights break out with a hungry crackle, like a fire on well-dried twigs, at each verbal interaction, and it seems that the number of therapy sessions will have to increase: “problems” are “problems” and society ordains that we solve them with four arithmetic operations: there’s A, there’s B, you can add them, multiply them, divide, or transpose them, and all that in the hope of getting a third quantity, a full-time occupation!—somewhere in the back of the workbook lie the answers in fine print, let’s be patient, someday they may show them to us. Someday each of us will read his or her answer—except that by that time it will be too late to change it.