It was all—iniquity and dirt:
The washing of underground ores
From ancient resistant poisons,
After which there remained—a corpse.
Washed and without a scent,
Both arms thrown back,
Like the limb bones of wings,
He lay there, silent, and smoked.
I, too, remained awkwardly still,
As into me entered—hell
—that’s what she writes now, what good-for-nothing shit—the function of a sick organism, no more, but then—then, through her insomnious stupor she could see the bluish, starchy, light snow sparkle finely, frost glittered on the windowpanes; it was quiet, a great, almost universal silence, only leaves caught up in the fresh snow would rustle from time to time underfoot, there were streaks of pale sunlight across the hardwood floor when she walked into the hall where he crouched before the hearth setting the fire, edging the prepared logs to the center, he spoke up without turning his head: “Can you hear that?”—a capricious, splashing sound carried down from the attic—“the pipes have burst, we’ll have to call for a plumber”—she gently passed her hand over the back of his head, from the shoulders up, against the grain as if expecting to set off some sparks, what is she to do with this unease inside her, “what am I to do with you?” when suddenly—she barely had time to step out of the way—Lesyk flew into the room, coat askew, the film zoomed in for a close-up—the lens twirled like a ballerina: hysterically jubilant horror in his eyes, the mouth gashed in a scream: “Everybody get out! Fire!”—who’s on fire, what’s on fire, but they were already outside standing dumbly, heads upturned: the whole mansard rumbled, cloaked in a thick smoke underlit by a yellowish glow, it was blustering up to the sky, and it was already guffawing boisterously, something inside was building into a roar of laughter, extending itself to full height, its head crashing through the roof out to freedom, ho-ho-ho, at last!—and again she for a split second was surprised that she felt no fear, detached, as though none of this was happening to her—a young woman was awkwardly running over from the neighbors’, for some reason wrapping a black kerchief around her head as she ran, someone ran off to make a phone call, faces and figures leaped about in the corner of her eye, commotion picked up all around, and yet all she saw was his strange, somehow otherworldly calm, his profile raised up to the low silvery sky, hands in pockets, she remembered the lines from a letter she received from him recently: “I’m getting used to my present condition, but I need medicine. I’ll accept hospital, prison, lobotomy”—something was not right, and when after several hours, after the fire was put out, after all the screaming was finished, when the fire trucks were done with flashing their blue emergency lights over the snow but the police investigator had not yet arrived, and the group of friends, still in the throes of excited laughter, coughing, blowing of noses—the first shock was over, they had to unwind, didn’t they—began polishing off the rescued bottle of cognac, the one that was to go with the shish kebabs, in the annex, which seemed all the more cozy after all that had transpired—they almost felt like family, well, folks, that was really something, wasn’t it, pour me a little more, who wants some lemon, ah, heaven, that hit the spot, somebody get me a cigarette—and he suddenly went rummaging through the bag and pulled out a bunch of fireworks: bought them at the market that morning, he confessed, wanted to put on a little show—an explosion of nervous laughter shook the annex, even the panes rattled: well, well, well, you certainly did that—how did you pull it off? just don’t think of showing those to the inspector, you hear?—he folded his wrinkles into a smile and turned to her, raising baggy eyelids with a quick dagger flash: “Maybe now you’ll have something to remember me by”—earlier that morning, before the fire, she told him she was leaving for the States. The investigation found nothing, absolutely nothing—the fire had burst into the building out of nowhere, who? what let it in?—it burst in and proceeded to chase her for the next nine months, even all over the American expanses, in the kitchen, especially when she would come out to smoke late at night, she would pick up a distinct sulfuric scent every once in a while—was that gas leaking? skillets, with a cobra’s hiss, would spit boiling oil at her legs, the burns healed slowly, and after he arrived they simply opened up like stigmata, God forgive me—he personally sealed up the blisters on her calves with a thin coat of ground eggshells: “Sit still for a while until it dries”—and she did sit still in front of the television set, humbly laying out on the “coffee table” her unevenly seared raw sausages, now completely devoid of any erotic charm—and finally, the last night before they were to, thank God, move out of that apartment which had been transformed during the time of their habitation into a furious box of thickly condensed, almost visible dark-brown cloud of torpor—where they were going it wasn’t clear, into a motel for now, as long as there’s some kind of a change—that time, as if to say good-bye, the fire returned in its original form: she was alone preparing dinner in the kitchen with the usual squeeze of anxiety growing into nausea as she waited for his return from the studio, scrubbing something with her back to the stove, and suddenly she turned around as if someone pushed her—the electric burner under her skillet was ablaze, fire almost up to the ceiling, and that same malicious laughter was coming alive within it, but this time she was facing it alone: the “fire alarm” was silent for some reason, like it was paralyzed, but she thought about that only later, in the first moments she automatically, without opening up her clenched fists—in the left one she later discovered some clutched onion peels—set to beating down the fire with the towel she had grabbed from somewhere—the hungry fire bounced with joy as though that’s what it had been waiting for, the smoldering towel in her hand seemed to be melting like molten metal, curling swiftly, embers flickering along its blackened edges, until she remembered to start throwing water—one quart, another, a third—and it hissed, spreading in all directions with an acrid stench, she stood in the middle of the kitchen with the charred rag in her lowered hands: no, God, I can’t take this, I can’t take this anymore!—and so her prophetic dream came true—an old dream from a year ago, visited upon her long before they met: a sapling at the crossroads, trembling and rustling, someone invisible is setting a bonfire below, the strike of a match, and oh—in a flash!—the sapling is consumed by fire which goes out as soon as it starts, as if it only meant to strip its crown of leaves, and so in the place where a moment earlier the sapling glittered with shades of light green against the blue sky there now protrudes a bitter, blackened skeleton. On the occasion of which, girlfriend, allow me to congratulate you.
A budding tree in a naked row—
Why in such hurry, you foolish thing?
The soaked earth, rusty and lifeless
Still awaits its suede medley of green,
The spring wind still hides like a mouse
Under branches lined upright like brooms—
And you’re out here sighing, and you’re out here trembling,
Sticky little leaves fluttering in the light!
Stretching up on your toes, poor child,
With all of your sap and nerves—
One can almost hear the languid crackle
Of your joints, still stiff from the winter…
—first came this poem, also unfinished—and couldn’t you finish it, see it through to the end—was it that hard?—then the dream, then—everything that came after. So knock yourself out now, dig deep, layer after layer, you pitiful, pitiful archeologine—just don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself, because nothing weakens you like self-pity). Who can tell us—poems, do they only predict or do they, God help us, construct our future for us—summoning from the teeming multitude of possibilities within it that one, which they name? And if this is really so—if we, blind maniacs, program our own lives in advance, pleased as punch at how cleverly we’ve written it all down!—and thus make our l
ives what they are, then this is a truly frightening gift, Lord, like a bomb in the hands of a five-year-old—and how does one pray to be released?
Who (what) writes through us?
Lord, I’m scared. I’ve never truly been scared before—not of external threats (those are nothing, there’s always a way out), I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid to trust my own gift. I no longer believe that it is—in Your hand.
Look down upon me. Please.
In the evenings she escapes to the library—mainly so that she doesn’t stay alone in the house, where despair waits for her in the gathering twilight in order to throw a black sack over her head—but the library can’t save her: none of those more or less well-written other lives, bound in folios with worn spines, that stretch on and on, row after row, from floor to ceiling on multi-storied shelving while she accrues mileage walking up and down in search of the volume that she’s decided she must read—like in the universal cemetery (gray sky, a limitless field out to the horizon of identical gray headstones, and even though you know that behind each there is a person hiding ready to hop out the minute you call him, donning a perfectly living and full-bodied shape, the mere astronomical quantity obliterates any sense in choosing one of them: how many of them, after all, will you be able to resurrect during the course of your life, and how many of these resurrected and read entities have meant anything for you? The most you can do—and that is the maximum!—is to join their monotonous ranks with yet another not particularly noteworthy slim volume, and the “date due” slips glued on the inside covers indifferently demonstrate the absurdity of this whole enterprise: according to them, in twenty years you turn out to be the fifth person at Harvard to borrow Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing—a novel that is mentioned in all literary handbooks and truly deserves it—and the second to fancy the Polish edition of Milosz’s work—whereas most of those recounted lives simply gather dust, like uncollected letters in the numbered pigeon holes of the “general delivery” window at the post office)—not one of those lives has any relevance to hers, not one answers the question that she cannot seem to avoid no matter which way she looks at it, no matter which direction her pathetic hopes turn in search of an excuse: why not now? immediately? why wait?
Beautiful children, we were to have beautiful children, an elite breed. Better not to recall that, right? Well, no, it doesn’t seem to even hurt anymore: you remember—but with your thoughts, not your feelings (hard to say which is worse!). What’s true is true, in slavery the nation degenerates—the crowds that fill Kyiv buses, all those stooped men with drawn, rumpled faces on bowed legs, the women buried under walrus-like gyration of raw-meat dough, young guys with retarded laughter and wolfish bite that bust in without regard to who’s ahead of them (if you don’t step aside—they’ll knock you off your feet and not look back), and the babes with the crudely painted masks over their skin (remove the makeup—and all you’ll find is a naked eggshell surface like in a De Chirico painting) and a persistent aura of some kind of clammy underbathedness—they’re like objects made without love, any which way just to get it over with: had to meet the quota at the end of the quarter, or needed to produce a child to get on the housing list, or simply fucked somewhere in the alleyway or, after some heavy boozing, in a train corridor (she actually rode one of those trains once, from Kyiv to Warsaw, going to a poetry festival—just imagine!—a fierce horde of contrabandists heaving bags, a third-class sleeper car, six open berths per compartment, baggage piled up to the ceiling—commodities, that’s how they called them, by their scientific name in reverence to our own Karly Marx—the stench of the toilet, the door from the sleeper car to the front corridor clung to one hinge, swinging open occasionally to the clatter beyond with a slow, slow creak, like the pain of grinding teeth, the accustomed yet still disgusted expression of the clean-shaven puppy mug of the Polish customs officer who collects—a bottle of vodka from each occupant of the przedział, and that’s not bad at all, the matrons who have just shed a few years from joy rush to assure her as they smooth out their outer garments—phew! we got through!—and pull, from their seemingly bottomless sweatpants, two more miraculously spared bottles of hooch, each of which will go for ten bucks in Chełm: you should see what happened to us at the Yahodyn crossing once, where they told us—we’ll take a woman for every bus, say yes and we’ve got a deal!—A-and what, did you do it?—Well, what else could we do?—at night she lay in the top berth listening to the cacophony of unevenly pitched snoring, painfully in love with her misfortunate people, and the people—they heard her and responded: a massive body loomed in the hushed darkness, a waft of heavy, aroused breathing against her face: “Mommy…baby…Cum’ere, you hear me? Hey, you hear me?”—getting more and more heated as he went—“Wat’s wrong? Let’s go pokey-pokey, huh?” an arm plunged under the blanket—“how about I play wit’ your boobies, eh?”—she shot up, hollering in a well-rehearsed bass: “Back off, sir, please!”—the bitches on the neighboring berths played dead with fear—fear for their commodities, perhaps?—only a tiny granny by the doorway spoke up in a trembling voice: “Leave the girl alone, why are you bothering her?” “Mammashaa!”—he turned and growled—“Mind your own bizness!”—he did heave himself back, though, the mood had been spoiled: he had released some of his dangerously-building aggression, and that’s when she started hollering loud enough to wake the whole train car; and he also, no longer lowering his tone or backing down, roared: “Dontcha worry, cunt, I’ll find’ya and get’ya! I’ll get’ya so bad, it’ll be tits up for you in Chełm, you hear me?”—there was a stopover in Chełm and she ran, her coat under her arm, through all the train cars to the very back, the train conductor, a cachectic young woman with a blanched complexion shook her head with that old-lady Mother-dolorosa look—the things that go on in trains these days, God help us—and let her out the emergency exit—there was no step stool, she had to jump, first throwing down her bags—into the stinging moisture of the early-morning fog, straight into the gravel between the rails, drawing blood as she scraped her palm against it—and straight into the hands of furious Polish cop who’d been racing alongside the train like a greyhound—there’s no exit here, ma’am, show me your documents—she practically threw herself on his chest, hugging him like a brother). Only much later, in fuzzy erotic fantasies (when she was getting divorced from her husband her hungry, lively, corporal imagination was released first—that’s when that slippery-slope slide began—whereas her childlike, or rather, maidenly, barely twenty-year-old, staring-out-into-the-world-with-curiosity readiness for new love switched on only later, finalizing the separation)—returning in her mind back to that night in the third-class sleeper and picking it apart, she tried to play that unrecorded clip: how might have things played out, how and what is it that those people do—out in the passageway between train cars, wheels clanging, back pressed to the railing, groaning, convulsing together with it? or maybe in the bathroom, astride the toilet seat with ankle-deep runny mud smeared all around?—what do they feel at that moment, what do their women feel—the sensual luxury of humiliation, the perverse thrill of momentary descent to the animal kingdom, or, perhaps, and this is far worse, they feel nothing at all? but maybe, hell knows, maybe this really is healthy sexuality in its purest form, no complexes, no paralysis caused by civilization and all its twisted perversions—only, damn it, why do they end up having such ugly children, dwarfed, with faces of tiny adults, expressions set, after about age three of four, like cooled plastic in molds of obtuseness and spite? Once, and not all that long ago, maybe only three or four generations, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to assure you that we were different, and the evidence can be clearly shown on the screen—if we can find a screen and projector somewhere in the auditorium—at least a few images—yellowed, pale photographs of those times showing peasant families frozen in unnatural, stiff poses before the camera: father and mother at the center with hands folded in their laps like schoolchildren, no evidence
of birth control whatsoever, and above them towers a whole forest of personages—lads like oaks, one sturdier than the next, a feast for the eyes, uniform gazes sternly aimed at the lens from under their heavy brows, their thick locks of hair painstakingly slicked back, their ox-like necks bursting out of the tightly buttoned collars of their dress shirts; the youngest, who seems to be burning a hole in the photo with his fiery glance, is, of course, still in his high-school uniform and cap, this would have cost a calf every year: but God willing, he’ll get an education, be somebody, because he was such a smart, quick little thing even as a tot—later they perished in all the national battles: Kruty, Brody, and wherever else, those who were to make up our elite—the girls usually posed in national dress: the jangling—you can hear it by just looking at it—heaviness of earrings, coral necklaces, braids and ribbons cast over shoulders, the shimmer of densely embroidered upper sleeves, the rough cut of their skirts and vests does not conceal the luxuriant healthy bodies, ready to give birth; I, however, would like to draw particular attention to the faces, ladies and gentlemen, these beautiful, expressive faces which must have drawn a fair deal of input not only from God’s carvers but also from the many years of lives spent in toil, lives which—if only you don’t insist on constantly ravaging them in search of their sense and meaning, as we fools so often do, and accept them as they are given, like good and bad weather—gradually smooth away from your face all the secondary layers, baring the lean purity of the original—could it be God’s?—sculpture: everything superfluous is tucked in, cleaned up, the foreheads fill out, jaws become more determined, and—the eyes, eyes, eyes shine ever-deeper, the black earth has risen, as the poet wrote, and its glance from time’s distance—is frightful and scrutinizing—what happened to all of them afterward, did they all really die out in the 1933 Famine? Did they perish in the camps, in the NKVD holding cells, or did they simply work themselves to extinction on the collective farms? Good God, we used to be a good-looking people, ladies and gentlemen, open faces, strong, of good stature, self-willed, and firmly rooted in the ground from which many have tried long and hard to rip us out with the flesh until they finally succeeded, and we have flown off, scattered over all the expanses liked plucked feathers from the guts of pillows ripped apart by bayonets, pillows lovingly harbored in hope chests in days of old—for we were always waiting for our big wedding, embroidering songs for ourselves, cross-stitched, word after word, and so throughout our entire little history—well here we are, embroidered. Slavery degenerates a nation, I tell you this yet again, I’m gnawing on this thought until it has no more taste, just so that it would stop gnawing me, like bad weather, like monthly pain in an empty womb—survival, as soon as it takes the place of living, turns into degeneration, that’s right, my Jewish brothers, my dear Ashkenazi, in case any of you happen to be tucked away in this audience by chance—this glass is raised to you, too: you can cast your contemptuous guffaws at the Sabras—dullards, so to speak, hicks, or whatever you call them there—but I will never forget the envious, up-and-down gape of a Kyiv colleague who first saw them, he himself was a small-built, lively demisang with narrow, feminine, raised and tucked-in little shoulders which imperceptibly gave his side view the profile of a hunchback—we traipsed all over Jerusalem together, passing by the hundred-and-umpteenth patrol unit, and the poor guy—couldn’t help himself, gave in: sixty years old, still from Brezhnev’s time, a professor, and a boy who greedily glues himself to a hole in the fence to watch the military parade, a tiny hunched pillar, and as the patrol unit marched off a secret whisper called out something buried even deeper than all the Soviet demisang complexes: “God, they’re gorgeous!”—and those soldiers truly were a sight, like they were deliberately selected—mythological Titans accidentally dressed in camouflage uniforms with automatic rifles over their shoulders, broad mountain-plateau shoulders, movable tree-trunk thighs, strong, bluish teeth glowing against olive tans, as though earth itself came to life and stood up to stride, ah what men, a joy to look at!—in Eastern Europe go try to find yourself such luxurious Semitic giants—it was as if there, among dry hills burnt to ochre, Biblical history proceeds uninterrupted; at any rate these men—in uniform and hoisting automatic rifles who combed the Arab and Christian quarters, moving in the sunlight with the lazy grace of sated predators—could have been the descendants of Abraham and Jacob, whereas my professor—if only because with those little shoulders, pulled in either from cold sensitivity or merely apologetically (cover up, hide, clear your throat obsequiously, and blend with the furniture), he subverted the veracity of the Old Testament: you can’t wrestle angels with shoulders like that, you can’t do much of anything at all except run the tightrope, which is what he did his whole life, as did millions of Ashkenazi, sinking deeper and deeper into their chest cavities with every generation, and then the tightrope snapped, like in that ditty, and everything came crashing down, oh my God, did it ever! Nonetheless, they do still have those hills, burnt to a yellow ochre, where history goes on, but where is our Jerusalem, can somebody please tell me, and where do we look for it?
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex Page 8