Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Just as soon as she thought that, Milena found herself on the service stairs: the humongous multistory digestive tract of the TV studio now spewed her out easily, without resistance. And maybe it was for the better, a sleepy thought stirred heavily in her mind (once on the stairs, Milena suddenly felt terribly tired), maybe that’s how things should be, since that other Milena (look, she conceded to recognize her, to call her by her own name for the first time) had gone much further than she would have ever dared on her own, no she would not have (the thought was interrupted by an exhausted yawn, so intense it brought tears to her eyes), while the other Milena stopped at nothing, took up the dirty work. The first Milena felt a relaxing warmth embrace and rock her (Let someone else, caring and strong, do everything for me, and later she can . . .)—the TV Milena is now a true queen, and no longer the perpetual good girl, Like someone else, she reproached in the tender grumbling tone her husband used, and dissolved into a smile, blinking her way out of her insuperable, deathly fatigue: to sleep, to sleep, pressed up against Poppet, his broad barely furred chest, one sleepy hand feeling its ticklish growth and the other cradling his warmly swollen tail, Poppet would put his arm around her, Mm-m, sunshine, my golden Sugar, calm her with the touch of his lips, a last bedtime kiss. I love you, Milena would say to him from the far shore of sleep, and all the others, well, to hell with them and all their games. And their TV shows. And all crazy women.

  And with that, Milena dragged herself home.

  The apartment was dark, only a low, bluish-grey light seeped from the bedroom through the new stained glass door. Milena, startled momentarily by the new door (when had her honey had time?), and by the whole ungraspable, disturbing feeling of unfamiliarity that one’s own home evokes after a long absence (how long had she been gone?), reached for the knob where it had always been, startled again, with the very skin of her hand, when she found it on the other side, groped about, and finally went in.

  And saw.

  That is, she heard.

  That is, simultaneously both saw and heard:

  Milena (from the screen, still wearing crimson and her legs in the same victorious V): Give me more! More! More!

  Husband (on the bed): I’m coming, Milena, hang on, love, hang on . . .

  Milena (from the doorway): No! Get out! What are you doing? You’re mine! He’s mine! (Undecipherable from that point.)

  Milena (from the screen): Well, look at that! Look! Now that’s a turn-on! See? See? And now you do me, come up and do it, use your tongue, girl! Use your tongue, they all do me that way, all those cunts, and they all come from it, right there on the air, it’s the highest-rated show, two million letters each month, more! More! Use your tongue, I said, your tongue, there’s no other use for you anyway, come on! More!

  (Milena moves from the doorway—she comes closer, takes the remote, and turns off the TV.)

  Husband (rabid): What? Who? Who are you?

  Milena: I am Milena. Your wife.

  Husband: Fuck off! (Grabs the remote and turns on the TV.)

  Milena (from the screen, sitting in a chair high up on the studio’s podium): My beloved! My dearest, my sweetest viewers, and above all, my female viewers, my brothers and sisters, I turn to you once again, I, Milena! I am the one who comes into every home to remind you that there is no earthly woe that cannot be conquered by the great force of our coming together! I am with you, my sisters. Anyone who feels lonely and abandoned this evening, cheated and hurt, come to me and I’ll satisfy you! I’ll let you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, my sweet flesh, and even sweeter blood, and your hearts will be filled with great joy, and you will be avenged on those who have hurt you, they will gnash their teeth and gnaw the earth in their impotent rage, for as long as they live they will never know the joy that is yours and mine, sisters! Here she is, my beloved sister who will be in the studio today with me and with you, here she comes now, come, my dove (a church hymn starts playing), come, my precious, my body is waiting for you, loving you, as no-one-has-loved-in-a-thousand-years, oh come!

  But she has no body, the other Milena suddenly thought, and it seemed to her that she had cried out loud, “She has no body, do you hear me? This is all an illusion, a terrible fraud. This really used to be my body, and still is even now, and there is no other nor can there be.” And, as if she were looking for proof for herself, she grabbed a knife, her husband’s beautiful pocketknife, a Swiss Army Knife with a tiny pair of tweezers and a bone toothpick in the handle, which was lying open on the night table, or perhaps she was simply in great pain at that moment, realizing that she, too, had been jilted, the impossible had happened, what seemed unthinkable had come to pass, and she was finally united with the mob of all the countless women toward which she had been heading so unswervingly from the beginning, and she therefore had the instinct to block, outscream this pain with another, louder yet, but lighter, as people who thrust various objects into their bodies often do. The blade grinned blindingly in the teleblaze with its teeth poised sharp and ready above Milena’s bared forearm, and then there was a stream from that arm, a steady drip of something inky dark, the color of a blank TV screen at night, and with a shine like that of a metallic, greyish oily film, which crackled with sparks sputtering out . . .

  From that moment on, it becomes difficult for me to state with certainty what happened to Milena—it’s like she’s been cut off, our connection got interrupted, and the picture warped and began to flicker. I know she disappeared, because there was nothing else for her to do, but in what manner—in what order and sequence—I do not know, and if I don’t know, you can consider it good and lost. Of course, there were no hospitals or morgues, nothing quite so, god forbid, morbid: I see, albeit out of focus, a frame in which Milena walks slowly down an empty street, at night, possibly supporting her left arm, bandaged awkwardly in a scarf or something like that, with her right hand—she is walking away from her extinguished apartment building with that single bluishly lit window and looks at other people’s windows. In each, a TV glows. Milena moves her lips, but we hear no sound. She keeps walking. She turns the corner. And then she vanishes, meaning no one sees her after that. Never.

  And what, I ask you now, am I supposed to do?

  Naturally, with Milena’s disappearance, her famous show lost its luster—it held on for a while, but out of pure momentum, it wasn’t the same without the live wire of her energy—a dead woman’s photo, a deflated ball, self-reference upon self-reference, beating on a dead horse, an utter loss of any credibility not to mention emotional power, so naturally, the viewers also grew distant and their feedback gradually went quiet somewhere in that distance. At the same time, the first voices of steel found their way into the reviews, and those were women’s voices, saying, What is that girl doing, are you all nuts there on TV? The press rolled the piece of candy that was “Milena’s phenomenon” in its mouth for a bit longer, but the candy dissolved as a result, and in one academic institution folks were forced to change one graduate student’s all-but-approved dissertation topic that treated the show from some highfalutin sociopsychological angle, the committee suddenly declaring the topic as unscientific and really unseemly, so the poor student had to write about the viewer reception of the televised broadcasts of the parliament meetings by different demographic groups instead. Right about that time the studio finally canceled the show, quietly, without a fuss, and all I was left to do was haunt the sets without a particular purpose, dwell among the turned-off cameras and the dark spotlights, myself unplugged, colorless and weathered, like Milena the day she came to the studio, and just like her, no one here sees me, except that one time the night guard saw me rise full height during a thunderstorm—he now wears a little copper cross under his uniform. They still remember me, I’m sure, and will not forget me anytime soon, but they will forget—everyone is sooner or later forgotten, my brothers and sisters, I, for one, have already clear forgotten everyone who’d been brought to me, despite the fact that they still say, although usually
with an awkward laugh, that it was an incredible spectacle to behold, the Roman Saturnalia and the feast of Astarte rolled into one! Actually, Milena is the only one I do remember—that’s why I want to make sure I write everything down, the way things happened, stealing time on a studio PC someone left on for the night, while somewhere, in her empty apartment, Milena’s mother is sitting alone in front of the TV, stubbornly expecting her daughter to appear again at the appointed hour, until the screen goes dark, day after day. I guess it is she and her vigil that stand between me and complete oblivion, because Milena’s husband did buy a satellite dish, and cheaper than he expected, and turned himself off a long time ago, not to mention everyone else whose memory is so ephemeral and fragmented, so dot-pixelated, that if I had to survive on that alone, I’d have long ago turned into a sheaf of white sparks, like noise from the transmission signal.

  AN ALBUM FOR GUSTAV

  TRANSLATED BY NINA MURRAY

  He: When people ask me what the hardest part was, back during those days on the Maidan—and it’s usually foreigners who ask (Gustav is not the first), usually just to be polite, just to be asking something, because the only thing they remember from their press and cable news is that more than a million people (no one knew exactly how many anyway, and I bet no one will ever find out) came out into the streets of Kyiv and stood there, in the freezing cold and under snow—and you know they picture the Ukrainian winter as something out of the vast Asiatic steppes: birds frozen dead midflight, tongues stuck to metal spoons—so when they ask about the hardest thing, they are hoping to hear Hollywood-worthy horror tales of frostbitten cheeks and amputated limbs à la Jack London, and Manifest Destiny’s Go West, my son, since a conquest of the West (and they are certain that’s what we fought for—a piece of the West!) must need, in their mythology, be accompanied by purely masculine sacrifices; they ask in full anticipation of having you tell them what they have already imagined so that they can nod sympathetically and say, Wow. When people ask me this question and I try to answer, every time I feel like I come up against a solid wall inside myself, a profound lack of desire to explain anything, muddling in my inadequate English, to mutter that hard is not quite the right word, and it doesn’t really fit what we experienced during those three weeks. That, actually, it was later that things got “hard,” after everything was over, the rush was over, and we all had to go home, and become again anonymous strangers passing each other in the street, so that no matter how many times you clicked your busted lighter in the middle of the sidewalk in a hopeless attempt to light your cigarette, there would be no solicitous onslaught of helpful hands with ready flames offered to you from every direction. I remember how utterly lost I felt the first time this did not happen. After those three weeks I had forgotten completely what it was like to be alone in a mass of people, and this was only a few days later, and Khreshchatyk looked like the same street, and the people looked like the same people, only now they hurried along on their holiday errands and no one gave a damn if some loser could use a light—that was the moment when I, stunned for an instant by the chill of the sudden emptiness in the space that was only recently, days before, bubbling with thick familial, intimate warmth, a void not unlike the one left by the death of a loved one, understood finally and undeniably that it was all really over: we had begun to fall apart again, to segregate into the composite elements of a pedestrian mass, no different from a crowd in any city in the world, and one had to learn to live as before, as if one had never known a different life. That was really hard—it was like coming home from war, albeit victorious (for some reason, this particular metaphor strikes me as especially apt), like coming back from the front, Gustav, you see?

  Gustav nods and grunts a low, respectful ja, he’s all right, only, of course, he doesn’t have a clue, this guy who looks in every way like a storybook Dutch skipper, with his red sideburns straight out of a cartoon; all he needs is a pipe. Sweetie, when she first saw him, cracked, “The Flying Dutchman!”—he really is a walking stereotype, but I’m sure there are tons of stereotypical-looking people in any nation, it’s just our deeply inculcated distrust of national stereotypes that makes them seem like a rarity. Gustav has come for one thing and one thing only: pictures—and pictures are what he really understands, no arguing about that. He’s got a good eye, instantly grabbing onto the shots he wants me to pull up to full screen, and really, I could very well shut up and not try to explain anything at all, because the pictures do speak for themselves, but I can’t shake the suspicion that they are telling him something different from what they say to me. He wasn’t in Kyiv back then, and all he’s seeing now are untold numbers of people in the city streets, under the snow. A few angles are really nice (especially when I managed to climb a tree and take shots of Hrushevsky Street—a bright-orange human sea as far as the horizon, seen through the latticework of snow-covered tree limbs), and so are the wide angles, of course—the people’s faces are beautiful, old, young, inspired, smiling, with happy tears in their eyes, with mouths open in joyful cries (Gustav skips over a grinning gap-toothed boy in a black stocking cap—that’s taken from farther up the hill, next to the Supreme Council building; I got a few good shots there too. While I was hoisting myself into the tree, and my buddy Vovchik held my camera, the boy volunteered to guard my coat; the women standing around fussed over me, tutting that I’ll freeze, that I can’t go without a coat, Vovchik retorted sternly that it’s nothing—the love of the motherland will keep me warm—and the boy, with his head tossed back, watched me from below, his face glowing with that spellbound grin that seemed fixed on so many people’s faces in those days: the mouth beatifically stretched from ear to ear, the expression one gets standing on the top of a mountain or riding up a rushing wave on a surfboard—the awe inspired by the magnificence of a force greater than what can be accommodated by human imagination. That boy had come to Kyiv from Rivne, on the very first day, and told us what it was like: the highway was lit bright as daylight, all cars speeding to Kyiv, it seemed the whole of Ukraine had picked up and rushed to Kyiv, horns blaring, and along the road the villagers stood by the blazing fires and waved them on with flags and banners. “I won’t have another night like that in my life,” the boy said, and if I were to translate this for Gustav now, the Dutchman would probably think that’s how men speak of a night with a woman, but we wouldn’t have thought of it that way at the time because what the boy was talking about was also our night, belonging to all of us who listened, in a single oceanic wave that furled and crested for hundreds of kilometers around the capital and rushed through the darkness with the ascending thunder of an elemental force breaking through a dam, smashing anything stupid enough to stand in its way, and we were as proud of it as that boy, so I asked to take his picture and there it was: a common snapshot of a boy in a black stocking cap, with a beatific smile on his face, nondescript but for the orange ribbon, but then again, everyone had orange ribbons, so we move on).

  Sweetie comes in to ask if we want coffee and, getting a no, makes herself scarce. I wish she’d stay and help me—she speaks English much better than I do—but she leaves me to suffer alone, with Gustav who says ja and doesn’t get it. The only people who got us—really got us—were the Poles; with them we had a complete and utter ja, and didn’t have to explain anything. The Poles lived it as their second youth, their second Solidarność. I knew it on the first day, when their parliamentarians came and I spotted one of the women on TV, the way she stood on the stage on the Maidan with the same expression as our older people, and held her hand in the air with two fingers in the sign of victory like a blessing for all of us. I knew right away the Poles were all right; even the young people, who were born after the Solidarity movement, knew how to recognize the same thing in what they saw in Kyiv; they had received a key from their parents, the score for this opera, and they knew how to read it. The Germans also sort of got it—they could rely on their own analogies: the year ’89, the wall coming down, Wir sind ein Volk, but for them
it was all more on the emotional level, without the grasp of the subtexts; all the others just hung out, wandering through the crowds, getting high on the pure scale of the human force around them, riding their own adrenaline rush—free thrills, a revolutionary vacation in the capital of a vaguely known ex-Soviet republic located somewhere on the Asiatic plains between Albania and Belarus. These other foreigners were sincerely thrilled with their ethnographic discoveries in this new territory (“Your city is really large,” a British cameraman, with whom I spent half a day shooting shoulder to shoulder, kept saying in utter astonishment), such as the fact that we did not actually warm ourselves with vodka in the cold weather, and remained strictly alcohol-free for the entire three weeks of standing in the streets (that’s what made it clear to these folks that we were different from Russians); that we did not break windows or windshields, and generally, against all odds, did not break or smash anything or anyone, and did not produce a single bloody nose that could be presented (exhibit A) to the powers that be in Moscow or Washington who insisted on alarming the wider world with predictions of a civil war in this obscure country between Albania and Belarus, the new Balkans. So, in the end, just by doing what we did and without any particular intention, we screwed things up for more constituencies than just the Russians—it’s just that the Russians were as clumsy as a bear on a bicycle and couldn’t get away fast enough, while the quick-witted American diplomats, who sat out the whole thing on the sidelines waiting to see who would win and did not leave their embassy even on that very tense night when our tent city expected to be attacked and asked all accredited missions in the city to let their personnel come out onto the Maidan and form a “sanitary barrier” around the protesters—the Americans, one must give them credit, figured things out in a blink, and before Khreshchatyk even had a chance to cool down from the crowds, trumpeted to their press another success in their endeavors to teach us Albanian-Belarusians about democracy and the rule of law.