Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  As I’m thinking this, Gustav scrolls past another picture that doesn’t tell him anything: a shot of an apartment building window where one glimpses a hand holding up an orange teakettle. He’d have to zoom in to see that it is a very old and desiccated hand, resembling a chicken paw. It belonged to a very old little lady who couldn’t even walk anymore, and had only this symbolic means of joining the column of protesters that passed under her window. I remember I heard people ahead of me (I was walking in that column) chanting a new slogan that turned out to be “Grandma! Grandma!”—someone had spotted that teakettle, and the feeble hand holding it, a shaky orange blot in the window, and heads began to turn one after another, people pointing—What’s there? Look!—and I shouted too, “Grandma!” and pointed my camera, blinking off tears. Old ladies had a special power of bringing me to tears in those days; the little old ladies who shambled and tottered to the Maidan day and night, slipping on the steep hillside streets and carrying their treasured possessions, steeped in the smell of old-age poverty: knitted scarves and socks from their ancient dressers or a few hot boiled potatoes wrapped in a clean kerchief, which the tent city’s wardens accepted almost reverently, many with a lump in their throats. Never mind that just a minute earlier those same wardens were practically begging women in mink coats and a French restaurant owner who drove in a Land Rover loaded to the gills with prepared dinners, “Please, don’t bring any more food, we’ve got more than we could eat already!” Looking at these old ladies, at their stubborn, taciturn tenacity (I’ll never forget the one who kept bringing tea in a tiny eighteen-ounce thermos. In the crowd, it took no more than three seconds to pour out the three cups of tea it contained, and the grandma would turn and crawl back home up the steep, iced-over Mykhailivska Street to brew another thermos full, and I wondered, How many trips does she make every day?), I was truly touched for the first time by their frightening, primordial almost, elemental life force that could not be cowed by starvation, wars, or labor camps—by any of the horrors, including the destitute old age that befell them, as if the inhuman labor of enduring through it all was a mere nightmare of history, a scam, a foolish bet, as folks would say, the devil wagering Job ’gainst the Lord—and the devil lost it all, because these little old ladies, who certainly could teach Job a thing or two, on their deathbeds, when they had no more hope of being themselves rewarded with the brooks of milk and honey, gathered their last strength and raised feeble hands to salute freedom through their windows. It occurred to me then that if one went looking for a single image of this revolution, for our own Liberty Leading the People, the young beauty with the orange carnation facing the shields of the riot police would not do no matter how awesome she looked on posters—it would have to be that hunched-over, inconceivably old, indestructible, and uncowed old lady from the Maidan, with her three cupfuls of hot tea—Here, children, warm yourselves, God bless you. Now, that would be the real truth about us, but who’d ever want that old flesh to be their revolution’s allegory?

  She: I can tell Sweetie’s miffed at me for leaving him alone with that Dutch dude, but what can I do if I can’t stand to talk about the same stuff for the millionth time! I just can’t do it. The more you talk, the more you repeat yourself, and the next thing you know, you have lost any trace of your real experience of those days—you just have words, units of meaning, and they come out prerecorded, and then the entire conversation degrades back to politics, the talking heads on TV, oil prices, the government crisis, the fight against corruption, all that bullshit. Thank you, but no thank you. Mr. Gustav can shape his Eastern European album with its chapter on “Revolutionary Kyiv” however he sees fit. Without my help. I’m glad to see Sweetie’s pictures put to use, else he wouldn’t get around to doing anything with them for another year, but that doesn’t mean I have to participate. You boys are on your own.

  I have my own book of visions, but no one would ever want it. The world has determined to live exclusively in the present—for however long whatever is on TV stays there. Time has not sped up—it has simply disintegrated. The only reality is what can be touched. A problem of attention span, I think they call it. We have the attention span of a puppy, at best. Today there’s a revolution in one country, tomorrow in another, on a different continent. And if it’s not a revolution, it’s a terrorist attack, or a hurricane, or another calamity, which we will forget about as soon as they switch to the next story on the newscast. We just want to make sure there’s something new being beamed at us every minute, and we’re not being asked to hold anything in our minds for any length of time at all. We don’t want to go to the trouble of making connections between the past and the present because, you know, that requires effort. And we are not being encouraged to exert ourselves in any way; we are being taught to relax. Leaf through a photography book on the coffee table, at best, move your eyes left to right a few times, up and down. That’s just a smidge better than channel surfing. Or the internet: snippets, tweets, fragments—Where did I read that?—screw it, who cares! Don’t worry about it.

  And here’s the interesting part: I’m a historian by training, and what, I ask you, was all that training good for, inclusive of a graduate degree and a thesis on the Russian government’s suppression of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1847 (which was nothing less than our very first bourgeois-democratic revolution, nipped in the bud), and the hours spent in our gutted archives, and my trip to Moscow in pursuit of the documents the KGB, in their panic to cover up the tracks, culled from the Ukrainian archives back in the fall of 1991, in that short window of opportunity after Ukraine had already declared independence, but before the USSR officially fell apart—what was all this professional preparation good for, if it took even me until November, until the days of the Maidan, until the climax of the most significant Ukrainian political movement since the seventeenth century, to begin, laboriously, to realize, as if a heavy door was creaking slowly open on rusted hinges inside my brain, that this is for real—and to recognize it, incredulously. For the longest time, I simply could not believe that everything I had known through archival records and books was real, and very much alive, and happening to us—and none of us knew what it was. I actually needed a hint, a nudge, which I got from a German reporter, I think (there were so many of them, it feels like they had their own tent city in my head), the one we took along the front lines—from Institutska Street to Bankova, to the riot police detachments in front of the president’s administration building, to Shovkovychna, and from there onto Luteranska Street and back to Khreshchatyk. We sat down to warm ourselves at one of the mobile canteens, and a man from the Sumy region told us how in their small town before the second round of elections, groups of shaved-headed men went from bar to bar, making everyone drink to the health of the ruling government’s candidate and beating up whoever refused to do so with such violence that a friend of this man’s ended up in intensive care. I interpreted, the excited German scribbled furiously in his notebook, and then later he said to me, delighted as a boy, Isn’t it amazing, just think about it, your people never knew democracy or justice—they’d been ruled by despots the whole time, the Russian czars, with terror, persecutions, violence—and here the people have risen to defend their rights, it’s a miracle!

  I remember I all but choked with surprise: What do you mean, never knew democracy? Do you people not read? Andreas Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine—doesn’t ring a bell? Were you not aware that the Ukrainian head of state, the hetman, was always an elected position, that was what gave it legitimacy? Or that we lived for three hundred years according to the Statutes of Lithuania, the most democratic code of law, if you’d care to remember, of its time? The Russian czar canceled it, of course, but not before 1840, and village courts continued to use it until the beginning of the twentieth century. There’s even a special genre of charms in Ukrainian folk magic—judicial magic, spells to affect the outcome in court. Kyiv obtained the Magdeburg rights in 1494, and other Ukrainian cities had th
em too—so how do you figure, your people never knew the rule of law?

  I blurted all that out in one gasping fit of patriotic outrage.

  The German was a little surprised. He thought about it for a moment, and then said, Oh, was that when you were a part of Poland?

  The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, I corrected sternly, as if he were a C student in one of my classes. And we also had our own army—nothing to sneeze at, I assure you. And a mercantile middle class, we always had a strong middle class. A nation of small bourgeoisie, you know. Which is one of the reasons, by the way, that Stalin hated us as much as he did.

  But all of this was a very long time ago, he objected, visibly disappointed: I think he really wanted to see a miracle and my academic prissiness was getting in the way. Today’s generations don’t remember it anyway, he said.

  We were having this conversation while walking down Institutska Street, sucked into the massive, unanimous whirlpool of people around the Maidan: as one current carried us downhill toward the square, another ascended toward us; the sidewalks were filled with people, the street studded with myriad flickering lights. People carried candles set in plastic cups, and the whole scene looked like a vast vigil under the eternally dark December sky, lit up from below by the burning fires, flame-like orange clothes and pennants. I was shaky with lack of sleep, with exhaustion, tension, cold, and noise, and the answer slipped from my lips before I even realized what I was saying:

  As you can see, I said, we very much do.

  It came out very dramatic, like in a movie. My German just sort of stopped midsmile, stunned, and I realized—moments after I said those words—that I’d spoken the pure and holy truth. It was true: a sort of deeper, collective memory had come alive in us, even for those who weren’t aware of it—a dam had burst open, our horizons fell back, and in one instant, millions of people discovered themselves to be in possession of knowledge and instincts they never suspected existed, of which they had never thought themselves capable. Perhaps that was the law of history: when a nation acts as a single collective soul, its collective memory, by some incomprehensible means, proves to be greater than the sum of its constituent parts. And everything then comes naturally and easily, as if people had known in advance how they ought to behave, and are, in fact, obeying the same centuries-old norms that had guided their ancestors. The warden at the tent city who, checking through the donated food, pulled out a bottle of vodka from a plaid bag with a trained motion said peaceably, “Didn’t we ask you not to bring alcohol?” then opened it and poured the stuff into the nearest trash can, was doing exactly the same thing as his Kozak great-great-grandfather would have done on a boat setting out to sea. Except back in those days, they would’ve thrown the bringer of said vodka overboard too . . . But the point is, the warden’s hand knew to grab the drink in that forgotten three-hundred-year-old motion all by itself, and the man knew he was doing the right thing. If you must have a miracle, then this was it: this ability to step into the current that flows beyond common time, through time, to be buoyed by it and to know that you are doing everything exactly right. And those kids who lined up in front of the cabinet building on the hill and stood there day in and day out, beating on steel drums—thump-thump-thump! thump-thump-thump! A signal, and the apocalyptic drumbeat scatters into a hail of quick, sharp bangs that get under your skin, and then shifts again, guttural, menacing—thump-thump-thump! thump-thump-thump! Those clueless undergrads, from the circus college, from all over, who found the discarded oil drums near Dynamo Stadium and decided to put them to this use, who stood on that hill for three weeks and never once stopped drumming, can be counted on to have been ignorant of the fact that this was exactly how the Kozak army used to be called together in the Sich, and the job they had taken upon themselves used to have a name—dovbysh—and that’s exactly what those drummers would’ve done: they’d climb a hill, stand by a post, and begin sending their signal, with tympani and tambourines. And just as back then, these were the drums of war, war declared on those who’d secured themselves in the cabinet building—and everyone understood this, without a need for explanation, without the knowledge of historical facts, without textbooks, everyone knew it from the sound itself that had come from the ancient depths of memory and was recognized by all, and the drivers of the passing cars tooted their horns to the same beat. Things like this—they were everywhere you looked. The law of the preservation of memory. A country that had previously existed only on yellowed medieval maps—Ucraina terra Cosacorrum—suddenly came to the surface. It hadn’t disappeared at all, we realized—it was just hiding all this time, somewhere deep. Underground, but alive and invincible. There was no miracle at all; we just had to discover that countries do not disappear, no matter how many times the maps are redrawn, just as a person doesn’t vanish just because his picture is destroyed.

  Were I talking to Gustav about his book, I would tell him to put two maps next to each other on the frontispiece. In the morning after the first round of the election, when the TV showed the electoral map with the regions colored orange and blue and we were all calling each other with congratulations because we’d just glimpsed a real hope out there (in the streets of Kyiv, people began to smile again—the same people who days before had been glum and silent in the shops and on the metro), I got a call from my former department head. In the voice of a man on the verge of a great discovery, he said:

  “You know, I was just looking at Coronelli’s map—”

  “Which map?”

  “Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, the Italian who came through in 1657, you remember. The one with the embassy to the Hetman’s government from Emperor Ferdinand III. The cartographer? He made a map of Ukraine?”

  “I’m with you now. And?”

  “You know, it matches. I’ll have to check it against other sources, of course, but it looks like all the orange regions—that’s what was Ukraine in 1657. Eastern Sarmatia. If you go further southeast, that’s the Wild Fields, Piccola Tartaria, as Cornetti called it.”

  I hung up and checked the maps. They did match.

  That’s when I knew we’d won.

  Two maps, Gustav. Just two maps: one from 1657, the other from 2004. Without them, your readers can’t understand what all those millions of people in fire-colored scarves in the pictures are doing in the streets, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to think it’s all about the president they elected and whose name they are chanting. But that’s not it, that’s just a phantom, misdirection. What they are doing, in fact, is getting their country back—the one that sank to the bottom of history three hundred years earlier. And the amazing thing is—they know that’s what they’re doing, know it in their guts with a sudden and undeniable immediacy. That’s why they are so happy.

  He: Gustav takes a close look at almost every picture I took on Bankova Street, in front of the presidential administration (in the Soviet times, the building housed the Communist Party’s Central Committee, I tell him, and he bats his copper-colored eyelashes at me, excited as a kid, Is that so? For him it must feel like glimpsing a dragon’s lair straight out of a storybook and discovering that you could get a guided tour there), where the riot police stood in a solid wall behind their grey shields, and chooses many shots, almost all of them, to be copied to his discs, although, to my mind, they are not that interesting. But I know why he wants them, this show of naked force—government against its own people—it gives one pause. By virtue of physical presentation, Sweetie prompts in English (she came back, not with coffee, but with chips and nuts—she knows, my good girl, that I will chew anything when I’m nervous, like a demented rat, so I can’t pout at her any longer). That’s well said; I wouldn’t have come up with that, if only things weren’t as dire as Gustav must be thinking looking at the pictures now: turned out, my pal Vovchik went to school with a guy who was now one of the special forces officers; my fourth-floor neighbor’s beloved nephew was also among those soldiers, and the woman went looking for him on Bankova, with sa
ndwiches, because her sister had called and cried that the boys weren’t getting any food, and didn’t get to come off their shift, as they were supposed to, every hour, and stood there in the cold for four hours straight, and had to piss into their own boots. Gustav goes after a picture of an infantry colonel grabbing at the shields from the protesters’ side: the colonel is square shouldered in a precise, disciplined way. You can see he’s unaccustomed to bowing his fierce head as he had to do at the moment, to peer at the troops’ faces under their visors—it’s a good shot, a lucky one; everyone seemed to be snapping pictures of that colonel, as he spoke to the soldiers. “Sons,” he pleaded in an utterly uncommanding voice that made all of our throats catch, “sons, boys, don’t shoot, listen to me, don’t shoot—I’ll beg you on my knees.” I know I wouldn’t want to be one of those boys who sniffled wordlessly behind their visors, while the human sea in front of them chanted, “I’m brother to you, you’re brother to me—lower your shield!” and the girls sang love songs and put sandwiches on the pavement before them. “What the fuck you think you’re doing there? They’re not dogs!” Vovchik’s school pal the lieutenant yelled on the cell phone from the other side of the line, as if the sandwiches were Vovchik’s personal fault, as if Vovchik personally managed the entire process of the sandwich offering or at least knew the person who did, as if anyone was managing anything at all, in those early days, when no one had a clue what they were supposed to do and just did whatever seemed necessary at any given moment, and things turned out splendidly—so Vovchik just came up as he was, camera in hand, to the teenagers who were prancing before the soldiers and passed on his pal’s words, minus the obscenity, and in two minutes the sandwiches disappeared, never to be seen again.