Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  He: Actually, he’s a good soul, this Gustav, and he’s got his head screwed on right. I’m beginning to see, from what he chose (and he’s picked at least twice as many shots as he’ll need), the narrative of the book that he’s building in his mind—he is really interested in the Maidan itself, the people on the square and the streets around it, and not the Maidan’s stage, populated by the politicians and rock stars. As an expert visual storyteller he grasps instinctively what has remained hopelessly beyond the reach of common, politics-obsessed journalists; that there was never a direct, simple connection between the stage and the Maidan; that all those people there, whose number exceeded a million every single night, spent all those weeks living and organizing themselves independently, with their own centers of gravity and energy meridians, and the stage served as a sort of temporary center to which we looked for instruction, the symbolic capital of our temporary nation—yes, a country, I tell Gustav, a promised land, and Gustav doesn’t laugh, doesn’t take this as a joke but waits, eyes eager and curious, for further explanation. Well, I tell him, we basically lived for three months—how should I put it?—with a growing sense of brotherhood or something like it (I’m short of words again, where’s Sweetie when I need her?). We all loved our neighbors as ourselves—and this started even before the elections, before the first round, when just the sight of a bravely displayed orange ribbon was enough to make your day, as if you’d seen the dearest old friend, and you walked down the street or drove literally awash in love, among people smiling kindly at you, people waving at you, honking their horns in greeting, and you felt yourself lifted above the earth, eager to hug and kiss everyone—they were all so dear, so good and beloved, and so beautiful—I’ve never seen so many beautiful people in the streets! I remember one day, in the middle of October, when the ribbons were still hard to find and people were just beginning to get orange scarves and stuff, I saw a young woman walking down Khreshchatyk: fire-red hair loose in the wind, she proudly carried in both hands a huge bunch of fire-colored leaves, like a lit torch, her own firebrand, and I kicked myself for not having the camera with me as I watched her march—this Nike, a priestess of freedom—and the rest of Khreshchatyk also watched, awed and instantly in love, and this unassailable force field of warmth, gratitude, and trust spread wider and wider—we were the City of God, we lived as men are supposed to live, as people should be living all over the world, all the time, you see? So when hundreds of thousands of people flooded the city from other towns and villages, the doors of our homes flew open like open arms, and we all marched down, in hundreds and thousands ourselves, to the Maidan, to the Trade Unions Building, which housed the organizers, and said, I have a room, and I have two, I have a country house that’s sitting empty, I could put forty-fifty people there, I want to give money, and I have ten sacks of potatoes, and I have nothing so give me a broom to keep this place clean . . . The slogan “Love Will Overcome All!” appeared on walls and cars, and it did—and who would have thought we had so much love in all of us, all we needed was to be freed of fear, to break it, like a dam, and our love that was held back for who knows how long and dispensed in miserly trickles for the closest friends and family spilled out in an ocean of light, illuminating the darkest time of the year. After we won, this city of three million people functioned for an entire month without a single road accident, people fell over themselves to be solicitous of each other, crime went down tenfold, and folks smiled to each other in the streets as if we all lived in a village where everyone knows everyone and says hello to strangers; it lasted for weeks, this feeling—that you could say hello to anyone and he would respond happily, as if he’d been waiting to see you; there was so much love that for a while it seemed we could fill the entire world with it, never mind that horde of shaved-headed slaves under their different banners (which they shed, throwing them onto the ground, as soon as their slave drivers looked the other way). I’m just sorry I don’t know how to communicate all of this in English, but it also seems that Gustav somehow understands anyway, he’s on the same brain wave, so I say, Why? Because I can’t hold it in anymore; I’ve been carrying this question inside me since that very day on Khreshchatyk when I stood there lost with the unlit cigarette in my mouth and realized it was all over. Why can’t we live like this all the time, why is the world so fucked up that we cannot, and then again, if we had been able to live like that—for months!—and we weren’t a handful of saintly Mother Teresas but millions of perfectly common, regularly stressed-out and busy people, then it must be possible at least in principle? Mustn’t it? And it wasn’t hard at all—it was as if you’d been drifting down your life year after year, working hard to shove the shit that’s floating around away from you, to stay more or less clean, and then suddenly you hit this current, a massive underwater gulfstream, and it grabs you and carries you with impossible speed, with a thunderous, mighty roar (The sound! That’s what’s missing from these pictures, damn it! The round-the-clock hum of the crowd, the clapping thunder of chants that echoed from the buildings’ walls and reverberated to the far shore of the Dnieper and, after several days of booming insomnia, began to rumble inside your own head; we all went around, especially during the first week, with that internal soundtrack, the thrill of ascension, as if your blood had been wired to a woofer and rolled down your veins with a growl, like the mass of people stomping down the streets and the metro tunnels, as if you yourself expanded to the size of the entire city, and all of this should have very well short-circuited and if it didn’t, it was only because you yourself, with your separate, individual life, had temporarily ceased to exist—everything that belonged to you, and nobody else, had been pushed to the background, suspended like a piece of software waiting for an upgrade. There was no room left to hide in the face of the danger we were up against, neither at home, nor at work, so we came out, all together, not just into the streets from our individual apartments, but out of our individual lives, crossing the thresholds of our I’s and there, once we had all stepped beyond our limits, it opened up and embraced us—the limitless ocean of love. We saw our promised land among its waves—we glimpsed it, real and tangible, for a few weeks, and then it began to fall apart, to grow distant again, sinking in the muddy political swirl of negotiations, agreements, bluffs, turf battles, the everyday pageant of human flaws). The thing is, I say, that all of this proved to be within our reach, only apparently separated from us, as if by a wall, as if it existed in a different dimension, but I now know it exists, it’s reachable—our country of the possible—like an underwater current, a subterranean river. We had brought it to the surface; we had cracked its path open, with one titanic blow, and it had flowed through us, searing us with its living flame, only to fall from our sight again, like a myth, like that Sarmatia my Sweetie talks about, our ideal motherland, in which we were supposed to live and for which we were ready to die—so why can’t we keep it forever? Why is it that the most we are capable of is to glimpse it once and then just keep telling stories of that one miraculous appearance, until the end of time, twisting our testimony, patching up the truth with lies, rewriting, repainting things, faking small details, photoshopping until we’re left with something glossy and hard, like a piece of candy, that no one can believe, and we’ll have to start all over again, looking for the promised land from scratch?

  She: “Our culture has no fear,” Gustav says. “No memory of fear.”

  Sweetie and I just sort of stare at him, startled by this apparent non sequitur.

  “We’re more open to manipulation,” he explains. “We have no immunity. We don’t know how to recognize real danger.”

  We stare.

  “Take advertising,” he says, “as an example. There’s so much illicit violence in it: a girl throws her boyfriend out of a boat, a kid throws his parents out of a car—all to take possession of their potato chips. This is understood to be humorous. When you mention visual fascism, people look at you like you’re crazy. They all believe that fascism, communism—
that’s all gone and forgotten. People don’t see that they’re being manipulated with the same methods. They don’t see they’re being herded into the prison of virtual reality. When something really happens, we are defenseless as children. Like those kids who get into an argument, fight, and kill their classmate and then stare at the body and cannot understand why he is not getting up, because in their computer games, you come back to life even if you’d been shot. There is no death, only simulacra. We are being trained to live in simulacra, and we are not afraid. We have no antidote.”

  We don’t say anything; what could you say?

  “That, of course, is a small example,” Gustav says, apologetically.

  I feel I’m beginning to understand.

  He’s looking for immunity, this dear soul. He’s wandering the world, very much like the Flying Dutchman, shooting and publishing his Middle Eastern, Balkan, Eastern European, and who knows what other books—all in his quest for a way to find reality. He wants to juxtapose real sweat and blood, love and hate to the avalanche of simulacra. He wants to see for himself and to show others the world in the gaps and holes in the opaque sticky film of information, where the true, uncreated nature of things shows itself like raw flesh in a wound.

  “You know,” Sweetie says suddenly, “our former president, the one who sat out the revolution at his dacha, he, people say, also couldn’t believe what he was looking at when he saw Maidan on TV. He was convinced it was CGI.”

  We laugh, all three of us, united in a shared impulse of wordless understanding and strange relief. It feels like we have accomplished something here tonight, like we have won a small victory. We’ve defended something, a patch of reality; we’ve washed a window clean—and are basking in the sunshine. “Boys,” I say, “isn’t it time we had a drink?” “Tya-koo-yoo.” Gustav butchers the only Ukrainian word he’d learned, and we all laugh again.

  The boys get up to wash their hands; I glance at the screen before shutting down the computer. The shot there, taken from a low vantage point looking up, shows the line of shields and below them flowers and burning candles, and it looks as if they are bursting straight from the earth itself, breaking through the asphalt and the tamped-down mass of millennial snow—small agglomerations of light surrounded in the picture with uncannily bright halos.

  YOUR AD COULD GO HERE

  TRANSLATED BY HALYNA HRYN

  They were the most splendid leather gloves I had seen in my life: finished to the gossamer weight of a rose petal, with a dazzling, luminous bay hue that instantly brought to mind the Imperial horses and their silky croups at the Hofreitschule, delicately laced with a finely cut design at the wrist (all of it handmade, my goodness!), they immediately wrapped my hand in the firm loving grasp of a second skin, and one was compelled henceforth to stroke the hand thusly gloved with the same reverence as an Imperial steed. One wanted to stroke and admire the hand, spreading one’s fingers against the light, making a fist and letting it go—Ah!—and never take such beauty off. In a word, walking away from those gloves was beyond my power.

  They existed—as befits any work of art—as a singular artifact. Everything in that glove shop was singular, not one pair resembled another, each more fantastic than the next, but these—these caught my eye the second I walked through the door, like the glance of a dear fellow creature in a crowd. And they were exactly my size: I told the gentle old man in a knitted vest who sat behind the counter I wore a size six, but he just shook his head. No, he said in his slightly raspy Viennese English, you’re not a six but a five and a half, here, try these. But I always buy sixes! You’ll be telling me, miss, he laughed, I’ve been making these gloves for fifty years. Oh, you make these? And sell them? So you are the owner? Yes, he confirmed, with the quiet pride of a master craftsman who knows his worth. The tiny store on Mariahilferstraße, which I entered on a whim with a purely touristy I wonder what’s here? transformed into a fairy-tale forest hut—the one to which the fleeing heroine stumbles at nightfall and where she meets the master of the underground kingdom who chops his own wood, carries his own water, and makes his own supper. I dearly wished I spoke better German—and the old man, better English—we could hardly talk about anything important with our tourist-minimum vocabularies. I adore such dapper gentlemen in vests—in my own country they were exterminated as a species fifty years ago, shipped out to Siberia in cattle cars, and their absence from the universe in which I grew up was still evident—as visible as silhouettes cut out of group pictures, with the names written underneath. It warms my heart every time I see what became of them in other, less chaotic lands. To spend fifty years sculpting such gloves, from tanning and cutting to the finishing stitches around the eyelet holes that would adorn imaginary hands—does this not mean becoming the Lord of Gloves, the one and only, not just in Vienna, but in the whole wide world?

  I named them my sunshine gloves—they glowed. I could see their aura in the paper bag into which the Lord of Gloves packed them for me—with his name imprinted, and the address—Mariahilferstraße, 35—and the telephone numbers (landlines—everything about him was so Old Worldly, solid, with a distant nineteenth-century breeze of faith in an ordered world, a world in which things are made to last forever because the makers know that things outlast people and will one day serve for our descendants as the only tangible proof of our existence). Even through the paper bag, I could feel the silky softness of the rose-petal leather. I kept touching it and smiling. I had been entrusted with a treasure, in the fairy-tale forest hut—a talisman from a different age. Who today would labor over such gloves—every pair unique, every pair a single copy—to sell them for those same fifty euros they charge for the thick chunks of mitts in the mall across the street?

  Later I got myself a special designer sweater to go with the gloves. A special jacket. A special pair of fine suede pants. I had the persistent feeling that my sunshine gloves stood out no matter what I wore, no matter how carefully I selected it, and they most certainly did: they demanded different lines—designed by someone in love with their model. With the gloves, I could tell the mood with which another item of clothing was conceived and made: they accepted some, but rejected other garments without any apparent logic, but irrevocably and at once. In the fall of 2004 they suddenly fell in love with a flamboyant fiery scarf, which I then wore throughout the entire Orange Revolution—never mind that the scarf did not come from a fashion designer and cost a third of what the gloves had. They were perfect together, and press photographers all to the man wanted my picture in that orange scarf and my sunshine gloves—No, no, don’t take them off, just leave everything as is!

  Here one rather expects a certain development of the plot: Julio Cortázar, for instance, or even Peter Haigh would have definitely written a story (and Taras Prokhasko would have told one in a pub, being too lazy to write it!) in which the gloves quietly move on from approving garments to approving—or disapproving—people and begin to rule the heroine’s life, guiding her to the authentic and away from the fake, sweeping out from her life’s wardrobe false friends, unnecessary obligations, and ultimately her own masques, stripping her down like a cabbage to her bare core, and then we might discover that there is no core, that the heroine herself does not pass the test of the magical gloves, so in the end she has to perish in a dramatic fashion, to disappear, be disposed of, and the gloves, fine as a rose petal, will remain gloving in their silky-chestnut splendor on a desk, waiting for their new owner. Something along those lines.

  What actually happened was different. What happens is always different from what we read about later. In May of 2005 I did what I had never, in my recollection, which begins more or less at the age of three, done: I lost a glove.

  Maybe I lost it getting out of a cab. At least, it was not anywhere on the sidewalk—I retraced my steps along the entire length of my route, where I could have, theoretically, dropped it, looking hungrily into every single trash can. All in vain: the glove was gone. Evaporated. Vanished. Rose up to the sky a
nd flew away. Took off and flew into the wide blue sky. Burned to a crisp like the Frog Princess’s skin. My sunshine glove from my left hand. The hand was left naked.

  And I don’t think I wept like that since the age of three. I mean, of course, I’d cried countless times, and had abundant occasions and much weightier reasons to do so in my more or less coherently remembered forty years since I was three—but weeping like this, truly, never. I wept like the child who discovers for the first time the injustice of the world, which she had begun to believe to be orderly and safe. Adults call it a life crisis—and instead of weeping, they usually climb into a noose or call a therapist. Or look for other ways to glue together the shattered self, because the older you get, the more you see that really life can be put back together somehow, made bearable, although it will never be the way it was before, but that’s okay, it’s going to be all right, really, things have a way of fixing themselves, as long as you’re okay. That, specifically, is what everyone at home told me: Stop being a child, you have the other glove, you have the address, you have a book coming out in Austria, you’re going to Vienna anyway—stop by the store and just ask them to make you a new one! You could even send them the right one by mail, my husband said, call them, make the order, and have the left one ready for pickup when you’re there. There was no way I was doing that, though, no mailing—for me, that was somehow out of the question. To pass the surviving glove into unknown hands, to entrust its fate to a faceless tracking system felt like a betrayal to me, as if I would be confirming I deserved to have been abandoned by the lost glove, as the folk song goes, “You knew not how to honor us . . .” No, I had to do it in person, I had to face the Lord of Gloves in his forest hut at Mariahilferstraße. One step into a side street off the busy shopping thoroughfare, push the right door—and I will be again in that cozy, draping silence, green colored, as if tinged with the virgin forest outside the windows but in fact because of the green lining the display case, filled with the gorgeous, one-of-a-kind pairs of gloves in liver-bay, black, buckskin and roan. Perhaps the Lord of Gloves will offer me tea and we will have a chance to converse a bit, about important things—such as pursuing his craft for fifty years, despite the rising flood of Mariahilferstraße outside his windows. I memorized several particularly difficult phrases in German, in case he couldn’t understand my English.