Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  The prospect truly made me nervous.

  On that trip, I barely had an hour to spare in Vienna and had to fit in the trip from Hotel Mercure, near the Westbahnhof, to Mariahilferstraße and back. So I started dialing the numbers listed on my paper bag (in which I carried the right glove) as soon as I landed and kept calling until the cab came to pick me up at the hotel. There was no answer on either line. I felt a sick knot in my throat; my heart hammered. In forty minutes, I was due for an interview with a reporter from a popular weekly, back in my hotel’s lobby. At least I long memorized everything one says to a reporter about one’s book, in well-polished blocks of text, like an audio guide—please press ten now. It was fall, the air beaded with moisture, and early lights glowed along the inappropriately festive Mariahilferstraße. I wore the same tweed coat I had on the day I lost the left glove. Here? the driver asked. Here, I said: at least the door was where it should be, I was looking straight at it.

  Nothing else, however, was there.

  It was like coming home at night, opening the door with your key, and seeing someone else’s apartment, with entirely different furniture, long inhabited by strangers who, disturbed, turn to face you in alarm. There were scarves, and belts, and some high-tech home decor, plastic, not wood. Different lighting, vertical cubical display windows, everything a sterile white, a crowd of people, and a completely different smell. Instead of entering a magical parallel world, I was standing in the accessories section of a large department store. Grüß Gott, darf ich Ihnen helfen? asked a glamorous young woman with a smart haircut and fluorescent fingernails. Stammering in my English, I pulled out my paper bag, the talisman that would let me be recognized at the entrance to the other world. (What if, I’d desperately thought, there’s still another room here, and the forest hut is now there?) Desperately looking in all directions in search of a secret door (maybe behind that curtain? No, that looks like a closet . . .), I tried to explain: I had one glove, which I bought here two years ago, and I lost the other. Please, over here, the woman pointed with her blinking nails—the gloves are here! Faceless chunks of grey hung from clothes pegs like carcasses in a butcher shop. No, you don’t understand, I want one exactly like this . . . This is Roeckl, the woman repeated, and the brand name sounded piercing, like the cawing of the carrion-feeding crow—Here are our gloves! Mine appeared to irritate her, like a piece of evidence testifying to a covert misdeed in which she, too, had a part: she kept saying Roeckl, Roeckl, as if she meant Shoo, shoo! Where is the older gentleman who used to have a store here, a glove maker? I asked and Miss Crow screeched as if stung by a wasp, in German, Er ist tot! Slamming that word like a door into my face. Then, in a nicer voice, she repeated in English: The elderly gentleman has died, Roeckl bought the place.

  When did that happen? I made an effort to keep down the trembling in my knees—I already knew the answer.

  In the spring, Miss Crow said, sometime in May.

  In May, wasn’t it. It was pointless to ask for the exact date, everything was clear: he took his glove as he was leaving, the dead sometimes do that—when they want to leave the living something to remember them by. Something more reliable than mere words.

  Doors swung open and closed, a plump lady in a down jacket was asking to see a wallet, behind me a pair of Russian women chatted loudly about scarves. Passersby looked into the windows. A cell phone rang. Nothing was left, nothing to remind me. He died—he’s been disposed of. Gone to be recycled. And what about the gloves? My sunshine gloves and other, moonlight gloves (Mars gloves, Jupiter gloves, Venus gloves, Saturn gloves?)—gloves for love, gloves for mourning, liver-bay, black, buckskin and roan, that had inhabited this space so recently, what became of them? Were they disposed of at a garage sale?

  Aloud I asked, trying to sound more or less composed, Wasn’t there anyone to inherit the business? Miss Crow made a face that simultaneously expressed the appropriate respect for the deceased and a barely indulgent sympathy for the total unsustainability of his business model—meaning, well, you must understand. Yes, I understood. Understanding, in fact, is my job, that’s what writers are for—to try to understand everyone and everything and put this understanding into words, finished to the gossamer fineness of a rose petal, words made supple and obedient, words cut to hold the reader’s mind like a well-made glove that fits like second skin. One can’t do this without understanding, no matter how regularly our kind appears on official paperwork under the rubric of “Entertainer” and gets paid not so much for the hours of labor but for the brand. Roeckl. The old store’s location smack in the middle of the main shopping street must’ve cost a fortune. I can imagine the bidding war that broke out after the Lord of Gloves died, the space is practically a mansion. But can anyone tell me: Is there no one left in Vienna who makes gloves like these? Is there anyone left even still alive who knows how to make gloves like these? Can it possibly be that I became witness to the death of an entire art—like one of those Pacific Island languages that disappears from linguistic atlases every year, sealing off for us, like treasure caves, the parallel worlds they give expression to?

  Why didn’t he pass his craft to anyone? Why wasn’t there the right person to pass it to, another slightly crazy, bearded nerd in love with women’s hands, or simply with a girl to whom he wanted to give the most beautiful gloves in the world? One doesn’t even have to be all that crazy for this—the Lord of Gloves probably himself started there, and the girl refused him, most likely, and for the next fifty years he touched women’s hands with all his unrequited tenderness but all of us who bought his gloves dragged off, bit off a bit of it for ourselves, like hungry geese, and before we knew it, it was all gone. How could it be that no one stopped, no one asked to be taught this language? Every great master has to have students—and he was a great master, I still have proof I could show you, look at this chestnut glove I have, look how delicate and sensitive it is, like a living thing, don’t you want to try it on?

  Try it! Please, girls, don’t be afraid . . . don’t run away!

  No, this last line is me making things up, that didn’t happen. I didn’t stand there brandishing the master’s last surviving piece in front of the alarmed saleswoman and did not deliver a fiery oration that would scare the customers (although we could have yet another short story here, in which the heroine is taken away by the police, a little Hollywood, a little homage to Woody Allen, but squarely in a feminine sensibility—why not, the sixties are coming back, female rebellion is trending). Instead, I politely purchased from Miss Crow a pair of her mass-produced mitts in a less-than-acidic color (and never wore them): it was my way of paying her for the information. Then I walked, without seeing where, along Mariahilferstraße, stumbling—Entschuldigen!—into other pedestrians’ bodies and thought, swallowing tears mixed with rain, I could write a story! Oh, what a story I could write—winged and sure footed, as if dictated by heaven itself, I could go lock myself in my hotel room right now, and write it—if I didn’t have the interview to go to, and then my reading in the city library, and then a dinner with the organizers, and my flight at the crack of dawn—the usual schedule of our literary marketplace. I, too, work regular retail. The Lord of Gloves was mistaken to trust in me.

  And you, too, should forget everything just read here. One day, someone will erase all of our scrupulously crafted words from their electronic depositories in order to save some space, and on the white screen of the new and improved supergadget of fall 2063 we will see the flashing slogan that already so often covers up the vacant spaces of bricked-up doors:

  YOUR AD COULD GO HERE.

  III

  THE TENNIS INSTRUCTOR

  TRANSLATED BY HALYNA HRYN

  I irritate him, it’s obvious. Nothing surprising—when I think of how I must look, a veritable cow, legs awkwardly spread and tennis racket clenched convulsively in my fist (how in the world is one supposed to look graceful in this unnatural pose?—like those two young things on the next court, some fat cat’s daughters,
no doubt: the blonde Barbie on the right keeps tossing her long, loose, picture-perfect hair held back by a white headband—she knows, the bitch, she’s gorgeous!—I experience my own arms as poorly fit artificial limbs, and the legs too), I make myself sick at this tragicomic spectacle and feel genuinely sorry for the dude. It can’t be fun, can it, for this athletic bro to be running drills with a gawk like me—and he must think I’m a moron!—for ten bucks an hour—I know I couldn’t do it even for a hundred! But there’s nothing I can do to help him, except maybe try and explain that I’m really not as dumb as I look on the court. Like that’s going to make him feel better.

  “Wrist tight, fingers loose,” he repeats patiently, catching me for the umpteenth time with a deadly stiff palm and authoritatively unwrapping my rigor mortis clasp. “The racquet should move freely.”

  (His racquet, which he pronounces pretentiously as racquette, grates my ear much the same as I grate his with my irreverent racket, which he corrects every time with a shade of disgust: every trade has its pride.)

  “I know,” I mumble like the class dunce, and really, I do know, I catch everything he says perfectly the first time (I stick to racket not because I don’t know better, but because I physically cannot make myself utter the pompous racquette, my whole sense of language rises up in revolt!) and there really is no need to repeat the same thing for the hundredth time, and to what end, when the information received becomes hopelessly stuck in my brain and in no way can be transmitted to my limbs—I’ll bet paraplegics endure this same agony of humiliation. When I was four, my father bought me a bicycle. He must have had the day off and decided to sacrifice all of it on the altar of paternal duty, and by the end of it, I could be said to have grasped the concept of pushing the pedals with my feet and steering with my hands at the same time, but the only thing I recall from that entire day—one of the scariest days of my life—is the mute terror of my body, rigid with the desperate longing for the torment to end. The spectacle of me on a bicycle brought kids running from all over the block to stand around and offer, loudly and for several hours straight, advice and commentary to assist my father in his task. He probably enjoyed being at the center of such unanimous attention—I, on the other hand, crushed and helpless under the collective pressure like a kitten hurled out into the middle of a roaring stadium, was as good as electrocuted—the wires connecting the first and second signal systems were resolutely cut, leaving the ability to understand instructions and the ability to reproduce movement forever separated, and thus for the whole afternoon my father, not noticing a thing, faithfully wheeled a victim of catalepsy around the yard—a tiny, frightened, motionless body curled up on a bicycle seat. Maybe if I’d burst into tears then, my whole life would have turned out differently. Or if my parents had divorced earlier. As a weekends-and-holidays parent, a role that demands no pedagogical skill (or ability to understand another human being), my father was as sublime as an inventive lover, and from the time I was eight, our excursions to the zoo, to theaters and museums, with the obligatory concluding ritual of ice cream in the café, most resembled amorous rendezvous, especially in the sweet and anxious anticipation they engendered beforehand. In terms of intellectual maturity, I think we may have been peers already, and the game excited us equally: my father, may he rest in peace, knew how to play much better than he knew how to live. As do most men, for that matter.

  Like this one here telling me, with a note of scarcely discernable superiority: “Relax now, you’re not at work! This is supposed to be fun.”

  Hmm, but you are supposedly at work, mister, aren’t you—or have you purposely found a job where you can play and get paid for it too? This “fun” of his he is eager to manifest at all times—when he takes the racket from me for a demonstration (I mean, racquette of course—I wonder if he addresses it as vous in his mind—a pretty expensive toy actually, almost 350 euros, I practically blew my whole honorarium on it at the Reebok store in downtown Stockholm: I thought it would make a nice present for Oleh because I was feeling guilty about something I no longer remember, which has been happening more and more recently, and when Oleh, after a long lecture on account of Reebok—because why didn’t I talk to him first, there are even better, more exclusive stores in Sweden—sent me off with my own gift to these idiotic lessons, I went feeling even more guilty, which raises the question, Is this what my better half was after in the first place?).

  “See heere, ma’am,” he says (dear Lord, what a way with words he has, see wheere? but, unlike him, when I say racket, I don’t frown, not a single muscle in my face moves, I’m a veritable tobacco-store Indian!) and slows down his movements deliberately, for instructional purpose, a film in slow motion, and I can’t shake the feeling that he’s showing off a little in front of me—he is easy on the eyes, and I do enjoy looking at him, he’s good at this: the racket sweeps up as an extension of his arm and then connects with the trajectory of the tennis ball, there’s even a hint of infinity here, of a projection of oneself into the universe with its own mathematical function and limit (the limit in this case being the ground, or else the wall, which the ball meets with a dull thud that sounds a little bit like a moan—if not for this wall, it would fly on and on to eternity). It is only at such moments, when I am watching him, that I relax: what can I say, it’s a pretty sight, and he would make a Hollywood-ready couple with that blonde hussy working her hips on the next court, him dark haired and all, but I definitely see no place for myself here—I will never be able to do this, you can point a gun at me and I still won’t be able to move like that. Any situation that requires me to go through the process of acquiring a physical skill in public instantly throws me thirty years back, to that same little bike—I go deaf, blind, enter a stupor, and wait for it all to end so that I can be set free again. My greatest nightmare in high school was gym class, from which, despite my best efforts (I even pretended to faint once and succeeded in falling quite convincingly, but still lightly enough not hurt myself) I never did manage to get exempted. In high school I figure they must have suspected me of permanent uterine bleeding, like that poor woman with the issue of blood for twelve years that Jesus cured. To swim, at least, I learned on my own—in a deserted spot, risking death by drowning countless times. I never did learn to dance properly—waltzing with me would be something like whisking the Motherland Monument up on the slopes of the Caves monastery in Kyiv, minus the sword—but dancing, fortunately, always contains a sexual element, and that’s what saves me, sex being the only sphere where I can compensate for my otherwise total physical cretinism. Well enough not to have been found out yet.

  And my poor instructor, too, suspects nothing. In his naive mind, the explanation for my unnatural awkwardness is that I spent too much time at my computer—“Yours is a sedentary profession,” he says with a hint of respect and advises me earnestly, the dear boy, to go for some kind of special massage because at this rate I’ll earn myself a herniated disk, and I promise him that I will definitely schedule some, just as soon as I finish my article for the Atlantic Monthly, and the conversation ends there until the next lesson, when the whole story repeats itself. How can I explain to him that there is no way to relax me short of knocking me out? A good pint of cognac would do it, to be sure—then I could dance whatever, wherever, put me on a catwalk, a bar, or a float, like a carnival queen, it’s been known to happen. My body becomes Play-Doh, responding to the rhythm of the music alone, dissolving in it before soaring to absolute freedom, but those movements are all instinctive, as in sex, but once I’m sober again, teaching me any moves, however simple, is not something anyone has ever done, there are no methods for it. If this guy succeeds, he could write a dissertation about me. Put a patent on it. Why not—at least there’d be some benefit from all this.

  But instead he flashes his eyes boyishly, hands the racket back to me—now you do it. In other words, have fun. Hell no, brother: you can drill me like a circus bear, but there’ll be no fun in it, neither for the bear nor for me. Th
ere’ll never be freedom in my conditioned tricks.

  “I have a blister,” I say, and think to myself, Oh my god, I’m like Mavka the forest nymph in that classic play when she says, I cut my hand, because she can’t bring herself to cut down the wheat. He’s going to ask me, like Mavka’s prospective mother-in-law, Doing what? and he’ll be absolutely right! Nonetheless, there really is a small blister at the base of my thumb next to the groove rubbed red by the racket handle: I’ll have something to show Oleh for my efforts, let him see! And if he doesn’t feel guilty after this . . .

  “That’s because you’re not holding it right,” my instructor answers indifferently: my boo-boo obviously makes no impression on him, typical male insensitivity (but when it comes to their own boo-boos, heavens help us, they all turn into the same mewling baby). Something else draws him in, though: he holds my hand a moment longer, studying it as if he’s going to read my fortune, and lets go in response to my quizzical look—flushing, if only just a touch!