Later, as she prepared herself for the Big Talk, Olha wondered if perhaps Ulyanka really wasn’t feeling that well at the time—it was the first day of her period, and at seventeen, a period is still an event that requires special attention—or is it, anymore? On this score, Olha was lost because she couldn’t remember anything about herself in this regard, she remembered little about herself being seventeen, and that prompted her to realize another thing: that Ulyanka had, without her noticing it, pulled a curtain across her own memory of herself. Family stories involving one or the other of them were getting mixed together, like their makeup in the bathroom; she could no longer immediately tell if an event happened in her own childhood or in Ulyanka’s, the way sometimes reality and dreams merge in one’s memory. And of course, like every mother, she liked this: she liked the fact that her daughter grew up to resemble her, she liked it when strangers mixed them up from a distance, or mistook their voices, or thought they were sisters—just last summer, when Olha had suddenly lost a lot of weight, it happened all the time, and they had such fun with it, as if they really were the same age, a pair of coltish teens, two fluffy-headed dandelions in identical jeans. At that point they would still trade tops (only the bust size was different, and she’d say to the kid, Don’t you worry, just wait till you have your own baby, you’ll be a C cup in no time), and Ulyanka, mouth open, absorbed her mother’s unwritten rules of heritable stylishness, and bragged about her to her friends while Olha would sneak at night onto teen-oriented websites to keep up her street cred (and bite her lips anxiously at the fashion videos she and her husband called “a pedophile’s banquet”—but it’s not like you can pack your child into a burka, and besides, Olha, back in high school, herself wore skirts so short she could not bend down, only squat, and nothing terrible happened to her, and what did happen came later and had nothing to do with the skirt). That was a happy time in their relationship, heady and euphoric, as if spiked with spices that quicken the blood, and make a small anthill explode in the hollow at the base of your skull, sending invisible insects down your spine. They did not discuss this at home—Olha knew she had her husband’s tacit understanding; it was during that summer that he began to trawl the internet in search of war orphans, and Olha made several trips to the front to sing in morale-boosting concerts (and locked herself in the bedroom to cry every time she came back—as if the tears could wash out the sight of those young soldiers, boys with velvety skin and small blue veins on their necks, just like Ulyanka’s classmates)—at night, after Ulyanka went to bed, the two of them would sit around the kitchen drinking cognac or whiskey, not a lot, a few drinks to relax because no one could stand being under that much stress twenty-four hours a day—and sometimes after this they would make love like they used to when they were young, with a renewed thirst for the process itself (and sometimes, her husband would come back into her, as she was sleeping, in the middle of the night, like an animal doubling its tracks, and after that they would fall asleep in each other’s arms, and in the morning the pillow would be wet with tears). Neither one of them would give voice to it, but against the background of all those horrific rumors and news stories that went straight as a loaded needle to that groove at the base of your skull, and Olha’s weeping over the pictures of the men killed in combat, and the unremitting dread lodged under their skin—that was the summer they were all afraid the Russians would take Mariupol, that’s all anyone could talk about, that boring grey industrial city that never had anything going for it except its location on the seashore—secretly, they both rejoiced, gloried in the fact they had a daughter and not a son, that no matter how many waves of mobilization came, none could bring a draft notice to their home, ever.
They would never have to face the choice Olha sometimes allowed herself to imagine, inwardly shutting her eyes in horror at the very conjecture: to call in every favor with everyone they could think of to get your child a safe job at headquarters or to send her, together with all the other people’s children, to face the bullets at the front. It’s better not to know some things about yourself, Olha learned a long time ago, better not to end up in situations where such choices need to be made. Of all her friends whose children were drafted, only the Nazarenkos’ son served at the front (“mile zero,” they called it): the boy never said a word to his parents, on purpose, and called them when he was already on the bus to boot camp, said, “Hi, Mom, everything’s okay, I got drafted,” and his poor mother spent the next year explaining to everyone that the boy lost a friend in the Battle of Ilovaisk, and just had his heart set on going after that—well, thank god, he came back already, alive and well, and Olha heard he was about to get married. Every once in a while Olha would remind herself that she really should go visit the Nazarenkos, but at heart she knew she didn’t have the courage to do it—that she wouldn’t be able to hit the right key with that boy, it was as if their generation had swapped places, and in front of him, she was the clueless teen and he the adult she’d rather not face.
For the prom they bought Ulyanka a gown from Lilia Poustovit, for almost two thousand euros—red silk, lace bodice. Ulyanka, with her delicate neck and lovely arms, was so beautiful in that dress that Olha couldn’t hold back tears and spent the whole evening, again, bawling. Of course, they could have been less extravagant, could have saved the money—Ulyanka would have been just as gorgeous in a dress not made by a famous designer—but their smutty, secret joy at the fact that they, thank the merciful Lord, had a daughter and not a son also demanded to be expressed, needed its own celebration—a legitimation, a recognition, and an absolution. The knowledge that other people’s sons were dying, and some other people’s daughters, as the Nazarenkos’ son told his mother, from the villages near the front would sleep with a soldier for a can of beef stew gave Olha’s vision of her daughter walking across the stage, in her crimson gown, a yet more poignant, marvelously painful intensity, an ecstatic, rock-hard booming in her blood, the triumphant chorus from Carmina Burana, as she felt again the sting of fire at the base of her skull and the familiar ant-footed, acidic languor flow down her arms, prompting her eyes to fill with tears. Never had she felt so alive as that second summer of war. Never, not even when she was young.
Not even when she was in love. Not even when in love with Odainyk.
Not even that night he asked her to dance, and she had wanted him so badly that her teeth clattered and she could barely control her shaking.
You wee pesky gnat, you nit, she spoke to her daughter in her mind, marveling at her grandma Hanna’s voice that unexpectedly resurrected itself in her head, What do you know? How dare you? What have you done?
She wasn’t letting herself off the hook, of course not: she could have stopped that fight, could have prevented it from unraveling. Could have doused it at the spark—but that’s the point, isn’t it: she didn’t want to quell it: that would have meant giving in to the kid, tacitly acknowledging her new, alien, condescending separateness, her adult right to evaluate and judge her mother according to her own criteria no longer known to Olha, even when the judgment concerned only her perfume—which was, incidentally, exquisite, perhaps just a touch too musky, a little bitter, with a hint of incense, but it was not meant for you, you little monkey, was it? Not to suppress the fight—to take it, and win it, that was the point! To rub the kid’s face once again in her inappropriate behavior, to make her repent and become, once again, the way she was a year ago. That was the casus belli. All their fights that shook the house like the reverberations of mortar fire in Donbass had essentially one reason: it was a war for territory—that narrow strip of solid ground on which until recently they had been sisters, girlfriends wearing the same jeans, one already and the other still a woman, who could scarf down ice cream together at outdoor terraces and gossip about someone’s pierced lip, and loll on the couch at home, talking, so Olha could thread her life into words and dangle it for the kid like a pearl necklace—Here, hold it, cherish it, it’s yours now. She heard her first bell—a holl
er, actually, a vulgar prison-guard bark to head for the exit—at the endocrinologist’s office, but she knew how to take a hit, not for nothing did she spend all her years onstage, and gave no sign of the news at home, and a thing not named does not really exist. That Ulyanka herself soon began edging her out of their shared space, like a maturing pup growling at the old loose-titted bitch at the food bowl—Just give me a break, Mom! followed by the door slamming (when couples begin treating each other this way, it means love has come to an end, and people who have even a tiny bit of sense part ways at this very moment so as not to torment each other—but what do you do with your own child?)—did not deter Olha from defending her right to the ground that was slipping from under her feet (a fight in which her husband was of no help because he, like all men in such times, understood jack shit); she wanted the impossible, of course—to hold back time, to hold it like a note perched beneath a fermata symbol, to stuff it back, hammer it back, scream it back if necessary. Why not, she could always hear her own voice and control the sound, even when she was screaming, so after that last peaceful turn where she said, Would you mind rolling up your window, the two of them went at it for real, racing up the crescendo as the car climbed Saksahansky Street, outpacing each other, a twelve-tone composition for a rabid violin duet that the good-natured interjection of her husband’s voice, like a double bass, could not hope to overturn. Olha, enraged as she was, registered, at the edge of her awareness, how similar her daughter’s voice was to her own, only a bit higher, more shrill, it’s a shame the girl refused to take up singing, just had to go all preppy with her law degree, didn’t she?—and all of it, all of it could have been stopped, she could have cut herself off midsentence and laugh, change her tone, speak confidentially and gently, or, by contrast, firmly, and everything would have turned out okay, if only Ulyanka had controlled herself also, and hadn’t said, half turning to face her mother (finally!) with all the vileness and contempt she could (or so it seemed to Olha at the time) muster, that last sentence of hers, like the last blow of a sledgehammer that knocks down a cracked-up wall:
“You’re just menopausal!”
All sound ceased in Olha’s head. The world was quiet as an aquarium.
Shocked, she inhaled deeply (and noisily). Next, instead of saying something mature and rational (all she had in her head was a tinny bleat, You’re such an idiot!), she reached awkwardly, and like a cat with her paw, slapped the kid on her conveniently turned cheek.
Every time she thought of that singeing contact of hand with face—each time the memory of the slap returned—Olha wanted to curl up and hide, not just under a blanket, like she did as a child, but way deeper, somewhere beneath the earth. Her fingers remembered they slipped—Ulyanka jerked her head back and Olha was afraid that she might have scratched her with her false nails—and what if, god forbid, she’d caught the girl in the eye? Her husband yelled at them (finally!): they were stopped at a traffic light, stuck in traffic, in the middle lane, and that whole horrible scene lasted less than a minute, wasn’t nearly as long and slow as it felt to Olha in her aquarium, and yet, somehow she missed the moment that came right after the slap—as if a computer in her brain froze up for a second—when Ulyanka opened her door and jumped out of the car. It must be, Olha thought later, that we really do perceive the world in chunks, in discrete frames, because in her next frame Ulyanka was already running down the middle of the street, between the cars, her fashionable little turquoise coat flapping. For some reason, she was not running for the sidewalk but in the same direction as the traffic, like a rabbit caught in the headlights at night; the cars were beginning to move as the light changed, and one after the other hit the horn hysterically at the blinded girl in the turquoise coat (a perfect soundtrack for the end of the world)—and in the next instant (another memory gap) Olha too was running after her, tripping in her high heels, through the sound storm of car horns and the rumble of disaffected drivers that rose up around her like a forest, herself shouting full throat, at the top of her powerful lungs: Ulyanka, stop! Come back! Ulyaaanka!—seeing nothing before her but the turquoise coat, which finally did turn and skip across the street to the sidewalk just as traffic revved up and surged ahead, projecting into Olha’s mind, with commanding clarity, the most horrific product of her imagination: a vision of Ulyanka being hit by a black SUV, several tons of dense metal, how she goes flying out of her coat and jeans like a rag doll, and hits her head—splat!—on the hood of the grey Toyota in the right lane, the blood and brains on the asphalt, and one of her shoes (she’d seen this in a police newscast) resting sixty feet away at the curb. She had no awareness of it, but for the duration of time it took for Ulyanka to reach the sidewalk, she, Olha, stood shock-still among the moving cars in her stupid goddamn heels and shrieked after her daughter like an air-raid siren, like she meant to hold all those cars away from her child, as a prehistoric human must have shrieked to ward off predators in the primeval forest, like a whole women’s battalion in the Finnish Winter War whose battle call, at a perfect fifth, scattered the Soviet Army lines—and like those women, Olha won: she shrieked that whole intersection of Saksahansky and Tarasivka to a halt, she stopped all those crouched rows of cars like a herd of walruses with their tusks—she stopped them and cleared the path for her child to reach safety. Spit three times at that horrible vision, never tell anyone, let it blow away like dust.
Except she could not sing that night. That’s where they were driving—to her show (meaning, she and her husband were going to her performance, and Ulyanka asked for a ride to meet up with her friends—long gone were the days she followed her mother to every show like a puppy).
That same day, or rather night, after it was all over, when Olha, like a deflated tire, lay in bed with a migraine, and the muffled, insistent beat of her husband’s and daughter’s voices in the kitchen assaulted her like the heaving of waves, and knew they were conspiring against her in the kitchen (So she did come home, the little brat!), her husband slipped silently into the room (the drumbeat in her head did not stop, though), stood over her in the dark for a moment, and then sat down beside her. He asked how she was feeling. He asked about her headache. He asked about her throat. She almost expected him to ask when her last period was.
She knew there were more questions coming. Her husband was good at questioning people—he had thirty years of experience as a lawyer plus his acute, far above the average, sense of fairness, it was from him the kid got it, she was his daughter, too, much more than hers, really, Olha thought with blazing clarity, Oh, this blazing clarity of pain, and marveled weakly that the thought evoked no emotions in her.
Instead, what her husband said was completely unexpected—otherworldly:
“Your ex died . . . Odainyk. She knows.”
“I don’t understand . . . ,” Olha’s voice a rustle in the darkness.
Something was coming at her, like that entire street of cars at the stoplight, but she no longer had the voice to stop it. Odainyk? Dead? Why, how? And, wait a minute, what does this have to do with her child?
“She says she knows his daughter,” her husband said simply, in response to her unspoken question, as he often did lately. “They met in a club, she said the girl approached her.” He paused, then added, “Don’t be mad at her. She’s quite shaken.”
That’s when Olha’s voice came back.
“Fuck,” the voice said, coming from the bottom of a barrel, clear and low, from the bottom of her diaphragm. “Fuck. Fucking goddamn it.”
Apparently, she knew no other strong language that she could say out loud, and this, for some reason, made her feel as small, helpless, and unable to move as earlier in the middle of the street on those high heels.
At this, she finally cried—this time really like an orphaned child. She lay there with her head squeezed in a steel band of pain, slapped the bed with her hand, and kept saying as she wept, “Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .”
Tiffany—the word popped up in her head like a jeering clown: t
hat was the name of Ulyanka’s trendy raincoat’s color. She had forgotten this word during the day, and now it came back: a word that had suddenly slipped from her memory, yet another symptom of aging. Hello, menopause!
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