Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  She remembered very clearly his tone when he screamed at her, “Do you want to say I left the two of you alone on purpose? You think I could do that? You think that’s what I’m capable of, and you’re telling me just like that?”—his rage so rehearsed, and the sound of it so false it made her embarrassed, not for him, but for herself, for listening to this pathetic, community-theater production. That’s when she started packing, after she said, “Fail!” over her shoulder, in Russian, the language Mr. Corpse-Fucker spoke, as if she’d contracted it from him, like crabs, and was now giving Odainyk back his due share—please sign upon receipt.

  And now it had been twenty years, and Odainyk had left this world, and yet his voice lived on inside her, as if recorded on a nineties tape that you couldn’t listen to for lack of equipment, it was still there, it existed—Olha remembered him but couldn’t produce the sound. This surprised her; it was as if someone told her that she’d kept Odainyk’s sperm alive inside her all these years.

  It was not a pleasant thing to realize that his beautiful, muscular male body (although, let’s be honest, it ceased to be so a long time ago), with his horseman’s powerful torso and strong legs, the body she once embraced with her entire self, whose salty sweat she picked up with her tongue, the body she knew so thoroughly and was delighted with that knowledge, now lies and rots, what’s left of it, in a wooden box somewhere underground—no death had ever evoked in her such a creepy feeling and such a strong urge not to have anything to do with it. Secretly, Olha hoped that Odainyk’s new wife had the good sense to have him cremated. She understood how the news might have affected Ulyanka: she had never told her daughter she’d lived with another man for five years, before she met her father—she had only told her, half in jest, how as a student, bored in class, she’d practice signing her future married name (she made sure this sounded like typical postpuberty silliness, girlish fancies, trying on boys like outfits—what if it’s this one? or that one?) and made sure Ulyanka would never know how intimate of a memory this was for her—many years later, going through her old notebooks when she found those pages, curlicued with versions of Olha Odainyk, Olhaodainyk, Olya Odainyk, O. Odainyk—the name of a new, unfamiliar woman she wanted to be, tore those pieces of paper to shreds, as if they bit her, and burned the shreds in an ashtray. And she certainly would never have told Ulyanka about how once, about a year or so after the breakup, she was watching a children’s choir on TV and burst out sobbing: the children diligently moved their mouths like little fish following the conductor as she bawled uncontrollably, with a fist in her mouth, because she could have given Odainyk three, four, or five such children that looked like him, she could have gone with him to the ends of the earth, lived in a hut in the forest, lived on bread and water if need be, as she once had offered—where nobody could find them, and everything could have been completely, completely different.

  That was the last time that she spoke to him in her mind, reproaching him as if he were standing in front of her—or on the TV—the way she didn’t have a chance to do in real life. In fact, that was her real goodbye to him—the final spasms, delayed in time, with which one expels the placenta after a stillbirth. For years, Olha believed that was it, and with that came an end to her turmoil. When her husband, after the encounter at the opera, made his own inquiries and told Olha more about Odainyk, she felt neither sick nor wounded at the news, despite its violent force, which, she guessed, now also rocked Ulyanka’s world; what he told her robbed her of her entire youth, and to stay whole, she now had to squeeze all of it out of her, like a worm from a healthy apple. According to her husband’s sources, Odainyk did lose his business, but went into politics instead of slavery: he hung around campaign offices for dubious errands, was passed from hand to hand, from project to project, and most recently was seen at the very bottom, at those preposterous staged pro-Russian demonstrations—with priests swinging incense and men wearing Stalin-style cavalry pants and astrakhan hats—which occurred with odd regularity in Crimea and along the Black Sea coast and that no one took seriously. No one suspected that the freak shows with the local riffraff were a cover for rehearsing the Russian invasion. Her husband showed her a photo of one such protest, somewhere in Odessa or Kherson—they all looked alike, like a grotesquely Russified Tolkien production, with Baba Yagas and orcs, plus a dash of military style—and there, behind toothless old women with accordions, skinny tattooed alcoholics fit for a herbarium, and bullnecked jocks in striped navy-issue undershirts, Olha, aflame with shame, spotted the object of her youthful ardor. True, Odainyk had aged, and not in a good way—his face sort of lost structure and sagged in search of its new shape (“Beastly,” Grandma Hanna would call it)—but it was him, without a doubt, peeking from behind the zombies, with a cell phone pressed against his ear, like an anxious overseer. The very same one to whom Olha used to sing Leonard Cohen’s songs from the stage, publicly declaring her love. Olha’s cheeks burned.

  “It’s quite likely that he’s the stage manager there,” her husband confirmed and pointed out a few more men in similar attitudes spread among the crowd (which, when you took a closer look at it, was actually a pretty thin crowd): they were running that whole gathering. Olha liked that he didn’t put down her ex in any obvious way as most men in his place could not have resisted doing—he spared her even greater humiliation—but rather approached the matter in a purely professional way. That’s what she remembered, taking the rest, the dirty backstage of political spectacles in the convoluted Russian-Ukrainian war for oil—or was it the pipelines?—that her husband explained to her the way she always received his explanations: she gasped, nodded, and made her eyes round as appropriate while assessing all the time what this might mean for her and for her family, and as the answer to this key question typically seemed elusive at best, she let the rest of it slip by as background noise, a parallel tonality in a secondary musical part, and soon forgot it—Olha could hear the same thing again as if for the first time. It’s not that it was too complicated for her to grasp; it merely seemed unnecessary. Olha let her ear be her guide in public affairs as much as she relied on it in private: she listened for false notes in a voice, focused much more on how people said things rather than what they said, on laughter and timbre, on the harmony between appearance and behavior, on the vibration, as she would say—that was how she judged political groups and individuals, and was rarely, if ever, wrong. This also made it easy for her to carry on impeccably with her husband’s colleagues, and none of them ever thought of her as stupid. A woman like that could never have been in love with the man in that picture—even when she was very young, even at seventeen. She wasn’t supposed to have even met him.

  The worst thing after this discovery was that Olha lost confidence in her own past, in that entire period of time she was with Odainyk. She no longer knew how to think about what she had considered facts: for example, when Odainyk told her (and she always did as he said) that they could not afford to have a child just yet—did he really, as he told her, care about her stage career or was it possible he never intended to marry her, and simply let himself enjoy being the object of a much younger woman’s love, which gave him the opportunity not to look like a loser at least in his own eyes? Or, that skiing trip to Austria—was he fooling her, or himself? Did he already know he was bankrupt and wanted to have one last fling, or was he, good god, already running Russian secret service errands for his creditors and needing to keep her in the dark? Each piece of her youth she touched fell apart, as if rotten from within—everything could turn out to be not what she had believed it to be, and the only thing she could be sure about was that back then she was dumb as a bag of hammers. Not exactly a great achievement on which to build and, of course, not something you want to share with your own child. So Olha pushed that whole period of her life into the furthest room of her mind, locked the door, and broke the key in the lock. By the time Ulyanka grew old enough to have women’s conversations, she found no traces of Odainyk in her mother’s
life. And thank god, Olha thought—she knew her husband agreed.

  At the beginning of the war she once again thought of Odainyk: when it became known that, following Yanukovych, hundreds of Russian sleeper agents in government agencies, and even some musicians, who would have thought, fled to Russia. Olha pictured them as a murder of crows, a huge black cloud, disappearing on the far side of the national border. For some reason she decided that Odainyk must be among them. This would have been logical, given his political past, and—more importantly—it would have been a fitting end to a secondary theme in her life: the last and final purification, the extraction, the surgery, the distancing from the man in physical space, the separation visible like the parting of light from darkness, the good from the evil . . . let him go, far, far into Mordor, beyond the moat filled with crocodiles, beyond the border, beyond the front.

  But Odainyk did not go anywhere. And now Olha felt as if he spent all those twenty years hiding, lying in wait, biding his time until her not-his-daughter grew up in order to thrust himself into Ulyanka’s life at exactly the same point at which he’d broken into her mother’s: at the age of seventeen. Alive or dead.

  It was at that age that Olha first saw him. Age seventeen: first year of university, second semester, exactly like Ulyanka.

  My god, Olha thought, suddenly lucid, was I as beautiful as she is now? And it still didn’t save anyone?

  Olha prepared for the conversation meticulously. First, she had to apologize to Ulyanka for losing her temper and slapping her, and this, in turn, required her to introduce and lay out several incredibly difficult topics, among them the one most obvious to her, which was still unknown to everyone else. Before visiting the doctor, Olha went to her dentist—because in addition to losing weight that summer, her teeth came loose like they did when she was pregnant, and that was the first thing the doctor asked, whether she was pregnant.

  Olha tried out what she thought was a good tone: Kiddo, one day you will understand. No, that’s not right—for Ulyanka the age of forty-five is the same as seventy, light-years away, the whole you’ll-get-it-when-you’re-my-age is not going to play, she has to try something else.

  Kiddo, remember when I talked to you about menstruation and taught you to use a tampon? So, about that—you know jack squat, and no one does, until it hits you personally what it’s like to lose a part of your own body, something that’s always been yours—and to have to learn to live without it, knowing that it will be forever. In fact, we spend our entire lives losing pieces, running along on the goddamn treadmill, training to accept loss—to drop bits that won’t grow back and not regret it—but we always resist, and you know why? Because we refuse to believe we are mortal, that’s the thing, every loss is a microrehearsal of death, a tiny little bell that we do not want to hear. First it’s the glow of your skin, this golden softness of yours, like an ear of corn—that will dim and dimple in just three or four years, just so you know, and the first lines, if everything goes well, will come in about ten, depends on your sexual life, too, but that’s a separate conversation. Shit, no, forget that part. And then our babies carve the calcium out of our bones and teeth and suck out our breasts—remember how you told me not to button the top button on my shirt? So it would drape over my breasts just so? Well, no dice, honey, your mom can still manage a fashionable just-rolled-out-of-bed haircut, and keep her hips, stomach, and shoulders in respectable shape so as not to fear the swimsuit, but after nursing you, the combat-ready position of nipples up that these pedophile-bait shirts are cut for is quite beyond her, and the veins on her arms and legs, after the double duty on the heart, won’t be chased or massaged into disappearing, and that’s how it’s going to be for the rest of my life, just think of that, but not a single woman ever regretted it, do you understand the point here? These are all medals that we carry on our bodies, like scars earned in victorious battles: the red capillaries of stretch marks on the sunken drum of the stomach, the scary brown tracks after a caesarian, shreds of blue lace of veins on our thighs—we show these off to each other whenever we take our clothes off, never mind that pop culture screams at us to shut up at billion-dollar volume and every surface around features a fifteen-year-old model airbrushed to the smoothness of a greenhouse vegetable. We know what those models—what you—don’t know: that all of our physical flaws and injuries, acquired from you, all these blemishes we are ordered to hide like something shameful, only make you more precious—this is the tax that we paid for the fact that someday you will survive us and will be better than us. This is not a reminder to us that we are mortal, but just the opposite: the marks of immortality. Do you understand? She will understand, she will have to understand this, as long as the delivery is right, the passion not too much . . .

  So that’s that. And there’s only one physical loss, my dear child, that women avoid talking about, as if it were indeed shameful, and that, just so you know, is menopause, the word that you let fly so easily. You must think it’s something like PMS, don’t you? You noticed you are the only one taking tampons out of our box over the past four months (damn, I should have stolen a few . . .), you put two and two together, you clever girl, and gave your mother a drive-by diagnosis? No, Ulyanka, it’s not the same at all, especially at forty-five. At forty-five, just so you know, it’s too goddamn soon, and it comes down on you like the lid of a coffin. You come out of the doctor’s office with this idiotic grin plastered onto your face, as if there’s a crowd with paparazzi waiting for you, and you must not let them suspect anything, and you just keep carrying that grin along the street as if someone had slapped you in that office, and no one must find out. The loneliest experience in a woman’s life. Never mind every one of us goes through it sooner or later—and each one wants it to be later, as late as possible, so you have women on the far side of fifty bragging about their periods like schoolgirls, with eye-rolling, stomach-grasping complaining about the irregular schedules and asking their younger girlfriends for tampons so that everyone would know that they’ve still got it, even though they understand that the younger ones can see exactly what they are doing and are secretly laughing at them—just as you laugh at your own mother now, until your time comes, and you hear that coffin lid coming down: only then does it become clear why nobody wants this particular experience and thus doesn’t want to admit to it, because this, my friend, is the bell you can neither ignore nor protest, no matter how long you still have to live.

  Just think: for thirty-five or forty years, or more, depending on your luck—that’s twice as long as your present age—there is this idea alive in your body, on the cellular level, unknown to you, and all this time it acts as its conductor’s baton: Do I or do I not want—right now, without delay, at this very point in my life—a child? And the rest of your body’s orchestration, the monthly bubbling up and flooding, despite your will, is built according to this idea: it decides how to live to avoid a pregnancy, or how to acquire one, and you are like an instrument in an orchestra, you are plugged into all the secret rhythms, vibrations of the universe, pheromone choirs, weather patterns, magnetic storms, Mayan calendars, phases of the moon, ocean tides, all those things that you, my little friend, are only beginning to discover and make your own—now imagine they snatch that baton away from you—poof, it’s gone! From this point on all your days run together, indistinguishable, as if you have been transported from spectacular mountain country onto an endless flatland covered in grey ash, and you lose your bearings—only your body continues to writhe like an animal that doesn’t understand why it’s been punished: it lows mutely, it fights, it struggles to get out of its own skin that’s become a prison. Until it grows quiet and succumbs, because, in the end, we all go quiet. People still ask you if you happen to be pregnant, and you yourself are unsure of what’s going on with you, until you find out it’s menopause, very funny. Yesterday a maid, tomorrow a hag. A classic comedy of errors. A menopausal woman is such a comic figure: men fall over themselves to pay her back for the power she used to h
ave over them while she went around stinking to high heaven with pheromones, and the women, too, are not far behind, that whole fertile full-blooded herd is only too happy to expel the one who is no longer their sister. The one kissed by death. So that’s whom you decided you want to join, daughter dearest. And that’s why your silly ole mom lost control and slapped you. She is very sorry.

  Olha was herself moved by her decisiveness. It was important that Ulyanka understand her as one woman understands another, for them to delineate a common territory—the one where she would always be needed by her daughter, because she, Olha, would have something to tell her about that which lies ahead for her. Ulyanka is a smart girl, she will understand. And from this territory, Olha’s dead antediluvian lover, who passed through her life long before Ulyanka was even born, will appear, as Grandma Hanna would put it, a speck in the eye—as seen through the wrong end of the telescope. Regardless of what she might have been told by Odainyk’s daughter. Somehow, Olha repeatedly failed to ask her husband, who shuttled between her and Ulyanka like an envoy between warring nations, to find out from Ulyanka what the name of that girl was. Who, obviously, is not to blame here, but who has become, for all intents and purposes, Olha’s main adversary.

  The girl’s name was Hanka—the first surprise thrown at Olha by the newly departed. In those times immemorial when she and Odainyk dreamed about their future, Olha confided in him that if they were ever to have a daughter, she would like to name her in honor of her grandmother Hanna—Hafia, in full. It’s beautiful name, isn’t it—Hafia: Hanka, Hasia. It has been ridiculed and spoiled, mocked as a hillbilly anachronism, so no one chooses it anymore, but it’s so melodious, like a chord on a harp. And why, for example, is Sofia fine, and Hafia is not?

  When Ulyanka was born, her father chose her name; Olha never thought of her as Hafia, not once during her whole pregnancy—as though her old fondness for the name was also infected by Odainyk, as if he crawled into her head, took it away from Grandma Hanna in there, and kept it for himself. And now we see that’s exactly what he did, Olha’s instincts did not betray her. Even from a distance he was eating and drinking up that which nourished her and gave her strength. Her roots, her resources.