Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

There’s just one thing, she tells herself, looking into the mirror for the four hundred and forty-third time (so this is it, for the rest of my life?)—the mirror is cloudy, with moldy-green spots (what do you expect from a cheap apartment in a poor neighborhood)—at her face, crudely touched-up by approaching old age (thirty-four years old, no fucking joke!). Just one. They never taught us, all our literature with its entire cult of tragic love—Ivanko and Marichka, Lukash and Mavka, my students were enthralled and declared Forest Song superior to Midsummer Night’s Dream, you bet—they somehow forgot to warn us that in reality tragedies don’t look pretty. That death, no matter what form it takes, is first and foremost an ugly business. And where there’s no beauty—how can there be truth?

It’s too bad. It’s too damned bad. Should I head out to the balcony for a smoke?

A discovery: this is how frigid women see the world! There was a time—the last few days of living together and right after the breakup—when, on seeing an erotic scene on television, she would start to cry. Now she watches calmly, like a zoologist watching lizards copulate (hmm, I wonder, how do lizards do it?): two half-naked people in bed, the man places his hand on the woman’s thigh, moves it up, she turns toward him, her legs, bent at the knees, spread; she throws her arms around his neck and the two of them, moaning and tussling about, melt into a kiss… Thank God, next scene.

She had once blurted out, without thinking, in a so-called shared moment of an interesting confidential observation: “You know? Just don’t misunderstand me, don’t be offended: it seems to me that you’re open to evil.” That was about the third or fourth day after his arrival in the Pennsylvania boondocks where the good-hearted Mark is happy to invite, at the expense of his department, all the poets and artists of the whole world at the same time, if only they would help him escape the storms of hell at home for an hour or two (every time he called her in Cambridge he related, in a voice that would go well with a bird’s tilted head: cuck-oo: “Today I met a lovely little Russian girl,” “There’s a black girl here kind of interested in me”—who’d be interested in the poor thing, an awkward forty-year-old schoolboy with excellent grades, with his duck’s waddle, the tummy of a teddy bear, nose-hairs showing, and thinning hair on his crown—and then he’d return again to his home life with the intonations of a hurt child: today he had to do all the dishes and was late to work because of it, and the only thing she could say was that the frying pan wasn’t done right—the intonations would jump into shrieking hysteria when, having exhausted all possible ways of consoling him, she asked plainly, “Mark, if it’s all so hopeless, then why haven’t you split up?”—“Because the fucking bitch couldn’t survive!”—aha, the house bills, the “mortgage,” the “insurance,” and all other maintenance, it’s a good thing we in Ukraine don’t have such problems, a lot simpler for us, you pack your bags, slam the door, and “good-bye, my love”: poverty is freedom is freedom)—Mark arranged for a studio for him over the summer holidays: a corner in a huge barn, kind of like a surreal-looking gym crammed with easels, with a frosted-glass window the kind you have in bathrooms extending the full length of the wall—you should be grateful to him for that, fella, beggars can’t be choosers—she herself had come to that empty university town only for him, it was for him she left Cambridge, and as soon as she did it was like a wall had been hit by a battering ram and come tumbling down, everything shifted from its place: already in Boston’s Logan airport, as soon as she got out of the taxi her sandal strap broke—dragging her foot she walked up to the check-in counter to find out that all United flights were delayed, Washington, where she was to transfer to the mangy Pennsylvania turbo-prop, was in the grips of a thunderstorm—she started running around from one customer agent to another, all shot back empty smiles like flyswatters, what could she do, she absolutely had to be at Mark’s house tonight because they were heading out by car to New York the next morning, to Kennedy airport to meet the brilliant Ukrainian artist who doesn’t (idiot!) speak a word of English, the script was prepared so well, and now this screwup!—she was able to get on another flight, sweating on the plane for forty minutes to elevator music in her headphones (interrupted every five minutes by cheerful promises of departure just as soon as they receive permission), and at Dulles it was like war had been declared moments earlier: people thundered down the corridor, bags bouncing across their shoulders, carts squealed, wheels screaked, an invisible child was bawling along the entire length of the corridor’s rafters, and she, too, charged after the others, from one level to another, looping around like in a nightmare or horror film, from gate to gate, and when she finally ran up, panting like a race dog, to the isolated corner with the gate for her turbo-prop, she crashed right into the proverbial immovable mountain, a professionally pleasant clerk behind the counter: “Your plane has just left, ma’am”—so when’s the next one?—oh the next one is tomorrow at noon—he flashed his teeth: “Have a good night!”—she swore up and down, tried to phone Mark, all the telephone booths were jammed, the machine ate up her quarter, the angry hordes at the United counters were going crazy, demanding their rights (here’s where you see the difference between us and Americans), a huge man with a full shock of hair, for some reason wet, who was clearly on the verge of an epileptic attack, was violently shaking a black man in a United uniform with an also shiny-wet face: “You’re a jerk, you hear me, man? You go and bring me your boss right now, you hear? Right now!”—the fellow, with the whites of his eyes bulging, struggled to get away, slurring and spraying: “You just don’t call me names!”—and pulling the radio receiver out of his pocket with the elegant gesture of a magician or perhaps a waiter he called, not the requested boss but rather the police, well, this you would have gotten in Sovietland as well—Rosie whined into the receiver that Mark had already left for the airport to meet her—outside the glass doors, in the yellow-lit darkness, she once again saw the diagonal spears of rain, she hobbled over to the baggage claim conveyer belts to pick up her bags since it was obvious now that she’d be spending the night in Washington, the small-built baggage-handler with a pitted nose, like it had been transferred from someone else’s face, eagerly informed her as soon as he saw her claim stub that they had managed to transfer the Boston bags to the damned turbo-prop in time—they really had to hustle, ma’am, they only had ten minutes, but they made it, thank God, don’t worry, ma’am—he stood there glowing with his accomplishment and awaited praise, she almost felt bad about disappointing him: you mean the luggage went on without me? I’m standing in an airport called Dulles in the city of Washington on the continent North America on the planet Earth with a ladies’ purse over my right shoulder, in my left hand there is a computer bag, no toothbrush, no spare set of underwear, at this moment flying over the Atlantic is a man for whom I arranged this whole business, and yet this indeed is—my only address: after collecting her thoughts somewhat as she smoked two cigarettes in a row, she changed her ticket yet again—destination JFK: if this is how things are Mark can meet both of us there tomorrow, we’ll each arrive separately, but we’ll find each other somehow; she called some friends in Washington who had been inviting her to come stay for quite some time, although probably not at midnight and without warning—hi there, so I’m here, in Dulles, “if you could just give me a drink of water, because I’m so hungry I don’t even have anywhere to stay,” as the saying goes—and this is the literally the case: with their address written down on a scrap of paper—“it’s a fifteen-minute drive, we’re waiting for you,” phew, the world’s not without good people—feeling a smile of a mentally challenged child permanently glued to her face, no doubt from fatigue, she shuffled off to the taxi stand, but this was not yet the end: there was a tiny Pakistani at the wheel in whose coarsely grated speech English was not to be discerned so easily—bravely heading out into the night, at exactly fifteen minutes later he turned his head toward her in the darkness of the car—slowly, as if on hinges, headlights of approaching cars lapped back and forth like waves, like the shadows of giant invisible fish, the red tableau of the meter flickered like an abandoned cardiogram in an operating room where all the doctors have left—and he asked her, did she happen to know how to get there—excuse me, but isn’t it the cab driver that’s supposed to know the way?—the nakedness of empty suburban expressways, the blackness of the night on either side without a single light, where am I, Lord, who am I, why am I here?—another fifteen minutes and they drove into a town, they sped up neatly swept moonlit streets, first one way, then turning around, the other, how long have you been in the States?—she shouted at him from the back seat like he was deaf—five years, he answered, continuing to hold his head in the same awkward position—and he kept stopping his cab, and he kept turning on the light, and he kept pulling out the crumpled blanket of a map from under his seat, holding on to it with both hands like it was the magic carpet that would miraculously deliver us, and kept waiting for something as he stared at it, she thought dully for a moment that perhaps the poor guy didn’t know how to read—what did you say the street was called?—he rolled the pebbles of disobedient syllables in his mouth unable to pronounce “Rupert Street,” nor could he repeat them after her, because she also spoke with an accent, perhaps not as vigorous as his, “Kood yoo koll dereh?”—uh? aha, “could you call there,” in other words, to the place we’ve been trying to get to for the second hour now, my friends are probably losing their minds, she calls and then she disappears!—good, hand over the receiver—once, twice, and a third time, at first they couldn’t get a connection, and then finally an aggravated Ron (who, it turns out, had already been calling the cab company), was giving the driver, who still could not shake his ataraxy, some kind of multi-storied instructions, and once again the speeding up and down empty streets began, as though the driver had turned over all his senses to car: the cab rushed and groaned desperately, stopped, snorted, scratched the back of its head, and asked itself: what if I go that way?—it cursed (squealing its wheels), wrung its hands, and in the half darkness of the car interior the Pakistani’s silent fear slowly spread, she could sense it physically—it was beginning to make her queasy, the man was watching his job slip through his helpless hands like a rope, his frail support in this freakish land, and devil take this “ledi” with her strange accent who got it into her head to go devil-knows-where in the middle of the night—she felt bad, wanting to occupy less and less space in the back seat, and after the fourth (!!!!) call “dereh” Ron was screaming into the phone: “Where are you? Stay where you are, just don’t move, man, okay?”—after five minutes a white car flew out from around the bend, Ron’s figure jumped out, ripped open the door of the cab, your lungs filled with the humid smell of a summer night, and into the car—Ron’s furious seething (“it’s fifteen minutes’ drive, man, you just don’t know your business!”)—and crawling out to freedom, swaying on her high heels (the left sandal had fallen apart totally, could not be held together) she suddenly felt a wet gurgle in her panties: her period had begun. End of paragraph.

And she could not muster up any pity for the Pakistani—he was too frightened to take any money, not a cent, well, too bad, he wasn’t he only one who had a bad day… She fell asleep at Ron and Martha’s with that same idiotic smile still attached to her face like cookie crumbs: well-well, it occurred to her as she fell asleep, my darling’s on his way, he sure is—the catastrophes have begun raining down! So it’s small wonder that her first reaction at the sight of her beloved man at Kennedy—he was standing against a wall, chattering away with fellow travelers on the Kyiv flight in the most innocent way, jeans jacket, the familiar gray spiky hair, she saw him before he saw her, how many times had she played out this scene in her mind!—was an involuntary prickle of hostility—whereas he, look at him, scampered toward her as fast as he could, planted a kiss on her cheek as though nothing much had happened, as though this half year of devastating waiting had never occurred, this futile burning of oil in the vessel of a vestal virgin, and there was no need for any explanations, behind him Mark bobbed up and down like an obedient penguin, his round belly protruding forward, well, true, this wasn’t the time for long explanations, I’d like you to meet… —how dumb and inappropriate all this turns out to be, rumpled, chewed up, I’m simply tired, I have to rest, catch up on sleep, and he, too, has had a long flight, I’ll figure it out later, later—and “later,” once we got home, alone and face to face with each other, suitcases half-unpacked, it appeared—peeking out as if from afar, not quite yet accessing the still deadened, seared, gnawing instincts—that thought which she blurted out to him without thinking, brought it forward and laid it at his feet, like a dog retrieves a stick—you know, it seems to me that you’re open to evil. He jumped back like someone stabbed him with a knife; that malevolent flame in his eyes was strange, she had seen it before—on the edge of a bared grin with sharply protruding incisors from under the upper lip, like it was something else that peered out for a moment through his narrow eyelids, red-rimmed and swollen from lack of sleep—it was late at night, they had stepped out for their first walk at the new place, to have a look at the neighborhood that mysteriously glimmered with colored lights in the yards and gardens; from the half-open doors of the single-story buildings bursts of music and laughter escaped from time to time, white T-shirts passed by in the gentle brown darkness, disappearing into its depths, the town was awake, in the throes of anticipation of a holiday: the annual arts festival would take place soon, look at that house straight out of Andersen’s fairy tale, look at that interesting spire!—a new beginning, we will have a new beginning, I still have to go light a candle in church—to thank God for helping me come here to be with you, yes, yes, she nodded, all the horrors are behind us, all those fires, crushed cars and bodies, crazy flights, quite a story! there’s only one thing to mention to keep in mind for later—you know? Just don’t misunderstand me, don’t be offended: it seems to me that you’re open to evil. She was aiming, in the habit of a professional lecturing bore, to examine this issue further: it’s not that the evil is actually lodged within you, but that you, in some fashion, manage to attract it—but there was no explaining: he flashed a wild, otherworldly glare, just as they came out to an intersection—looked both ways and decidedly shook both his head and forefinger: that way!

And from that moment they were hopelessly lost.

Before that they had spent an hour wandering around their own, not-yet-accustomed-to abode (he was saying “our little house” as she was filled with the warmth of an inner smile)—time after time they would return to it and then set off in a different direction—when suddenly the whole neighborhood became unrecognizable, and they could not figure out which direction was home. Knocked off their bearings, they passed intersection after intersection, stoplight after stoplight, all their orientation points—the pseudo-Gothic spire, the hedge, the square with the trash bins, which they had walked by each time—vanished like into another dimension and after a few times she began asking directions (at least she remembered the address) from every passerby who crossed her path, of which there were fewer and fewer because it was already past midnight, tipsy students partying on the lawn of one of the yards simply shrugged their shoulders unable to say anything comprehensible but at the same time still managing to get into a fight discussing whether it should be left or right, and for quite some time after they had stupidly-smiling-sorry-apologized and taken off, they could still hear behind them the strident clamor of a female voice sliding over consonant clusters not very soberly—giving some Jerry hell for, as usual, not having a “damn clue” and naming the wrong street—they had obviously wandered off too far, it was actually quite funny—amused, she was translating the girl’s scolding for him, poor Jerry—he, on the other hand, clammed up, demonstrating no such childish enthusiasm, but she still kept making fun of it, see, you should have listened to me, I’ve got a perfect sense of direction, it has never led me astray—yup, that much is true, sweetness, it’s just that this time it was another one of your instincts that led you astray, fa-a-ar more important than mere direction. Did it ever.

This went on for about an hour—and then suddenly he stood stock-still and pointed: the hedge! They had been circling not more than several dozen yards away the whole time. Again the neighborhood “switched on,” all the familiar landmarks bobbed up. How could they have been so blind, she wondered. That’s right, “good question,” as they are prone to saying around here. How could you have been so blind, you poor fool? So blinded at a time when everything around you was screaming, howling at you in direct speech? What’s the panic, you would have tossed your head, no-oh, you would not have let it stop you, even if a fiery hand had appeared out of thin air and sketched a written warning on the wall right under your nose, you were in love, oh yes, you were sure that you could do it (“I can do anything!”), do what not a single person can do on their own for another—it can’t be done, luv. It can’t be done. Unless—and here, as they say in newspaper ads, different options are available—unless you exchange your own life for another’s: exchange destinies. No, thank you very much, I had somewhat different plans for my life.

Too bad that they have now somehow altogether lost their meaning…

Their first night together, that mad—festival!—night with the crazy race toward the flashing avalanche of lanterns reflected in the street puddles, flying from one late-night pub to another, and finally to the completely unambiguous little bordello on the outskirts of town, who would have thought that they had something like this out in the provinces (unremarkable from the outside, except for all the expensive foreign cars—a house with two rooms “across the hall” from each other, in one room leather soles shuffled across the wooden floor, a densely compacted drunken human mass shoved to and fro in dance, and in the other, where they were served coffee and liqueur, there stood two cots covered with quite touching azure plaid blankets, over which hung some kind of obscene lithographs—“Kuprin! Straight out of Alexander Kuprin!”—she had burst out laughing; despite her physical exhaustion—it was her second night without sleep!—she was nonetheless very keenly aroused, like she had drunk champagne, by the pathetically exhibitionist theatricality of this atmosphere of cheap sin, by the convulsive music behind the thin wall, by the almost embarrassed look in the eye of the woman serving them drinks—she would especially remember seeing in the dance room a very young, scarcely eighteen-year-old prostitute with flowing chestnut-colored hair, attractive in that puppy-wet, bright, untarnished folk-song beauty that you can still find among girls in Volyhnia and Podillia—and the poor thing, dead drunk: “Listen”—she had latched on to them, sensing something out of the ordinary—“what’s your name? My name is Maija. You’re such a beaudiful cupple. Naawh, I’m seerious”—and when given a light for her cigarette she replied like a gracious girl, “Thank you kindly”—that local dialect “thank you kindly,” just like they taught her at home!—for some reason pierced one to tears with an aching pitying tenderness: “She’s still a child and has no idea what’s happening to her”—she shared her feelings with him in the car on the way back—he shrugged his shoulders—“Who the hell cares? She’s just a wipe, that’s all,” and yet that “wipe” was the first to recognize the growing, awakening love between them, every love needs witnesses at its beginning, it needs—parental, tender approval from the outside world of this newly emerged union of two, and the world is never miserly in dispensing its blessing with warm, misty eyes, with the smiles with which old men turned to look at us in the train station café into which we brought from the street, in a flying, dancing rhythm, the fresh breeze of an invisible carnival, the atmosphere of sly glances at each other, little games, conspiratorial chortles over something frightfully funny but incomprehensible to anyone else—shining sequins, generously scattered lucky confetti, which, as it falls, slowly twirls in the air long after the door shuts behind the radiant couple, “Which cigarette lighter do you want?”—“The red one”—he turns to the bartender, spreading his arms helplessly like a comedian: “She said—red”—and the bartender begins to glow like a juicy peach, a smile washing over his face, he’s a participant, and, filling the tall glasses with sticky, amber liquid, he lets it spill over the top—ah the world loves lovers, because only they, in the dull monotony of daily life, give it a sign that it’s really different, better, than it’s used to thinking of itself, that it’s enough to stretch out your hand, twist the dial, and everything around begins to sparkle, glitter with the colorful lights of a child’s kaleidoscope, begins to laugh from an overabundance of strength, and breaks into a dance!—the old street photographer on the park bench, beside him a matron like a Scythian statue in a cloth padded jacket: “Photograph those young ones over there!”—“Oh stop,” he drones slowly, almost dreamily, “they’ve got other things on their mind, they’re in Love”—the last word is spoken with a capital letter, and you, exchanging glances, turn and rush over to be photographed, eager to either offer yourself as a gift to these oldsters or, on the contrary, thank them for the unexpected blessing that descended like a wet kiss of a fallen leaf on your forehead—then he takes away those photos and you will never see them again, it’s not impossible that he’s already torn them to bits, thrown them into the ashtray and set fire to them—afterward carefully pushing the ashes into a little pile with his crooked baby finger—okay, darling, I’ve nothing against it, you can engage in a little suffering, too: it was time for you, too, at the tender age of forty-plus years, to discover that not all of us are “wipes” or, in the best-case scenario, “mousy loves,” I’m sorry, but I only know how to play for keeps, and if I’m not going to be your love, not a mousy one but a real one, then I sure as hell won’t be, in any way, your “wipe”: I prefer to be sandpaper, sir)—that first night, it was probably then, in those moments of heightened emotion, that somewhere deep inside her was born a slightly ironic, sneering coldness: it’s a fuck party and nothing more, with all the attendant attributes, like some off-stage screenwriter had taken care to maintain the purity of the genre (and moreover, as quickly became apparent, a rather unsuccessful fuck party at that!)—however, they don’t call us gifted kids with enormous creative potential for nothing, we can convert an unsuccessful fuck into a tragic love in a flash, driving ourselves into a totally suicidal state in the process—it was only after nine (that’s right, nine!) months, in another land on another continent, on the night of the final fight in a room of some hillside motel—first tiptoeing around, smoking on the wooden veranda, they wrestled in hushed voices so as not to wake anyone up, then they went out walking—speaking at full volume as though the raising of voices meant automatically setting feet in motion—across the parking lot, between automobiles whose walrus sides flashed reflections of the moon, a stop—a confrontation, eye to eye—a spark!—a clash of sabers!—and suddenly he’s turned around and running across the whole lot back to the room to pack his things, a small, almost waxlike figure in shorts quickly moving its naked legs—within him twirled, like a screw—it seemed as though you could hear it grinding—nothing but rallied pride, a burning fear of what, God forbid, “people might say” (the good old provinces talking, Khvylovy might have sighed!) if they were to learn that it was she who left him, yanked him out of his home turf, carried him over the ocean and dumped him, what a tough broad! they’d say, and that’s why, heaving a travel bag quickly stuffed with his crap over his shoulder (“Don’t forget your sponge, dear,” she was handing it to him from behind, now that she too had made it back to the room) he barked with that especially brutal, quarrelsome voice that he’d been in a habit of addressing her with lately: “I’m flying home tomorrow! Thanks much for America!” (she ha-ha-ha’d in her soul, despite not really being in a laughing mood, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be flying anywhere, that by tomorrow or no later than the day after—a creative personality, after all!—he’d find himself some new version of his being here, in no way connected to her, which is exactly what happened)—and he tore off into the night—two and a half miles! with his stuff!—to that damned studio (I wonder if it’s at least open at night or whether he’ll just sit somewhere under a bush, crazy man, until morning?)—it was only then, after she closed the door after him, with mixed feelings about a show that wasn’t quite over, a burning rod of “what the hell do I do now?” plunged into her brain and that feverish-nauseous trembling scattered over her entire body that hadn’t subsided for over a week already—as though she really was a mechanical doll in which all the wheels and screws had slipped out of their grooves so that she could only swallow liquids and couldn’t sleep at all for several nights at a time—it was only then that she turned to the mirror and saw it: coming up, coming up to the surface, artistically twisting her lips with their not yet totally smudged-off lipstick!—that same coldly ironic (it’s a fuck party and nothing more) detached smile: what a story!—this smile said—God damn it, what a story…

And on that same night, as soon as she found herself alone (she felt better!), she finally, for the first time since his arrival, had a real dream: at first, still on the cusp of being awake and falling asleep, she had the one of him walking away from her on a narrow plank heading downward, but then there suddenly came a crowded, erotic nightmare: invisible hands, many hands caressing her from all sides—persistently, hotly, suffocatingly, and she had to gather all her strength to break free—only to turn up in a huge, empty, echoing hall with a high, vaulted ceilings like backstage at the opera, something akin to constructivist stage props were cluttering up the hall—carelessly draped pedestals, plinths of papier-mâché, some kind of stepladders, in a nave that looked like a dark cave stood a high podium, and flying in from all sides, with the whistle and rustle of wings and capes, settling on all those raised surfaces were the Princes and Princesses of Darkness—black vestments flitted by, out of the corner of her eye she spotted some chicken claws coming out of huge paws overgrown with shaggy reddish wool that had dug into a protruding section of a wall, but her main attention was glued to an incredibly tall—you couldn’t even make out its face!—figure dressed in a black cassock standing at the podium: is that not the Grand Prince himself, she wondered, who decided to reveal himself? None of this was in the slightest bit frightening—despite all of the striking external trappings, the demonic assembly constituted no clear threat, rather it gave the impression of a ritual somewhat reminiscent of a Brezhnev-era party meeting and in fact treated her with a kind of friendly acceptance, taking her into its circle, accepting her as one of its own—and, walking up and down that filled hall from one end to the other she began, crossing herself confidently, to recite “Our Father,” and they obediently transformed themselves into whorls of neon-blue vapor and flew off with a pyrotechnic hiss—only a gigantic cat, turning into a neon-blue shadow of a cat, hopped around from pedestal to pedestal for some time still before he too went up in smoke, and then there was still that panting gnome—with black wings, with a ski cap and simpleton’s round face (clown nose!) who swooped in late and, not catching on to what’s happening, lashed out at her, “What, hasn’t it started yet?”—for him especially she repeated “Our Father” and he, after putting up some minimal resistance for appearances’ sake, and likewise not presenting himself as anything too scary as he lunged for her a few times, had to, in the end, what else was there to do, also turn into a neon-blue ball and, releasing a carefree whistle, fly away. In that dream she first felt a waft of relief—as though she had returned back to herself and, all alone in the now emptied hall, she thought, no—she realized: so it’s not really serious—this suicide stuff. At least, it wasn’t yet.

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel a little awkward raising this issue now—obviously, it’s more suited for a sermon than a serious academic paper, and I can see you, one after another, leaving the auditorium with sarcastically curled lips: “crazy stuff,” typical Slavic mysticism, your auditorium seats noisily snapping back—just a moment, I’m asking for just one more minute of your attention, I’ve even prepared, just to keep things comme il faut, a quotation for you here—I apologize that it’s not from Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan but quite the contrary, from Jacob Böhme: when Satan was asked why he left heaven, he replied that he wanted to be an author.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the country which from its inception was a human creation and where the authorship of each person over his or her own fate is the fundamental postulate of education (I have here a newspaper clipping: an elderly millionaire couple, the Browns—Richard, seventy-nine years old, and Helen, seventy-six—killed themselves by carbon dioxide poisoning in their garage, prior to that bequeathing their entire estate—ten million dollars, nothing to sneeze at!—to Christian charity and sending explanatory letters to their friends: both were gravely ill and after considering everything rationally they decided that rather than squandering the money they worked so hard for their whole lives on doctors and medical care it would be better to help young people get on their feet—will they also be buried outside the perimeter of the church cemetery, or will those who derive benefit from their millions intercede with their prayers to God and ultimately save their souls? It’s a murky business—this dispensing with yourself as you see fit: there was a certain Father Kolbe in Auschwitz who during one of the “purges” there offered himself up to die in place of a certain Pole, because that man had two sons at home—the SS officer smirked and allowed the exchange, and that man survived and returned to his family in Warsaw only to find out that his two sons were killed during a bombardment, how about that!—ah, Father Kolbe, you interfered in something that wasn’t your business, you wanted to become an author—and you broke the rules of the game, because that man was meant to die and who knows, if you hadn’t meddled, his boys might still be alive today, and I am seriously concerned, that’s right, don’t laugh—I am concerned about the Browns’ millions—will they really bring someone a luckier lot in life, or will, God forbid, one of those Brown fellowship recipients burn to a crisp in a chemical fire in the research lab where he ends up at their expense, or will yet another one, after completing his studies in Italy and becoming a renowned singer, after years of success and glory, slit his throat once he loses his voice? It’s a shame, really, that your country has never known a proper war—war allows you to understand many things about life and death, because individual fates, no matter how telling, generally never teach you anything; a year ago, I remember, the latest news carried a hilarious, if you allow me to call it that, story: in New York some guy threw himself out of the window of a skyscraper, but landed on the roof of a parked automobile whole and unharmed, and, unwilling to accept defeat—obviously, he had been taught in childhood to get what he wanted no matter what—headed back up to that hundred and umpteenth floor and, if you can imagine, threw himself out again, this time breaking an arm, a leg, and something else, but still wasn’t able, the poor sucker, to settle scores with his life—let’s admit, ladies and gentlemen, that somewhere in the depths of our souls we are a bit annoyed by the arrogance of this bastard—just like we are by the burglar who tries to break down the door when he can’t pick the lock, or by the spoiled child who stamps its foot and screams “gimme!”—so he didn’t succeed, it’s what he deserves)—in this country, ladies and gentlemen, with its increasing proliferation of satanic sects in the underground and psychiatric offices on the surface, might it not be time to stop and ponder over the question of authorial rights—over what we truly can do, and what we shouldn’t?

Wanting to be an author—to create—is to raise your hand to the exclusive prerogative of God. Because none of us truly creates, ladies and gentlemen—we all remember the example about creative thinking from our psychology textbooks—a mermaid, half woman and half fish—what poverty of thought, if you really consider it, the imagination of a butcher—cut a piece from here and a piece from there, glue it together and we’re all proud: we’re artists! But what about ex nihilo—have you tried that? Can’t do it? That’s the point… All that we’re given—like children toys—are ready-cut slivers of reality, fragments, details, colored pieces of some large, unsolvable puzzle, and we crawl over fussing with them, without raising our eyes, touching them, licking them, smelling them, a completely innocent and pleasant occupation—except that the point is that every once in a while (ho, you wouldn’t believe how often, actually, and it doesn’t necessarily take a genius) we manage to put a few of those puzzle pieces together according to some greater, taken from who-knows-where, invisible-to-the-naked-eye plan, in which one can recognize the pulsation of independent, as if naturally born, life. And that’s when our authorial (ha-ha!) pride switches on: we puff out our chests, ruffle our feathers, and imagine ourselves to be creators—whereas all that has happened is that the curtain was pulled back for a second and through the slit we saw a tiny tip of the original general plan, the same one according to which the world was once created—from nothing, complete and beautiful, the one from which humanity backed away (when? at which prehistoric turn? in which Pyrenees cave?), and the memory of it (so evanescent! so distressingly easily lost! and yet—how would we live if we were to lose even that?), of that original, blinding completeness is preserved, besides religion, only in art and in love.

(I believe that all those rigorous clerics had a point—the iconoclasts, the Puritans, and the rest of them—that the very idea of an icon or a religious sculpture profanes the sacred—the joint venture of religion and art truly is a compromise on religion’s part, an inevitable concession—from exhaustion—enough already!—because of an inability, any longer, to establish direct contact without resorting to various obvious vulgar devices: peeling gilding on wooden boards, an angel’s nose chewed off by bad weather, a statuette crudely decorated with motley rags. Quite possibly at one time there had been direct contact—there had, but what’s the point of trying to track it down now?… Religion, having become a social institution, has gone to the dogs—in church, where I dragged myself one day in the hope of somewhat dispersing the dark nimbus cloud that burned my brain day after day without allowing a single cooling thought to slip through, there reigned a distinct spirit of a closed society: curious glances at the stranger, clustering of old friends on the balcony after the service in separate groups, stares, laughter, meaningful exchanges, shared news—people showed up the way they would to a party, to “socialize,” and praying in front of them felt somehow inappropriate.) Right of access to the plan is still maintained by us—individual access, because humanity itself over the past several hundred years has been moving further and further away, in leaps and bounds (perhaps beginning with the Renaissance, with Mirandola’s audacious: “Man! Adam! I have put you in the center of the world!”—so go ahead and stand there, may you stand there till Kingdom Come, and now every psycho with a paralyzed arm thinks he’s Adam while we afterward scratch our heads unable to tally the millions killed: was it twenty, or forty, or all the way up to sixty?)—while the memory of lost divine status keeps teasing us, it so-o entices us, flickering seductively, but too bad, as soon as we step a little closer, oops—yup, there he is, waiting at the door watching us and rubbing his paws—the One who would be Author—he’d so love to wedge his way in there and take over, but can’t do it himself; only by riding in on our backs, on the backs of those with access can he get in there and that’s why it’s a hundred times safer for us not to even try anything, to forget all about access and play obediently in the sandbox, shuffling around those puzzle pieces, creating out of them newer and newer useless combinations—lining up Campbell’s soup cans in a row, displaying rubber chairs dressed in women’s shoes at the Biennale, blowing streams of soap bubbles onto newspaper pages—identical, meaningless words, sometimes it ends up being quite entertaining, kilometers of texts (that’s right, not poems anymore, texts) about your first ride on a bicycle, about your first period, or about nothing at all—it’s okay, “interesting,” cackles the gaggle of critics, university professors, doctors of literature, forgive me if I’ve offended anyone present—they say that if you seat three monkeys at a typewriter that between now and eternity they have a chance of clicking out a Hamlet for us, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to reveal a terrible secret to you now: art in our times is slowly going to the dogs because—it’s afraid.

Only love protects us from fear: only it alone can shield us, and if we carry it within us, then… then… (I honestly don’t know what then, I don’t know what will happen now with that man, what more destruction will be wrought by that black tornado with a slight, phosphorus-pale figure locked in an iron grip getting pummeled in its vortex—a “devil’s wedding” on dusty fall roads, my grandmother used to tell me: if you see it, step aside, she herself still knew how to throw a knife horizontally through the eye of the whirlwind, and then blood would show on the knife, all that we know how to do these days is perhaps whip a knife across the kitchen at the man we love—the gesture seems to be the same—a copy, an imitation, a reflex of tribal memory with its inner meaning dead, a gesture with which, rather than shield yourself, you throw yourself into the very center of the “devil’s wedding.” You mustn’t, oh you mustn’t chase the cold starlight of loveless beauty: those aren’t the allies you want on this path.

—that’s the sort of stuff I was writing, I finally got my wish, so to speak, look at me—Lady Dante! Yet Dante not only had Virgil, he also had Beatrice. And if there is no love living inside us at all times then, instead of expanding, the tunnel through which we race with such excitement grows narrower and narrower, it becomes harder and harder to squeeze through, and we no longer fly, as it seemed at first, but crawl with great effort, coughing up clumps of our own lungs and also that, which was once called our gift and which, my God, really was a gift!—and we ooze onto canvases like squashed bugs, with the colorful spots of our own poison, and we choke on carrion words that stink of rot and hospital carbolic acid, and all kinds of unpleasant things begin to happen to us, insane asylums and prisons show up on the horizon (depending on your luck), and then the only thing remaining is to jump off a bridge (Paul Celan), tie a noose around your neck in the hallway of someone’s house (Marina Tsvetaeva), stick your head into a gas oven (Sylvia Plath), lock yourself in a garage, maximizing emissions from an exhaust pipe (Ann Sexton), swim out to sea as far as possible (Ingrid Jonker), the count goes on, “to be continued,” so what do you think, is this normal, is this the way things should be? But the further you go on, the worse it is for these “things,” nobody lives to see their “Faust” anymore, what do you think, this is a coincidence, you think that people have less talent these days?… It’s their chances that are decreasing, chances are decreasing for all of us.

Only love protects us from fear. But who (what) will protect love itself from fear?

(And there are more and more sex shops with every year, mechanical devices, oh, these advantages of the technological age, sex over the telephone, they got me that way once, too—at home, in my own home, where did you think: took me for a ride totally, never did find out who it was—at first a female voice disguised as a whisper—I took it to be a friend, a pretty screwed-up gal: “Olka? Is that you?”—it was no Olka, as it turned out later, even though that thing seemed to confirm: yeah, me—and they began the scam: I’m in trouble, I’m calling from someone’s apartment: there’s two guys here, they say they want to rape me—either in the bum or in the mouth, there’s one of them coming now, I’m scared, “Where are you? I’ll call the police, give me your address!” but the non-Olka was gone and instead a young male voice, breathing threateningly, came on the line: “You’re her friend, right? You want me to let her go? Then moan for me”—what wouldn’t you do for a dear friend in trouble, it was disgusting—I tried to plug in my sense of humor, it’s okay, it’s like they’re asking you to sing a little song for them, but when finally, in reply to my helplessly painful cry of humiliation [you’re screaming from the abuse and they think it’s from pleasure, or maybe they’re not thinking that at all, maybe your pain is exactly what it takes to make them come?] the male voice abruptly snapped, “Done,” and a busy signal came in on the receiver, short beeps like drops of water from a leaky tap, I, wiping my moist forehead, nonetheless felt—laughs aside—raped: that was a young healthy man on the line, could it be that, damn it, he, too, was afraid of a live woman?)

Fear came early. Fear was passed on in the genes, one was to fear all beyond the immediate family circle—anyone who expressed any degree of interest in you was in fact spying for the KGB to find out what’s really going on at home and then those bad men will come again and put Daddy in prison. Especially suspect were those who tried to strike up “liberal” conversations. Around ninth grade, at the citywide Creative Writing Olympiad she met a whiz kid in big glasses from the math school. He had the skin of a freshly-peeled peach, rare for an adolescent, and glancing at him sideways she could see, behind the abnormally thick lenses, dark feminine eyelashes as thick as silk; and when he laughed, his whole body contracted as often happens with very nervous intellectual boys who aren’t allowed to go out to play by themselves, but are let out only when sitting on a sled bundled up in a wool shawl to well above the bridge of the nose. Such boys inevitably fell in love with her, that much couldn’t be helped, but in spite of it they were avid readers and liked to discuss what they read. And so one day the whiz kid from the math school, holding on to her elbow awkwardly and old-fashionedly (as if with an artificial limb) while he guided her around the slippery spots—it was winter then and the snow-covered sidewalks glistened with treacherous black mirrors—had the indiscretion to ask, by the way, had she read the banned Ukrainian author Vynnychenko? Instantly she felt her head pound: This is it! This is what Mother and Father warned about—and with that shrewd Lenin glint in her eye (she did sense it quite consciously to be Lenin’s), accompanied by oh, such a languorous pause as if to say, okay, let’s play with this, I can see right through you, she replied, “No, can’t say that I have,” and, having waited it out until the whiz kid confessed all he knew—about the democratic Ukrainian republic that waged war on the Soviets, about the Ukrainians living abroad (as she listened, practically swooning at such flirtation with danger, she no longer had the slightest doubt who this was talking to her)—she doused him with a bucket of ice, tapping out each syllable in precise Pioneer Girl fashion (“Attention!” “Right face!” “Forward… march!”) informing him that she hadn’t the slightest interest in émigré counterrevolutionary trash, and at a time when the international situation is as tense and complicated as it is and demands our vigilance, she has always been outraged by young people who listen to Voice-of-this and Voice-of-that radio broadcasts—he, staring wildly at her with both pairs of eyes seemed to forget all about breathing (“Little hedgehog, where was your head? Forgot to breathe, and now you’re dead!”)—that’ll teach him! She was more pleased with herself than ever before: her first test of maturity and she passed it without a hitch! No, she had always said she would never want to relive her adolescence—those desperate, unconscious attempts to break out—out of the dull concrete walls, out of the family nest choked inside, amid billows of pungent fear, miasmic haze, where one false move, one ill-considered revelation, and you splash into the murky waters to your death. On the radio that Father listened to every evening, squeezing ear-first into the speaker that sputtered with a deafening scrape and occasionally burst into a sharp, dangerously increasing metallic whistle—on the radio came memoirs of the dying Snegirov, lists of surgically removed intestines, ruptured kidneys and bladders, insulin shocks, forcibly inserted feeding tubes, puddles of blood and vomit on cement floors—summary reports from the slaughterhouse, a carving of carcasses: Marchenko, Stus, Popadiuk, every few weeks more names, young and handsome, youths not much older than yourself with thick manes of hair brushed back stiffly, you dreamed of them the way your girlfriends dreamed of movie stars, any day now he’ll come out of prison bearing scars and a mature masculinity, and you’ll meet—except that they never came out and the airwaves groaned with their agony, while Father sat on the other side listening helplessly, year after year, ever since the day he himself was thrown out of work, just sat in the house and listened to the radio. There was no breaking out—all around nothing but Communist Youth League meetings, political education classes, and the Russian language. One only ventured out there (like a four-year-old to a stool in the middle of the room to recite a poem for aunties and uncles) in order to reproduce, in ringing tones and tape-recorder accuracy, all that had been learned from them and them alone, and only this guaranteed safety—a Gold Medal on leaving high school, a Diploma of Red Distinction at university, and then ever so carefully along the tightrope—my God, all the garbage she had let pass through her brain!—and at age fifteen tumbling right into a depression, complaining of mysterious stomach pains, Daddy ran himself off his feet dragging her from doctor to doctor who found nothing wrong, for days she tossed in bed crying hysterically from the slightest sharp word—Daddy’s girl, apple of his eye, it was he who hovered, wings outstretched, over her first menstruation, calmly explaining that this is very good, this is what happens to all girls, just lie and rest, don’t get up. He brought her thinly sliced apples laid out on a saucer, like for a real sick girl, and so she lay there, curled up and very still, frightened by this new feeling—on the one hand shame at her secret being revealed so openly (but then how can you have secrets from Daddy?) and, on the other, a kind of searing vulnerability, a wary uncertainty—a feeling that would reappear at the loss of virginity (which she only manages after Daddy’s death), and then every time after that, the same eternal sense of daughterly duty, ultimate feminine submission from which men, not having a clue of its source, would necessarily go wild (“You’re such a good fuck!”) and then she would leave them. Break loose, that’s all she wanted to do, break loose—all elbows from spontaneous adolescent growth, pimply teenager in tears at her own awkwardness, one pair of panty hose speckled with brown knots where she tried to sew up the runs, and one dress, the school uniform worn lily-white at the elbows. She went to school dances religiously—every Friday without fail, like a Moslem to the mosque!—in a borrowed blouse and too-short skirt from her Pioneer Girl days (white top, black bottom), consuming herself with bitter envy at the sight of her classmates in all-grown-up clothes, with grown-up haircuts done at the stylist’s, in full bloom like the proverbial cherry orchard, glistening in high-gloss lipstick and black Lancôme butterfly lashes—ten roubles was what that blue tube of mascara cost, and Mother’s monthly paycheck, on which the three of them lived, came out to 150 roubles, so what was there to do but steal it, in the coatroom, from a briefcase thoughtlessly left open by a beauty queen from the senior class—true, it was a pretty cheap tube, from Poland, half used up, or so she consoled herself, and not such a great loss for the beauty queen, but nonetheless there it was, nineteenth century, the classic Jean Valjean loaf of bread and Cosette staring at the doll-store window: shame, fear, a secret, both despicable and exciting, like her exhibitionist exercises alone in front of the mirror. She applied makeup badly in the school bathroom, painting crooked lines under her eyes, and after the dance she would fiercely scrub the mascara from her red eyelids: it was frightening to think what would happen if Daddy saw—Daddy, who was always so afraid for her, who ran around collecting dossiers on each of her girlfriends: they were all spoiled, smoked, and kissed boys, Daddy screamed, face turning beet-red and she, you have to hand it to her, screamed just as loud in return, and then sobbed in the bathroom—especially after that memorable evening when he slapped her face right out on the street, at the trolley stop, because she had taken off somewhere and he decided that she was running away from him—but she came back, because there was nowhere to run to, and he, not saying a word, slapped her as hard as he could across the face. Of course, later there were hugs-and-kisses, forgiveness-begging and the like, “my baby,” “my golden girl,” all this after several red-hot hours of pandemonium, wailing, sobbing, slamming of doors, accompanied by the shuffle of Mother’s feeble attempts to intervene—because Mother was quite beside the point in all this, Mother was, in fact, frigid, and obviously out of it, a black windowpane deflecting all light (later on, one morning in the early months of your marriage, she would poke her head into your bedroom with an alarm clock ringing merrily in her hands: wakey, wakey, breakfast is ready!—precisely at the moment—and after the ensuing explosive scene she would weep like an orphan in the kitchen, frightened and helpless: she was just trying her best!—so that in the end you, having calmed yourself and shaken the rest of the shivers from your startled body, would be apologizing and cheering her up). And what else could she have been if not frigid, a child-survivor of the Famine (a three-year-old in 1933, she stopped walking, while Grandmother made her way to Moscow in freight cars, switching from train to train, in order to exchange her dowry—two thick strands of Mediterranean pearls—for two bags of dry bread). A child nourished on single stalks of wheat stolen from the field, for which the collective farm guard, catching her once, cut her across the face with a whip—you can still see a thin white thread of a scar even now—and it was lucky to have ended with that, because her father, your grandfather, that is, was already up in the Arctic panning gold in a slave-gang, and about fifteen years later your father, her future husband, would be up there doing the same. And as for her, she made out okay, she got over the stolen ears of wheat and finally got enough to eat, twenty years or so later once she graduated from university and found a job—and American Sovietologists still can’t figure out why there are so many fat, shapeless women in this generation, they read Fromm and Jung up and down and between the lines—Eat, that’s what these babes wanted to do when they hit twenty—eat, that’s all!—stuff their faces with meager bread rations in student dorms, both hands, picking up crumbs, what a clitoris was they never did get to find out (it hit you for the first time standing in line at a pharmacy: they had brought in some menstrual pads, and a queue made up entirely of young women was busily stuffing shopping bags—the grannies, meantime, walked up shyly: “Girls, what’s in those packages?”—“They’re women’s packages, for women!” the girls snarled back: not for the likes of you, in other words—and the grannies stared back blankly, not understanding). So Mother was as innocent as a lamb, or rather the Virgin Mary (there really was something Madonna-like about her in those photos from the late fifties—the time when they all finally did get enough to eat—she glowed with such gentle innocence, a girl in curls, you couldn’t take your eyes off her!—delicate long face with a slim tapered nose—a now lost, quiet kind of beauty illuminated by an inner smile, the Cossack Baroque portrait three hundred years later: Roxolana, Varvara Apostol, Varvara Langyshivna—yup, those were the days, now gone for sure! You still get to see the full-faced, embroidered, fresh-off-the-farm-let’s-go-dance-in-the-cherry-orchard variety, but not the true Cossack ladies, forget about those! And even your own good looks are already by two exponents coarser, more vulgar—let’s not forget to make that were). And so Mother, gentle songbird, sacrificial lamb, slaved over her dissertation in a Khrushchev communal housing project, while in the kitchen her neighbor, a cook from the local working-class diner—one of those that Lenin had ordained to rule the state—(single mother of five from five different men), threw rags and teeth into Mother’s borsch (baby teeth belonging to one of the progeny, perhaps?). But Mother did finish her dissertation in poetics despite it all, right in time for 1973, when as the spouse of an “unreliable” she was booted the hell out of grad school, so that the day of your dissertation defense (which you needed like a hole in the head) was in fact her day, she was as happy as a child: “Ah, if only your father were alive to see this!”—and how in God’s name, by what means was he supposed to have stayed alive, pitched to the very bottom of the well but catching hold of a beam on the way down in a spasmodic grip and clinging desperately (anything but back to the prison camp), buried alive in four walls, listening to the radio, blowing cigarette smoke out of the tiny pilot window and watching with horror as the only woman of his life, his own flesh and blood, irrevocably slipped away, pushing out through the trap door, propelled by the sheer force of natural growth: “Lift up your nightie, I want to see how you’ve been growing” (and would it not be the same kind of both concerned and authoritative intonation twenty years later—“Turn around, I want to take you from behind now”—that would awaken in you that long-forgotten feeling of home?)—and it won’t matter that you never liked it from behind, it won’t matter that at first you refused to lift up your nightie, flushed with an un-childlike feeling of insult—only to hear in response a quiet and unfamiliarly moist, deeply-felt “my child, it’s me, your Daddy!”—in the end result of which the nightie did indeed go up (what else could you do?)—that anxious, obscene feeling of exposure, the first experience, far stronger than any of that knee-touching under the classroom desk—and yet you yearned to break free, God how you yearned to break free—like a condemned soul from under the executioner’s axe, but—where? To your teenage friends, any dance in sight, rock bands, football games, and the first groping of body parts in the darkness of the school gym—what a joke! You couldn’t even tell any of them how in the third year they finally showed up, your father’s fear came to pass, because fear—it always reifies in the end. They burst inside the four family walls like a tornado with a luscious creak of leather holster belts and a vigorous outdoor wind behind them and suddenly filled the room to capacity: three huge males, rosy-cheeked from the sub-zero temperatures, slapping the covers of their identity cards, “pack up, let’s get going!” Father scurried around looking for papers, sorting something on his desk, hands trembling, stunned and pathetic, and then you jumped out at them from the corner of the room, pimply pale-green adolescence trying to unbend its back—squelched and squeaky, long bangs swinging across your nose, you screeched: “How dare you, what right do you have!” It didn’t come off too well, actually it came off not well at all, the guys shut you up as easily as kicking a puppy aside with one foot (young junior officer, moustache the hint of a thin line was trying real hard, piece of fucking shit on his first responsible assignment—no piddly matter, catching a real-live anti-Soviet!—“not your business, sweetie, you’re a little young for this, aren’t you?”). And anyway, your parents, dark-faced with terror as though someone had slipped Polaroid paper under their skin, began hissing-shushing-flapping long before you even rushed forward. But the first failure didn’t stop you, because it’s true what the man said, you’re a brave woman, that you are, sweetness. Some years later, as a student in the eighties out on a date with the latest cutie-pie, you decided to head for the theater with a group of friends to see some hit show in from Moscow. Just a random attempt since nobody had tickets, laughing your heads off the whole while, quips flying back and forth like snowballs, you began storming the ticket office with a mob of similar revelers, the crowd having grown quite sizable by then: New Year’s Eve after all, you’re young and alive and who wants to go home and that’s when the cops showed up—a squadron of paddy wagons revved up, gray coats plowed into the throng sending furrows of breaker waves crashing in all directions and who the hell even knows how it happened, just a moment ago there you were, well, having fun—so, if you hadn’t gotten in, big deal, you would have headed over to Khreshchatyk for a cup of Turkish coffee! When suddenly there was cutie-pie’s friend, the most persistent of the bunch, light and slippery as quicksilver—in fact, one more push and he just might have squeezed into the theater!—there he was, identified and fished out from the huddled, bellowing herd and now being dragged under the arms by two gorillas in uniform. He couldn’t even reach the asphalt with his feet, the rest of your coterie followed in confusion, not having the foggiest of where to begin, and he was already whining to the gorillas: “Come on, guys, let go of me, let me go, please, come on, guys,” legs twisting in the air independently of his torso, and your cutie-pie, dumb jerk, shuffled behind like a somnambulist mumbling—“It’s okay, they won’t do nothing to him”—meantime the paddy wagon was standing ready, rear end wide open and then you once again—brave woman!—with a panther leap of a by now considerably stronger and better-looking body landed smack in front of the wagon, a long-legged lightning streak in a short sheepskin jacket, scattering them to both sides (by that time they were already pushing the poor schmuck into the van): “Boys!”—your voice sent sparks through the air like a piece of flint—“What are you trying to do here, huh?!” And you sprang the captive free: the boys (more like mating bulls, really) opened ranks, became somehow softer around the edges and more malleable, stepped back, mumbled something in defense along the lines of “Well, how come he…”—oh yeah, he resisted arrest and said something rude—and then cutie-pie stepped forward and you scooped up the victim and let’s get the hell out of here! (And wouldn’t it be like that on your first night with that man, when he boldly zoomed up the one-way street and the cops pulled him over—and he, puny and stooped in an unbuttoned leather jacket which suddenly drooped on him like a used condom, was explaining something to them out there, flailing his arms about: come on, guys, what did I do, I didn’t, honest—and you, tired of waiting in the car swung the door open, stepped out, click-clicked your heels down the sidewalk, tossed your curls and, absorbing the ravenous glances of the holster-swinging males—one could light a cigarette on your scintillating laugh: “What’s the problem, gentlemen? We didn’t break any rules?”—and the tempest somehow dissipated all at once, well okay then, go ahead, but watch yourselves. And in the early morning, fixing his shining eyes on you as you lay half-draped on the couch, he muttered slowly, smacking his lips and relishing his triumphant smile: “Ah, you’re a tough broad—jumped right out to plow the cops in the kisser… I could go do some jobs with you,” and you were flooded by a surge of childish pride: Finally, finally somebody noticed—because he was one of those who could have come out of the prison camps and you met, after all these years—for he was more than a brother, he was homeland and home…) Fear oozed in from the outside like caustic fumes, but inside the house it was warm, sultry in fact, teenage depression, no, neurasthenia, some kind of stupid pills, fever stuck at 99.2, tears umpteen times a day, the lady doctor told you to undress and asked Daddy to leave the room “she’s a big girl already”—and you were shocked that Daddy, rather than defend his paternal rights—after all, it was his child that was about to be examined!—shuffled to the door in humiliation, flustered and dwarfed as if caught red-handed (the curious thing, she tells herself with the imperturbability of a surgeon, is that he really was a good-looking guy, talkative, witty, and ready to embrace life, and women liked him, and there would have been absolutely no problem finding some action outside the house, so why did he guard his chastity like some Galician old maid, was it not because Mother married him still before he was “rehabilitated” and he spent his whole life cowering, afraid to hear her say aloud what he was secretly tormenting himself with within—that he ruined her life? But to be left alone, without her, he was afraid of that, too, wasn’t he). And by way, this time they only charged him with “willful unemployment,” keeping him for only twenty-four hours in the district jail and sending him out after that only as a night watchman to a construction site where he sat in a glass booth opening gates for dump trucks and the rest of the time reading Bruno Schulz, about whom he was going to someday write a book but never did get around to it (he had pretty good taste in literature, except that he couldn’t stand any hint of eroticism, like the Catholic Index)—his panic at her unrestrained growth—“Hey, stop that!”—settled into his insides and slowly sawed away at them with a dull blade, but they only diagnosed cancer when it was too late to operate, his whole reproductive system was affected: prostate, testes (every day Mother grated carrots for juice and squeezed them by hand, twisting the ball of mash through a piece of cheesecloth, her fingers, which had once strummed a guitar, acquired a permanent yellow color and could be straightened only with effort, and at nights Daddy’s girl would run to the phone booth down the block to call the ambulance, and so when Mother, her eyes white with horror, returned from the hospital one day with news of the diagnosis, which at all costs was to be kept a secret from Daddy, the first thought that flashed through your head [which you would never ever forgive yourself], was a cold and merciless, hissed through clenched teeth: Thank God!). In fact, it was nothing less than war, a war in which there could be no winners because, having exhausted all means to get his way (pin ’em down with your knee, shove ’em into the crib, “she’s just a child,” we wanted a boy, but that’s okay, she turned out a smart tough cookie and she’ll show them all!)—having done all that, the man resorts to the ultimate weapon, death, and that does the trick, you lay down your arms and you go over to his side. And your adolescence, which you swore you would never again relive, it catches up with you twenty years later, releasing from the darkest recesses of your being a tearful and frightened teenage girl who takes over completely, and then it laughs at you long and hard: “What, thought you could get away?… Didn’t get too far, did you?”

Maybe it’s true that slaves should not bear children, she muses, staring dully out the window: yesterday the first snow fell, but now it’s melted, only the windshields of cars parked up and down the street look like wet spots on newborn calves. A man—black skin, bright red jacket, blue baseball cap—bounces down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets: it must have gotten colder. Because what is slavery, if not infection by fear—she draws toward her an open notebook half-filled with such lukewarm aphorisms that move you about as much as a textbook in formal logic. Slavery is the state of being infected by fear. And fear kills love. And without love—children, poems, paintings—all is pregnant with death. A+, girl! You have completed your research.

Ladies and gentlemen—no, for now it’s just ladies or, more precisely, one lady, Donna from East European Studies, one of the few friends you’ve made during this time, half-Irish, half-Slavic mix, a rather pleasing combination: golden hair, warm hazel eyes, high cheekbones, skin sprinkled with fine freckles like a good sesame seed roll. You can’t smoke in the university cafeteria where you arranged to meet for lunch, and Donna, having finished her cup of the dark brown liquid Americans for some reason insist on calling coffee, stuffs a stick of chewing gum in her mouth: sublimated nicotine. This chewing of the cud comes off as not at all offensive, perhaps because Donna laughs so often and so sincerely, which gives the impression that she keeps tasting something funny. She’s writing a dissertation on gender in postcommunist politics, she is quite honestly interested in knowing why in those politics there aren’t and never have been any women—a question that stumps you every time, no matter how often it’s posed to you by Western intellectuals (hell, how am I supposed to know?). It seems that Donna suspects that this is the root of all our problems: like all feminists, she is convinced that men are “full of shit,” and the minute you let them loose you’ve got wars all over the place, concentration camps, famine, natural disasters, someone starts shutting off the hot water and electricity, then there are budget cuts in the department for the second year in a row and her dissertation defense is postponed yet again. And so Donna takes your story perhaps not so much to heart, as directly into her files. Ladies and gentlemen, let me go on.

“Whaat?!” Donna thrusts herself forward so that her golden curls bounce in the air and settle into the deep cut of her sweater.

“How?!” Donna is outraged. “How could he do that? And how can anybody treat a woman that way?!”

“Oh my!” Donna nods her head sympathetically and with completely uncharacteristic domesticity begins straightening out a nonexistent tablecloth with the palms of both hands: a gesture that indicates complete bewilderment and a loss for appropriate commentary. No, she had problems with her last boyfriend, but nothing like this!…

“Listen,” says Donna as her face clears up with the discovery of a solution: “Looks like this guy is severely sick, don’t you think?”

A short course in psychology, the road to mental health: find the reason and the problem goes away. Why hasn’t anyone thought of doing this with nations: you neatly psychoanalyze a whole national history, and “poof, you’re cured.” Literature as a form of national therapy. Hmm, not a bad idea. Too bad that we happen to have no literature.

“I just don’t understand one thing,” Donna says judgmentally (it’s obvious that a fundamental aspect of her worldview is at stake here). “I don’t understand, why did you put up with it? In bed, I mean? Why didn’t you just say no?”

The conceptual approach: women’s struggle for their rights.

What can I tell you, Donna-dearest. That we were raised by men fucked from all ends every which way? That later we ourselves screwed the same kind of guys, and that in both cases they were doing to us what others, the others, had done to them? And that we accepted them and loved them as they were, because not to accept them was to go over to the others, the other side? And that our only choice, therefore, was and still remains between victim and executioner: between nonexistence and an existence that kills you.

After throwing the vestiges of their lunch into the cafeteria trash bin—plastic trays with paper dishware: cups and plates all in bright spots from different sauces—soy, ketchup, mustard, plum (vermilion, carmine, ochre, umber)—palettes, props from a theatrical performance (act one: an artist’s studio; act two: a room in a student dorm; act three cancelled for technical reasons, tickets not returned and prayers not answered)—they head for the exit. Donna pushes the glass doors, a sudden burst of frosty air joyfully zaps the lungs, cars drive by, young men in jackets sporting emblems of their university walk past laughing, a disturbing electric-blue sky blazes overhead, and on the corner a tall, shaggy, gray-haired Leonardo da Vinci stands wrapped in a blanket, stretching a paper Coca-Cola cup toward them and rattling coins: “Help the homeless, ma’am!”—“I’m homeless myself,” she shakes her head, not at him, out into space.

“But you know,” Donna turns to her suddenly as she pulls on her fine leather driving gloves and happily chews on a new stick of gum, “these East European men of yours may be brutal at times, but at least they’re passionate. While ours…”

…And you’ll be staring out of the airplane window watching the suitcases go up the conveyer belt of the ramp loader and disappear into the bowels of the plane, one after another, and then it will be just empty space floating by, and the man with US Air written on his cap will hop into the blackness of the baggage cart tug, and the bag carts will move out, and while you follow them with your eyes the ramp loader will be taken away and only a gray puddle of melted snow will remain on the cement: “Well, that’s it,” will resound in your head, like a cry in an abandoned church, that’s it—it means they have battened down the hatches, and in a moment you will hear the dry crackle of a microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant will purr, and the plane will rumble and shake as the engines warm up, and soon you will be in a different reality, a different life, with the bitterly searing pain of unfulfillment of the life lived thus far (“qu’as tu fait, qu’as tu fait de ta vie?” a faraway voice will ask—ah, let’s drop it, this topic’s as old as life itself: you’re always waiting, dreaming, thrashing about, hoping for something up ahead, and then one day you discover that this indeed was your life)—better for that pain to shut its mouth and not poke its nose out again.

Pass me the microphone and I’ll say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have created a wonderful world, and please accept, on this occasion, sincere greetings from US Air, and from CNN, and from the CIA, and the Uruguay drug mafia, and the Romanian Securitate, and from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and from the millions of killers in all the prisons of the world as well as the tens of millions still at large, and from the five thousand Sarajevo children born of rape, who will, after all, grow up some day, and—onward and upward, brave new world, and that, actually, is all I wanted to say, thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen, have a good flight.”

When I was young, I dreamed of such a death: plane crash over the Atlantic, an aircraft dissolving in the air and the ocean—no grave, no trace. Now I wish with all my heart that the plane land safely: I like to watch the tall, sinewy old man with the hooked nose and deeply furrowed lines running down from his eyes, the way he takes the nylon bag with a tennis racket on its gut and pushes it into the overhead bin; and the Spanish-looking brunette with the unbuttoned leather coat—she’s on board with two children and while she removes the smaller one from her backpack carrier and sets him on the chair, the other one, a girl of about five, narrow tanned face in a baroque frame of promisingly capricious curls, flashes her eyes and her smile up and down the aisle in all directions, glowing with excitement—her first trip!—and her eyes stop on me:

“Hi!” she shouts happily.

“Hello there!” say I.