“Incredible,” I say, shaking my head, but you don’t understand; you’re not on the same wavelength, and you continue surfing along on your own frequency, registering my comment as a quick burst of
applause for your past triumphs with girls. You toss it, with a small clink, into that twenty-years-ago drawer in your mind; and so we stay, just as we were—each with our own drawers whose contents haven’t mixed, haven’t even been put out side by side and really compared. And that’s what I meant by incredible.
How could we hope to conduct our dead-relatives exchange—to cross these ghostly bloodlines that stretch into the most impenetrable reaches of time—if we can’t even manage to marry our younger selves, that boy and that girl who used to fall in love with other girls and boys, who both lay awake at night in different cities without the slightest inkling of each other’s existence? And the worst of it is that they are still here—that boy and that girl. They must be if I am still capable of such idiotic jealousy toward your high-school sweetheart—never mind that I met her decidedly in the present tense, precisely so that I could get over it once and for all, because the comparison now was not at all in her favor. She turned out to be a rather dour, prickly, thick-boned, and lumpy-looking matron, like the former project engineers who now have to sell secondhand clothes off cots in street markets; and she had those deep-set eyes—like soot-black hollows—that with the passing of time seem to be increasingly the result of constant crying or no less constant drinking, aging their owner beyond her years.
On top of that, she didn’t even smile when we met, which leads me to conclude that
her
life experience thus far has not proved particularly conducive to friendliness—it is quite possible that first schoolgirl love remains her only bright spot—and so I ought to pity her, both as a fellow human being and as a woman. But like hell I can, because I am still not sure which woman it is that you see in there: This current one, or this one and the one from back then, together, a shadowbox backlit with a time-denying glow from another dimension. If it’s the latter, the deck is stacked against me because the only me you know is the present-day me, cut with an ax at a year-old whorl—a single thin line, no matter how wonderful the shape it draws.
“You’re like a little bird...my schoolgirl...”
“How am I a schoolgirl?”
“It’s your body—it’s like a teenage girl’s. It’s fantastic.”
“What is?”
“That it has managed to stay this way.”
“What a prick!”
“Oh, am I now?” you say, very agreeably, turning me on my back. Your hands’ capacity to coax out of my flesh musical tones—so varied in pitch and color, audible to myself alone (a little like the minimalists, like Philip Glass, only this makes Glass look like a rookie; he couldn’t have dreamed of such a palette...)—once again forces me to enter a different kind of listening: with my eyes closed, focused completely on the pictures that flash and flicker on the insides of my eyelids, like a symphony—first come pale fronds of fern, unfurling slowly, as if underwater, with the fluid precision of Japanese prints; then the surface breaks into a rich dollop of tropical emerald green that grows darker and darker until it congeals and hardens into the aching point of my nipple, and at exactly the moment when I am about to cry out with real pain, the pressure releases, spills into a caressing flood, and a round, fiery-orange sun rises triumphantly above the horizon. The joy makes me laugh out loud. I am now all living, spinning wet clay in the hands of a master potter, a musical sculpture.
“You’re not supposed to applaud after the overture,” you say from somewhere in the dark, as if already inside me, and your hands keep moving with merciless precision—this gift of yours—and I begin to die again, as usual (How
do
you do that?) long before you enter and fill me entirely; and when you finally do, all that’s left of me is a form, a mold—warmed with the gentle glow of gratitude, fluid and flexible—into which you pour all of yourself with the desperate force of nature, the all-consuming fire and rock. Oh you, you, you, my love, my nameless one (in these moments you don’t have a name, cannot be named any more than infinity itself)—a primordial boom, a flash of newly born planets, an eclipse, a scream. Of course, this is incredible luck; you and I have been unbelievably, unfairly lucky—so lucky it’s frightening.
Why us? And what price shall we be asked to pay for this? But just think about it—I murmur in blissful lethargy, my nose tucked securely into your not-yet-cooled neck, with its sweat, with its warm, spicy (Cinnamon? Cumin?), manly scent—millions of people must have lived their whole lives and never experienced anything like this (although, come to think of it, how would we know?—but something inexorably fills happy lovers with this unshakeable certainty that they are the first since creation). And that’s why there isn’t a single reason (and if there had been, it’s been washed away with the tidal wave), not a single good reason, to rewind and reflect upon that “schoolgirl” and the fact that you persist—as if you’d be an idiot not to—in your stubborn, hand-callusing work of merging me—in the sum total of all emotions and sensations, sensory memory included—of binding me in with your first love.
This would be the moment to ask with affected cynicism something like, “What, you’re an expert in schoolgirls? Nymphophile? How exactly would you know?” But a question like that would do no more than disrupt the mining machinery of memory—an intrusion as careless as calling after a sleepwalker as he makes his way along the edge of a roof, and with the same risk of having the roused man tumble to his death. No, let it all be; let it go as it goes. I’m not the one to take a wrench to someone else’s brain. And really shouldn’t I be flattered? Or at least reassured? What more reliable proof of his undying love can a man give a woman than to plug her (to borrow from electrical engineering) into the network of the first female images set into the concrete foundation of his imagination: his mother, his sister, the girl next door? (And women do this, too: all of us plug each other into one thing or the other, ready to replace breakers, find missing wires, and wrap it all thickly with insulation tape until—boom!—the circuit shorts with a jolt.)
Dear sisterhood: Let us all love our mother-in-laws, for they are our future; they are the women we will become in thirty years (otherwise, your beloved would never have noticed you, would never have recognized you). Let us love our rivals, past and present,
for each one of those women has something of ours, something that we ourselves fail to notice and prize and that, for him, is sure to be most important. Shit, does this mean I have something in common with that droopy-faced hag with eyes like burnt holes in a blanket!?
And this is just the beginning, Lord. Just the beginning.
Apollinaria, Stefania, Ambroziy, Volodymyra. (How comical these cloche hats from the Jazz Age of the already-past century: these tightly fitted little felt pots, pulled down to just above the eyebrows and banded with silk—you know it’s silk because it glistens even in the prints—with tiny brims and round tops; and the women’s legs, always in stockings, even in summer. Just think how they must’ve sweated, poor things.) To shuffle the photos is to greet each one of them silently with my eyes, despite the fact that they’re all long dead. I’m the one poorer for it.
It’s not just me looking at them—they
do
look back. I realize this in an instant (I couldn’t possibly explain this, even to you!) with the same precise and inexplicable certainty as I did one day, many years ago, at St. Sophia Cathedral when I had wandered in, lathered after a half-sleepless night, agitated not so much by any real events but by the much more deeply disturbing premonition of fundamental changes in my life—changes whose advance I could feel from all sides at once and which I knew portended the end of my youth.
The ticket office had just opened and I was the first visitor, all alone in the echoing and alert silence of the temple, where every step on the terrifying cast-iron floors rang all the way through the choir lofts. I stood at the bottom of the honey-thick twilight suspended in half-consciousness by a swirling, tilting pillar of sunlit dust until I suddenly felt a thrust at my chest: from a fresco on the opposite wall of a side nave, a white-bearded man in a blue, richly draped, floor-length cloak looked at me, his dry, walnut-colored palms pressed together. I felt faint—a soft, furry paw brushed me from inside—a shaky shard of a vision slashed through the air. Something stirred. I stepped closer
but the man—this monk or statesman with the time-darkened face and those clearly drawn, typically Ukrainian contours that are also soft like the lines of aging mountains and that one still recognizes, so easily, in the faces of the men at the Besarabsky Market—was already looking at something else. Only the eyes—implacably dark and swollen with knowledge—burdened his face, as if not given quite enough room, and it seemed they would turn upon me again at any moment. I couldn’t stand it and looked away first, and it was then that I saw what I had never noticed before, as if helped by a sudden shift of light: the cathedral was alive, it teemed with people—every wall and arch was inhabited with dimly silent, time-smudged women and men, and every one of them had the same otherworldly eyes, pregnant with the ecclesiastical pall of all-knowing.
All these eyes
saw
me. I stood there in view of a crowd, only it was not a crowd of strangers. They took me in with such kindness and understanding, as if they knew everything about me, so much more than I could ever know myself, and as I slowly dissolved—like a pat of butter in warm water—in their encircling gaze (I couldn’t tell how long this lasted, time had stopped), it was suddenly revealed to me as the most obvious thing in the world that these people did not just live a thousand years
ago
; they had lived
for
a thousand years, taking in everything that had passed before their eyes until their gaze held the quintessence of time—the heavy slow suspension of a millennium, clots and crystals of time squeezed together like tightly pressed atomic nuclei. And I was before them, a mortal, barely nineteen. I wasn’t even a woman yet to tell the truth (it was soon after that I became one), so perhaps mine was the kind of revelation classified in theological literature as a maiden’s vision or some such. At any rate, never again, in any of the ancient holy places—not at the Athenian Parthenon, nor on the bare site of the Jerusalem Temple, nor in the Garden of Gethsemane—would those, visible or invisible, who persist in a place for ages, welcome me as one of their own. All I ever felt again—even when I managed to be alone with them—was their
purposeful wariness, not menacing or defiant but more akin to a held breath, a whisper:
What do you want, woman?
I must admit they have a point. Indeed, what business do I have with them? Having once accepted a man, a woman passes irretrievably into a different gravitational field—she simply falls into time, into a silt-clogged stream, falls with the entire weight of her earthly body, with her uterus and ovaries, these living chronometers. And time begins to flow through her, no longer pure (for when pure it does not flow at all, it stands still, like that day at St. Sophia; it is a single lake, a placid spill of the radiant dark-honeyed twilight) but
em
bodied as she is in her clan—her kin—in the endless chromosomal rosary of the dying and resurrecting genotype that pulses with mortal flesh into that which we call—for lack of a more accurate term—human history, every one of us plugged into a serial circuit and once in, you cannot jump out, you cannot see the whole thing from outside. Unless you’re a nun—but it’s too late for me now.
And so now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this new feeling. They look at me from these old photos as if I owe them something—I shrink and shy in their heavy gaze that reaches so far beyond the moment captured by the camera, unsure about what it is they expect of me. It’s as if they don’t know if they can trust me, like they need to size me up, to see if I am good enough for the family, how serious my intentions really are. (Good Lord, what nonsense am I thinking?!) These women with their cloche hats and their thighs sheathed in sun-spotted Jazz-Age dresses (it is a clear summer day, and there are trees in the background that might still be growing in the same spot, and a dog, his tongue wearily lolling from his mouth) and their buttoned-up, sporty-looking boys in turtlenecks and breeches, and men with black moustaches like butterfly wings above their lips, later called Hitler moustaches (but Hitler hadn’t yet come to power, and across the Zbruch River no one had yet stacked mummified-alive corpses like hay, and Lemyk hadn’t shot Consul Mailov, and Matseiko hadn’t taken aim at Minister Pieracki...).
And then here are those after the war, in incomparably poorer rags, who managed to live despite it all, the
remainers
, or better, the
survivors
, meaning the nonetheless living. (Which sounds so much kinder, doesn’t it?) And here is a tiny snapshot after the deportation, with oppressive, low-slung volcanoes on the horizon (Kolyma? Transbaikal?), and the boy in the foreground is struck with a completely different leanness, not the athletic kind but the thoroughly plebeian, hunger-worn kind. He wears a baggy jacket with hideously padded Terminator shoulders, and so does the young woman with poodle-like curls next to him. Both are laughing into the camera; their heads are close together yet their hands are behind their backs, as if still under the armed guards’ command, but laughing joyfully nonetheless, laughing from their hearts—their entire beings so happy about something. What is it, one wonders, that could make them so happy there?
Something painfully familiar flashes in the tight ripples around the man’s mouth, like déjà vu or a dream you can’t recall in the morning. I must have seen this same expression in your face, must have caught its fleeting, uncanny breath on your features, gone in an instant without a trace, a message from a long-gone soul who has only this one way of reminding us about himself—and if I look carefully (What exactly do you imagine I’ve been doing here all this time, gulping down eyeful after eyeful?), I can find something of yours in many of these faces, something imperceptibly altered but shared nonetheless, as if an errant beam of an invisible torchlight, dancing over them, flashed you out of an accidental fold of another’s features or in a turn of another’s head. Here, here it is; it almost coheres but again merely almost, and the dream of unrecognition goes on, growing slowly more nightmarish, as if now I am chasing a fleeing ghost.