I straightened my clothes quickly, checked myself in my compact mirror, all without looking at the happy, sweaty, and confused Artem, who felt the urge to show some uncalled-for tenderness, which, as the poet Pluzhnyk once said, “is born on the far side of passion,” but froze up in the face of my indecent efficiency and monosyllabic grunts. I may have made it look like I was fleeing from the site of shame and dishonor, but my mind, sharpened by the orgasm, ran like a super-computer clicking through an algorithm with maximum effectiveness and minimum use of energy: “You have my 1928 Kyiv guidebook, by Ernst, don’t you? You still need it? And would it be okay if I borrowed the photo, just for a while?”
I slipped the photo between the yellow pages of the innocently extracted Ernst, pulled my purse closed around it, made sure I didn’t leave anything behind; Artem caught up with me when I was already halfway through the door with his kiss (sloppy) and the warning that he’d call at the end of the week (Why is it that men always have to stake a claim on the future when they say goodbye? Like I wouldn’t call him if
I
wanted him?)—and that’s it; that was really it. We did not see each other again, and when he called, I complained of how busy I was, said I’d love to, it would be heaven, but I can’t, I really can’t.... I’m quite good at that if I do say so myself.
Artem (thrilled about a chance to prop up a worn-out romance with a substantive obligation, as often happens when affairs are ending or beginning—when you’re lending books, CDs, and pictures, and inventing shared engagements that are hard to evade later) asked me at the door what I was going to do with the picture, and I mumbled something cryptic along the I’m-thinking-to-do-something-about-UIA lines; it’s a hot topic (as if I were rehearsing what I’d say to my producer). Of course, this was just a flaky-artist excuse—I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. I was firmly convinced that only Western Ukrainians had the right to write, film, or say anything about the Insurgent Army because it was their families who held, just under the surface, either “forest boys” themselves or someone deported “for abetting,” and when someone got deported, the whole village was sent along, just to be sure; so it’s a miracle the Soviets didn’t manage to pack them all off to the other side of Yenisei, as the Poles did when they cleaned out this side of Vistula. Why on earth would I go try to stick my two cents into what, to some, still feels like a bone crushing?
All I had in my personal history were Mom and Uncle Volodya’s, my stepfather’s, accounts of the 1947 hunger in Eastern Ukraine: Uncle Volodya (I never could bring myself to call him Papa Volodya, as he and Mom would have liked), then a fifteen-year-old Odessa boy, worked alongside adults netting fish from under the ice and kept his family alive. Around the ice holes, he said, all
day long lingered swollen women on elephantine legs, immobile, like ghosts: they waited for the fry to slip out of the nets, snatched them off the ice, and gobbled them down, raw. To get bread—the blessed, salvific bread—both his Odessa and his mom’s Poltava communities outfitted expeditions to Western Ukraine (“in Western,” Uncle Volodya stubbornly kept saying, as if this illiterate patch on his generally very proper, for someone from Odessa, Ukrainian was inseparable from the events of the past and had to remain uncorrected; “in Western” was his, and “to Western Ukraine” belonged to a different generation). These hunting parties stuffed themselves, like sardines in a tin, into the deranged freight train #500-J that chugged from one station to the next with no order or timetable. Its ghoulish nickname was 500-Joy because it was liable to stop without warning somewhere in the middle of a field and stay there for five hours, or five minutes, and start again just as suddenly, leaving behind a shedding of the unlucky ones who jumped off to relieve themselves. So they learned not to look for cover, and just rolled off the train’s platforms and roofs—head over heels, men and women—all in a rush to bare their behinds with a single feverish thought: to make it, and to claw back into one’s spot before someone else had taken it. This constant fear of losing the spot was branded in Uncle Volodya’s memory, and his spot on that train must’ve been especially hard to win—a starved teenager shoving and elbowing grown men—but I was captivated by the vision of that sexless orgy of the hurried mass expulsion of bodily fluids and solids along the train, the ease with which people could be transformed into a herd.
Those treks after bread were no safer than the ones undertaken in the name of breadwinning today—migrations after work, to Western
er
Europe, the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe, aboard a sooty Icarus across Poland and Slovakia, where every clump of trees might conceal an eager Russian gang, quick to block the road with their Kalashnikovs aimed at the bus. Uncle Volodya, who made the rooftop journey on the 500-Joy in the spring of 1947,
remembered a flashlight blinding him in the middle of the night and the icy needle of steel against his throat. “Got money, boy?”
Incredibly, he thought to fold back both sides of his threadbare jacket exposing its empty inside pockets and to squeal the first thing that came to mind, “Going to my brother’s,” and they left him alone, didn’t frisk him; though he did have money—carefully sewn by his mother into his boxer shorts—he could not say the same about a brother. (What he must’ve had was a dream, a boy’s secret dream, an orphan’s dream of a brother, an older one for sure, who would come back from the front, beat down every offender, would protect and defend—and the dream did protect him.) In their eyes—the eyes of dirty, famished people who hurriedly washed the railroad embankments with steaming urine—the then newly annexed Galicia—in its eighth year of being whipped, along and across, by frontlines and now a guerilla war—still retained the glow of “Europe,” an oasis of unimaginable luxuries. It beckoned much as the new, Schengen Europe beckons today’s Ukrainian migrant workers—and to those who were lucky enough to make it, it bestowed generously of its riches: a sack of dried biscuits for some, two bags of buckwheat and a bag of dried peas for others, and for the luckiest ones—a packed, shaken-down, and leveled sack of flour. Mom’s older sister, Lyusya, may she rest in peace, managed somehow to carry precisely such a marvel on her back all the way back, with a change of trains in Zdolbuniv, and that’s how 1947 did not become, despite the Ukrainian plans of the mustachioed Generalissimo, a conclusive repeat of 1933, so the UIA can be credited with winning at least
this
war, one that’s not mentioned in a single history textbook. Not a single food-rationing crew in the late forties would risk going into a Western Ukrainian village to “shake down grain”; if it foolishly did, it would be remembered as last seen on its way to that village, as Uncle Volodya told it, with a satisfied predatory smirk, which still held something of the boy in awe of a friendly power—someone’s in for an ass-kicking!—but which also was colored with a tinge
of resentment and something a bit like envy, as in, sure, easy for them to fight, they didn’t swell on the ice with me,
Where’d they be then?
Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.
Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”
And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.
I just
could not
leave the photograph with Artem. It was
mine
—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by
someone else’s will
. That’s what it had felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)
The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.
And beyond that, I really knew nothing.
***
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m never going to make this film. Never.”
“Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.
Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want
you
to start thinking about it.)
Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your ecstatically adoring gaze that only lacked a pair of hands folded in prayer—of course you were intimidated, with me being a TV star and all), what shook me most, wrung me more cruelly than ever, was the expression I saw on your face when our lips parted: the look of a man who climbed to the top of the mountain, then turned around to look at the valley, and saw the earth swallow the city where he’d come from. You looked at me as if you didn’t recognize me, as if I oscillated and changed shapes every instant, and the flickering of ecstasy and horror on your face mirrored my shape-shifting, and for an instant, before we looked away, I glimpsed through your eyes the ground parting beneath; silently, with the sound on mute, buildings collapsed one after the other, as if filmed from an airplane by an awestruck cameraman.
Since then, the sensation became my own, and every so often I feel its short mournful pang: I am standing at the top of the mountain and you are looking at me, and there’s nowhere for me to go if I wanted to leave.
“You’ll work it all out,” you say, and your certainty sounds unshakeable.
I only now figured out why I felt so ambushed by your Ukrainian when we first met: you move through life with too
much confidence. You’re too calm and composed, as if you have not the slightest inkling that one could be otherwise. Among those of us over thirty, who grew up with the constant awareness of our Ukrainian-ness, such natural, unconstrained dignity is rare: composure like yours, even posture like yours, requires three to four generations of ancestors unfamiliar with any kind of internalized social humiliation—not something possible yet in post-twentieth-century Ukraine.
Give me your hand. So hot.
You have wonderful hands; the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen on a man—strong, finely sculpted, with long, well-bred fingers. Why am I not Rodin, or at least someone in marketing? I’d put your hand on a woman’s knee and hold the shot. Buy Hanes hosiery. This must be the limit of my imagination, the best I can do—commercials.
Don’t let me go, you hear me? I know nothing—I don’t even know if this is what people call love, or if I’m possessed again by someone else’s will. Sometimes I think I am. I don’t know what to want from the future and whether we even have a future. I don’t know anything. Just hold me, okay? Don’t let me go. Just like this.
Daryna Goshchynska’s Interview with Vladyslava Matusevych
[T
he scene is picture perfect, as intended: Two women, a blonde and a brunette, are sitting at a café table in the Passage on Khreshchatyk. Both are stylishly dressed and well groomed, both sport bare tan shoulders. It’s the end of August, when everyone returns from summer vacations. In the background, a waiter appears every so often, dressed in a white jacket and wearing the mysterious smile of unspoken understanding that is the trademark of all Kyiv waiters and the reason they all look like low-rank Hindu deities, while the truth is that few of them really know what they’re doing and most are deathly afraid of running into an unusual client—say, someone accompanied by a TV camera that’s currently installed between the tables. One notices the lovely play of light as it filters through the blonde woman’s hair, making it golden and translucent; in fact, it is darker than it appears but streaked with highlights the shade of ripe wheat to give her pale face, with its masculine cleft chin and small birdlike features, a brighter frame, without which it would certainly disappear in a crowd, despite her wide-set eyes. The colors have been chosen perfectly, and no wonder—she’s a painter. In the foreground, more colors contrast with the white of the tablecloth: a glass of dark-ruby wine, a voluminous tankard of Obolon lager with its bridal-veil cap of froth, an ornate pack of Eve Slims—the white-jacketed deity brings an ashtray as big as a soup bowl, but it’s black, better to move it out of the shot, take it off the table altogether, it draws the eye too much.] “Does anyone mind? Okay, this looks good; let’s roll.”
“Vladyslava, we’ve known each other long enough that I can address you in informal terms even in front of the camera—and take great pride in that.” [Both laugh the conspiratorial laugh
of women who take pride in their age and are connected by something utterly inaccessible to men, which always inspires a vague unease in the latter.] “First of all, let me congratulate you on your remarkable accomplishment, especially uncommon for a Ukrainian artist—the Nestlé Art Foundation Award for your solo show in, correct me if I’m wrong, Zurich?”