Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex Page 4

  That’s a separate topic, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, forgive me if I’ve taken up too much of your time, it’s not easy for me to talk about all this, and I’m also actually quite seriously ill, my frightened, hungry, and if we’re not going to bother with euphemisms then we could just say raped body has been unable, for the third month now, to curtail this light internal tremor, especially horrible—ad nauseam!—below the stomach where I continuously feel a pressing, beating quiver, and when I spread my fingers they immediately take on a life of their own, each marching to its own drummer as though they’ve been stretched and separated from each other, and I won’t mention the puckered teenage pink pimples that have blossomed over my shoulders and face and there’s nothing I can do about it—the wretched body is still alive, it’s demanding its rights, it’s dying from basic sex deprivation, perhaps it could even recover, start hopping around like a bunny rabbit if it could get sweetly laid, but, unfortunately, this problem is not so easy to solve; moreover if you’re all alone in a country you don’t know and a city you don’t know, in an empty apartment where the phone rings only to offer—a rare opportunity, and this week only—a hu-u-uge discount on a subscription to the local newspaper, an apartment from which you dig yourself out three times a week to get to the university where half a dozen neatly dressed, white socks and sneakers, and fastidiously washed and deodorized American kids with moist, healthy skin and teeth follow you with their eyes as you wander back and forth across the classroom, the eyes of fish in an aquarium, quietly writing something down (God only knows what) in their notebooks while you, getting yourself all worked up (you have to hang in there somehow for an hour and fifteen minutes!), passionately explain to them that Gogol had no choice! given that he was who he was, no choice but to write in Russian! you can cry, you can dance—no choice! (and you likewise have no choice but to write in Ukrainian, although this is probably the most barren choice under the sun at present, because even if you did, by some miracle, produce something in this language “knocking out Geothe’s Faust,” as one well-known literary critic by the name of Joseph Stalin would put it, then it would only lie around the libraries unread, like an unloved woman, for who knows how many dozens of years until it began “cooling off”—because untasted, unused texts unsustained by the the energy of reciprocal thought gradually cool down, and how!—if the stream of public attention doesn’t pick them up in time and carry them to the surface, they sink like stones to the bottom and become covered by mineral waxes that can never be scraped off, just like your unsold books which gather dust somewhere at home and in bookstores, this same thing has happened with most of Ukrainian literature, you can count on the fingers of two hands—not even authors, but individual works that have been lucky enough—with numb fingertips and tears in your eyes you had read a translation of Forest Song done here in America, an authorized version meant for the Broadway stage, you were as high as a kite from your quickened, passionate breathing: it’s alive, alive, it hasn’t perished, seventy years later, on a different continent, in a different language—just look at that, it made it!—of course, it’s an entirely different matter to write in English or in Russian—your first poem published in English in a not particularly well-known magazine received a rave review from somewhere out there, Kansas, I think, some kind of Review of Literary Journals, can you believe it, and Macmillan is ready to include it in its anthology of international women’s poetry, “you’re a superb poet,” the local publishers tell you [dragging their feet on publication all the same], thank you, I know, so much the worse for me—but you, sweetness, you have no choice not because you’re incapable of switching languages—you could do that splendidly with a little effort—but because a curse has been placed on you to be faithful to all those who have died, all those who could have switched languages just as easily as you—Russian, Polish, some even German, and could have lived entirely different lives, but instead hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking show for it but mangled destinies and unread books—and yet today there is you, unable to step over their corpses and go on your merry way, simply unable, tiny sparks of their presence keep dropping into your life here and there, into the ashes of mundane daily existence; and this then is your family, your family tree, you pitiful backwoods aristocrat, please forgive this unpardonably long digression, ladies and gentlemen, all the more because it actually has no relevance to our subject). Ladies and gentlemen, the sense of one’s own body wasting away day by day—is a feeling familiar perhaps to prisoners of the Gulag: I examine myself in the bathroom every evening (putting on my owl’s glasses, those same ones with the thick lenses, so I look pretty darn funny), my breasts, until now invariably round and bouncy with pert nipples pointing in opposite directions (“Check it out,” one of my not yet fully Ukrainianized men once said, and not all that long ago—“they’re probably a size D, but see how high they sit!”): this fall they sagged for the first time, definitively moving downward, bringing to mind bread dough that’s been standing around too long, and they’ve also been attacked by some kind of revolting spots, probably pigmentary, and the nipples are looking more and more like the dark skin of a shriveled peach—that man was one of those who generally had a very foggy notion of what you’re supposed to do with women’s breasts except perhaps pinch them through a blouse, but the point, of course, isn’t that—this was a good-looking body, healthy, smart, and vigorous, and to give credit where credit is due, it hung in there for an awfully long time, it was only with that man that it instantly began giving me a hard time, but I put the screws to it, harshly and unsparingly, and still it resisted, chafed with various chronic colds, swollen glands, and febrile rashes, a “weakened immune system,” the doctors said, but I would pry myself out of bed, patch the rashes with plasters, and, burning with fever, charge to the train station, the train, clattering over the jointed tracks, would rush me toward the city in which that man sat silently after totaling his precious car, the night of the accident I had a dream that someone had stolen it from him, and verses, unaware of the real state of things but in their own way somnambulantly clairvoyant, flooded in like the landscapes from the fog outside the window:

  The snow, back then, was yet to fall.

  Autumn still smelled of Corvalol,

  And cars, run off the road,

  In their garages weakly groaned.

  I abused my body for a fairly long time and it must have some sense of grievance against me (or, as they say here, “a grudge”), and now, after the fact, there’s not a whole lot I can do for it—except torment it every morning with pointless knee-bends after which the tight, deceived thighs ache with forgotten, sweet moans; or else vapidly drag it to the swimming pool every night (off to work!) where they know me already: the black lady custodian in a motley turban who hands out locker keys blitzes me with her blinding smile each time: “You’re pretty faithful to that swimming, huh?”—God, how gentle, soft, and kind she is, like the water in the pool; at each unexpected kind word I’m ready to start bawling my eyes out, like a hounded adolescent wolf cub, ready to eat from each outstretched hand, like, for example, this trustingly open palm—pink nakedness upward—handing me a little golden key on a red nylon string, to which I eagerly explain that I must, that I literally must frequent this place, that this is the sole way I can save myself from depression—the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way—and in order to describe my depression, which actually falls under a different name—I’ve already managed, willy-nilly, to pick up a little terminology familiar to them: “broken relationship,” and moreover “straight after a divorce,” and moreover “sexually traumatic,” and from there summoning psychiatric textbooks to my aid: “fear of intimacy, fear of frigidity, suicidal moods”—in a word, a classic case, not even worth going to a psychiatrist with, and my b
lessed African woman, so lusciously fleshy behind the narrow counter, Earth Mother, gentle, steamy moos and rough tongue, nods with a wise, knowing smile: “I’ve been there,” she says, “with the father of my kids”—how about that, so she’s divorced, a single parent with two little ones, the younger will be two soon, it’s easier when you have children—both easier and harder (“And now,” said that man, glowing triumphantly over her, a sweaty boy in the dark—“and now you’re going to be pregnant: I came right inside you!”—“No,” she laughed, gently so as not to spill all that tenderness over the brim—“no, my love, it won’t be today”—although this in fact was, from the first night, her main concealed thought, the submerged underwater current of that love: a baby boy, Danny, she secretly established—forehead covered in tickly baby-chick down, frog-like tiny legs tucked in, fingertips like the tiniest buds, oh, my Lordy!—in her dreams she eagerly cradled him to her breast: this is the anchor that keeps us alive and without which we, ladies, do not have full rights on this earth, “unregistered”: neither a word nor even a letter in that text but merely an accidental dot in the margins—and in the meantime her verses mumbled mutely to themselves, dispersing into multiglossia:

  I’m cold, my darling.

  —Wrap a sheepskin around you

  I’m sad, my love

  —Try working, my dove

  Ah, but I’m feeling lazy

  —Because you need a baby

  I’m frightened, my dear, to have her,

  And thus become yours forever

  —no, no, I mustn’t think if it, I mustn’t!)—“Everybody seems to have been there,” I remark, feeling momentarily relieved of the heavy weight by joining at least some kind of community, a social group: join the club!—oh, yes, my black woman gives a stately nod, “every woman has been there”—and then a mischievous woman’s squint: “maybe you’ll meet someone here, at the pool?” That would have been the moment to start laughing hysterically, at the very least because this fall, as you forcibly dragged your miserable, oppressed body down the streets of an alien city, you first became familiar with the notion of invisibility—at first you didn’t even quite realize what the deal was, but once you did, you began to study it fastidiously: yup, it’s true—men walking toward you would glide over you with indifferent, unseeing eyes, like you were an inanimate object, and even on the bus, when pressed by the crowd into dangerously close proximity to somebody’s massive back with a hockey emblem on it, you did not pick up that lightning-quick flash of animal instinct—a twitch, a face turning to look at you—that which switches on in them automatically, simply from the smell of a woman but not only: in reality they—perhaps only with the exception of camp prisoners and soldiers, those who have lost their minds after years of abstinence—respond not so much to the woman as to the electric frequencies, undetectable by any scientific instrument, of all the other males’ desires which at the moment happen to be aimed at her and which envelop her (and which at the present moment do not envelop me) as a densely charged erotic cloud—no wonder they say a betrothed woman is attractive to all: that’s the part that really seduces them, forces them to flare with nostrils dilated by fury and pound the ground with their hooves—the spirit of competition, the desire to win, the challenge to a duel, the silent call of the bugle to battle that vibrates the air, the insatiable need to prove superiority over all others, doesn’t matter if they’ve ever seen them or not: “Tell me—was sex with your husband good?”—“Very good!”—she blurted out truthfully, like a slap in the face—he practically curled into a ball: too bad, she no longer had the strength to force those patent phrases through her throat, to pretend, swallowing insult after insult, to brazenly demonstrate, like a whore for money, how very all-out cool he is (“You slut, dumping your tits out for all to see!” he hissed as though a bee had just bitten him when during their final days of communal habitation he caught sight of her half-naked body, angry at himself that he could still, against all common sense, want this woman with whom sex was nothing but mutual torment: “your cunt’s like a vice”—well, you shouldn’t have gone in with a crowbar: hopping under the covers at three in the morning, shoving me around, turning me over on my back, that businesslike manner of sticking your finger in where you’re not invited, that much I can do for myself and a whole lot better than you, more gently; my body defended itself against my own willfulness, oh yeah, fear, so thoughtlessly dismissed by me earlier, appeared out of nowhere, planted itself inside my body and grew: my body sensed something in this man that I could not—meantime I turned myself into a witch, a castrating Megaera with a vice in my loins: ever hear of “no”?!—and that’s when the bellowing of the trapped male would commence: “You know how many women I’ve had!”—Oh fuck your women, all one hundred thousand of them, I couldn’t care less, I don’t need to conquer you, I need to love you—love, can you understand that?!—therefore in her nakedness, we must admit he had a point, there truly was a shamelessness: it was a deliberate and offensive nakedness, that which is not meant to seduce but rather to express contempt—I can cut my toenails in front of you, shave my legs, not rinse the bathtub after I’m done, leaving dark curly hairs on the sides, wash up between my legs, masturbate—and not in the same way as when each such expression of physical liberty is taken as a gift, as one more precious sign of trust that evokes in you a hot torrent of grateful tenderness, not the way it was between us back home during those days when we would meet in unexpected quarters, crawling into some friend’s empty cottage through a window on a cold November night where the temperature was about seven degrees Celsius, drinking cognac in the dark, so as to warm up a little, without taking our coats off, and I was blowing into your rough, frozen hands and hiding them under my sweater because that was the warmest spot, and you both laughed and cried, catching your breath, not able to believe it: “Is this you? Can this really be you?”—that autumn was the autumn of keys; never in my life had I, homeless, carried around so many borrowed keys in my purse at the same time—it seemed as though I jangled with them as I ran, like a merry-go-round pony, attracting all eyes to me, which gave me, like that pony from the fair, an irrepressible desire to neigh happily—and when you, in that home that belonged to some unknown, were boiling water in two huge pots so that I could take a bath, drawing it by pail in the middle of the night from an invisible well in the yard, identifiable only by the occasional splash, while I hung around the doorway in nothing but a housecoat over my naked body feeling no cold; and later, when I locked the bathroom door and saw the soap still foamy after you in the soap dish, standing there gingerly on end the way you had a habit of carefully placing it—so that the water would drain, because mine was always flat on its belly soaking in a puddle—I stood looking at that soap and was so stupidly happy as I could only have been in my childhood, because only then had I had a home, I was tired, my love, I was so tired, and all I wanted was for you to be near me and to lather me up, but you locked me in that room and turned the key and took off somewhere into the night in that car looking for groceries—oh, God damn it, fuck those groceries, my good man, how much life do we really have and how much love that we should be slicing it neatly for breakfast and dinner!). “How many times were you in love?”—“Three,” he counted, shutting his eyes—“this is the fourth.”—“Seems like a few too many for such a short life—three great loves…”—“Why do they have to be great right away”—his eyes laughed and she thawed out with a smile in return—“maybe they were small and mousy—little tiny ones?” Who the hell talks that way about their love, even if it’s been trampled, even if it’s all in the past, even if it’s cut you in half like a truck severs a dog on the road, the way it did me that winter—the flight over the Atlantic: until five in the morning, right up until the taxi came to take me to the airport I waited—for a ring, if not of the doorbell (a thousand times, to exhaustion, my mind rewound the same clip: I open the door and you’re standing in the doorway, barely containing with
the corners of your mouth that insanely happy radiance that wants to leap from your face: finally, oh God, take your coat off already, how could you do this to me, you look a mess, so what happened, I’ve been going crazy here!) then at least of the telephone, a word, a voice, the end of a thread that I could catch hold of and keep unraveling from one continent to another, I don’t believe it!—my insides screeched, scalded with grief, I don’t believe it!—the taxi unloaded me into the snowdrift at the entrance to the international flights hall, how empty it was, how dead—a crematorium—the lights of Boryspil at five a.m., destination Devil’s Dead End, the main gateway of the country, haha!—a country hopelessly unconnected to the nervous system that crisscrosses the planet, that thunders day and night, pumping through gigantic ganglions of ports, train terminals, and customs booths teeming streams of activated human neurons, Sheremetevo, JFK, Ben-Gurion, and wherever else I’ve been tossed about, even though all this is vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit and body, but—there is motion, but—there is the animal pursuit of life, the wolf’s bared teeth: another moment and I’ll catch you, grab you by the scruff of the neck!—but in Boryspil, awakened by the desperately echoing click of my high heels, only unfocused, sleepy faces were rising from the luggage piled up along the walls, slowly unfurling their features like nocturnal animals roused from their sleep: as though they lived here, Jewish households in an eternal state of waiting until a crack opens in the border gate and they can scoot out, and so that’s how my country saw me off, the country to which I, when all’s said and done, will return—you betcha, despite the fact that my well-meaning American friends advise me to apply for yet another grant and assure me that my chances are good, I will return, come crawling back to die like a wounded dog, tied to the leash of a language that nobody knows, while you be sure to honor my memory in the Review of Literary Journals, that’s right, and then there’s my article from the year before last in the Partisan Review, which wasn’t entirely stupid either, it was noticed, there was even a response in—wow!—the Times Literary Supplement; but the main point, my friends, you missed anyway, it seemed funny to you and no more: that the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake—I’m here! I’m still alive!—but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own—how the hell are you supposed to get out? She felt herself alive for a moment in Frankfurt where they changed planes: when running blindly down the corridor she ran into two upright-standing border guards, two identically red-haired burly German guys with identical splotchy freckles all over their arms who, checking her out with a healthy youthful curiosity and exchanging good-natured growls in their own language, examined her passport and asked, just for the hell of it, in distilled international English where she was going—to Boston? Oh, it’s very cold there right now, the coldest winter in a hundred years!—“I know,” she said, giving a perfunctory smile like she was striking a soggy match, and, warmed by the animal, purely physical vitality steaming from them she suddenly felt, for the first time in her life, a literal uncontrollable urge to wring her hands: no longer a mere folk-song expression, no!—wring your hands, your white hands, every finger, too; you’ll not find, my dear girl, a Cossack’s love more true—but rather the most urgent, insuppressible physical desire to wrest, with this desperate gesture, her still living body from the tight armor of agony that squeezed her from all sides: Mykola, Mykola, she wrote him later from Cambridge, into thin air, to his local post office for “general delivery” because there was no other address—what are you doing, my love? Why are you turning to dust that which could be such an insanely brilliant—life, passion, a flight of two forever-linked stars through the fin-de-siècle night? Shit, now might be a good time to reread that stuff—the style alone could inspire a fit of hysterical laughter!—School of Medicine! that’s where one should take courses in Ukrainian romanticism, in the psychiatry departments! “You’ll return my letters,” she instructed dryly as they parted, not that she had any great desire to own those letters, what’s over is over, hell with it—but to free from his possession any vestiges of herself that contained even weak signs of life, that still stung and very much so; he turned the lock instantly, raising high his dangerously well-endowed chin (no contest from all the super-sexed Hollywood spermatosauruses): “I wouldn’t think of it. They’re mine”—the only thing that’s yours, sweetheart, is what you’ve painted, and there’s no point fooling yourself: what you can’t get into totally, blindly, over your head, will never become yours. Write down those words, I’m giving you permission, why not. And one more thing, almost forgot: that’s why those loves of yours end up being so small and mousy—the little tiny ones.