You are shit, Vadym. Good Lord, what unadulterated shit you are.
This sentence comes together in my mind suddenly and of its own volition, like a barrel lid rumbling shut. (At the next table, the high-pitched soprano squeals again—damn, she’s loud, should be singing Mozart or something.) I have to smoke. The curious part: no more internal squishiness, none of that drizzly whining of the drunken French fiddler. It’s all gone, shut off. Like a sudden change of weather. Simply: the man with whom my friend had once fallen in love turned out not to be the person she’d thought he was. A crappy and rather trivial turn of events, basically. Of which the crappiest part is that the friend has moved on to a better (one hopes) world, and the man who had once babbled to me incoherently in an empty apartment—“I killed her”—goes on presiding over great flows of money from his office and responds to my claim that his class brethren, his fellow minders of, perhaps, the very same cash flows, intend to use television as a means of netting girls for the sex trade, by telling me he has more important affairs to attend to. Affairs of state, damn it. Of the state.
“Fuck this state, Vadym” (and representatives therein, I added mentally) “if things like this can be the norm!” At this, Vadym, sniffing offendedly, advised me to be realistic. Translated from representative-speak: quit being stupid. But—that’s a chore, as
Aidy’s dad says. Once a person’s stupid, you can’t do much about that. One could, I imagine, have put her wits to work and figured out, in advance, that the sex business, for Vadym, does not constitute a good enough reason to rush to anyone’s rescue. That, when he himself needed rescuing from the Misfortune-That-Had-To-Be-Endured that had so unfairly befallen him, he must have tried, besides Svetochka, any number of professional masseuses for his orphaned dick, and found them precisely on the same market that the
Miss New TV
show is intended to supply.
Everyone makes use of prostitutes, sure—that is to say, everyone who can afford to—why should our elected representative be any different? Is he a man or what? It’s a man’s world, sweetie, nothing to be done about that, nothing to be done, and you just have to be realistic. The more Svetochkas out there, the easier it is for solvent men to endure everything they are supposed to endure. To bear their cross and be pillars of the state—the poor thing’s about to keel over, like the tower of Pisa.
I’d better stub out this cigarette. I’m getting lightheaded.
I asked him about Katrusya after he said that—how’s she doing at school? Does he keep track of that? Vadym thought it was my way of changing the subject and started telling me, happily, how he picked her and some friends of hers up from school just the other day. Quite a sight for a pervert’s imagination: this big-screen, well-massaged, tightly fleshed at the nape, and everywhere else, Humbert Humbert in his Land Cruiser, smack in the middle of a whole flowerbed of sweetly aromatic Lolitas—girls at that age still smell almost as divine as babies, of vanilla or something like that. I’d give anything to know if fathers ever get erections at the sight of their pubescent daughters. Right, like anyone’d admit to that...Vadym believed (and if Vadym believes something, then that’s the way it is) Katrusya had an easy time with her studies; she could get all As if she tried just a bit harder, but (he believes) it’s not the most important thing. Of course not. And does she watch TV? Vadym still wasn’t catching my drift. You know—what would happen when Katrusya watches this beauty contest, girls,
you know, need such things, especially at her age: to have a universally accepted standard of beauty before them, something to aim for—and then around eighth grade or so, she’ll want to send in her own picture to be considered for the contest.
“But you’ll warn her, won’t you?” Vadym smiled with the charming immediacy of an adult talking to a child, and I was simply floored—floored, and for a moment fully capable of believing women could find him attractive, even a woman like Vlada. The smile was absolutely genuine, a good, beautiful smile. He wasn’t being dishonest or cunning—he really did not see here a Problem-That-Had-To-Be-Solved situation. And if Vadym doesn’t see it, then it’s not there at all.
I did not ask him, after that, who would warn all the other Katrusyas around the country—the ones who do not go to the British Council School and for whom television is their only window to the world. And I did not even tell him that I resigned from my channel—why? Clearly, the media and everyone involved were low on Vadym’s priority list at the moment; the imminent election tsunami meant something different to him than it did to us, mere mortals—something hard and tangible, some stupendous redistribution of cash masses in the direction I’d be lucky to guess. Only I’m not inclined. In any case, I’ve no doubt that for him things will turn out just fine; Vadym’s not used to losing. It’s only with Vlada he got beat. Got away, that one.
What if she did want to get away from him—only didn’t know how? What if she’d also had her own morning looking through the window onto wet roofs—when she had to force herself out of bed with the new day pulled over her head like a bag and realize that her life took the wrong exit somewhere, that this was no longer her highway, and she had to grab the wheel and twist, back up, back up. Only it’s very hard to do when you live life at the speed Vlada did. Her motor revved till the scenery flew past like a ribbon.
She did. Of course she did—my proud girl who quivered as though set on top of a tightly coiled spring. Proud people who are accustomed to being the ones giving support to others are so
bad at sending out their own SOS signals that even when they call you at two in the morning and complain about insomnia, about an irrational fear—if I fall asleep, I’ll die—you do not hear the signal. And even when you can see, having spent five hours straight under the watchful guard of her boyfriend, as if he were ordered explicitly not to leave you alone for a single minute even if his bladder should burst, that something is very much awry indeed, and things are not as good as they’d just recently appeared—you still don’t allow yourself to think that the love glow this couple radiated not so long ago could have been no more than a ghost light, leading a trusting traveler straight into the bog. You do not allow it because you know, in your heart of hearts, that to think so would be to insult your proud friend, because she herself, teeth clenched, must have fought an unimaginably exhausting, life-sucking war before she could admit it—her defeat—to herself.
Now I am absolutely certain that’s exactly what happened.
Now—after today’s Vadym, who has already heroically turned that page (“She was the best thing in my life,” he’d said over Vlada’s coffin, and had I died, R. would’ve said so over mine) of his life and returned to himself—the way he was before Vlada, BV, because people like him do not change and no new experience can turn things upside down inside them; now all the little incidents that had once scraped on my attention as dissonant, accidental splinters line up, in hindsight, into a regular pattern. There was one thing Vadym and Vlada had in common, and it was this thing that like a wrench thrown into a turning gear caught Vlada, brought her to a halt: they both had it living in them and motivating them their entire lives—the fear of defeat.
It was that fear that, ten years earlier, made her break up her marriage with Katrusya’s father (who, ultimately, did not manage to do anything better with his life than to emigrate to Australia, where he, according to different sources, either worked as a night guard or babysat kangaroos). It was that fear that made her hair stand on end when, in the fall of 1990, we were smoking the one cigarette we had between the two of us in
the little park on Zolotovoritska—right here, across the street, where the casino now stands (the spot I’ve been circling since—for fourteen years already—as if under the sway of gravitational pull)—and the hot wind of tectonic shifts blew self-published (on Roto Printers back then) leaflets at us, and the bitter coffee from tiny chipped cups scorched the roofs of our mouths. “We had no youth, Daryna.”
We did, Vlada, we did, that was it—our youth, and our country’s youth that was being born out of the tidal roar of the Independence Square, of the boys with seraphic faces and white hunger-strikers’ headbands, not one of whom, back then, had yet thought of paying for being prepared to die. And they were really prepared to die, and those who haven’t died, only got themselves to blame.
Yes, my Vlada had that fear, of course she did, however deep it sat—a genetic fear, inherited from her mother, from Nina Ustýmivna. Or perhaps even older than that—from those grandparents of hers, the Komsomol activists who, in 1933, lit out for the city from the famished country and became teachers at a workers’ night school, and thus did not die together with everyone else in their village—and who knows at what price. And it was because of this fear, which did not allow her, in her own eyes or in the eyes of her jealous community, any right to err, that she got stuck with Vadym for so dangerously long in that stage when you work through your days as if they were wet dirt on a shovel, because in place of your extinguished love, or whatever it was that appeared to have been love, comes emptiness—and into emptiness, always and inevitably, like black water, seeps death: I’m afraid to sleep. I’ll fall asleep—and die.
Shit, now I remember! She even told me, sometime that summer, before our interview, a dream she had—told it to me in detail. The dream was about Vadym, but I only remembered one image from it. (You generally don’t remember other people’s dreams very well; they’re like the plots of movies someone has retold you but that you haven’t seen yourself.) In the dream, Vadym took her
somewhere, to a hill, gray as the surface of the moon, and the hill began to slide from under her feet, and she saw it was a pile of concrete sand—really, what could be deader? I think there were even crows in that dream—black, fat, and glossy.
Why couldn’t I have told her then: Vladusya, my dear, cut the cord and run as fast as your legs will carry you—exactly like you did ten years ago; follow your own design, that same mind-boggling pattern of yours. I know you can, you’ve done it before, and you know when it’s time to go under the knife—and to hell with him, this husband of yours, and with his—actually your—penthouse, with its glassed-in floating clouds, mirror surfaces, and white leather ottomans; all that, literally heavenly beauty, with the eternal view of the sky, you could charge admission to that place, that was a heck of a job you did, but to hell with it, tear it from your heart and run. Run because this man, whose one other woman has already gone round the bend, alarmingly, in the loony-bin direction, is clearly dangerous; there are men like that—packed hard inside into an unassailable mass of self-satisfaction that we mistake for strength, and everything they touch, they kill, even sex. Such men like power, and it comes to them easily, because when someone’s plowing ahead with such unassailable confidence, it is very hard not to think that he is the one who has seen the light and will, if you follow him, show it to you, too—hard to believe that such a juggernaut carries with it nothing but itself. But it’s now that I’m all wised up—I knew nothing back then; it was all before I met R., and I was as stupid and naïve as a bunch of parsley. Dara—Dolly—Folly.
Why is the word death of feminine gender in our language; where’d this nonsense come from? Death should be a man; a woman’s death, at least. That’s the way the Germanic people have it, I think, they’ve always been better mystics than we. Spoken by a man, “I killed her”—it even sounds better, more convincing, than when a woman says, “I killed him.” When a man says it, it doesn’t admit any levity of interpretation.
I killed him with that one phrase
—men don’t talk like that. Or,
I killed him with my silent
disdain
—you’re kidding, right? He doesn’t give a hoot about your disdain, if he even noticed it. What does he notice, really?
I know nothing about the war that may have been raging between them her last autumn, when Vlada was so rapidly withdrawing from us all, cloaked in the cold, otherworldly glint of estrangement, like an acolyte soon to take her vows—I know nothing, and will never know anything more. And Vadym doesn’t know either—I doubt he suspected even then what role he’d been destined to play in her life. (He did get rattled a bit with a chilly draft of recognition when she died—in those first weeks, when he drowned his grief in drink and, like a buffalo, stampeded at nights down the Boryspil highway as if he wanted to catch the runaway and bring her back—but he did not let that recognition rattle him any looser, and no more drafts from the other side will ever get to him again.)
No one, except the dead person herself, can see her death in its entirety. See how it evolved, how it ripened, day by day, like a fruit. The living can only observe, from their side, the result: how the overripe fruit drops from the branch under its own weight. And only the dead, herself, knows how things got that far.
***
“Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna. I’ve always wanted to.”
The bathroom—impeccably stylish rather than luxurious, without any nouveau-riche bells and whistles, all those Roman therms and gold leaf—still smelled of recent renovation, of paint and varnish, and the smell resembled the air of Vlada’s studio a little. Perhaps that’s what put her in the working mode, made her hands itch to pick up her tools (painting, she loved saying, is first and foremost manual labor, a craft!). She worked differently from the way makeup artists usually did: seated me facing her instead of the mirror, did not talk to me, did not comment on anything she was doing, but instead brought in a tape deck and put on Queen, “The Show Must Go On.”
The longer I sat there, offering my face to her with my eyes closed, the stronger chills that ran through my body. Brushes, multiplying against my skin like a swarm of butterflies, tickled my mouth, temples, cheeks, eyelids; I was being transported to a different place, disappearing, changing form like a sculpture in the artist’s hands. The music blared inside me, and from there, from the darkness of roaring halls, broken glass poured down my veins, a battle call breaking to the surface—like a challenge to life itself—it thundered: the show must go on! And Vlada’s breath on my face froze like the breath of a tightrope walker hovering above the abyss of a great dark hall: this was no game, no innocent playing at dress-up and do-over, but something as ominously desperate as what Freddie Mercury must have felt in the flight of his own voice—she wanted to bring something important out of me, show me something that mattered a great deal to her; and when that scorchingly bright face finally hit me from the mirror, with the long Egyptian brows, the blood-dark lips (the face of a pagan goddess of war, a priestess of a bloody cult, something about it threatening, witchy, something that made you want to stomp it out, right away, like a fire, go back to the ranks, to the polished TV-screen picture that can reassuringly tell you the brand of the anchorwoman’s suit), I recoiled, terrified. But at the same time I couldn’t take my spellbound eyes off this strange mask, marveling at how, aided merely by the masterly blended colors, it grew out of my own features. Incredible. Perhaps only in dark, low-lit windowpanes, with the texture of the details smoothed away, can human faces be as magnificent as this, and afterward it was in dark windowpanes that I’d glimpse this strange face on myself—and shudder every time. By then the emotional overload was making my whole body shake, all but teeth clattering, and all I could manage was to hide behind a nervous chuckle, like a village girl behind her sleeve: “Matusevych, what have you done to me? I am not like this!”