“Then you were like this in a previous life,” she answered, very serious, “you just forgot.”
“You think?”
In response, she stepped in closer, with that balletic move of hers, upward from below—and kissed me on the lips, running her tongue between them, which brought them, with a gasp, right back to life under the rolled-on lipstick, the feeling back in them again: her little tongue, in comparison to a man’s, turned out to be incredibly soft, tender, like an oyster pried out of its shell. I forgot how long it had been since I was kissed by a woman—at school, at summer camp?—and thought to myself, stunned: so that’s what we girls feel and taste like, some lucky bastards those men! Vlada withdrew and stood in the mirror beside me—a bloody smudge stained her lips like the hand mirror in that famous painting of hers,
Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident
. “Now wait, I’ll take a picture of you.”
And I stayed there waiting, trembling a little—had she told me to slice my wrists at that moment, I would probably have done as she said. But she only brought back her camera—and casually, without aiming, shot off, like a good machine-gunner from the elbow-grip, a whole clip,
click-click-click
. “And now, the hard-est”—and she stood next to me again, with that bloody smudge across her mouth, holding the camera aimed at the two us in her stretched-out arms,
click-click-click
. A double portrait: the artist and her (nibbled) model. Or, perhaps, not the model, but the work? No, it wasn’t the model, or the work either. For her, I was something else in that incarnation, a bizarre impersonation of female strength, which she no longer felt in herself. And I remember well the strange alarm that stirred in me when she was aiming at us like that, with both hands, at face level, as if it were a gun muzzle and not a camera lens.
Those pictures remain in her digital archive—Vadym hasn’t destroyed that yet. That’s what he says, at least. I don’t know if I would like to see them now. “Doesn’t matter,” Vlada said, when we looked at the pictures together—“no photograph can ever give you what you get when you look at the thing in flesh, and color photography especially is all smoke and mirrors, bull and
opium for the people.” And she was right: The pictures were very impressive but something crept into them that wasn’t there in the mirror—theatricality. We looked like a pair of masqueraders, and my witchy mask no longer mesmerized as powerfully—some magic had gone out of it. This is why, Vlada professed contemplatively, painting can never be replaced, not ever, not with anything. “That’s okay. I’ll use this. I’ll do something with these. I just don’t know what yet...”
And I did not tell her that she’d already done something—to me, only I also didn’t know yet what it was. Washing my face in the bathroom later—with dull regret, as if an unfulfilled promise had breathed so near and passed me by, only brushing me with that one touch on the lips, and then slipping between my fingers (only living beauty can evoke such an aching sense of loss—never the one on canvas)—I felt my knees buckle under me. Just like that, literally, as if the tendons suddenly turned to mush and lost their grip—and up till then I thought “straw legs” was just a figure of speech. Had there been a male artist in Vlada’s stead, everything between us would’ve discharged into clarity by means of immediate sex, and that sex probably would’ve been divine. One of those few times, count them on your fingers, that you remember for the rest of your life—with a complete release from the body such as one experiences in the midst of religious ecstasy, when, as I seem to remember Papa Hemingway wrote, the ground swam, although that was nonsense, too, because there’s no ground left in sex like that, neither ground nor sky, neither up nor down, and love has nothing to do with it. Although I did have one time like that with Aidy, but then I’ve also had one with Artem—that time in the archive, when I first saw the photo of Dovganivna with her comrades and it came over me right on the spot, and that’s when it all started, my life changed.
But Vlada was not a man, and the two of us could not rely on such simple resolutions, programmed into us by Mother Nature herself. Something else, then, was between us, something more unsettling, something akin to the link between a new mother and
the fruit of her womb—she gave birth to something in me that night. She set something free, like a large dark bird.
And this remained our secret, one for the two of us—we never talked about it again, didn’t have a chance. Until the day there was no longer anyone to talk to.
How could I have given her the strength I myself did not know was in me?
***
“B-beg pardon, I didn’t hear you—what was t-that?”
Baldy asked me a question or something. And I tuned him out. Coz I’m drunk. Drink-dong-drunk...I hear bells ringing somewhere, a tinny-tiny little sound. No kidding, I’m drunk, good and drunk, who’d have thunk. Somewhere there was a stage at which I should’ve stopped and lingered, and I didn’t notice how I rolled straight through it. Overdid it. And butter won’t help no mo’.
Baldy was asking whether I am bored. Oh, sure, he needs an audience; he wanted to preen before me, too. And I just tuned him out; how uncivil—did not hear a thing,
nada
, of what they were talking about.
“I’m n-never bored.”
“Oh, then you are a very special woman. One of a kind—your health!”
But I am bored looking at you, mister. Do you have any idea how boring you are to look at? You’re all so boring, like someone’d just pulled you out of a washer. That’s exactly what you’re like: soggy and wrung out. And you probably imagine yourself all clean and squeaky, right?
“It’s time we got going,” Aidy says. The big sweetie, he’s a bit tipsy, too. And all that alcohol has clarified some things in his head, too: that the only way to get rid of this character is exactly this—to get up and leave altogether. He won’t go by himself, unless someone throws him out. And Aidy can’t throw anyone out for
anything. Aidy doesn’t like humiliating people. And thank God for that. Thank God.
Baldy shoots hungry looks all around him, as though he wants to swallow the whole place in one gulp before he leaves, and take it with him, in his gut, like a smuggler carrying diamonds. And sighs sorrowfully, woman-like:
oho-ho
!
“As old Taras once wrote—”
Who? Baldy quotes with great pathos—although he talks all the time as if he were quoting someone anyway. His generation still uses quotes like scholastics use the Holy Scriptures, sat out their whole lifetimes behind other people’s backs.
“First drink down—makes you spry / second—worry on your mind / third one—now your eyes glow / thought after another follows!”
“Taras Shevchenko wrote that?”
Aidy and I ask him to repeat it, and he does. I love it—like it was written about me. The clinical picture spread out, plain and simple. If only I’d stopped at that third drink—while the eyes still glowed. Aidy hands his credit card to the waiter, and Baldy pretends he is too engaged in the conversation to have noticed this delicate moment. (He’ll ask insincerely later: How much do I owe?—and pretend to be surprised, just as insincerely, that the bill’s already been settled; these old suckers always do that.) He tells me the great bard wrote this on a wall somewhere while he was carousing in a tavern. You know those poets maudits. Although it’s still better than “les saglots longs des violons.” For some reason, this conclusion prompts a surge of patriotic pride in me. (How did I ever get so drunk?)
“It would be good to write it on the wall here somewhere, too,” Aidy contributes, as he always does, a dose of constructive pragmatism. That’s right, this is supposed to be a literary café; no less, they even have some moldy hardbacks huddling on the shelves over there—what idiot would ever want to read in this light? Thought after another follows, that’s very well said indeed.
And, out of some deeply sentimental gratitude to this old art-worm for the aptly supplied quote—as if this quote, for reasons past comprehension, took us to some deeper level of mutual understanding in this place and at this moment, before we got up from the table and parted ways (Will our paths ever cross again, or have they separated forever already?), as if the quote sent us into the throes of an intimacy so urgent we needed to fall into each other’s arms at the feet of Myshko Grytsiuk, whom Vlada considered a genius—in a word, that drunken daze that makes the proletariat, after the umpteenth, by the great bard unforeseen, drink, grab whatever’s handy and crush it on the tablemate’s skull, I open my mouth and blurt, “Did you, by chance, know Vladyslava Matusevych?”
Done, it’s out, can’t take it back. And instantly the face I see before me is no longer weaselly—it’s a hyena’s maw.
He-he
.
“You know, for me it was enough to have known her matinka,
he-he
!”
“Nina Ustýmivna?” I’m not being obtuse—I’m slamming on the brakes: something’s coming at me that I do not want to hear, and there’s no way to swerve around it.
“Exactly, exactly. Ninél is her real name.”
Ninél? Yes, indeed, that’s right, Ninél—a name once fashionable among the Soviet bureaucrats, “Lenin” spelled backwards.
“I knew Matusevych Senior, too. He wasn’t actually without talent, as a painter, but that bitch, pardon my language, just drove him to the grave. We used to call her the praying mantis among ourselves,
he-he
...the spider female that turns the male into protein after the act.... She, by the way, was a beauty, a nuclear blonde; you know—you could bury her alive, and she’d dig herself out with her bare hands,
he-he
. God spare me from a woman like that.”
Something in his voice, a grating note, tells me he is not married. Or long divorced. Could’ve figured it earlier, not rocket science: his dingy shirt, a general dusting of neglect—it happens when a person has long lived alone and doesn’t have anyone to look him over on his way out. His only consolation—how bad things
can be for the married. Especially those who marry beautiful blondes. Vlada also always said that her mom had been a beauty, and I always kept politely quiet: I think the real beauties remain beautiful in old age, and I wouldn’t say that about N.U.
“The fact that Matusevych never fulfilled his potential as an artist,” Baldy continues to gloat, “was all Ninél’s fault, much more so than the Soviets! She couldn’t get him the Government Award, that’s true, although she packed him off to the Central Committee more than once—to confess the mistakes of his youth, and he still didn’t make it to the special-rations ranks,
he-he
...I’ll finish the cognac, with your permission. No use leaving tears at the bottom—Your health!
“About me, she wrote a denunciation in ’73—to the Union’s political committee and the Art publishing house, whence I was promptly expelled, after that report of hers—for ideological immaturity. And that was the beginning of all my trials and tribulations. Despite the fact that I was a young specialist and they had no right to expel me.” (He is talking as if this all happened just yesterday, the resentment raw in his voice.) “Right before that I published in...” (
Bla-bla-bla
—he names a periodical from back then,
Socialist Painting
or
Swine Tending
, I forget instantly) “my article...” (he rolls out a pretentious multiclause title that whizzes straight over my head and might as well have been in a foreign language) “they called it the generation’s manifesto, the debate in the Union was oh-so-stormy—the last, you could say, stir of freedom.”
“You mentioned a denunciation.”
“And the denunciation,
he-he...
” (he’s all but rubbing his hands together, so pleased is he to be opening my eyes to the bottomless pit of human depravity) “the denunciation was that beauty’s way of getting back at me for criticizing her husband, among other things. In that article of mine I wrote that he was more successful in his nonfigurative works than he was with the builders of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and that was absolutely true. Except that he’d already been raked over the coals for his
nonfiguratives, and it was time for him to distinguish himself. It was a critical year, you know: there’d been one wave of arrests already, Zalyvaha got time, Gorska was killed, a whole bunch of people got expelled from the Union, blacklisted—and Ninél, you know, she was used to comfort, to status; she wouldn’t have taken kindly to being the wife of a persecuted, starving abstractionist. So she packed him off to paint ‘men of labor’ at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Project.... ”
“Good Lord, why to Chernobyl?”
“Eh, you, young bucks!” Baldy is all but melting, blissfully, like a living block of butter. He is in his element—the guide to the past, where we are foreign tourists, mouths agape. “They just started building it, right then! All the papers blared about it; poets were falling over each other to sing the peaceful atom on the Pripyat’s shores. It was a win-win subject: it’s not the great leaders you’d be painting again, you know, but men of labor—just like Courbet did—and at the same time you’d be manifesting the correct understanding of the government’s and the party’s policies. Back then, you must remember, few knew—it only came to light after the accident—how dangerous a project it was, that nuclear plant. And that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, no matter how deep in Moscow’s pocket it may have been, did not, in the end, give its approval to build the plant in such a densely populated area—only in Moscow, they didn’t give a shit, pardon my language, about some stupid Ukrainian hohlys’ permission.
“It was so ordered—and off went the campaign, and everyone ran to get in line for a creative road assignment. And Matusevych Senior, too. He slapped together a whole series, painted in the realistic manner, of course; it was his first official show. He did have a few interesting uses of color here and there; color was his strength, and you can’t escape yourself at the drop of a hat, just like that—but overall it was a sloppy job, such blatant socialist realism. If they’d given him the award then, it would have been a giant leap for him...” (he spreads his arms, to make his point more visual) “clear to being crowned on the other side of the
chessboard, straight into the establishment!” (The establishment seems to drop onto my untouched plate next to the veal filet that’s gone cold, and Baldy blinks at it in passing, with visible regret.)