the door shut behind me and a complete silence enveloped the room. My mind raced: Who am I, and what am I doing in this world? Is my world delimited by my body? By how far I can see? By the apartment I live in? Does it even exist at all, this world of mine? Will it go on existing if I close my eyes, if I pass out, if I die?
I lay in that total silence, consumed by my fear of disappearing. I could hear it—this fear—thudding fiercely inside me, trying to break its way out. I clenched my teeth firmly and pressed my hands against the plateau of my chest to keep it from splitting open. I needed my fear to stay contained; it had no right to break loose. It had no right to become physical.
I was an inconsequential being who had suddenly become deathly afraid of life. The world had suddenly become too vast around me, just as there had suddenly become too much of me in the world, too much of my body. I dreamed of diminishing my body to the size of a pearl and hiding in a shell on the ocean floor. I dreamed of closing myself up. Of shutting off the light. Of shutting off the unbearable silence.
Without my noticing, my body had slowly prevailed over my intellect. Now, years later as I write this, I understand that this should have been foreseeable: I had neglected my body for too long. Driven to despair, it had switched into autonomous mode and taken full control over me. It was saving both of us, however it could. Whenever I tried to push myself out of my shell, it whispered with dizziness, pain in my temples, and nausea: it was dangerous there, outside my apartment. Venturing out into the world wasn’t worth the risk, it cautioned; everything I needed was here, inside.
but, as it soon turned out, I didn’t have everything I needed in my hideout. In a week of solitary living, I ate up my whole stock and was beginning to go hungry. I was overcome with a constant and incredible desire to eat. I’d stuff everything I saw into my mouth until my stomach swelled up like a basketball and I felt exhausted and sleepy. Fear protected me from the dangerous world; food, in turn, protected me from my fear. With a full stomach, I was less afraid. And now I was out of food.
On Sunday, my parents came to visit and brought two liter-sized jars filled with potato dumplings that were still warm and cabbage rolls from the day before, also stuffed with potato and drizzled with pork cracklings—my favorite. Barely chewing, I devoured the gifts while my parents watched me wordlessly, as if they had come to have a look at a sideshow at a zoo.
“It’s our opinion,” my mom finally began, “that you need to stop being a drama queen and pull yourself together.”
“Pulling myself together is impossible,” I replied with my mouth full, unconcerned and not attaching any particular importance to what had been said. But for my mom, that was a signal to launch an attack.
“We know about everything. We know that you two aren’t together anymore and you’re living alone now. But you’ve become an invalid! You don’t leave the house! Tell us”—here her voice became tender—“what happened? We’ll help, just talk to us.”
My father couldn’t take it anymore and walked out to the living room. He avoided high vibrations of emotions whenever possible.
“I don’t know what’s going on with me,” I said to my mom, but she waved her hand dismissively, as if to say, Yeah, yeah, you’re just being dramatic. “I’ve started having these attacks, as if my heart will explode any minute or I’ll just suffocate . . . I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“Then go to the doctor.”
“A doctor was here and said I was healthy.”
“That means you’re fine!”
“I’m not fine.”
My mom exhaled loudly, her powerlessness palpable. “Are you insinuating that you’re having problems with your head?” She was ashamed. I could see it.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“If you want, I’ll talk to Nina.” Nina was Mom’s neighbor, who worked as a nurse at the regional psychiatric hospital. “Maybe she can recommend some good pills. These days everyone’s taking pills.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“If you’re going to keep financially relying on us, then we’re going to make this decision for you.”
I went back to my dumplings and cabbage rolls. My father came back into the kitchen. “Look, don’t eat so much or you’ll end up like Grandpa Bomchyk,” was all he said.
grandpa bomchyk, my father’s father, weighed a hundred and fifty kilos when he died. That was a lot, for Grandpa Bomchyk. In his youth, he had been slim. I had seen photographs in which my grandpa, thin as a rake, is embracing a mottled cow, his favorite. He used to take care of that cow as if she were a princess: he talked to her, milked her, combed her tail and, with a special brush, her belly and neck, cleaned the dried dung off her calves, let her lick salt out of a large bowl (what for, I don’t know), and even played the harmonica for her when no one was watching. The cow died before I was born, accidentally having eaten her fill of wet clover. Bomchyk tried to puncture her bloated stomach with an awl to release the gases, but it was too late. And Bomchyk missed her stomach in the process, so a butcher had to be called to finish up the matter. The bovine princess was twisted into sausage links, and my father ate them for the next half a year without any qualms at all.
After that, Bomchyk owned many other cows but never once took a photograph with any of them.
He also began to rapidly gain weight.
This process was in no way related to the cows; it’s just that I remembered him as that thin man in that one and only photograph with the legendary Mottle. In it, Grandpa is dressed in a tarpaulin shepherd’s coat with a hood because it’s raining. It’s late autumn—that blessed moment before a long winter when each ensuing day in the pasture may turn out to be the last if snow falls overnight. Cows graze the most assiduously then, in anticipation of the inevitable snow.
I remember how one time the snow started dusting first thing in the morning, when Grandpa Bomchyk and I and the cows were in the field. The cows were slowly being covered in a white gauze, like ridges of distant mountains. In the gorges between the cows’ spine ridges, more snow was gathering, but the animals calmly went on grazing. Their calm unfurled in every direction around us. Bomchyk and I were sitting on folding chairs nearby, under a shared daisy-patterned oilcloth, which had covered the table in the summer kitchen until recently. We delighted in the idyll.
“so why did Grandpa Bomchyk get so fat?” my mom suddenly asked. She never liked Bomchyk all that much because she considered him unserious. Grandpa was indeed prone to poking fun often and at everyone, including at her, saying that a “bride is a thorn in the side.” My mom never did forgive her father-in-law that phrase.
“Because he began to eat a lot,” my father said.
But that was only a half-truth.
Before he began eating, Bomchyk used to laugh a lot.
He used to laugh so loudly that sometimes even the windowpanes in his little house would jingle. He had built the home with his own bare hands, back in the 1950s, the same year that a collective farm was established in his village. When Bomchyk laughed outside, all the neighborhood dogs would howl in accompaniment and the chickens would cluck louder than usual. Whether inside or outside, he wasn’t embarrassed to open his toothless mouth wide when laughing; his plastic teeth spent most of their time warming in a mug on the windowsill of his summer kitchen. The kitchen was a stand-alone structure, with a clay floor, which he had also built himself. On the light blue windowsill, a strange red clock tick-tocked next to the teeth. It showed what I as a child understood to be the strange local time: depending on the season, time in Grandpa Bomchyk’s village differed from conventional time. In the winter, I knew that half past eleven really meant half past one. In the summer, at four p.m.—which was five p.m. to the rest of Ukraine—Grandpa Bomchyk, laughing, would drive out the cattle (sometimes he also had goats, and even had a sheep once), leaving a few hryvnias on the windowsill for me to go buy myself an ice cream and a pack of Vatra cigarettes for him.
We spent one summer and one winter living together, just the two of us, and those were the happiest times of my life. I laughed along with Bomchyk. The locals called me Bomchykova, as if I “belonged to Bomchyk.”
My grandfather naturally earned his nickname Bomchyk, “the Jingler,” because of his endless jokes and tall tales. He tossed them around whenever he had the chance, casually, effortlessly, lightly, as if jingling a small bell that was always in his pocket. He was always kidding: to me, as a child, it felt like he never spoke the truth. But maybe there was no truth; maybe truth didn’t even exist. I inherited my distrust toward everything that others deem to be true from him.
“we’ll stop by in a week,” my parents said, concluding their visit. They packed up the empty jars unceremoniously and walked out into the corridor arm in arm. I always made a mental note whenever they touched each other. For me, these touches signified tenderness and a contented trust. In my mind, they also denoted security, maybe because I regarded their mutual love as proof of their love for me. There were years, however, when my parents didn’t touch at all and even avoided looking at each other. Maybe those were the years that I felt most lost.
Once on the stairs, my mom called out matter-of-factly, “I’ll go ahead and call Nina.”
The door closed, and the apartment once more sank into silence. I was alone with myself again.
To entertain myself, I remembered that once upon a time I had wanted to learn the Chinese martial art of kung fu. So I looked for lessons online. I placed my laptop on a table and clumsily repeated the simplest exercises in the middle of the room at the instruction of the teacher.
Actually, I wasn’t the one who had wanted to learn kung fu; my father had wanted me to. He considered himself to be a kung fu master, even though he was one of those self-taught people who, in the late eighties, subscribed to Soviet magazines like Technique of the Young or Martial Arts of the Planet and met up to spar with friends in the district gyms that reeked thoroughly of men’s sweat. I say “men’s sweat” because, to the best of my knowledge, I was the only female to ever set foot in there.
My mom worked the night shift when I was little, so my father would drag me with him. We walked, two “kung fuists”—a kung fu master and the daughter of a kung fu master—with hands clasped, down evening streets, one tall and the other little, the tall one moving fast and the little one having to trot along. These are unusually fond memories for me now. We’ve never walked with such intimacy since.
The gym consisted of many rooms. The largest was completely lined with mats, and another one had exercise machines and thick ropes hanging from the ceiling. This second room smelled not only of sweat but also of rubber and iron. In the third room, which would be opened especially for me so that I wouldn’t get in the way, there lived a piano (possibly for rhythmic gymnastics classes for the nonexistent females). I plunked on it while the men beat each other up. My father accidentally broke an opponent’s leg one time, an arm another time. He himself had his nose broken once and toes broken twice. He was always bandaged up, or bruised, or limping with dislocated joints and sprained tendons.
Bomchyk would laugh at him.
“Look, by the time you get the hang of this kung fu stuff, you’ll be in no shape to fight anymore. You look like minced meat.”
My father was thin. Bomchyk was fat by then. Bomchyk never bothered with his body. His generation just didn’t find it necessary. He worked hard, and when he wasn’t working, he was sitting under the walnut tree and smoking, and when he wasn’t sitting, he was lying in his tiny bedroom, listening to the radio. He called his tiny bedroom a hut, while the other two rooms in that house of his that he had built with his own hands were known as the big room and the new room. Grandpa Bomchyk’s unexercised body served as a receptacle for the accumulation of unutilized laughter, which is why, over the years, as the reasons for laughter grew fewer and fewer, his body began to increase in size. It simply swelled from a surplus of giggles that had yet to come out.
in a sideboard in the new room, Grandpa Bomchyk kept a small decorative box with what he considered his “valuable papers”—his passport, his military ID booklet, his pension certificate, his cow record books (which noted when each cow had been with a bull, when it was supposed to calve, when it calved), and two Orders of Lenin. The Orders of Lenin had been awarded by the government of the USSR for outstanding service in building socialism—namely, for meritorious work at the Lenin Collective Farm, the one established in his village the same year he was building his house with his bare hands. This decorative box always allured me, even though as a child I already understood that something was off about it. Now I know what exactly it was: valuable papers for normal people would’ve been, at the very least, documents for land, for a house, for some sort of property. But Grandpa Bomchyk didn’t have those kinds of papers because he never had anything of his own. The fields on which he had spent his whole life toiling weren’t his; the clover that he mowed every morning wasn’t either. Even the house that he had built with his bare hands didn’t belong to him. In the nineties, when private ownership returned to Ukraine, Bomchyk could have privatized his house and lands—it would’ve cost him almost nothing, and he would have finally had proper “valuable papers”—but such a prospect no longer tempted him. A military ID booklet and Orders of Lenin in a decorative box somehow sufficed.
The strangest thing was that Bomchyk was never actually in the army. During World War II, when Halychyna was occupied by German forces in 1941, he was still considered too young. His older brother joined the SS; he’d send photographs from the barracks where they were being drilled but didn’t sign them because he was illiterate. Grandpa Bomchyk also kept one of those photographs in his decorative box. On it, some sub-unit of the division is lined up against the backdrop of a nicely decorated New Year tree, all the soldiers smiling, though the overcoats and helmets issued to some are clearly too big and they were drowning in their uniforms. The new year of 1944, which the young men from Halychyna were so joyously welcoming in the photograph, wasn’t a fortunate one for them. In six months, all of them, together with my grandpa’s older brother, would be killed by the Soviet Army near Brody, just east of Lviv.
When Soviet rule arrived to stay later that year, Bomchyk had just turned eighteen. While meeting with the commission that was supposed to determine his physical readiness and send him to the army, he played the part of the village idiot: he shook his hand under the doctors’ noses, saying, “Oh my goodness, I have a hand! Can you see, it’s a hand! I have a hand! Look!” The hoax worked, and the dummy was rejected by the army and instead sent off to Chelyabinsk in west-central Russia for six years to work in a foundry. There, Bomchyk melted down church bells collected and transported from across the Soviet Union into weapons. Meanwhile, his old friends back home in Halychyna ran off to join the Ukrainian insurgents and roved about the surrounding forests until the last of them were found and shot. A collective farm was established in his home village; people had their land and livestock confiscated, then were forced to work for free and routinely hand over meat, eggs, and milk from their personal households to the state. Life quieted down.
“In Chelyabinsk,” Bomchyk would tell the drivers of the collective farm’s trucks and machinery once he had returned back home, “I bathed three times a day in a tub of gold.”
“And here, it’s once a day in a tub of manure!” The drivers would laugh, and Bomchyk would laugh too. He cleaned the collective farm’s stables before getting upgraded to a driver.
what i loved most when living with him was waking up—one of those desires that you grow out of with age. I would be woken by the pleasantly noisy and unceremonious tumult of the living world. Before even opening my eyes, I’d discern the buzzing of flies under the hanging light. Wasps and bees that had accidentally flown into the room buzzed differently, menacingly; that kind of buzzing made sleep restless. Hens, in anticipation of a laid egg, would settle in on the concrete right under the window and purr lazily, while those that had just laid an egg clucked like mad. Bumblebees hummed in the thicket of grapes against the neighbor’s fence, and turtledoves cooed in a frenzy from the tops of utility poles. I’d also listen to the wooden winch creak and the aluminum bucket hit the cool water with a jangle when Grandpa Bomchyk drew water from the well. A gusty wind from beyond the village would strike against the old gate, cobbled together out of planks and greened from age, which led to the garden and the outhouse.
When my parents would come to visit, I’d wake up to the clanking of dishes in the summer kitchen and the knocking of five-liter bottles that my mom had already washed with baking soda and nettles, getting ready to fill the bottoms with horseradish, garlic, dill, and currant and cherry leaves, then stuff with cucumbers for pickling. The cucumbers would just then be soaking in a large wash tub to release their bitterness. My father, meanwhile, would have already gone walking barefoot in the morning dew and, by then, would be doing tai chi in the yard or twirling a huge “fighting stick” in his hands, tapping on my window with it so that the “kung fu master’s daughter” would finally get up.
“You’ll sleep through the whole day,” he’d holler, and Grandpa Bomchyk, who’d filled up on sour milk pastries by then and was sitting under the walnut tree smoking, would chuckle. “Jeez, stop waving that stick around. You’re making my head spin! Enough!”
My father had an insatiable need to know how to defend himself. Grandpa Bomchyk had no such need, even though he was the one who had had the opportunity to take up arms. But his real battle in life he lost for the simple reason that he never engaged in it.
when bomchyk returned from Chelyabinsk, in the grove where we would later graze cows together, a few of his insurgent friends were still hiding in an improvised bunker. The collective farm was already operating. One by one, the people had their land and livestock taken away, even their wooden threshing barns. (I’ve always wondered: How can you take a barn from a person and drag it from one place to another intact? It’s not like it’s a matchbox. Many years later, people would walk around the grounds of collective farms throughout Ukraine, pointing: “That was my barn.” “And that one was mine.”) The wealthier villagers were deported to Siberia in train wagons; others simply disappeared, and no one asked what had happened to them.
Bomchyk obediently handed over everything that was demanded of him. During the day, he cleaned out the collective-farm stables, and in the evenings and on weekends, he built his own home for his future family, just across the street from the home he had grown up in.
One night, the insurgent friends came by to ask for some food and clothes. They were whispering to him from outside, urging him to join them, insisting that the liberation cause wasn’t dead yet, but Bomchyk was fast asleep, a chicken-down comforter pulled up past his ears, and didn’t hear anything. He’d tell me later, “Sparrows would sometimes fly over to chirp under the eaves, but whoever followed their song was as good as dead.”
The friends stopped coming by. Till the end, Grandpa Bomchyk was convinced that he had done the right thing. Between a slavish existence and a heroic death, he chose the former, and only thanks to this choice did I become possible.
The NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs infamous for terrorizing the local population, discovered the insurgents’ bunker a few days before the Pentecost holiday in late spring. After a short shoot-out, which everyone in the village heard, the bloody bodies of the insurgents were piled onto a cart next to the dairy and kept in plain sight for two weeks—as a lesson to others. The local women, as they carried their still-warm, freshly drawn milk to the dairy before dawn, hung their heads low and, holding their breath, quickly scurried past. Among those women was Bomchyk’s future wife. If she had had more courage, if she had admitted that her uncle was lying on the cart, if she had gone up to wipe the blood off his brow and close his eyes, I wouldn’t exist.
I’m the offspring of meekness in the face of power and fear in the face of death.
And the price that had been paid to survive fell on my shoulders. Through the generations, considerable interest had accrued. Little by little, I had to start paying off my debts.
my desire to eat was overwhelming. I calculated the distance to the nearest grocery store—five hundred meters. That distance could be covered in a matter of minutes. I just needed to leave my apartment, and then the building, walk along the sidewalk, then cross a little road and a little public garden with fruit trees (who plants apple and cherry trees in a city, and why?), and then I’d be there. I’d slip into the supermarket’s refrigerated coolness, past the artificially selected Spanish tomatoes and frozen chicken thighs, buy some bread and oatcakes, buy pasta, buy anything and everything, then go back home the same way.
“Come on, you can do it,” I told myself.
I got dressed and ran out of the apartment. Then out of the building. I even took a few brave steps on the sidewalk, until my heart began to leap out of its nest in my chest and my head started spinning. The blue sky dangled beneath my feet. I pressed my back against the concrete wall and squatted down on the sidewalk. I covered my face with my hands to avoid seeing the passersby gawking in my direction. Inhale–exhale. I let out a loud laugh. What I was feeling was shame and powerlessness. The same things that were hiding behind Bomchyk’s laughter. The same things my father was trying to distract himself from by practicing kung fu. The battle was lost the moment the decision was made to never engage in it. That’s why I couldn’t even call this defeat; it was something more humiliating than that. It was dishonor.
I’d stand up, take two steps, then squat, huddling against the wall to wait out the fear, which felt violent and insurmountable. My first visit to the store—five hundred meters—took up an entire day. I also needed to squat in the store a number of times. But I stocked up on everything. It was the middle of August. When I finally got back home, it was dusking. I ate and laughed, and ate and laughed.