as years passed, i seemed to have less and less innate freedom left. I had been born with a big orb inside me, filled with freedom, like gas, but gradually my inborn supply of freedom leaked out, seeping into the surrounding expanse, and the orb began to deflate and pucker. It was impossible to replenish its contents anymore, just as it’s impossible to reinflate bouncy balls that have been accidentally punctured by a splinter on the road. Over the years, I slowly transformed into a living prison, one where nothing is allowed and everything is forbidden. One sleepless night, I even jotted down in a blank document the following sentence: “Like through an interminable prison, I walk through myself.” I don’t know where it came from.
the oddest thing was that I didn’t let myself indulge in completely innocent things—like, for instance, having long hair. I would let my hair grow out to my shoulders at most, but more often than not it was very short, barely covering my ears. Twice, I shaved my head completely, and even though friends would hint that baldness doesn’t suit me, for some reason I felt incredibly attractive. I would eagerly wait for the hair to grow back enough so that I could get rid of it again. My attitude toward my hair was overall disdainful. The only thing that concerned me was that it remain clean.
I also didn’t let myself have pierced ears and made fun of women who wore earrings.
I didn’t let myself uncork a bottle of wine just for myself. I’d open a bottle only if one of my golden-haired men was also interested in relaxing for a bit with a glass. Or if guests were coming.
I didn’t let myself enjoy heights, even though as a child I had had an incredible love of heights and would often climb up to the very top of the walnut tree Grandpa Bomchyk used to smoke under. I felt at home on top of the walnut tree and knew that even if I were to fall, nothing horrible would happen. The trunk of a walnut is completely different from that of other trees. It somehow resembles the body of a massive water boa—greenish, shiny and smooth, and cool to the touch. I remember climbing up barefoot, gradually conquering its height. First I would content myself with the lowest thick branch, then I would find the courage to pull myself up to the second “story,” and eventually the third. From the third branch, I could already see Grandpa’s yard. From the fourth, I could see the village road, the neighboring houses, and the church on the little hill in the shade of the cemetery’s pear trees. Someone had once planted a bunch of them there, and ever since the trees matured, the villagers had been forced to dig graves for their loved ones among the sprawling root systems. They would inscribe death into a pear orchard. In early autumn, the graves would grow covered in a densely woven sackcloth of little seedlings. The pears would rot, and above them clouds of wasps and bees would swarm. As a child, I knew that the cemetery-orchard was dangerous; pear trees are the worst for climbing.
i barricaded the doors to our apartment’s balcony with a couch, to lessen the temptation to go out onto it. The balcony doors elicited as much unease and uncertainty in me as did the front door of the apartment. I recall when I had voiced this aloud to my third golden-haired man when he was still living with me: “Balconies are actually very dangerous because no one checks them. There’s no guarantee that ours won’t fall when I set foot on it.”
By deciding the balcony was too dangerous, I cordoned off another one of my pleasures, narrowed the expanse of my existence even more. Once upon a time, I used to love balconies very much.
“So, what, you’re not going to go out on the balcony anymore?” the man asked in response.
“No.”
“And what if I go out and call to you?”
“Why would you do that?”
We both knew why. The man, who had always generously shared his own internal orb of freedom with me, suddenly wanted to know what he’d receive in return. Was my love for him greater than my fear of everything else? I didn’t respond, but he must have guessed my answer, since he ended up leaving.
With him gone, my typical day began with a safety check. First, before even opening my eyes, I would listen attentively through the silence for, God forbid, any extraneous noises, soft furtive footsteps, creaking of the parquet, or someone else’s breathing. Next, I’d visually plunge myself into reality and survey the room, checking how firmly the windows were closed, and looking for shadows behind doors or items that had been displaced even a little. After that, I would carefully walk around my realm, peeking into nooks and crannies where some unknown person could hide, and trying the latches on the entryway and balcony doors to convince myself that they were still locked. Only then was I able to relax somewhat, even though I never really relaxed at that time. New habits kept popping up—for example, washing my hands with soap every time I touched something. At first I resisted this habit because I was aware that total loonies did things like that, but after touching a book or some other surface, my fingertips would burn with a hellish fire until I rinsed them off with water. Water became a fetish. Every evening, I’d climb into a bath for a full, final cleanse, though, before long, I’d find myself climbing back out to inspect the suspicious noises floating in from outside and conduct another safety check.
“i spoke with nina,” my mom reported over the phone one day. “And Nina’s of the opinion that if you can sleep, then it’s worth waiting on the pills.”
Nina was that nurse at the regional psychiatric hospital and mom’s neighbor.
“Nina recommended going to see a therapist. She gave the number of a friend of hers. She says that she’s very good. Her name’s Olia.”
I wrote down the phone number but had no intention of calling. I didn’t trust women named Olia and planned on becoming my own therapist. That’s how one evening, while missing the golden-haired man, I convinced myself to move the couch and open the balcony doors. As I did so, I imagined telling the good news to my lost love: “I stepped out on the balcony! I did it! Now you can come back!”
My foot timorously crossed the threshold of the balcony and trembled in the air. The floor was covered in pigeon droppings, trash, and a thick layer of dust.
I’ll have to wash the soles of my feet with soap later, was all I could think as I stepped into the danger zone with my bare feet. No, it’s better that I bathe entirely. It’s very dirty all over here.
I grabbed on to the railing because my head had begun to spin. Somewhat automatically, I glanced down at the courtyard packed with cars, ballparking the distance down. My entire body turned to jelly, becoming unwieldy and resistant to my will.
Ten meters down to the ground, swept through my head. Two seconds of flying.
I jumped back into the apartment, horrified at my own thought (or wish?). I locked up the balcony, pushed back the couch, and only then dialed the number on the slip of paper. Olia answered immediately.
“Nina gave me your number,” I said. “She works as a nurse at the regional psychiatric hospital.”
“Yes.”
“You offer therapy sessions?”
“Yes.”
“I’d very much like to meet with you, but I’m trying to avoid leaving the house right now . . .”
“Trying to avoid or can’t?”
“Can’t, I guess.”
“Then let’s Skype.”
the ridiculous thing was that Olia’s office was very close to my apartment, a few minutes’ walk away. Nonetheless, I never saw her in real life, only through my computer screen. She was a young pretty blonde, as I had imagined. Our meetings took place regularly, twice a week.
“So, what do you two do?” my mom would prod. “She probably gives you some sort of tests?”
“Well, last time I spent an hour crying.”
“Why?” My mother’s face turned steely and hostile, which was typical when she took offense.
“Because I was such a bad mother, right? Oh, what a bad mother I was. And you were all such angels.”
Actually, she hadn’t been a bad mother; therein lay the biggest problem. Thinking ill of her was yet another thing that I never allowed myself. When there were reasons for it and I had the urge to think negatively of her, pangs of remorse that destroyed me more than anger instantly subsumed me. If I dared to voice my disappointment in her, my mother would immediately have heart pain, and my guilt would increase even more. It was impossible to bear. I’d cry, and Olia, from what I recall, would say the following: “Tears are anger at someone else that you’re scared to verbalize to them and, instead, turn on yourself.”
I’d wipe my eyes and punch at the air, attempting to look aggressive.
Sometimes Olia would tell me stories about other clients of hers. This must be a generally accepted trick of pastors of the church of psychotherapy: to cheer someone up, they offer examples of souls that are even more lost. Names, obviously, aren’t disclosed. Olia could’ve shared my own story with others roughly like this: panic attacks, doesn’t leave the house, her man left her, has broken off any and all social contact. In lieu of commas, Olia would probably insert one or two words of empathy because she was overall an empathetic type. Initially, her empathy annoyed me—until I learned to relish it.
one of olia’s patients, X, lived in a remote Carpathian village and hadn’t left her little one-story wooden house for a full decade. X had no idea what was wrong with her. When she’d try to go out, she’d have a “heart attack.” Paramedics showed up a few times in an ambulance, tried persuading her that she was healthy, and then eventually put the woman’s telephone number on a black list and stopped answering her calls. Relatives and neighbors would make fun of her. “Why are you being such a drama queen?” they’d ask. Then those close to her grew ashamed and started viewing her not just as an embarrassment, but as some sort of curse that had been brought on the family. They beat her. They asked the priest to try to talk some sense into her. No one even thought of helping the woman, because in the part of the world she and I come from, the human head has one purpose—to eat. The head is assumed incapable of anything noteworthy beyond food consumption.
When internet was installed in the village, X, by some miracle, found Olia. Thanks to Skype, they were able to have regular therapy sessions. The woman slowly began to leave her house, and with time the radius she was capable of distancing herself from it grew. Like a dog having its leash slacked meter by meter.
“Now,” Olia would tell me, “she can travel thirty kilometers from home, to the bazaar in the neighboring village. There are seventy kilometers between me and X. We need to do a little more work to be able to meet in person.”
with the example of the woman X, Olia wanted to demonstrate that the leash around my neck would be slackened too someday. That is, that I would slacken it myself. But the leash wasn’t what troubled me the most. If push came to shove, I could force myself out for therapy sessions the way I forced myself to the store for groceries. It’s just that making it to Olia’s in my current state would take an inordinately long time. What truly frightened me was the irreversibility of brain processes. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked Olia if she was sure that she would be able to identify if, and the moment when, I truly lost my mind. Olia assured me that she would. She said that people like me don’t lose their minds.
Her optimism and empathy did yield certain results. For example, with time, I covered the five-minute distance from my home to the grocery store in two and a half hours, as opposed to three. I began washing my hands not a thousand times a day, but nine hundred and ninety, occasionally even without soap. I washed the floor less and less often—not every day, but three or four times a week. I returned to writing and wrote a few stories, mostly about fear and funny human lunacies, for instance, about this one woman who decides to eat only potatoes because that made life simpler.
All of the stories I wrote invariably began with the words “This one woman . . . ,” “This one man . . . ,” and again “This one woman . . . ,” as if singularity and uniqueness had suddenly become exceedingly important. It no longer mattered what happened next in the story. That’s probably how I personally transitioned from the “everyone” that humans conventionally subscribe to (to be a part of everyone, to be like everyone) to the extreme of “one” (I am one, how singular I am, how unique, how unknown, a one and only one).
I felt terribly lonely in my singularity. I would tell Olia about Lypynskyi, but she didn’t want to listen: “Are we discussing you or some historical figure from the last century?”
“Well, this historical figure didn’t have the opportunity for therapy . . .”
Olia treated my enthusiasm for history as an “intellectualization” of an internal conflict—namely, that I was hiding in my mind in order to not feel something strong and shameful. What, precisely, she never did say.
it was july, I think, when I found the courage to resort to a desperate measure—to travel to Volyn Oblast to visit the Lipiński’s estate in Zaturtsi. By then I already felt calmer out in the street; I was only washing the floors in my apartment once a week, like a normal person. But public transportation still scared me, all the more so since the trip to Volyn by train (trains, to be more precise) would take up an entire day. That’s why I decided to travel by shared car, thinking that it would be calmer and safer with a living person. And faster, of course. I wrote to some driver through the online service BlaBlaCar. He was driving to Lutsk and called as soon as my message came in: “Not a problem, I have room, we’re leaving tomorrow morning at six.” I packed my backpack and spent the whole night sitting awake on the couch; I was so anxious about venturing out that far that I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. At exactly the appointed hour, I was waiting at the crossroads in front of my building. The day was breaking. A black car pulled up a minute later.
“I’m going to ask you to not drive too fast.” That was the first thing that I declared as I climbed into the front seat next to the driver. I didn’t look at the driver himself. Some young couple were already settled in back.
“So, what’s fast for you?” the driver asked.
“When it’s scary.”
We drove, and the bright light of the morning sun flooded the car to the very brim. Hilly tracts of fields and plantation forests stretched on both sides of the road. Tiny villages, as if out of a movie, and cottages, beautiful but sometimes abandoned, flickered in the company of gardens, some well-tended but others not. The lush greenery screened the poverty. I caught myself thinking that, preoccupied with my own fears, I had forgotten how soothing and inspiring ordinary contemplation of the world around you could be. The couple in back were kissing. The driver turned on soft music.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“What does it matter?”
“I’m Oleksandr,” he said, obviously wanting to chat, then fell silent and pulled on dark sunglasses. He was wearing all black and had long, thick black hair tied in a ponytail. Equally thick black eyebrows with gray streaks stuck out from above his glasses. Some sort of knight of darkness, I thought.
We made it to Lutsk, the city closest to the Lipiński family estate, without incident. I paid him without saying a word and exited in front of Hotel Ukraine. I pictured how Lypynskyi’s brother Wlodzimierz once proudly drove down this street in the city’s first automobile. The residents likely flanked the road to watch.
Well, here I am, I thought, alone in a completely foreign place, who knows why and what I am hoping to find here. The ground lurched under my feet, and, to keep it from swinging all the way up, I poked into a pizzeria for some lunch. From there, I called a taxi and finally set off for Zaturtsi, a little village thirty kilometers outside the city, where the actual manor was. My heart was pounding wildly, but not out of anxiety; maybe it pounded out of excitement at seeing and experiencing something new. Until then, I had researched Lypynskyi’s life only through texts written by him and other people. We were bound together solely by words and my imagination. Now the story was becoming three-dimensional and could shatter against the real image. My excitement battled my trepidation.
the midday sun was intolerable. The fields and plantation forests that had seemed to radiate life early in the morning now looked parched and yellowed, covered in a blanket of dust kicked up from the road. There wasn’t a single living soul around. The village languished in what felt like an unnatural silence. I got out next to a sign for the Viacheslav Lypynskyi Memorial Museum on the main road because I wanted to walk the rest of the way. I followed the sign down another road, this one straight and narrow, which was supposed to end at the estate. I imagined how, a hundred years ago, Lypynskyi had walked here just like me, or maybe ridden a horse, and the locals, busy with housework, had peered out of their yards to see who it was. Now there was no one peering; only piles of fresh cow dung attested to an inevitable human presence somewhere close by. The smell of manure had never disgusted me.
The closer I got to it, the more distinct the features of the manor house became. The home had been destroyed three times—in 1915, 1918, and 1920. The porch, supported by four columns that rose majestically above me, had fortunately remained intact each time.
First I circled around the building (you could see that it had recently been restored), then I walked inside. The large wooden door creaked ominously. A villager by the name of Petro squeezed my hand with his rough, callused palm.
“So, why are you interested in Lypynskyi?” he asked skeptically after an hour-long conversation. “For an average tourist, you know too much.”
“So, tourists visit?”
“Sometimes. They come from abroad. He died elsewhere.”
“But his body was later transported and buried here in Zaturtsi, no?”
Petro hesitated a bit.
“Well, yes, but the grave itself is gone. He was buried in the family vault at the Polish cemetery, over there, next to the pond, along the main road. There used to be a Polish church there once too. When the Soviets came, the church was demolished. And then a tractor driver from the collective farm—he passed away a while ago—razed the cemetery to the ground in exchange for some moonshine. The grave slabs got repurposed as flooring in the collective farm’s pigsties. Until not long ago, the home we’re standing in also housed animals.”
“They hold animals in high regard in your village,” I said for some reason. Petro seemed to catch the irony of my comment—only in the Soviet Union could pig accommodations be deemed more important than history and graves—then added something else about people who simply didn’t understand “the value of that sort of thing.”
“Lypynskyi was a great man,” Petro continued, almost with tears in his eyes. “I have this one photograph, will you give it a look? Since you know so much, maybe you can tell me who it is.”
The photograph hung on a wall in the exhibition hall. It was taken at his sister’s wedding: Kazimierz and Klara Lipiński are still alive, and Uncle Rokicki, his mustache curled up, his gaze mad, is standing to the left of the happy bride. Lypynskyi himself was still at military training at the time.
“This one over here—do you know who he is?” Petro pointed at a stately bald-headed man in an overcoat with a white collar, sitting in the first row of wedding guests. He looked like a government official. But I didn’t know.
Instead, another photograph caught my attention. In it, Lypynskyi, older, is sitting with his brother Stanisław on a bench in a garden or park, a hat on his head, a cane in his hands. Two women are seated on either side of the brothers. The one next to Lypynskyi is in a beret; a scarf or shawl hangs down from her shoulders untied; her hands rest demurely in her lap. The woman is looking into the lens; Lypynskyi is as well. Nonetheless, you can feel that the two of them are barely stomaching the situation in which they’ve found themselves. The woman’s expression is impenetrable, demonstratively indifferent—her jaw clenched, her lips pursed. She’s no beauty at all.
“This is Kazimiera, right?” I hadn’t come across pictures of her anywhere before.
Petro nodded. “I think that they’re separating here. It’s sometime after the war.”
i wandered around a bit in the grove surrounding the house (Petro explained that part of the Lipiński orchard had managed to be preserved), then, cutting across a sun-scorched pasture, I walked out onto the main road to catch the bus back to Lutsk. The absence of Lypynskyi’s grave affected my perception in a strange way. It seemed as though his death had permeated the air. Sharp and stifling, it could be smelled, even tasted, bitter and unjust, full of distress, reproach, and blame. Deprived of a grave, his death had willfully inscribed itself into the landscape. His bones, plowed through by a tractor in exchange for a bottle of moonshine, stirred underfoot, making the ground itself frightening. How do you tread on such ground?
I waited for an hour, but no bus came. No cars stopped either. I had an overwhelming urge to run from there, to not see and not feel whatever would happen after the end of the story. I had always thought that the end meant a big nothing, a reign of black matter, deafness and blindness, a mathematical zero. But it turned out that the end can pass by imperceptibly to those of us in the story. Most of us will keep imitating life for a long time still, not realizing that what we call life is just a branch growing green on a withered tree: the tree’s roots have been long dead and replaced by disparaged bones.
I started to cry and reminded myself that tears are unverbalized anger at someone else. But at whom? At the tractor driver who was merely obeying an order he had received from someone at the collective farm? At the peasants who just stood and watched, not understanding “the value of that sort of thing”? At the party members who gave the instructions, adhering to the Soviet policy of destroying harmful history, the policy of lobotomizing memory? Or, perhaps, at my own grandfathers and grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, who proved too weak to resist this lobotomy? Who was to blame? Who should I be angry at?
In desperation, I dialed the most recent number in my phone. A harsh male voice responded, and, swallowing tears, I unloaded everything in one fell swoop: “Oleksandr, I’m the one that drove to Lutsk with you this morning. I’m sorry that I didn’t introduce myself. It was so stupid of me. It’s just that I’m broken, you see, something’s off with my head, I’m very scared of everything, and I’ve gotten stuck here on the main road in this village. If you’re still in the area, come and pick me up, please. I’ll pay whatever you ask. Just come and pick me up.”
I think I kept rattling on, but I remember that when I stopped, there was an exhausting silence on the phone. It lasted for an eternity. I even thought that the man had hung up as soon as he realized who it was. But he finally spoke up: “Fine, I’ll come. But you calm down, okay? Go sit in a coffee shop . . .”
“There are no coffee shops here.”
“Then breathe. Inhale through one nostril, then exhale through the other.”
“Those kinds of gimmicks don’t help me.”
“Then just lie down on the ground and relax.”
“The ground here is frightening, I’ll stand.”
“Okay, then, stand.”
I don’t know why he agreed to come. But the knowledge of an impending rescue made me feel better. I wiped my tears and hid in the shade beneath the willows so as not to get sunburned. The knight of darkness rescued me from there half an hour later—in his black car, with his black hair, in his black sunglasses and T-shirt. After the predominance of light blue and gold colors in my life, he was soothing. For the first time, I didn’t recognize my own likeness in the person facing me.
“Thank you for saving me,” I said, settling into the front seat.
The driver shrugged and accelerated. We drove very fast, but it wasn’t scary.