the last photograph of him dates from October 1930. Lypynskyi is sitting on a stool in front of his “death house,” dressed not in his usual dressing gown, but as if expecting a visitor. Trousers and a light topcoat, with a slightly oversized canvas cap on his head. Everything on Lypynskyi is a little oversized because there’s very little left of his body, and before long it will vanish completely.
Based on the angle at which the shadows are falling in the photograph—it was a very sunny day—one can assume that it’s around five or six in the evening. Lypynskyi’s head is lowered. He’s fully absorbed in his own business and isn’t paying any attention to Tsyprianovych’s photography experiments. Around his chair, a dozen chickens tranquilly peck at the grass. (The photograph is black-and-white, but I know that Orpington chickens are black and bright orange.) One chicken had jumped up onto her master’s lap. Lypynskyi is feeding her from his palm. A flash.
Behind him is a tall porch with a terrace, where a woman in a white blouse is standing, her elbows leaned against the railing. Her sleeves are rolled up, and her face is hard to make out. Maybe it’s the housekeeper Fin Yulí. For some reason, it seems like she’s smiling. Maybe she’s even saying something to Lypynskyi, but I can’t hear. Not a single sound will break through the tightly sealed hatches to here, where I am—on the other bank of memory.
Is it possible to kill time? To destroy it? To wipe it out of existence? Is it possible to shade over time with charcoal so that, God forbid, not a single face can poke out of the gloom of the past? To dig up the graveyards and pretend no one had ever been buried there? To cut the frames you want and like out of the film reel that is the past and simply glue them edge to edge, as if what had existed in between had never been?
When my parents and I would drive to the village to visit Grandpa Bomchyk or Grandma Sonia—when I was little, they lived very close to one another—along the way we always passed a bizarre metal structure enclosed by wire fencing, mounted with warning signs of painted skulls. There were satellite dishes affixed on the very top of the structure, from which antennas stuck out, pointing in various directions. For some reason, I thought that this was a space station and that, with its assistance, humanity was preparing to receive greetings from distant galaxies. I was very proud of the fact that a notable event would take place at the entrance to our family’s village. Until my father explained that the purpose of the “dishes” was to ensure tropospheric government communication in the event of nuclear war. In peacetime, they were supposed to jam enemy radio waves. So that it would be impossible to inadvertently catch the foreign radio stations banned by the Soviets. So that the time excised from our nation’s filmstrip wouldn’t slip back in the form of sound and, gaining a voice, come to life again.
lypynskyi had a nice tenor. When something was going awry, he could at times break into shrieking, but would quickly regain control of himself. Even though there were no grains left in his palm, the chicken had nonetheless remained in his lap. She raised her flat head just barely—not really upward, but sideways, the way chickens do—and with one eye was tracking every movement of her master. Her gaze was grim: impending death could have looked at Lypynskyi like that.
He could tell each of his chickens apart by their appearance; he knew how much each one weighed and how well she laid eggs. Lypynskyi had found no other way to earn money. His political and writing activities had stopped, his correspondence had become limited to a few names, and news made it to him only through newspaper columns.
The economic crisis in the United States had just reached its peak:
“Thousands of stray cats and dogs have been kicked out of their homes by people who have nothing to eat themselves, and are now roaming the streets.”
Mass repressions had begun in the Soviet Union:
“In Kharkiv, the Bolsheviks have been conducting arrests among the Ukrainians, with over a hundred arrests in recent days alone. The arrestees are being charged with conspiracy to proclaim an independent Ukraine with the help of disaffected units of the Red Army in Ukraine.”
In Poland, police attacks on the Ukrainian population of Halychyna grew rampant, in what some were calling “pacification” and others were calling “the Polish atrocities”:
“They’re beating people like savages—primarily, more politically conscious Ukrainians, members of village establishments and community councils, and high school and university students.”
“Prisons are overflowing with Ukrainians.”
“After the beatings, many people are left with broken bones, legs, and arms, or are fighting for their lives.”
“One man, for example, had his hands tied to his knees and a pole inserted between his arms and stomach. Then the bound man was rolled across the ground and whipped with a chain until his body was a lump of flesh.”
“In one of the villages of the Lviv District, a peasant was tied to a wagon and had to run behind it for about three miles, all the way to the city.”
Lypynskyi carefully monitored the events but kept his thoughts to himself.
“When I was healthier,” he’d tell Tsyprianovych, “I carried on my work patiently. But then I grew exhausted: I lost my equilibrium and verbally chastised everyone for two years straight. And then that too passed. These days, I’m slowly growing calmer.”
Raising Orpington chickens was a melancholy conclusion to a blustery career. Heavy and stumpy, they alighted with difficulty and lay a maximum of one hundred and eighty eggs a year each. Orpington roosters could rival royal peacocks in their beauty, but Lypynskyi hadn’t acquired any roosters yet.
“Have you written to Ms. Arnim, the breeder, Tsyprianovych?”
The secretary was readying the camera, attempting to catch the last rays of the sun in the lens.
“I did, as you instructed me to. I ordered two roosters. They’ll arrive by mail in a few weeks.”
my grandpa bomchyk had similar chickens, though, granted, he didn’t know what Orpingtons were, or that they had first been bred in the late nineteenth century by the Englishman William Cook, who named the breed after his native suburb of London. My Grandpa Bomchyk probably didn’t even know that there was a city named London. He knew Chelyabinsk in west-central Russia, had heard about Kolyma and Kamchatka in the Russian Far East from his neighbors, and had traveled once to either Rostov or Tula, both in the direction of Moscow, to sell apples. The east spread out welcomingly before him, but he had never been to the other border, the western one, and only had a very vague idea of what went on there, even though you could reach it on foot from his village.
At dawn, while I was still sleeping, Grandpa Bomchyk would open up the chicken coop. Next, he would go to the storeroom attached to his house and grab two fistfuls of wheat or barley from the sacks next to the attic ladder in order to feed his poultry. The hens would wait outside the storeroom, the most impatient ones perched on the threshold. With a deft sweeping motion polished over decades, Grandpa Bomchyk would scatter the grain so skillfully that the hens wouldn’t have to clamber over one another to peck at it. Then he would shut the storeroom door and turn a large, rusted key in the lock.
I often imagined what was going on in there behind the closed door. (The storeroom had no windows; it must have been dark.) Items rested on shelves, just as they had in the light when the door was open, and hunks of cold baked pork hung on iron hooks from the opposite wall. Grandpa Bomchyk kept the baked pork till late summer, when his closest relatives would gather in the house he had built with his bare hands to celebrate the summer harvest. The lard was stored in aluminum pails on the ground. Over time, it would grow covered in a thin layer of mold, which we would scrape off with a knife and throw away. Individual cracklings would settle at the very bottom of the pail, and as we ate the last of it, the snow-white lard resembled a fancy Italian dessert of white cream speckled with bits of sponge cake. But Grandpa Bomchyk didn’t know where Italy was, nor did he know what dessert was. For him, ordinary sugar was a dessert. When he had a craving for something sweet, he would simply dust fresh bread with sugar, after first sprinkling it with a little water or spreading some sour cream on it. Or he’d go to the storeroom and fetch some plum butter out of a yellow clay jug. The plum butter would also sometimes be covered in a layer of mold. In general, mold felt very much at home in my grandpa’s storeroom. The place smelled of dampness, earth (there was no floor), mice, jerked meat, and wheat. Once I was a little older, I finally ventured to climb up the attic ladder; at the top rung, you needed to hoist yourself up by your arms, resting your stomach on a board, and from there plunge into the ominous hole in the ceiling. When I first managed to pull off this acrobatic trick, Grandpa Bomchyk was celebrating the summer harvest. Guests were gathered around the table in his house. His younger brother, an ardent Communist who worked in some ideological capacity, had come from the city.
“The commies have destroyed the village,” Grandpa Bomchyk said scornfully to his brother after his third tumbler of moonshine.
The brother was reclining on the couch and inhaling chestfuls of air as if he were gearing up to blow everything in front of him off the face of the earth. “The village is a breeding ground for nationalism. It needs to be destroyed,” he responded.
“And why have the commies forgotten about me?” Bomchyk asked.
I don’t know if I made out the whole conversation correctly because I was still in the attic. That’s where Grandpa Bomchyk hid all the things that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away—his past. Spare chipped or cracked milk jugs, and embroidered sheepskin coats, so eaten to a pulp by moths that my parents had to burn them after Grandpa Bomchyk’s death. Corncobs were drying on burlap mats. Sacks of various sizes stored white beans from the preceding year, the year before that, and the year before that. I groped my way around the attic. There were also two chests, one large and one small. The large one I was unable to open; in the small one lay ancient matches as long as my whole palm. Beneath my feet, books rustled. They were lying around, opened, amid dust, nails, and broken glass, like perished soldiers after a bloody battle: a physics textbook for fifth grade (my father’s, from 1963), an astronomy textbook (also his, from 1966), a class reader (from 1911, I don’t know whose) published back during the Austro-Hungarian period. I moved through the darkness like a sleepwalker. Through a tiny hole in the tin roofing, a single ray of light made its way in, and I raised everything to it that I wanted to examine more closely. The guests in the room below must have heard my steps above their heads, but they were engrossed in what had become a heated argument.
At the end of it, Grandpa Bomchyk exclaimed, “I don’t know why I put up with a commie like you in my own house!”
His brother snarled back, “You should thank me that this house hasn’t been taken away from you.”
Between them, on the table, there were little plates of sliced herring layered with disks of onion, and of meat jelly and tsvikli (grated beets with horseradish), a large plate of cold cuts (cold baked pork and sausage, most likely the Moskovska that my parents used to bring from town), and a large plate of fresh vegetables (cucumbers and tomatoes).
After I climbed down from the attic, I joined the table. I was given a small cup of fruit compote and a fork with a broken prong, with which I immediately reached for the meat jelly, then generously poured vinegar over it. As was the case every time, my grandpa’s brother bounced up and down on the couch agitatedly before finally leaving, offended. By then Grandpa Bomchyk was completely drunk. As usual, my mom surreptitiously hid the bottle of moonshine out of his line of sight, while he muttered, reminiscing drunkenly, “Sparrows would sometimes fly over to chirp under the eaves, but whoever followed their song was as good as dead.”
Grandpa Bomchyk grew to be very fat, and when he died at age eighty-seven, the table at the memorial service collapsed under the weight of his body. My parents sold his last cow. His dog, thank God, had already died a natural death the day before. The chickens ended up having to be slaughtered all in one go. My mother did so while my father hid out at the neighbor’s house.
For some reason, I’ve always thought that, out of everyone, I remembered Grandpa Bomchyk the best. But when I start sifting through the memories themselves, I discover that there actually aren’t that many of them. And that the ones that do exist aren’t related to one another and don’t say much about either my grandfather or the time he lived in. It’s as if inside of me, in that part of my brain that’s responsible for memory, someone’s also installed an antenna for tropospheric scatter, and it jams, jams, and jams radio signals to keep me from remembering my own past. I don’t even know (and there’s no one left who would know) what Grandpa Bomchyk’s parents’ names were. Their surname was Okhrym, but they took their first names with them to their graves, the locations of which I will no longer be able to uncover either.
in a letter to Andrii Zhuk, Lypynskyi wrote disappointedly, “You and I, we’ll both die here in a foreign land. Meanwhile, all sorts of scum will return home to Ukraine, get cured of their myriad illnesses, procreate, and enjoy the remainder of their lives. Such is the law of Ukrainian nature.”
Do these harsh words apply to me as well?
Zhuk would die forgotten by everyone in Vienna’s Josefstädter Straße in 1968; he’d live the longest out of that entire mighty first wave of emigrants. There would be many more waves to come. When Volyn would be captured by Soviet troops in 1939, Lypynskyi’s brother would leave everything behind and flee from Zaturtsi to Poland. In exile, he’d finally gain fame as a selective breeder. His best-known potato variety would be called Voltman Zaturetskyi, and his best-known wheat variety Displaced.
finally, the woman in the photograph—the one who was leaning with her elbows against the terrace railing—straightened up. You could see that her face was very young and didn’t resemble the housekeeper’s. What’s more, Fin Yulí had short hair, and hers was long. She began to speak in Polish: “Father, these chickens seem to really like you.”
“Yes—yes,” Lypynskyi replied, I can hear his voice quite clearly, “chickens have always thought I was one of their own. When Kaz . . . your mother and I visited the Rokicki’s farm—the farm, incidentally, was called Kurnyky, ‘Chicken Coops’—the chickens immediately surrounded me and wouldn’t let me pass. I don’t know if you remember.”
“How can I remember if I hadn’t been born yet?”
“Ah, indeed. And you’ve never even been to Ukraine.”
They walked into the house, and the housekeeper quickly set the table. Lypynskyi’s daughter Ewa was given the privilege of choosing where to sit first.
“I don’t use salt because it’s very bad for your health, but you can salt your food if you like. Fin Yulí doesn’t listen to me either and always salts her plate on the sly.”
Lypynskyi sat down next to Ewa. He wanted to stay as close as possible to his daughter, to touch her, to see how she moved and what she did, to be the first to hear what she said.
“How is your grandma?” He didn’t have the courage to ask how Kazimiera was doing.
“She took the earthquake in New Zealand last year very badly. That’s all she could talk about.”
“I heard about it too, I think,” Tsyprianovych remarked, ladling pea soup into bowls. “Apparently an entire city, along with all its inhabitants, was swallowed up by the earth.”
“You believe all sorts of nonsense, Tsyprianovych.”
Ewa reached for the salt, then glanced at her father and changed her mind.
“Father”—Lypynskyi started every time he heard this word from her lips—“I’ve always wanted to ask you something. What you devoted your whole life to . . . none of it worked out for you, right? I don’t mean to judge you, I’ve grown up, you mustn’t think . . . I just want to know.”
Lypynskyi’s entire body collapsed on itself. Tsyprianovych stopped eating and inconspicuously placed his spoon in his bowl; chewing at a moment like this seemed inappropriate. Lypynskyi exhaled softly from the depths of his tubercular lungs: “I came to the conclusion that Ukrainians aren’t fit for life as a polity. It’s an anarchic nation.”
Ewa cut him short: “I’m not sure I want to know more. But I want to see where you were born, where Grandma and Grandpa lived. I don’t even have photographs of them.”
“I had some somewhere. Tsyprianovych will show you.”
“I wrote to Uncle Stanisław in Zaturtsi that I’d like to visit them. He and his wife seem like good people.”
Ewa’s bright voice resonates across the whole room. I can hear it very clearly, just as I can hear how the gigantic blue whale is slapping its tail against the surface of the sea somewhere not too far away. Very soon, it will open its mouth and begin to suck in everything and everyone: Lypyskyi, Ewa, Tsyprianovych, Fin Yulí, the Orpington chickens bred in a henhouse, the little house in Badegg that would be bequeathed to the secretary and housekeeper to use till their deaths, the letters and notes that, per Lypynskyi’s wishes, wouldn’t be allowed to be published for at least ten years and, even then, no one would really want to publish. The blue whale will suck it all away: everything that Lypynskyi fought for and lost, his pain and his hatred, everything that he saw and felt, his body, all his illnesses, his memories, his Ukraine.
in june 1931, the newspaper Svoboda would print in bold black letters on its front page the headline “VIACHESLAV LYPINSKYI DEAD,” and I would read it at some point in the future and not know who it was referring to. That’s when time would conquer me. The blue whale would shut its mouth and swim on.
The blue whale of forgottenness.