time is a big blue whale. It devours me along with all my thoughts, experiences, and memories, but I’m not enough. In order to fully satiate itself and keep functioning, it needs an endless supply of those like me—billions of minuscule, almost invisible worlds. They commingle and become its sustenance, but don’t become a single big world for the blue whale. The blue whale continues to live in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.
i approach remembrance with abandon. I grow first tense, then muddled, as if I’m falling through some bottomless tunnel and there’s nothing to grab hold of: my fingers scratch against the sleek surface in vain. I fall into the past. I yearn to scream, but my voice dies away in the depths of the body that I won’t be able to call my own before long. Only flashes of love—not of the love others felt for me, but of the love I felt for others—occasionally illuminate the surrounding darkness.
They, the men (though I have loved not only men), were all oddly similar. All three were fair-haired, with roundish heads, though this too sounds somewhat strange since it’s customary to assume that a head is always round. That’s not what I think. There are heads that are so sharp or rectangular or irregularly shaped that it’s simply impossible to call them round. A round head is a head that will roll if it’s removed from a neck and pushed. That’s what I could have done with the heads of the men that I have loved. They would have moved smoothly and with equal speed, their golden hair scintillating in the sun as they rolled.
All three had blue eyes. Only now do I realize this; I’m generally prone to not noticing the color of human eyes. I never noticed and can’t recall the color of my own mother’s eyes, for example, or my father’s—the people whom I’ve seen the most in my life. Sometimes I get embarrassed, particularly around ophthalmologists who are impeccably versed in the slightest color variations in irises. I didn’t pay attention to the color of the eyes of the men that I loved, but now when I think of them, I distinctly remember that blueness into which I would plunge every time I looked at them. Blue eyes suited these men. They couldn’t have had any other eyes, only blue ones, the color of a cloudless sky on an ice-cold February day. These eyes emanated elation and sorrow at the same time. Melancholy. The boredom that ate away at them from inside. I disturbed their boredom only temporarily, like a gentle breeze over a bottomless mountain lake. In retaliation, I had the urge to betray my blue-eyed men with someone whose eyes would have been blackish or muddy-hued. As black as possible, as muddy as possible. In reality, I was betraying one blue-eyed man with another.
I met the first one when I was beginning my university studies. In all honesty, I was totally indifferent to my major, but I was pursuing a degree in Ukrainian studies. I would have tinkered with either chemistry or jurisprudence with the same enthusiasm because, overall, what I liked most was working out information in detail, dividing up knowledge into individual branches and moving along every branch toward its roots, as far as my strength and memory allowed. By contrast, synthetic analysis, generalization, and ascending by way of a few details to the very top of a tree for the sake of a sweeping panorama didn’t come easily to me. I saw no spectacular panoramas, only bizarre and captivating minutiae, which I nonetheless learned to sort and, by means of fortuitous similarities, retain in my head.
Incidentally, my own head isn’t round but egg-shaped, with an elongated jaw and protruding cheekbones. It’s a good kind of skull to posthumously plant on a stake in a secret catacomb, to scare the occasional tourists with its eerie perfection.
I recall it being very important to me to remember as many details from Ukrainian Baroque literature as possible. Its artistic value wasn’t all that impressive, at least for a contemporary reader’s taste, but it was incredibly interesting in its historical accoutrements, in the names of forgotten and only recently rediscovered authors about whose fates nothing was known, thus nothing restricted the flights of my fancy. The refined titles of the works—generally of a spiritual and religious nature—beguiled me, a person of weak faith, with their abstruseness. And because the language they were written in was also antiquated, together there emerged a chimerical sacral abracadabra—mystical labyrinths of hidden knowledge that I very much wanted to decipher and understand but was struggling to. I made lists of authors and the titles of their works, recorded the historical events that served as their backdrop (principally religious polemics between the Orthodox and Catholics, and, later, the Ukrainian-Polish War of 1648–1657 under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi), and studied the biographies of the professors of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, around which (originally as the Kyiv Fraternal School) the Ukrainian Baroque first swirled up. I reveled in the Baroque; I swooned in it. It was already then that I started to sense this irrepressible and unbearable desire to taste time, to live through something more than this one life of mine, which in and of itself wasn’t all that noteworthy.
My parents, the color of whose eyes I don’t recall yet whom I’ve always felt very close to, meddled little in the daily course of my life, particularly after I finished high school and entered university. They commemorated this stupendous event with the purchase of an incredibly expensive (for our means) computer; they brought it into my room, turned it on, marveled for a moment at its sky-blue screen, then left me alone with it, closing the door behind themselves noiselessly. From that point on, my parents appeared in my room only to bring me something to eat (my mom) or to wake me up in the morning (my dad). Beyond that, they didn’t keep tabs on me, though there was nothing to keep tabs on. I dyed my short hair white, and then a reddish color, bought a bright green puffer jacket at a thrift shop, and wore it around with flared raspberry-colored velvet pants. In lectures, I always sat in the back row and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t strike up any friendships, especially after a Protestant classmate with luxuriant hair called me “unsaved,” and with complete seriousness assured me that I would burn in hell because I worshipped literature but didn’t believe in God himself.
and that was when he appeared in the lecture hall. At first I didn’t take any notice. It was a gloomy late autumn day, so from my back row the golden hair of the newcomer seemed lackluster, greasy, and unkempt. The man was dressed carelessly but predictably, in a cheap turtleneck sweater and a black leather jacket, which ninety-eight percent of the adult male population in my city also wore (the remaining two percent were in the process of saving up for one). I turned my gaze away to the window; I wasn’t interested in what he would say. The man positioned himself behind the podium and began laying out the papers from which he intended to deliver his lecture. The students quieted down, not out of anticipation, but because that’s what they always did before another routine descent into a two-hour slumber of lethargy: first they fell silent, then they fell asleep with eyes wide open, languidly reacting only to sharp rises in the lecturer’s voice. The man finished laying out his papers, then he too shifted his eyes to the window. He didn’t glance at us as other instructors were prone to doing, he didn’t seek to pique our interest or, at the very least, draw our attention to a new subject somehow, and that struck me as odd, even somewhat arrogant. It crossed my mind that this instructor was more apathetic toward us than we were toward him. His young face exuded some sort of inhuman fatigue in which he seemed to be dissolving with no resistance, like salt in milk. Even though the hall was warm, he didn’t even take off his leather jacket and finally mumbled out something that I didn’t catch, something along the lines of, “Today we’re going to look at the creative work of so-and-so.” Who-who? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Outside the window, an autumn wind was picking up and dying down again, swaying the withered browned leaves of the dwarf maples in the university courtyard and amplifying the chaos within me.
“Thrênos albo Plach!” the man behind the podium suddenly exclaimed so shrilly that the students, almost sunken in lethargy already, startled in fright and pricked up their ears. No one had understood.
“Thrênos albo Plach,” the voice repeated somewhat more quietly but just as shrilly, and proceeded, “of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Eastern Church.”
This, apparently, was the title of a work. It pulsated in my head, stretched taut like a crossbow string: two of the first three uttered words I had never heard before, and their obscurity perturbed and at once lured me. It was only later that I learned that thrênos was, in fact, Greek for the Ukrainian plach, “lament,” while albo was “or” in Polish. “A Lament, or a Lament.” At the time, the title sounded like veritable magic to me—an ancient incantation that caused clouds to disperse and cows to yield three times as much milk.
The lecturer went on, attempting to re-create with his intonation the style of similar “laments,” which he ultimately didn’t succeed at:
Woe is me, poor one,
Oh, woe is me, unfortunate one,
In my good deeds, tattered from all sides,
To my body’s shame, stripped of my robes before the world!
A chuckle rolled through the rows of students, yet his words struck me as so erotic that I blushed deeply and once more turned away to the window. I felt ensnared. A few sunrays suddenly pierced through the gloomy autumn sky and haloed the round head of the instructor. Wisps of his golden hair glimmered, and his face, filled with that inhuman fatigue, suddenly emitted an exalted sorrow—that same sorrow that pervaded all that literature that I so worshipped.
Nets on all sides, pits everywhere,
Poisonous stings in every direction.
Over there, predacious wolves,
And there, enraged lions.
Venomous dragons over here,
And here, ferocious basilisks.
I can’t see which way to turn,
I don’t know which way to go,
Whom to lean my head against, whom to ask for protection.
After a few quotations, the lecture took on a more conventional nature: the man dictated from his notes in a monotone while the students lethargically scratched notes with their ballpoint pens, writing down every word they heard so that they, God forbid, wouldn’t have to remember it. I alone sat immobile. I didn’t write anything down, I just listened. The instructor came to a stop and intently surveyed the lecture hall for the first time. His eyes stumbled against my suspended gaze.
“You aren’t taking notes? You know everything that well?”
I didn’t immediately grasp that these words were addressed to me.
“I’m listening,” I mumbled belatedly, so all my classmates in the front rows had time to glance back in consternation. Who is it that’s not taking notes? That was likely the first time they noticed my existence. The back row is good for hiding from the enthusiasts who go rushing forward.
The man at the podium pretended to not hear my response. He didn’t need my excuses. He wasn’t asking (I comprehended this later) but reproaching, mocking, poking fun. His gibes aroused me. He would resort to them often later on, and I would delight in them. So be it that he was making fun of me then; the other seventy-some students he wasn’t noticing at all. They were merely the stagehands to the theater of his daily fatigue, the stage set for his all-encompassing sorrow.
Every class thereafter, as he entered the hall in his predictable leather jacket and fraying pleather shoes, he would run his eyes furtively all the way to the back row and visibly relax when he had assured himself that I was there too. In order to be spotted more easily, I would crane my neck, ready for the next joust.
“Should I buy you a pen so that you have something to take notes with?” he would ask in greeting, smiling just barely, so that only I understood that the words were addressed to me and that he was joking.
“We have our own,” some student would answer with a giggle, but he wasn’t listening anymore. He’d spread out the day’s stack of handwritten papers on the podium and begin. Under the escort of his somewhat high and grating voice, the seventeenth-century Ukrainian Orthodox archbishop Lazar Baranovych would burst into our lecture hall with the Catholic poet Kasjan Sakowicz, or Kyrylo Tranquillon-Stavrovetskyi, whose didactic gospel was burned publicly in the squares of Moscow in 1627 as a furious missive of the devil. Ivan Velychkovskyi, the Ukrainian John Owen, would stroll leisurely down the isles with his booklet Zehar z Poluzeharkom, (The Half-Hour Clock), handwritten in 1690, which remained unknown to his contemporaries and which wasn’t discovered until two hundred years after the author’s death. Before us students, Stefan Yavorskyi—a former rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and then a servant of Russian Tsar Peter I—bade a tearful farewell to his books prior to his death in 1722, the poet Klymentii Zynoviiv wove praise for all life’s trades into verse, while, up beneath the cracked ceiling, countless anonym works hovered above our young heads like the spirits of unbaptized infants.
The golden-haired man didn’t joke when discussing the Ukrainian Baroque. He, a resident of post-Soviet Ukraine, handled the Ukrainian Baroque like a sacred crystal chalice adorned with pearls and a gilded rim. Taking a sip of the life-giving nectar from this chalice was permitted only on high feast days. I would accept the chalice he offered as a gift and sip with reverence. Watching, he would beam with gratitude and approval.
For the longest time, we never spoke in private, we just exchanged jabs during lectures. He would prick me, then I him. One time I managed to poke him in the nose with an error, and I was very proud of myself. Revenge was swift to come. At the next lecture, when my triumph had more or less been forgotten already, he shamed me in front of everyone because, as it turned out, I knew nothing at all about eighteenth-century Europe. We took turns flaunting our knowledge, though in reality we were experiencing a mutual joy of discovery. By the will of chance, two wholly unacquainted people became valuable, even dear to each other. Life gained color and meaning. A drop of moisture had fallen on the desert. A short-lived spark had flashed in the pitch-dark gloom.
One night I was working late in the university library. It stayed open until eight p.m. It was a quarter till and the middle of February. A mound of books that I needed to at least leaf through loomed before me. The library patrons were growing fewer and fewer; the tables were emptying. In the enormous windows that spanned almost the entire wall glimmered the well-lit university yard with its frozen dwarf maples. An unease wavered in the air. All at once, thunder rolled and lightning flashed outside. Winter thunder is a very unusual phenomenon. I cowered at the premonition that the end of the world was approaching. From a celestial clap, the windowpanes let out a jangle and the library lamps flickered. It dawned on me that I had never before experienced thunder in February. I evidently voiced this thought aloud, because the golden-haired man, who was passing by with an armload of some sort of broadsheet newspapers, stopped right next to me and said, “Yes, me too.”
That was the first thing that he said to me face-to-face. Yes, me too. His voice was serious and warm. I got the urge to muffle myself up in it, to become a word that he would utter.
I glanced around. Only the two of us remained in the reading room.
“What is it you’re reading so late into the night?” he asked, this time encouraging a response, waiting for it expectantly. Now his interest was piqued. His interest had always been piqued, actually, but only now did he allow his interest to be revealed. I turned the books around so that he could see their spines. I was unable to speak. He leaned in to peruse the titles.
“Mikhail Bakhtin. That’s good. Aleksei Losev. That’s good too. You like literature.”
“I’m unsaved,” I squeezed out for some reason, and he laughed.
“Let’s grab a drink?”