they say that once upon a time, the great Renaissance paintings looked quite different than they do now. The soot from the candles that settled on their surfaces for centuries—up until the invention of electricity—is now impossible to rub off; hence, not a single museum visitor will ever look upon the original again. One can only speculate at the gamut of colors hidden beneath the smoky overlay.
The past is nothing but a conjecture of the past. The soot that so densely coats lengthy intervals of time is a historical circumstance, while reality is that which, in defiance of everything, emerges through it nonetheless. What comprise our reality aren’t necessarily the most important details of the entire painting; conversely, it’s the secondary, often trifling minutiae that you probably wouldn’t have noticed if you were actually seeing the principal thing.
That’s how I’ve stored my personal past in my mind too. The trifling, secondary details play a more important role in that past—or more precisely, in my memory of it—than do the principal ones. The principal ones are all coated in soot. I can’t navigate the past of my own life. If someone were to quiz me on my knowledge of myself, I would most certainly fail. My neighbors would test higher. Yet I have a very good memory of involuntary glances, cast furtively when willpower failed me; of fears that never did get realized but hold me firmly in their grip until this day; of the unexpected smell of linden trees, and of asphalt drenched by summer rain, and how I ran over it at breakneck speed, spattering my raspberry-colored velvet pants with puddle mud. I remember very well the desire that made my head spin. I wanted everything. And I wanted to experience everything firsthand. Is this hunger not sometimes called youth?
This hunger often made me stay when it would have been wiser to run. I didn’t leave, for instance, upon learning that my first golden-haired man was married. Actually, it would’ve been strange to expect a staid university lecturer two minutes shy of becoming professor to be living a bachelor’s life. Wedlock is some sort of requisite initial phase certain types of men need to go through before daring to move up the social ladder. First they must get married, and only then can they do the rest: build a career, publish books, reflect on the meaning of existence, get drunk with colleagues after work—in short, live. Such men are born already married. Dolefully, I was coming to the conclusion that I was sinning, but I didn’t know it for a fact. Perhaps because I didn’t know that I loved him.
we began to meet regularly at a small, cozy pub not far from the university to talk. It was a game. We just talked. He told me right away, for instance, “My wife used to study the same thing that you’re studying.”
I asked what her name was, how old she was, and what she looked like: Valentyna, five years older than me, pretty.
“I don’t doubt she’s pretty,” I assured him.
“Yes—yes, she’s pretty.”
Valentyna never came up in conversation again.
Our conversations at the pub could last for hours, late into the night, until the weary waiters would begin to make a show of flipping over the chairs of the neighboring tables. Then we would pour the wine we had ordered into disposable cups and slowly sip the last of it in some dark little courtyard nearby, sitting on the low iron railings that typically enclosed the flower beds in front of houses. No one would have taken us for a university student and her instructor. We more resembled a melancholic poet and a frivolous damsel with a weakness for sweet words. Those sweet words never did get uttered. Nor did I look like a frivolous damsel in the proper sense because I never wore short dresses with plunging necklines. Actually, I never wore dresses at all, so perhaps my only resemblance to a damsel was in name.
But there was nonetheless something in me that attracted him. My audacity? Our shared interest in literature? My wit? Was I witty? What is it, actually, that pulls certain people toward one another? There must exist some mechanism that drives us—or at least some criterion, some sign that we use to pick a focus for our tenderness from the vast sea of other living beings.
Sometimes we would sit and look into each other’s eyes. He’d be stroking my hand, just barely, while I pretended not to notice. In those moments, he would look infinitely sadder than usual. His eyes would flare, the bridge of his nose would crease, and his brows would furrow as if he felt great regret for something he was losing. Or that he never had. That’s it: it was sorrow for something unattainable. I’d quickly come up with a new topic for conversation because I couldn’t bear these torturous silences. I’d burst into laughter and pull my hand away. Our game would continue.
During lectures, we behaved, as usual, antagonistically. He’d gently prod my impregnable fortress in the back rows, and I’d ungently brush him off, which he’d ignore, continuing on with the lecture. When finished, after saying goodbye to the class, he’d signal to me with an inconspicuous gesture that we could meet up that day. I’d go flying over to the pub, where he was already sitting, lost in thought over a folder of papers, with a few books under his arm and a glass of cognac under his nose. I’d enter, and he’d smile. But with what looked like bitterness. Increasingly, regret muddied his gaze. Increasingly, he drank. Increasingly, his comments grew harsh, and when I’d ask what he wanted from me, he’d respond in almost a shout, “I don’t want anything from you! I don’t know what I want!”
he was my first reader. One time I brought him a printout of a novella that I had written on my brand-new computer, under the influence of our strange unrealized relationship. He took the manuscript home and promised to give it a look. I didn’t take writing seriously; it was more like an exploration of my own self, a form of entertainment in the midst of unbearable longing, but the entire week, waiting to see what he would say, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I very much wanted to live up to his expectations. To tether him to me with my talent. To have him see my full beauty, which likely wasn’t noticeable from the outside.
When we met up again, he solemnly handed me the manuscript and said that he liked it. He had read it straight through, in one night, which had frustrated his family members. His lack of sleep made no impression on me at all; for me, it was a common side effect of our “unrelationship.” But what did concern me was the term “family.” Who was he referencing? His wife and a cat? A dog? Children? All of the above?
“Do you have any children?” I suddenly asked.
“Two.”
He didn’t look at me as he said this. I started to cry.
At that moment, some man approached our table: “Why are you bringing students to tears, Professor? Was she not prepared for class?”
I quickly wiped my face. Stiffly and unconvincingly, he tried to explain himself to the man, mumbling something like, I didn’t make her, she just teared up on her own, there’s a situation with her family . . . I snatched the manuscript off the table and ran out of the pub without saying goodbye. Our game had come to an end, that much was clear.
So too did his course on Ukrainian Baroque literature. My entire student cohort, breathing a sigh of relief, gladly delved into the considerably more comprehensible but exceedingly tragic and tearfully romantic Ukrainian literature of the nineteenth century. The lectures were given by an exceedingly boring instructor whose name I don’t recall, remembering only her good-natured singsong voice and her readiness to shed tears to Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko’s ballad “The Drowned Maiden.” This instructor seemed to have come out from under Shevchenko’s pen herself. I skipped her lectures shamelessly and didn’t make anything of it.
I also didn’t show up for my Baroque literature exam. This sort of disobedience could’ve had serious consequences, including expulsion from the university, but the matter didn’t get as far as expulsion because an A miraculously appeared in his handwriting in my transcript booklet. The prefect of the class, whose job it was to address such things, reacted with a telling silence. She probably figured that I had backstairs influence at the university.
When we’d cross paths by accident, we’d walk past one another, electing the most distant trajectories possible. In the narrow hallways of the Ukrainian studies department, this wasn’t easy. He’d nod and so would I, then we’d both immediately turn away. In the spring, he wore a long gray overcoat that appeared silklike but definitely wasn’t silk, which flapped open as he walked, making him look like an archangel who had descended to the sinful earth on a humanity-saving mission. His golden hair had grown longer and curled into gentle locks, while a few days’ worth of stubble added a decade to his years. Nothing could be gleaned from his shadow.
i sank into a leaden depression, barely eating at all and not sleeping. The uncertainty is the most irritating in such cases. What was going on with him—that other side of our nonexistent relationship? Was he tormented or, conversely, glad that everything had been managed without casualties? Was he rejoicing at my pain, or did he not even think about me? The inability to talk to him was driving me crazy. I began talking to myself and imagining what his response would be: undoubtedly, something rational and reassuring.
A friend of mine who was studying violin at the university invited me over to his apartment. After smoking our fill of marijuana, we ran a bath and climbed in clothed. We lay there, he on one side and I on the other. The water wasn’t all that warm. I remember vividly this experience of climbing into a bath dressed, casting aside all prohibitions, freeing myself of them because who said this wasn’t allowed? In a soaked sweater and pants, I felt as free and clean as if I had just been born and the world was mine to discover. I felt light, like his overcoat that appeared silklike but definitely wasn’t silk.
“Don’t furrow your brow,” the violinist was instructing me from the opposite shore. “Imagine that your soul is on the bridge of your nose. Be gentle with it! Stop wrinkling your nose!”
For some reason, he considered the forehead and the space between the eyes the most important part of the body and would get very tormented when he saw creases there. My distress didn’t move him in the least. The violinist’s sister had spent eight years carrying on with a married man, then finally snapped herself out of it, broke things off with him, and found herself another guy, who later turned out to be married as well.
“My situation’s completely different,” I moaned.
“My sister always says that too. Christ, I just don’t understand where in the world the two of you get this idea that you’re the chosen one. What’s so different about you?”
We put on roller skates (it turned out he had two pairs) and, still wet after our bath, skated back and forth between the living room and the kitchen until the neighbors below began to ring the doorbell incessantly.
I’ve never done anything more deranged before or since. For a brief while, it even seemed that I was starting to fancy the violinist. During a walk across the dam outside the city, I clumsily tried to kiss him, to which he said, “Why are you ruining everything? Can’t a man and woman just be friends?”
“They can, I guess,” I replied somewhat disenchanted, and at that our friendship ended.
my anguish congealed so much that I could no longer find the air to breathe. Time passed mercilessly, one minute at a time, and with every new minute that passed, I became cognizant anew of myself as the most unfortunate creature on this planet. Time expanded and clogged my blood vessels, took away my hearing and my voice, blurred my vision. My body, wasted away, became disproportionately bony. I seemed to be swimming in circles in an aquarium, densely filled with anguish the consistency of gel, while people examined me through the glass like some rare animal. I survived the day only because I learned to divide it into short distances, talking myself into suffering through one, then sprinting over into the next, where things would get easier.
“A little longer, and it’ll be twelve,” I’d tell myself to the drone of the computer first thing in the morning, lying in my bedroom. (I hadn’t attended university lectures in a long time by then.) At twelve, I was allowed to try to sleep through lunchtime. Enduring the anguish seemed easiest in my sleep.
“A little longer, and it’ll be five,” I’d tell myself when I couldn’t manage to fall asleep at noon. At five, my parents came home from work. I’d settle in on the little divan in the kitchen, cover myself with an old green throw blanket, and watch my parents have dinner. I concocted adventures from the day of cut classes—I lied blatantly quite often back then—or simply listened with delight as they unaffectedly conversed. If I managed to forget about myself for even a minute, I was happy; that’s why I found pleasure in the routine travails of post-Soviet Ukrainian life, like lack of money and corruption. I also found pleasure in hardships outside my immediate world, like problems of family friends and, in particular, acquaintances dying—because nothing distracts from personal suffering like someone else’s death.
I often imagined that I myself was dying. My swollen body was being pushed up to the surface of the aquarium face up, while he, my handsome golden-haired man, beat his head against the glass and, choking on grief, lamented, “No! No!”
In the evening, I’d stuff myself with sedatives, readying myself for another difficult night, during the course of which I’d write my stories, cry, doze, muse, cry, and finally remind myself, “A little longer, and it’ll begin to dawn.” And when dawn was about to break, I’d crawl into bed, only to begin this whole cycle of torments over again in a few hours.
Maybe you just have to undergo a bout of proper suffering, at least once? To excruciate oneself in order to determine the size of one’s soul—XS, S, M, or XL? Mine was somehow sizeless.
a local publisher agreed to publish my novella as a stand-alone book, despite it really being just a long story. I should’ve been happy, but I couldn’t feel anything. I just insisted that the book launch be held in the pub where we once used to meet.
Quite a lot of people showed up because, at that time in post-Soviet Ukraine, books weren’t published all that often.
And here again, soot coats the principal details of my past, leaving me with only the secondary ones . . .
I remember only that I sat before a smiling audience, joking incessantly as I crumpled the nicely bound little book in my hands. It was bright yellow. The wooden chair under me creaked now and then. The audience kept bursting into benevolent laughter in the vein of, Look at how lovely she is, she’s joking, her youthful energy spouting like a fountain, she’s writing something in such difficult times, her spirit unfailing, how lovely. The faces of those present metastasized into one continuous blotch. I read excerpts of the novella, and no one understood anything.
“Why, you don’t understand any of it,” I said, and the blotch exploded with laughter. She’s self-aware and ironic too, this really is lovely!
Among those present, one face pulsated—his. He had arrived late, so he had to stand by the entrance, cowering against the doorjamb. When the others laughed, he smiled, just barely, likely to not protrude too much from the general background. When the presentation ended, he was the first to disappear, leaving me unsure if I had merely hallucinated him.
I headed home late that night on the last trolley bus. At the stop outside my parents’ house, I noticed a lone motionless figure that was sitting Buddha-like on a block of concrete and staring at the full moon. Its crimson disk dangled over the suburban tract on the other side of the road like the sword of Damocles.
“The launch was fun,” the figure uttered, and I froze in trepidation.
“What are you doing here? How do you know where I live?”
“I looked it up in your student records. I wanted to congratulate you on the book.”
He was slurring; it was clear that he was terribly drunk. I stepped closer. He wanted to stand up but almost toppled over. “You’re drunk,” I said as sternly as I could.
“Come here.”
Like an obedient doll, I walked right up to him, the smell of cognac tickling my nose. The moon grew menacingly redder above our heads.
There wasn’t another soul around, just a little group of drunks hanging out on the steps of a convenience store about fifteen meters away. He embraced me, looking doomed, and began to grope me. I didn’t resist. He kissed me, and I too felt intoxicated.
“Be mine,” he whispered, “marry me.”
I instantly sobered up.
“How can I marry you if you’re already married?”
“Married?” Again, he almost toppled off the block of concrete. “Oh right, I’m already married.”
I couldn’t tell if he had really forgotten about his marital status or if, driven to despair, he was playing the fool.
“And she’s pretty,” I continued.
“She’s very pretty.”
“But it’s all the same to me.”
He fell silent for a moment or so, contemplating my words, and then started kissing me even more desperately. Despite the desperation, we were both overcome with relief.
I remember the moon was so close and so low that I had the urge to push it aside with my hand, to screen it with a curtain so that I might luxuriate in the darkness, as I deserved. I saw every tiny detail in his face. His drunken whispers sounded like a revelation; his fair hair blazed like the Golden Fleece of ancient heroes.
But he wasn’t a hero. And neither was I. In my first real love story, the leading characters were behaving more like antiheroes—paltry cowards and liars who were apt to use love to justify any cruelty whatsoever. His wife turned out to be the heroine: a woman who suddenly and involuntarily found herself the target of fire on my and his battlefield and didn’t flee, even though her chances at victory were less than mine.
I saw her not long after, when she stopped by the university one day to see her husband. She was slightly stooped and excessively thin, with a large, humped nose protruding from her pale, gray face. Her hair was fair, just like his. Her head was lowered and meekly tilted to the side, like an infallible Madonna’s. They said goodbye to each other on the stairs, and the Madonna set off down University Street toward the city’s central square. For a while I traipsed indecisively behind her: everything inside me buzzed, my cheeks were burning, my legs giving out under me. Finally, I caught up with her and blocked her path.
“You’re Valentyna, right?”
She nodded. “And who are you?”
I didn’t respond, just breathed hard.
“I know who you are,” she said finally. “I pictured you differently.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re pretty.”
She took my arm in hers, and together we walked, slowly. From the side, someone might have thought we were best friends. No one had ever told me that I was pretty.
our first meeting was followed by heart-to-hearts, and then heated quarrels, in which she nonsensically claimed, “I love anyone who loves my husband,” to which I nonsensically claimed, “You can’t break something that isn’t broken”; all of this followed by jealousy, pain, bouts of despondency, and suicide attempts on both our parts, condemnation from our respective families and friends, hatred, and, at last, fatigue and the slow onset of indifference. The entire journey from the genesis of my feelings toward him to our complete estrangement lasted a few exhausting years. The golden-haired man never did become mine. He also didn’t remain hers. I barely remember the details anymore, just little snippets of them: the crimson moon above, the dam outside the city where I liked taking walks, our secret getaways to a little house in the mountains—and then the train, my worried parents who’d come to see me off on the platform, me waving through the window for them to leave but them not leaving. The train heaved into motion. I was smoking in the train’s vestibule, and the cigarette smoke was suffusing the space around me densely, like sheep’s wool.
A stranger was smoking next to me.
“A difficult goodbye?”
“Nah,” I replied. “I’ve had harder ones.”
The stranger peered at me.
“You aren’t the author of that book, are you? The one with the bright yellow cover?” And he named the title.
I nodded sheepishly.
I’m embarrassed to hear the titles of my books on other people’s lips. They seem so infantile.
“I was at your book launch. I sat in the front row.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t remem—”
“You read an excerpt about a young woman who couldn’t sleep because her upstairs neighbors were making a racket, and when she finally went to complain, she found a squirrel family calmly sitting around, shelling walnuts, in an otherwise empty apartment. I laughed.”
“You remember that level of detail?”
“Oh, I don’t forget anything.”
The train was carefully crossing the Dniester River. I put out my cigarette, then said, “It wasn’t just the squirrels keeping the woman awake.”
“I figured. I felt sorry for her. She was special.”
“Everyone thinks they’re special, but in reality, we’re all ordinary.”
“That’s not true. You’re special. I’m a fan.”
And the stranger cast his eyes onto me with sincerity, blue as the sky on a frosty February day.
“Do you know what the Dniester flows into?”
I was at a loss. In that moment, I didn’t know if I knew.