Оксана Забужко - Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

Out there in Jerusalem, going from temple to temple, she pleaded with God to give her strength—no more than that: the year had turned out to be difficult, lonely (her marriage, which had been decaying slowly for a while, fogging up her soul like a window in a room full of heavy breathing, finally fell apart), but mainly—homeless, full of fitful jumps from one temporary shelter to another, just so she wouldn’t have to remain in the tiny flat with her mother: staying with her had made her hate her own body, its stubborn, insurmountable materiality—it had to, no matter what you did, fill up a certain cubic measurement of space—at nights she dreamed of herself as a man—a tall, long-haired, swarthy male Mowgli who drags an old witch with bluish-gray, disheveled hair into bed and can’t have sex with her!—American psychoanalysts would have a ball with that one if someone were to let them know about it!—and that’s when it began to appear—in tiny flashes and jerks, dashing out and running for cover again—a feeling of all-out complete exposure to all forces: have you come for good or for evil? In her mind she assured herself, clenching her teeth: I don’t care if it’s worse, as long as it’s a change!—and her poems promised:

There you go—shit, what else can you say here… But in Jerusalem there seemed to be a bit of relief, after all, the symposium turned out to be kind of interesting, so she was able to swallow fairly easily that bone of personal professional exhibitionism forcibly inserted into her throat: each time demonstrating yet again to grinning Western intellectuals that, see, Ukrainians also speak sentences with subordinate clauses; it’s just that when she was sitting at a table on the open terrace and blissfully stretching her legs during a break between sessions, imbibing sips of coffee together with conversation—they were arguing about Dontsov, please try to understand, folks, that was not anti-Semitism—it was the roar of a wounded beast: let us go, let us live!—and, with a concealed smile, examining her interlocutors through the golden slivers of her squinted lashes, she suddenly heard a sharp, powerful yowl: from out of nowhere a huge anthracite-black cat had appeared on the terrace and proceeded to walk among the tables, tail held high to general laughter and multilingual exclamations, still ripping the air with unrestrained shrieking—a cold shiver crept under her skin: what the hell kind of apparition is this now?—but the cat, bastard, kept heading straight toward their group and, arching its back, jumped straight into her lap, curled into a warm heavy ball and huddled quietly, twitching its perked ears and switching into a deep purr: it found what it was looking for. Everyone had a good laugh then; with unconscious fear, she carefully petted the beast as if to appease it—the tom bared its hard, glassy eyeballs, golden with deep black slits for pupils, like from the bottoms of inverted candles; in her mind she gasped: oh-oh-oh!—you were caught, sweetness, that’s when you were really caught—exactly half a year earlier, half a year before everything was swept up in a deafening whirl and carried you off, not giving you a chance to catch your bearings: and you thought of yourself as some kind of rescuer, a Myrrh-bearing Mary, yes? Well, you got it—right where you wanted it, smack into that yellow-lit rectangle with planks across the chest and abdomen, so don’t go whining now—he did, when all’s said and done, love you, that man. No, it was something else that wanted to love you through that man: a cat in your lap, a cat in your bosom, a flash of eyes and claws, while I, prostrate, am playing the fiddle and screaming: you’re hurting me, my love, you’re hurting me, do you hear me?

Explain one thing to me. Explain it, because I just don’t seem to get it. Do you really think that if you have a hard-on and you don’t come right away this makes you a prince and the woman must kick her legs in the air and squeal with delight every time you deign to touch her—in the middle of the night, after you’ve folded up your little pictures so very neatly and I’m in the grip of my first dream? Although, pretty soon after his arrival she stopped having dreams—or more precisely, she stopped remembering them: some kind of clumps of generally dull, brownish or asphalt-gray tones merged in a cloudy swirl, but not a single plotline emerged into daytime consciousness, like a huge lid had fallen down to divide it from the consciousness of the night—the simple awareness of his lying beside her shut down all channels of connection. Perhaps for the first time in her life she found herself imprisoned in the cage of naked reality—the world became opaque, the second bottom—the flickering, underwater net of secret meanings, which up until now had always shone through in her dreams and poems—switched off and extinguished itself with a click; there were now no more dreams and, consequently, no more poems either: she lost her bearings as though she had lost one of her senses, went deaf or blind. Her body, shattered by night, always felt heavy and awkward, somehow bloated inside, like she really was pregnant—a bag of meat from the market dripping blood, what’s going on, she wondered dully, why am I always feeling so bad—and would fall asleep on his arm like she fainted, while he happily mumbled at her ear: “ Hmm, it seems that you’re capable of being an even very ‘delightful babe’—just that you’ve to get this sex thing straightened out .”—“ Sex ,” she would murmur like a teacher, already half-asleep: her brain still being the last thing to switch off—“ is only a sign of deeper disagreements .”—“ I doubt it ,” he’d cut her off and close the subject. So it seems like you don’t know all that much about this business, my pet—notwithstanding all your extolled experience, who would have thought? Talking about it , to simply reach mutual understanding was impossible—he’d get angry right away, jump into a defensive posture; whereas stretching out her arms to him during the day would evoke in her a lighting-quick queasy feeling of losing balance—like in an elevator that comes to a sudden stop, or when you’re rushing alone against the crowd that has just poured out at the trolley stop—it turned out he “didn’t like to be pawed,” indeed this aversion to intimate contact was plain unhealthy (“ Aren’t you ashamed of pawing men this way? ” he would sneer, squinting one eye over the pillow)—by that time she was willing to wail, not just talk—in an endless 24/7 monologue (the way undigested food propels itself out of the digestive tract from both ends), to shake him by the shoulders, to shout loud enough for him to hear, what is with you, you jackass—and the jackass, incidentally, arrived with the intention of starting a family, no kidding, just picked up and showed up in whatever he was wearing at the time, that’s love for you!—and kept reproaching her that while he’s hanging out here with her, they’re probably stealing bricks form his construction site back home, “ So you what ,” she would place her fists on her hips: a witch, a bitch from the prison zone, she had no idea she could be like this—“ you’d like me to pay you for the inconvenience? ”—ah shit, how is this possible that two not entirely stupid people, who supposedly love each other, right? who overcame so many obstacles in order to be together, what he had to go through to get the visa alone, after all the car crashes and broken ribs, what she went through that winter in Cambridge—that they should be incapable of reaching even an e-le-men-ta-ry understanding—it’s mind-boggling! And—it was probably in such moments that his wife used to throw those knives at him, like against a brick wall, something he once admitted reluctantly—cute, a family sport of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, how about that: and so what happened? she was itching to ask, did she miss? Instead she tried to be rational: listen, I’m not a puppet on a string, am I now, why are you treating me this way—he’d snarl back, bent over the desk and glaring from under his brow, like he was releasing smoke rings of his rage: “ It’s just that many things inside me have been killed! ” Thank you, dear, it seems that from now on I’ll be able to say the same. In other words, it’s contagious, this disease of the spirit? In other words, it’s now better for me, too—to avoid people, better not to get close to anyone? You have taught my body to castrate the perpetrator: all of my feminine strength, accumulated for generations, which has thus far been directed toward the light (the most precious memory of previous loves is the sun against a dark sky: that’s how it’s seen in outer space, it’s from there that my fragile little vessel has filled itself to the brim with streaming joy), with you has turned itself inside out, black lining outward, has become destructive—death-bearing, if we don’t mince words about it and put it plainly.