Оксана Забужко - Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

But you, girlfriend, look like shit, oh boy, you really look like shit: at least forty, even after you went out and got your hair cut (she had mustered all her strength for this heroic deed, because her condition was such, especially in the evenings, that one time she almost fell asleep still in her clothes and only the strangely conscious pang of fear through the sticky haze of her heavy brain—what is this, have I lost it totally?!—forced her finally to lower her legs to the floor, feel around for her bathrobe, change, and stumble to the bathroom: don’t forget your makeup, with a cotton ball, that’s it, dip it into the lotion, wipe under your eyes, now brush your teeth, first gargling with Listerine, excellent, good girl, and now into the shower!—and now, okay, here we go, nice rubdown with the towel, nighttime Oil of Olay, there’s the black box on the shelf, first the neck, then the face, pat-pat, with fingertips, massage it a bit, good, done, don’t forget, lid back on the jar—and now you’re all set to go to bed, everything in order)—and all that effort as much good as hot compresses for a corpse: unexpectedly emerging to meet herself in one of those full-length mirrors, whether in a store or on the street, she at first wouldn’t recognize this hag in familiar, elegant outfits, and it wasn’t just the frightening skin, suddenly aged by several years (you should really smoke less…) and blotched with remnants of pimples, and not even the flaccid outline of the bottom half of her face, like a balloon that had lost air (get ready to hear a bunch of whining the minute someone with a face like that opens her gob!), but this now: here’s something new—something had imperceptibly changed in her whole posture, her gestures, her walk: that unrestrained drive of an airplane gathering momentum for take-off that had always been within her was gone, and, removing her tinted glasses she looked closer: yes, her eyes had lost their spark—they no longer leapt from her face like projector lights, but rather hid in it with such tearstained sorrow that she herself couldn’t wait to avert her glance elsewhere. They say that according to statistics a person looks into the mirror forty-three times a day—forty-three times you, squeezed by deep fear and still not quite believing it, stare at this Megaera aghast: so this is me? From now and forever? (And immediately the tears well up, this time from hopelessness, a forgotten feeling from adolescence.) Hmm, yeah, this is bad. No wait, if you changed the lighting, take it from above and at a slight angle it wouldn’t be quite so bad, there’s still something of that old me showing through… Oh, please!—whom are you kidding? Last winter still, during that flight through Frankfurt when she was sitting curled up by the wall and fervently writing something down in her notepad, reeling with invisible pain—packs of young men walking by would slow down with curiosity, trying to strike up a conversation: “Hi, girl!”; only a year ago in Cambridge a super stud was pursuing her, good-looking and an athlete, six foot two and about that much across the shoulders, too, gentle as a baby rabbit, with skin like dark silk and the smell of a healthy young man, ah, what a lover he would have been—you can wring your hands now, go ahead, and to her “I’m ten years older than you,” he replied after a pause, surprised, “You’re lying”—for him, too, she was, sincerely and simply, a “girl” he liked—while for her, rather than being seductive, that invincible force of ignorant health, that happy and confident inexperience with real pain was secretly irritating, because she was, after all, “a poetess of acutely tragic sensibility,” as one dull-witted critic had written back home, oh yeah, she had inherited it the way she inherited her blood type, and in this country with its code of compulsory happiness, which, it goes without saying, produces thousands upon thousands of neurotics and psychopaths, she carried her historical suffering like an act of defiance, like a blue ribbon from a pedigree dog show—with an ever so slight smile of superiority she would speak to trustingly open mouths (her words fell into raised glasses of wine and rippled their glimmering surfaces): in your culture tragedy is of an exclusively personal character, loneliness, love dramas, those clinical incests that forty-year-old matrons supposedly dig out from their childhood memories in psychotherapeutic séances, and which I, truth be told, don’t particularly believe—after a year or two of psychiatric sessions you’ll start recalling a lot more than that—however, you are unfamiliar with subjugation to limitless, metaphysical evil, where there’s absolutely nothing in hell you can do—when you grow up in a flat that is constantly bugged and surveilled and you know about it, so you learn to speak directly to an invisible audience: at times out loud, at times with gestures, and at times by saying nothing, or when the object of your first girlish infatuation turns out to be a fellow assigned to spy on you, who after a year of rather poorly performed duties—generally conversations in cafes and hanging out at the movies—suddenly falls in love with you for real, no joking, and confesses his love—at the same time confessing his KGB mission (the mouths open wider yet, rounder: now that’s life, they think jealously, that’s “real life”!), and there’s more, there’s more—but actually she prefers be silent on this matter—when at age thirty you first hop into bed with a foreigner, an overwhelmingly romantic act of passion (with an amazingly pleasant smell of expensive deodorant!), which he, regardless, took seriously and even began to say something about marriage—it was your luck in life, girl, to keep picking up serious guys, no matter which—each wanted to get married right away, some kind of disease, or something? a marriage epidemic, or was it perhaps a fashion trend for poetesses?—and that sweet-smelling (and gentle, oh yeah!) man tried to get you an entire wardrobe, because your own comprised an old pair of jeans and a few, no longer bohemian, already rather ragged tops—he bought you two real dresses of fine wool, and a silvery silk blouse with shoulder pads, and a gorgeous suit the color of red wine in which you instantly ignited in a glow of a now completely alien exotic beauty (swimming pools, lounge chairs, yachts, white sports cars…), and several pairs of shoes (big hello from Gogol’s Vakula—Italian, one-hundred-dollar pumps of the softest leather, which you still wear to this day), and a whole pile of accessories, a little purse, and a butterfly swarm of colorful scarves, and makeup, and resonant gypsy bangles, a watchband to emphasize yet again the artistic narrowness of your wrist and rich, dangling earrings to do the same for your thin, vulnerable neck; everything was expensive, chosen lovingly and with taste—and, for the first time in your life supplied to gills, for the first time dressed up like in a glossy magazine, so that you yourself lost your breath when you looked into the mirror (and ditto for each of the forty-three times!)—you sank into unbearable, burning shame , you felt yourself a typical Soviet whore who screws in a hotel room for a few pairs of underwear, and although not to accept all those goods turned out to be more than you were able, but with that the affair came to an end—you simply stopped answering his calls from Amsterdam (and in the meantime he was quickly filing for his divorce, or perhaps even did file), because, when all’s said and done, what would there have been for you to do in Amsterdam?—and you went back to your husband, bringing back jeans and cigarette lighters for him from your trips abroad, and you might not have been exactly satisfied, but you were clean : maybe relations weren’t perfect, but they were human , not beset from the beginning by the humiliating inequality of nations and circumstances that were beyond your control (and that’s why in the States she was not at all concerned that her great love lived off her paycheck: “big deal,” you’ll make some money, you’ll pay me back—it only got to her, and in no small measure—that was when she broke down, started running around the house, tumbling for a few hours into the pit of black, fiery, burning-in-the-gut hatred, ready herself, like his former wife, to hurl at him, should he happen to appear, all present knives and other stabbing and cutting objects, so that he’d come crashing down, the bastard, dripping with blood, so that he’d shit blood, so he’d come blood!—aaarrgh, disgusting, thank you kindly for these emotional experiences, would have much rather never known this about myself!—it only got to her when, with his chilling arrogant implacability—after all, he’s a man! a rock!—he announced, already over the telephone, that he owes her nothing—that actually it’s quite the opposite, that it’s she who still owes him—no kidding, he must’ve tallied up some penalty charges—for those bricks, for none other than those bricks!—and although it sounded like a threat, she gave a raspy laugh, still not quite believing it: “ So listen, will I have to get the mob after you? ”—but by that time he had already hung up—real hero, good boy, charming!—raving mad in her rage, she was gently held back by the shoulder by a fleeting thought: it must be so f-fucking miserable to live this way—regularly evoking these kinds of responses from people, and not only from women!—how unhappy he must be, the idiot, and he won’t even go see a doctor…). “Do you know the Ukrainian night,” ladies and gentlemen? Nah, you know fuck-all about the Ukrainian night, and there’s nothing in it for you to know, you’ve got your own, no less turbid nights, you commit suicide in elegant, suburban, ivy-covered homes because there’s nobody to eat turkey with for Thanksgiving, it’s just that I’ve had it with my own universal empathy, I’ve had it because, you see, no matter which way I turn, there’s misery, misery, and misery—maybe that’s the way I’m wired, or maybe it’s my “acutely tragic sensibility” always picking up the odor of misery like an insect’s antennae, and groaning, I crawl toward it rather than happily screwing my young, healthy stud (who, incidentally, led astray by me, has gone on to, wonder of wonders, start reading—he’s already polished off Uncle Tom’s Cabin , something from Jane Austen, and has now settled on Tom Sawyer , and then one evening while drinking tea in my kitchen—he used to drop by after the gym, rosy-red, pull his jacket off over his head, and throw it on the bed, he had a funny way of smelling his shoulders like a puppy dog: just back from the pool, still smell like chlorine—it was life that he smelled like, damn it, life!—he related with some excitement that he had already learned to picture the landscape described in a given book, or the room, and suddenly he interrupted himself and asked simple-heartedly: where was he supposed to now find a girl that he’d be able to discuss all this with?—oh, you clever boy, bull’s-eye, right with the very first step: the path she was opening up to him promised—loneliness—it hit her like a slap in the face: stop, you idiot, hit the brakes—will you finally stop fucking up the minds of young men, pushing them toward the deceptive lights of some kind of deeper meaning, which you yourself have no clue about, and afterward abandoning them halfway to lick their wounds for the next few years?—and she already knew that she wouldn’t be sleeping with him, that it would be only with someone as screwed up as herself, no, far more screwed up—in a plaster cast, with draconian debts and trails of police summonses, my sorcerer-brother, we are of the same blood you and I—whom she’d be unable to throw off his own God-given track—oh, how noble of you, sweetness, just look at yourself, just look at how well you’ve done—all-round good girl, no?). In psychiatry, I believe it’s called victim behavior, but there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s the way I was taught; and in general all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten : information, I must say, not very enticing for strangers, nonetheless, if there’s nothing else in either your family or your national history that can be scraped together, we slowly but surely began to take pride in this—hey, come see how they beat us, but we’re not yet dead—my Cambridge friends rolled on the ground with laughter when you translated the beginning of your national anthem as “Ukraine has not died yet”—“What kind of anthem is that?”—and truly, a pretty screwed up little opening line, just the thing to “go fight the Turk” with, like hell!—and that’s why, that’s why, my dear girl, since that’s the case—you should shout and rejoice that you haven’t died, you poor sexual victim of the national idea, although, if you think about it some, there’s not a whole lot to be rejoicing about, and who needs it, a life without love, and wouldn’t it be preferable to die, or even better, to never be born than now go through such torture? (Once upon a time I had a certain, oh so excellently programmed patriotic friend who constantly complained about the fact that we fall in love not with the man, but with the national idea—and in the end, after a several-year excursion through the bedrooms of overseas grandpas, she finally settled down in one of them, having acquired a bébé —which, it’s not out of the question, might even learn to speak Ukrainian when it grows up, that’s if it wants to, of course, and meantime its mom is making a few bucks preparing news reports for the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty, which Clinton still hasn’t decided whether to shut down—chirping away in her once-native tongue with those foreign intonations sticking out like springs from a mattress and designed to show that she is now a cut above—no longer from the home village: she broke out! ): I’m making the point, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s not such a great thrill to belong to a beaten nation, as the fox in the folktale said, the unbeaten rides on the back of the beaten—and that’s what the beaten one deserves, the problem is that in the meantime that beaten one manages to sing, let’s say, the ballad of the misfortunate captives, and in this way—legitimizes his own humiliated position, because art, don’t you know, always legitimizes, in the eyes of an outsider, the life that gave it birth; and in that fact lies its, that is, art’s, gre-eat deception. The Latin ars , which seeped into most European languages, the Nordic Kunst , which ricocheted over to our West Slavic neighbors as sztuka —now there’s a healthy attitude, you can almost hear the after-dinner burp of a burgher’s pickled cabbage: sztuka , a game, a trick, an acrobatic somersault on the tightrope, a melodic bell tone of a baroque clock, and a whimsically carved snuffbox; and our art, mystetstvo , or craftsmanship, is also of the same order. It’s only with an indifferent condescending yawn—well, well, and what will the craftsmen entertain us with today?—that one can break that spell, neutralize it, expose the hidden trap, and, it seems, only Old Church Slavonic raises in vain its dried-out cautionary forefinger: beware izkusstvo , from izkus —temptation, the same you pray not to be led into.