Оксана Забужко - Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

There’s just one thing, she tells herself, looking into the mirror for the four hundred and forty-third time (so this is it, for the rest of my life?)—the mirror is cloudy, with moldy-green spots (what do you expect from a cheap apartment in a poor neighborhood)—at her face, crudely touched-up by approaching old age (thirty-four years old, no fucking joke!). Just one. They never taught us, all our literature with its entire cult of tragic love—Ivanko and Marichka, Lukash and Mavka, my students were enthralled and declared Forest Song superior to Midsummer Night’s Dream , you bet—they somehow forgot to warn us that in reality tragedies don’t look pretty . That death, no matter what form it takes, is first and foremost an ugly business. And where there’s no beauty—how can there be truth?

It’s too bad. It’s too damned bad. Should I head out to the balcony for a smoke?

A discovery: this is how frigid women see the world! There was a time—the last few days of living together and right after the breakup—when, on seeing an erotic scene on television, she would start to cry. Now she watches calmly, like a zoologist watching lizards copulate (hmm, I wonder, how do lizards do it?): two half-naked people in bed, the man places his hand on the woman’s thigh, moves it up, she turns toward him, her legs, bent at the knees, spread; she throws her arms around his neck and the two of them, moaning and tussling about, melt into a kiss… Thank God, next scene.

She had once blurted out, without thinking, in a so-called shared moment of an interesting confidential observation: “ You know? Just don’t misunderstand me, don’t be offended: it seems to me that you’re open to evil .” That was about the third or fourth day after his arrival in the Pennsylvania boondocks where the good-hearted Mark is happy to invite, at the expense of his department, all the poets and artists of the whole world at the same time, if only they would help him escape the storms of hell at home for an hour or two (every time he called her in Cambridge he related, in a voice that would go well with a bird’s tilted head: cuck-oo: “Today I met a lovely little Russian girl,” “There’s a black girl here kind of interested in me”—who’d be interested in the poor thing, an awkward forty-year-old schoolboy with excellent grades, with his duck’s waddle, the tummy of a teddy bear, nose-hairs showing, and thinning hair on his crown—and then he’d return again to his home life with the intonations of a hurt child: today he had to do all the dishes and was late to work because of it, and the only thing she could say was that the frying pan wasn’t done right—the intonations would jump into shrieking hysteria when, having exhausted all possible ways of consoling him, she asked plainly, “Mark, if it’s all so hopeless, then why haven’t you split up?”—“Because the fucking bitch couldn’t survive!”—aha, the house bills, the “mortgage,” the “insurance,” and all other maintenance, it’s a good thing we in Ukraine don’t have such problems, a lot simpler for us, you pack your bags, slam the door, and “good-bye, my love”: poverty is freedom is freedom)—Mark arranged for a studio for him over the summer holidays: a corner in a huge barn, kind of like a surreal-looking gym crammed with easels, with a frosted-glass window the kind you have in bathrooms extending the full length of the wall—you should be grateful to him for that, fella, beggars can’t be choosers—she herself had come to that empty university town only for him, it was for him she left Cambridge, and as soon as she did it was like a wall had been hit by a battering ram and come tumbling down, everything shifted from its place: already in Boston’s Logan airport, as soon as she got out of the taxi her sandal strap broke—dragging her foot she walked up to the check-in counter to find out that all United flights were delayed, Washington, where she was to transfer to the mangy Pennsylvania turbo-prop, was in the grips of a thunderstorm—she started running around from one customer agent to another, all shot back empty smiles like flyswatters, what could she do, she absolutely had to be at Mark’s house tonight because they were heading out by car to New York the next morning, to Kennedy airport to meet the brilliant Ukrainian artist who doesn’t (idiot!) speak a word of English, the script was prepared so well, and now this screwup!—she was able to get on another flight, sweating on the plane for forty minutes to elevator music in her headphones (interrupted every five minutes by cheerful promises of departure just as soon as they receive permission), and at Dulles it was like war had been declared moments earlier: people thundered down the corridor, bags bouncing across their shoulders, carts squealed, wheels screaked, an invisible child was bawling along the entire length of the corridor’s rafters, and she, too, charged after the others, from one level to another, looping around like in a nightmare or horror film, from gate to gate, and when she finally ran up, panting like a race dog, to the isolated corner with the gate for her turbo-prop, she crashed right into the proverbial immovable mountain, a professionally pleasant clerk behind the counter: “Your plane has just left, ma’am”—so when’s the next one?—oh the next one is tomorrow at noon—he flashed his teeth: “Have a good night!”—she swore up and down, tried to phone Mark, all the telephone booths were jammed, the machine ate up her quarter, the angry hordes at the United counters were going crazy, demanding their rights (here’s where you see the difference between us and Americans), a huge man with a full shock of hair, for some reason wet, who was clearly on the verge of an epileptic attack, was violently shaking a black man in a United uniform with an also shiny-wet face: “You’re a jerk, you hear me, man? You go and bring me your boss right now, you hear? Right now!”—the fellow, with the whites of his eyes bulging, struggled to get away, slurring and spraying: “You just don’t call me names!”—and pulling the radio receiver out of his pocket with the elegant gesture of a magician or perhaps a waiter he called, not the requested boss but rather the police, well, this you would have gotten in Sovietland as well—Rosie whined into the receiver that Mark had already left for the airport to meet her—outside the glass doors, in the yellow-lit darkness, she once again saw the diagonal spears of rain, she hobbled over to the baggage claim conveyer belts to pick up her bags since it was obvious now that she’d be spending the night in Washington, the small-built baggage-handler with a pitted nose, like it had been transferred from someone else’s face, eagerly informed her as soon as he saw her claim stub that they had managed to transfer the Boston bags to the damned turbo-prop in time —they really had to hustle, ma’am, they only had ten minutes, but they made it, thank God, don’t worry, ma’am—he stood there glowing with his accomplishment and awaited praise, she almost felt bad about disappointing him: you mean the luggage went on without me? I’m standing in an airport called Dulles in the city of Washington on the continent North America on the planet Earth with a ladies’ purse over my right shoulder, in my left hand there is a computer bag, no toothbrush, no spare set of underwear, at this moment flying over the Atlantic is a man for whom I arranged this whole business, and yet this indeed is—my only address: after collecting her thoughts somewhat as she smoked two cigarettes in a row, she changed her ticket yet again—destination JFK: if this is how things are Mark can meet both of us there tomorrow, we’ll each arrive separately, but we’ll find each other somehow; she called some friends in Washington who had been inviting her to come stay for quite some time, although probably not at midnight and without warning—hi there, so I’m here, in Dulles, “if you could just give me a drink of water, because I’m so hungry I don’t even have anywhere to stay,” as the saying goes—and this is the literally the case: with their address written down on a scrap of paper—“it’s a fifteen-minute drive, we’re waiting for you,” phew, the world’s not without good people—feeling a smile of a mentally challenged child permanently glued to her face, no doubt from fatigue, she shuffled off to the taxi stand, but this was not yet the end: there was a tiny Pakistani at the wheel in whose coarsely grated speech English was not to be discerned so easily—bravely heading out into the night, at exactly fifteen minutes later he turned his head toward her in the darkness of the car—slowly, as if on hinges, headlights of approaching cars lapped back and forth like waves, like the shadows of giant invisible fish, the red tableau of the meter flickered like an abandoned cardiogram in an operating room where all the doctors have left—and he asked her, did she happen to know how to get there—excuse me, but isn’t it the cab driver that’s supposed to know the way?—the nakedness of empty suburban expressways, the blackness of the night on either side without a single light, where am I, Lord, who am I, why am I here?—another fifteen minutes and they drove into a town, they sped up neatly swept moonlit streets, first one way, then turning around, the other, how long have you been in the States?—she shouted at him from the back seat like he was deaf—five years, he answered, continuing to hold his head in the same awkward position—and he kept stopping his cab, and he kept turning on the light, and he kept pulling out the crumpled blanket of a map from under his seat, holding on to it with both hands like it was the magic carpet that would miraculously deliver us, and kept waiting for something as he stared at it, she thought dully for a moment that perhaps the poor guy didn’t know how to read—what did you say the street was called?—he rolled the pebbles of disobedient syllables in his mouth unable to pronounce “Rupert Street,” nor could he repeat them after her, because she also spoke with an accent, perhaps not as vigorous as his, “Kood yoo koll dereh?”—uh? aha, “could you call there,” in other words, to the place we’ve been trying to get to for the second hour now, my friends are probably losing their minds, she calls and then she disappears!—good, hand over the receiver—once, twice, and a third time, at first they couldn’t get a connection, and then finally an aggravated Ron (who, it turns out, had already been calling the cab company), was giving the driver, who still could not shake his ataraxy, some kind of multi-storied instructions, and once again the speeding up and down empty streets began, as though the driver had turned over all his senses to car: the cab rushed and groaned desperately, stopped, snorted, scratched the back of its head, and asked itself: what if I go that way?—it cursed (squealing its wheels), wrung its hands, and in the half darkness of the car interior the Pakistani’s silent fear slowly spread, she could sense it physically—it was beginning to make her queasy, the man was watching his job slip through his helpless hands like a rope, his frail support in this freakish land, and devil take this “ledi” with her strange accent who got it into her head to go devil-knows-where in the middle of the night—she felt bad, wanting to occupy less and less space in the back seat, and after the fourth (!!!!) call “dereh” Ron was screaming into the phone: “Where are you? Stay where you are, just don’t move, man, okay?”—after five minutes a white car flew out from around the bend, Ron’s figure jumped out, ripped open the door of the cab, your lungs filled with the humid smell of a summer night, and into the car—Ron’s furious seething (“it’s fifteen minutes’ drive, man, you just don’t know your business!”)—and crawling out to freedom, swaying on her high heels (the left sandal had fallen apart totally, could not be held together) she suddenly felt a wet gurgle in her panties: her period had begun. End of paragraph.