Оксана Забужко: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

What is it that made you think that you can pull him out of that hole into which he (it was obvious!) was so determined to sink? Actually, you should have taken heed on the first night—when, still undressing, he squinted attentively, as if determining a price: “ Can you come before I do? ”—you laughed, overflowing with frothy confidence like a bottle of young wine: “ I can do anything! ” Fool, you should have seen right there that he was no partner for you, that, petrified inside from years of permafrost, he was simply incapable of being not alone—even in lovemaking (“ You’re such a good fuck! ” was all he could squeeze out of himself after a long and cumbersome back-and-forth, after tortured convulsions, after all those pathetic lamentations—“ Oh, why did I drink so much! ” and “ Ah, damn, I wanted you so badly! ”—after falling into a momentary sleep, a solitary sleep, deadly removed from her presence beside him: he never moved once as she strained to extricate herself from his embraces, so fuck you, you miserable impotent, I’ll get up, get dressed, make some coffee, the buses will start running soon, and I’ll get back to the hotel, in the windows of the studio the blue tint of dawn grew inescapably paler, more watery, contours of angular piles of canvases stacked up against the walls emerged from the quivering protoplasmic twilight, a terrible hour, hour of the ill and the forty-year-olds, it is probably in this kind of gray murkiness that dead souls are tormented—that’s when he woke up and hurt her, hurt her for real, forget the pain of losing your virginity, painful intercourse , that’s how the phenomenon is defined in the medical literature which she, the browbeaten Soviet dolt, began studying only in America, she even went to see the doctor, swallowing utter humiliation, to find out whether there wasn’t something, Dear God, wrong with her sexually, and bugged out her eyes in disbelief when the doctor shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t see any problems”—but back then, as she shrieked wildly and jerked back, kicking out her legs [her battered uterus ached a full twenty-four hours afterward, like bad menstrual cramps]—“ You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, you hear me? ”—she also felt, over his fierce and victorious cry: “ And how about marrying me? And how about having my child? You silly girl, can’t you see I love you? ”—his moist, swollen hotness kindling and distending inside her, yes, this moment is everything—and for its sake stay, oh please stay a bit longer, don’t go, deep sighs, he emerges from her with so many years washed away from his face, smoothed with a moist sheen of happiness, her own eyes misted over by involuntary tears of tenderness and in those tears his thin, sharp features, pointed ears and cheekbones of a postwar village urchin [father liberated from a Nazi POW camp and off to the Gulag, mother working the beetfields on the collective farm] standing in the pasture with a stick in his hand, dumbstuck for the first time by the crimson gold swirling over the horizon as far as the eye can see amid smoky-gray clumps of clouds, the world was on fire, ever-changing, all this was in his paintings, oh to free that lad from this taciturn, thin-lipped, carefully groomed and clean-shaven man—“ You’ve never given birth? Your lips smell of fresh milk—I’ll give you a child, you hear? A little boy ”—that in itself was a completely satisfying work of art in which your personal physical dissatisfaction did not weigh all that heavily—left alone, because he, wrapping himself into a long-flapped robe resembling a trench coat took off right away to wash up: the ritual of an asshole, if you stop to think about it, but even that didn’t particularly jar you then—you purred and stretched, cracking your entwined arms over you head and admitted to yourself with a raspy giggle—well, you’ve finally been properly fucked , girlfriend, uncensored version—properly fucked for the first time in your life, because until now it was more like a service, aimed to please, fussed over you like over warm dough, asked what kind of words you liked to hear in bed, but here someone just took you and screwed the living daylights out of you like a thug, no dither—and strangely, this thought, too, was not unpleasant, and when you pulled your compact out of your purse frightened of what you’d see in there—after three nights of no sleep, countless cigarettes and midnight cognacs, very successful arts festival!—you found yourself flushed with pleasant surprise: a clear, suddenly youthful and doing justice to your authentic beauty, delicate, thin, almost childish face peered out at you, dark eyes darting out ahead, a face you always knew was in there somewhere but hadn’t seen in the mirror in God knows how long: you had come home, you were home —and he sat at the foot of the bed, smoking and watching, his luminously enchanted face, riveted on you, lit up the still dim studio—occasionally he would lean over you gently, concealing a smile, in order to kiss your nipples poking up from under the rolled-back plaid blanket, and to carefully, slowly wrap you up to your neck again, like a peasant tending to his property, and to bring you a cup of coffee, “ be careful not to spill any ,” and you immediately spilled some as you shook with laughter, “ I’ll put this plaid out on display with a sign saying who splattered it ,” and unexpectedly his “ Why were you crying? ”—I won’t tell, I won’t tell you yet, I’ll tell you in time, and once said, I’ll be repeating it almost every minute: in the absence of any other, more potent words—when there’s no cistern large enough to scoop out the bottomless well, one is left to lower and raise the same childish pail over and over—the monotony of repetition, the creak of the crank: I love you. I love you. I love you).

So there it was, girlfriend—you fell in love. And how you fell in love—you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you—although it should have—but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with all their red lights flashing and screamed “meltdown”—like before the accident at the atomic station—and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of—hell, and death, and sickness,

“ In other words, you knew? ” he snapped, lighting that wolfish glare in his eye, when she—there was nothing to lose anymore, gathered the courage to read him some of that poetic stream aloud—“ you knew this would happen? So why the hell? …” Uh-huhh, my dear, that’s the point…

N-nope, you weren’t a masochist, you were a fucking normal woman whose body took pleasure in giving joy to others, what can I tell you—you were a cool broad, “sweet baby,” “phenomenal lady,” “stud woman,” mull it over and over again in your head now, this guest-comment (commendation) book—made up of those moments when men don’t lie, maybe you’ll get a drib of balance back into your life: it did happen! after all—but no, it’s not coming back to save you—so what, if it’s true, if you always felt, sometimes with more, sometimes with less dark residue of unfulfillment, how much better you still could be—because there are things in life independent of us, because I am as you are with me—it’s a little different with men, but for women, unfortunately, that’s how it is—and, unfortunately, in all things; and no matter how many bras are burned by American feminists, masturbation—whether with a rubber penis or a living person, because with a living person it’s also no more than masturbation if it’s without love—will give you neither poems nor children. And that’s it, period. “That’s you limit.” How was it that Cambridge poem ended?