Оксана Забужко: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

Yep, exactly, or bien sûr , if you prefer. Yet another reason why this foreign country is doing you no good—it’s clogging up your brain, your nose, with the lint, down, and powder of foreign words and phrases, clogging all the pores and rudely shoving them into your hand even when you’re alone with yourself, and before you realize it, you’re beginning to speak “half this, half that,” in other words, the same thing that happens at home (home? get a grip, woman—where is this place, your home?), fine, okay, I mean in Kyiv, in Ukraine—with the Russian: it seeps in from the outside in tiny droplets, becomes dried and cemented, and you are obligated—to either continuously conduct a cleansing, synchronic translation in your head, which sounds forced and unnatural—or else to role-play, like we all do, using your voice to take the foreign words into quotation marks, place a kind of clownish-ironic stress on them like they were a citation (a good example for students in tomorrow’s class, for instance, would be “ So you—what, feel like a ‘victor’ here, that you’ve won? ”).

And you also might say—appearing with a lecture at some American university, or at the “triple-A, double-S” conference, or at the Kennan Institute in Washington, or wherever else the ill wind blows you, an honorarium of a hundred, two hundred bucks max, plus travel costs—and thank you very much, you’re not Yevtushenko or Tatiana Tolstaya to get thousands for each appearance, and who the hell are you anyway, backwater Ukrainian from the Khrushchev communal housing projects that you’ve been trying to break out of your whole damn life to no avail, Cinderella who crosses the ocean to grouse over dinner at Sheffield’s with a pair Nobel prize winners (radiating in all directions, juggling four languages at once across the table) about the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary civilization, after which you return to your six-square-meter Kyiv kitchen to fight with your mother and be humiliated by having to explain to various editors that “my homeland will be where I am” does not at all mean ubi bene, ibi patria —not least because with this fucking patria it will never and nowhere be bene for you, neither at Sheffield’s, nor at Tiffany’s, nor in Hawaii, nor Florida—because your homeland is not simply the land of your birth, a true homeland is the country that can kill you—even at a distance, the same way a mother slowly but inexorably kills an adult child by holding it near, shackling its every move and thought with her burdensome presence—ah, to make a long story short, the topic of my lecture today, ladies and gentlemen, is, as noted in the program, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” and before I begin I would like to thank all of you, present here and absent, for the completely unjustified attention you have given my country and my humble persona—because if there’s one thing that we haven’t been spoiled by yet it’s attention: to put it bluntly, we’ve been lying there dying, unnoticed by bloody anybody (and I’m still in a rather privileged position here, because if I were to really have the guts to say fuck it and pour the rest of those tablets in the orange bottle down my throat, my body would be found relatively soon, I’d say, probably within three days: Chris, the departmental secretary, will call if I don’t show up for class, therefore, it would be a crime to complain, the spider web–thin thread, slight as it is, still hangs there and I could pull on it to let the world know about my next, this time my final, departure, I do have it—and if something were to happen with that man in the Pennsylvania wilderness—although I really doubt that anything should happen to him, he’d never do it himself, too much rage for this kind of business—then he’s got Mark and Rosie checking in on him daily)—so, ladies and gentlemen, please do not be in a hurry to qualify the presented case of love here as pathological, because the speaker has not yet stated what is most important—the main point, ladies and gentlemen, lies in the fact that in the research subject’s life this was her first Ukrainian man. Honestly—the first.

The first one ready-made —whom she did not have to teach Ukrainian, to drag book after book from her personal library out on dates with him just to broaden the common internal space on which to build a relationship (Lypynsky, Hrushevsky, and he hadn’t heard of Horska either, nor Svitlychny, his idea of the 1960s dissident movement was completely different, good, I’ll bring it for you tomorrow!), or if in bed after lovemaking you inadvertently quote “nor dreams’ abode—the sacred home,” you have to immediately launch into a half-hour commentary on the life and works of the author—oh, there was this writer in Western Ukraine in the 1930s—and that’s the way it was your whole damned life!—professional Ukrainianizer, like growing a whole new organ for each of them, and if some day our independent, or rather not-yet-dead country, if it doesn’t die by then, should institute some special award—for the highest number of Ukrainianized bed spaces, you’d surely sock it to them with your grand list of conversions!—but this was the first man from your world , the first with whom you could exchange not merely words, but simultaneously the entire boundlessness of shimmering secret treasure troves, reflections from inside the deepest wells that are revealed by those words, and therefore it was as easy to talk as to breathe and to dream, and that’s why the conversation was drunk eagerly with parched, dry lips, the intoxication ever more dizzying, ah, this never-before experienced total freedom to be yourself, this four-hands piano playing, at last, across the entire keyboard, inspiration and improvisation, so many sparks, laughter, and energy suddenly released, when each note—ironic hint, nuance, wit, touch—resonates at once, picked up by your interlocutor, somersaults in the air for no reason other than excess of strength, a casual touch of the knee—a little closer: may I? and now a little more ambiguous, more risky, and now—up close and personal, and finally, turning off the car engine (because you did end up getting into that stupid car of his after all—after visiting his studio, after you saw with your own eyes who he was)—an abrupt switch to a different language: lips, tongue, hands—and you, leaning back with a moan, “ Let’s go to your place… To the studio… ”—a language that drastically shortened your path toward one another, you recognized him: he’s one of yours, yours—in everything, a beast of the same species!—and in that language there was everything, everything of which there would later be nothing between you in bed.

“Gosh, if only he weren’t such a damned good painter!” you were saying, sitting in a bar called Christopher’s in Porter Square, you had drunk two glasses of cabernet sauvignon on an empty stomach and it relaxed you a little—for the first time in all those Cambridge months, giving you a lightheaded audacious uplift, “bottle of wine, fruit of the vine…” ah, too bad nobody to break into song with—Lisa and Dave sat listening like children being told a Christmas story, forgetting all about crunching their chips, “Slavic charm,” that’s what they would call it—you used to like that bar, the dull bottle-green of the décor that would bring card tables to mind, and also the low-hanging lights that drew faces into the shadows, and the men crowding the bar watching the baseball game, and the din of voices, the night outside the distant windows, its thick, brown murkiness melting the candy-yellow street lamps—everything at once, because only thus can you enter an alien world: accepting everything at once, with all your senses, and you know how to do that, you had simply grown tired, after all these years of homeless wandering, of loving the world all alone —of passing, anonymous and unrecognized, through all the dusky airport terminals, the restaurants and bars with their warm lights, the seashores with their shuffle of incoming waves against the rough sand, the early-morning hotels with coffee in the lobby—“Where are you from?”—“Ukraine.”—“Where’s that?”—you had grown tired of not being in this world, tired of dragging home in your teeth the bundles of beauty that you had thirstily sucked in from it and shouting happily: “Hey, come see!”—but at home, in your poor beaten-down country, a country of government officials with sagging pants and generous sprinkles of dandruff on their jackets, greasy writers adept at reading in one language only and not partaking of that ability all too often, and shifty-eyed, cockroach-like businessmen with the habits of former Komsomol organizers—none of this seemed to fit in anywhere, it just hung there aimlessly and was only capable of irritating up to inducing an attack of bile with its foggy, coded inaccessibilty of unfamiliar names and customs, its fat, homegrown, self-taught dilettantes (and for some reason inevitably on short, bowed legs, like jockeys: a special breed or something?) pickled somewhere in a provincial public library bearing a forsaken commissar’s name, and here you had the gall (or perhaps dumb blind luck, they thought?) to hang out at Harvard’s Widener Library or wherever else—you had grown tired of the inability to share your love for the world and in that man—as soon as you stepped into his studio and stood (donning your thick glasses) before the canvas upon canvas facing you, propped up against the walls gathering dust, you knew at once that you had found your only, one-hundred-percent-assured chance not to be alone in that love—precisely because he was “such a damned good painter”—but this much it was hopeless to explain to Lisa and Dave, and you didn’t even try, Lisa was smiling, moved, with her unrealistically bright mouth looking like an aroused coral mollusk, her eyes shining mistily: “What a story!” Oh, yes, a terribly romantic love story—with fires and car accidents (because one night he went out and crashed that celebrated car of his, totaled it, as he told her), with the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist and the departure of the heroine across the ocean, with piles of poems and paintings, and mainly—with this persistent irrational omnipresent feeling that ultimately seduced you: the feeling that everything is possible : the man played without rules, or rather, he played by his own rules like a true Kantian genius, and in his magnetic field any kind of logical prediction of events was doomed to failure, thus he was his own “land of opportunities,” and whatever there lay hidden for the future among those “opportunities”—death in the next of a series of auto accidents (no, God, only not that!) or a triumphal march through the museums of the world—it didn’t matter, who the hell cares, as long as we can break out, tear ourselves away from the beaten track—from that eternal Ukrainian curse of nonexistence .