Оксана Забужко: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

That’s a separate topic, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, forgive me if I’ve taken up too much of your time, it’s not easy for me to talk about all this, and I’m also actually quite seriously ill, my frightened, hungry, and if we’re not going to bother with euphemisms then we could just say raped body has been unable, for the third month now, to curtail this light internal tremor, especially horrible—ad nauseam!—below the stomach where I continuously feel a pressing, beating quiver, and when I spread my fingers they immediately take on a life of their own, each marching to its own drummer as though they’ve been stretched and separated from each other, and I won’t mention the puckered teenage pink pimples that have blossomed over my shoulders and face and there’s nothing I can do about it—the wretched body is still alive, it’s demanding its rights, it’s dying from basic sex deprivation, perhaps it could even recover, start hopping around like a bunny rabbit if it could get sweetly laid, but, unfortunately, this problem is not so easy to solve; moreover if you’re all alone in a country you don’t know and a city you don’t know, in an empty apartment where the phone rings only to offer—a rare opportunity, and this week only—a hu-u-uge discount on a subscription to the local newspaper, an apartment from which you dig yourself out three times a week to get to the university where half a dozen neatly dressed, white socks and sneakers, and fastidiously washed and deodorized American kids with moist, healthy skin and teeth follow you with their eyes as you wander back and forth across the classroom, the eyes of fish in an aquarium, quietly writing something down (God only knows what) in their notebooks while you, getting yourself all worked up (you have to hang in there somehow for an hour and fifteen minutes!), passionately explain to them that Gogol had no choice! given that he was who he was, no choice but to write in Russian! you can cry, you can dance—no choice! (and you likewise have no choice but to write in Ukrainian, although this is probably the most barren choice under the sun at present, because even if you did, by some miracle, produce something in this language “knocking out Geothe’s Faust ,” as one well-known literary critic by the name of Joseph Stalin would put it, then it would only lie around the libraries unread, like an unloved woman, for who knows how many dozens of years until it began “cooling off”—because untasted, unused texts unsustained by the the energy of reciprocal thought gradually cool down, and how!—if the stream of public attention doesn’t pick them up in time and carry them to the surface, they sink like stones to the bottom and become covered by mineral waxes that can never be scraped off, just like your unsold books which gather dust somewhere at home and in bookstores, this same thing has happened with most of Ukrainian literature, you can count on the fingers of two hands—not even authors, but individual works that have been lucky enough—with numb fingertips and tears in your eyes you had read a translation of Forest Song done here in America, an authorized version meant for the Broadway stage, you were as high as a kite from your quickened, passionate breathing: it’s alive, alive, it hasn’t perished, seventy years later, on a different continent, in a different language—just look at that, it made it!—of course, it’s an entirely different matter to write in English or in Russian—your first poem published in English in a not particularly well-known magazine received a rave review from somewhere out there, Kansas, I think, some kind of Review of Literary Journals , can you believe it, and Macmillan is ready to include it in its anthology of international women’s poetry, “you’re a superb poet,” the local publishers tell you [dragging their feet on publication all the same], thank you, I know, so much the worse for me—but you, sweetness, you have no choice not because you’re incapable of switching languages—you could do that splendidly with a little effort—but because a curse has been placed on you to be faithful to all those who have died, all those who could have switched languages just as easily as you—Russian, Polish, some even German, and could have lived entirely different lives, but instead hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking show for it but mangled destinies and unread books—and yet today there is you, unable to step over their corpses and go on your merry way, simply unable, tiny sparks of their presence keep dropping into your life here and there, into the ashes of mundane daily existence; and this then is your family, your family tree, you pitiful backwoods aristocrat, please forgive this unpardonably long digression, ladies and gentlemen, all the more because it actually has no relevance to our subject). Ladies and gentlemen, the sense of one’s own body wasting away day by day—is a feeling familiar perhaps to prisoners of the Gulag: I examine myself in the bathroom every evening (putting on my owl’s glasses, those same ones with the thick lenses, so I look pretty darn funny), my breasts, until now invariably round and bouncy with pert nipples pointing in opposite directions (“Check it out,” one of my not yet fully Ukrainianized men once said, and not all that long ago—“they’re probably a size D, but see how high they sit!”): this fall they sagged for the first time, definitively moving downward, bringing to mind bread dough that’s been standing around too long, and they’ve also been attacked by some kind of revolting spots, probably pigmentary, and the nipples are looking more and more like the dark skin of a shriveled peach—that man was one of those who generally had a very foggy notion of what you’re supposed to do with women’s breasts except perhaps pinch them through a blouse, but the point, of course, isn’t that—this was a good-looking body, healthy, smart, and vigorous, and to give credit where credit is due, it hung in there for an awfully long time, it was only with that man that it instantly began giving me a hard time, but I put the screws to it, harshly and unsparingly, and still it resisted, chafed with various chronic colds, swollen glands, and febrile rashes, a “weakened immune system,” the doctors said, but I would pry myself out of bed, patch the rashes with plasters, and, burning with fever, charge to the train station, the train, clattering over the jointed tracks, would rush me toward the city in which that man sat silently after totaling his precious car, the night of the accident I had a dream that someone had stolen it from him, and verses, unaware of the real state of things but in their own way somnambulantly clairvoyant, flooded in like the landscapes from the fog outside the window:

I abused my body for a fairly long time and it must have some sense of grievance against me (or, as they say here, “a grudge”), and now, after the fact, there’s not a whole lot I can do for it—except torment it every morning with pointless knee-bends after which the tight, deceived thighs ache with forgotten, sweet moans; or else vapidly drag it to the swimming pool every night (off to work!) where they know me already: the black lady custodian in a motley turban who hands out locker keys blitzes me with her blinding smile each time: “You’re pretty faithful to that swimming, huh?”—God, how gentle, soft, and kind she is, like the water in the pool; at each unexpected kind word I’m ready to start bawling my eyes out, like a hounded adolescent wolf cub, ready to eat from each outstretched hand, like, for example, this trustingly open palm—pink nakedness upward—handing me a little golden key on a red nylon string, to which I eagerly explain that I must, that I literally must frequent this place, that this is the sole way I can save myself from depression—the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way—and in order to describe my depression, which actually falls under a different name—I’ve already managed, willy-nilly, to pick up a little terminology familiar to them: “broken relationship,” and moreover “straight after a divorce,” and moreover “sexually traumatic,” and from there summoning psychiatric textbooks to my aid: “fear of intimacy, fear of frigidity, suicidal moods”—in a word, a classic case, not even worth going to a psychiatrist with, and my blessed African woman, so lusciously fleshy behind the narrow counter, Earth Mother, gentle, steamy moos and rough tongue, nods with a wise, knowing smile: “I’ve been there,” she says, “with the father of my kids”—how about that, so she’s divorced, a single parent with two little ones, the younger will be two soon, it’s easier when you have children—both easier and harder (“ And now ,” said that man, glowing triumphantly over her, a sweaty boy in the dark—“ and now you’re going to be pregnant: I came right inside you! ”—“ No ,” she laughed, gently so as not to spill all that tenderness over the brim—“ no, my love, it won’t be today ”—although this in fact was, from the first night, her main concealed thought, the submerged underwater current of that love: a baby boy , Danny, she secretly established—forehead covered in tickly baby-chick down, frog-like tiny legs tucked in, fingertips like the tiniest buds, oh, my Lordy!—in her dreams she eagerly cradled him to her breast: this is the anchor that keeps us alive and without which we, ladies, do not have full rights on this earth, “unregistered”: neither a word nor even a letter in that text but merely an accidental dot in the margins—and in the meantime her verses mumbled mutely to themselves, dispersing into multiglossia: