A Russian Story (8 page)

So Eugene, as best he could, began to contest the child status which he had unexpectedly acquired in this village, and it wasn’t an easy struggle. One day he locked the door, and in the morning his delivery women yanked at the door, yelling outside, while he slowly made Turkish coffee in a copper coffee-pot brought from home, patiently watching the foam oozing up to the brim of the pot. The water in the Irivka wells was actually so bitter-tasting that even strong tea could not disguise it and coffee was the only answer. This spring water, mother’s holy well, tasted bitter too. However, in Kobivka, as they told him, the water was quite different. But you can’t keep fetching your water from Kobivka to Irivka. At the village shop he bought cartons of juice which the sales assistant Lida handed to him over the heads of the people queuing for bread, and he brewed coffee from the well water. And then a key grated in the lock and the door opened!

“Oh my goodness, you’re here!”

“Alive and kicking!”

“Didn’t you hear us trying to break into the house?”

“We rushed round to Vasylivna’s, because the General, God rest his soul, gave her a key when he got poorly.”

“You must have heard us!”

“I had some music playing,” said Eugene, making an excuse instead of firmly, not to say sharply, telling them he was not keen to see early visitors who would then roam about his house all morning.

“Well, we’ll let you off this once, but from now on please don’t lock up.”

“We all nearly had heart failure!”

“Oh what a lovely smell! You’re making coffee. In return for making us run round to Vasylivna’s!”

And the women started rummaging in the General’s sideboard for coffee cups.

He decided to go for morning walks in the forest, because he couldn’t follow his intellectual pursuits until the evening anyway. The women drew him off course, insisting that he accepted their vegetables and spent a short while at least telling them how he had slept. And listening to the village news. The Irivka women could not contemplate the thought that they were unwelcome. Once he was finally alone, he cursed his weakness, his pitiful inability to tell them to go to hell. This annoyance troubled him all day, preventing him reading the books he had brought from home, as he needed peace and quiet to read Nietzsche or even Francis Bacon. The big isolated house at the edge of the village was perfectly suited to intensive reading. But, for some reason, his everyday village life was reminiscent of the absurd, even more so than the situation in his parents’ house. When he went into the forest, if he actually managed to reach the forest, he heard voices behind him:

“If only he was going there to pick berries or gather mushrooms, but he goes there just for the sake of it. And we bring him his milk, don’t we?”

“As we used to bring the General’s.”

“Now then, the General, what a man he was! But this one! Well, never thanks you properly!”

I don’t want this sort of Ukraine,” he thought. I  can understand people escaping from here and doing whatever it takes to be able to afford the rent for a studio flat on the outskirts of Kyiv, as many of my acquaintances did. It is not the lack of hot running water that drives them away. They are escaping from Her who brings the milk, from Her who peeps through a gap in the fence and tells others what she has seen. From Her who brings vegetables and eggs to pay for her God-given right to peep.

Then he returned indoors and sat down at his desk to open
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. He read that you need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. And he felt that his soul was full of some pig-swill, not even worthy to be called chaos.

As always in this stupid world, help came from a lie, not from a rope stretched across an abyss, not from a will to live. One day he told them he could go home and wait in the town until his right to inherit was confirmed. But his flat in Kyiv was too small, so his ailing parents were an encumbrance, though they didn’t want to be. The thing was, he was writing his dissertation; he opened the door from the kitchen to the north sitting room wider to show the Irivka women the typewriter on his desk, which then convinced them that he actually was working on something very important, something beyond their understanding.

“So you’ll be a professor?” asked the Vegetable Woman.

“I’ll have a higher degree, but a professor is a university teacher.”

“My son is a student at the university in Kyiv. I think he is intending to write a dissertation as well,” said She who brings the milk, proudly.

“If you are writing a dissertation, you have to have quiet in the house, because the slightest sound breaks your concentration,” explained Eugene.

“But you have to cook!”

“When I’m cooking a meal I carry on thinking about what I have written or what I have read.”

“What’s the topic of your dissertation?” enquired Halyna Dmytrivna, the surprisingly knowledgeable deputy head.

“Gender analysis of everyday cultural practice in post-Soviet society,” he said, without blinking an eyelid.

“Oh, what’s gender analysis?” asked She who brings the milk, incredulously.

“When I graduate I’ll give you a copy of the author’s summary, without fail. That will explain the whole thing quite clearly,” he replied, and the women were very pleased; they left the General’s house, pressing their fingers to their lips: “Shhh!”

But the following day they still came round. Then he took a desperate step, offering them payment for their produce. He didn’t have much money, and he anticipated that they would refuse. And so it was. They said they would bury the vegetables anyway, so why shouldn’t they feed the future holder of a higher degree?

Gradually, the women stopped annoying him. For one thing, they stopped coming so often, and for another he became accustomed to them, learning to shut out their nattering and replying in words of one syllable, telling them he was considering the next chapter of his dissertation.

Wasted days were followed by quiet evenings. Dogs barked in the distance, occasionally a bird screeched in alarm, and he thought this was somehow associated with his thought process, which simultaneously tormented and comforted him. He thought about everything on earth. He thought about the people his destiny had brought him together with. He thought about Lada, with whom he had shared so many incredible minutes, hours, days, months, but it was all in the past, and he recalled her calmly, without emotion, with no feelings of guilt or anger, unfeelingly in fact! He thought about his son Myroslav. People attach so much meaning to their children; they want so badly to have them. He had nothing against that. Yet he had fathered a son without this arousing any feelings in him. When he thought about the child he was expecting in a detached way before, he was prepared to selflessly help the woman who would give birth to it. But the child was somewhere on Pushkin Street and he was here in the village, a hundred kilometres away. What happened, happened.
We have what we have
: the aphorism of the first president of independent Ukraine came to mind, and for a moment the level of his reflections, which he was attempting to raise to the heights of a rarefied mountain atmosphere, painfully declined.

That summer in the night-time quiet of the General’s house it seemed that of all things in the world what he had wanted most of all and still wanted was strong feelings, on the model of those which caused the death of Semele, mother of Dionysius, who wanted Zeus to come to her in the same splendid attire he wore for Hera. But the nymph could not survive what the goddess endured, and she died. He did not want to die, but he wanted to understand the nature of those emotions that take you to the brink of death, to the point of losing one’s reason. But he did not know what he had to do in order to admit such feelings into his soul. He could only analyse his own experience. So he carefully recalled and re-lived those events which in recent years had aroused powerful emotions in him. Concentrating on his past, he admitted that his being had been overflowing with emotions when the opportunity of a new foreign journey began to dawn. He was quite unable to work as his heart pounded at the growing probability of this trip materialising. At the same time, he was conscious of having survived the break-up with Halya, with whom he had also enjoyed happy times, who Lada had beaten so relentlessly; but then Lada had been repaid too, because he could feel the place where Halya had bitten her on the shoulder for a long time afterwards. He recalled how six months later he and Lada had calmly attended the farewell dinner Halya laid on before her departure for the United States, how they took turns to kiss her. What was that about? An ability to behave correctly towards others? Or an inability to have genuine feelings?

What a powerful surge of emotions he had experienced when he began speaking Ukrainian! And however insignificant the main reasons for it were, it was through the medium of Ukrainian that he experienced his strong emotions. What tempestuous emotions seized him after he comprehended the concept denoted by the Russian word for
transubstantiation
only when he discovered its Ukrainian equivalent! Well, what followed? If he had not even associated with that group of Ukrainian friends several years previously, he would still be sitting in this same house, because he would have been invited by the brother of his mother, who taught Russian language and literature, not the Ukrainian trumpet. His thoughts took leaps and bounds and then they vanished; he needed to write them down, but he didn’t even pick up his pen and he didn’t put a single sheet of paper in the typewriter.

But he thought: if he were to write, then it would only be philosophical essays, and never pitiful literary prose. Who needed another feeble biography? Only principled narratives that scaled the heights of mystery were worthy to be immortalised. In their community there were several writers who published their works in literary journals. On the pages of the
Suchasnist
journal he read with some interest contributions by his acquaintances, recognising in them certain factual aspects of their shared existence. But he found no real inspiration in any of these texts. He pushed the periodical away and reached for the philosophy books, since only they were capable of creating the chaos which, under favourable circumstances, can give rise to a scheme for a dancing star. What makes living in this world worthwhile, actually? In agitation, he got up from his chair, paced around the big house, then went and stood in the doorway, observing the Milky Way and the shooting stars. These flashes of light were supposed to evoke in him a joyful mood. But that did not happen and he went to bed, shelving his unthought-through ideas.

After nights like this he would go for a morning walk in the forest, wandering among the gothic pines, sometimes secretly taking a notebook and pen with him; apparently he worked on his dissertation even in the forest, because there too he met his benefactresses (aka hatchet women) who called out to him, asking how things were, how his work was getting on, and how the dissertation was going. He greeted them in a mechanical way, meanwhile listening to the strange sound up above; he looked up and saw the pines converging at an unattainable height. He felt that if he kept on walking among the pines for a long time he would be bound to emerge at the seashore. But the forest was becoming ever more dense and more gloomy. It was a particularly hot day, so the gloomy forest was enticing. The pines reminded him of music by the two Richards — Wagner and Strauss, and also of the writings of Nietzsche, which were above all musical. If only he could read them in the original! He walked on and now there were no people around and he had the feeling that he was prepared to wander in this forest until the end of his life, when, exhausted, he would fall at the foot of a reverberating pine tree and fall asleep for all eternity.

But suddenly the forest came to an end. Ahead of him there was boundless space with no signs of life whatsoever. No human life. The fragrant grasses whispered, birds screeched, and some creatures he could not see, and did not want to see, made a rustling sound amongst the grass. He wanted to go home, but he did not know the way. Leaving the forest behind him, he walked across the fields, following a path which kept winding around, leading goodness knows where. And now he had even lost sight of the forest; all around him there was nothing but the plain. Snatches from songs about
A Path in the Middle of the Fields
that was
The One and Only Path
came into his head. What idiots composed those songs! These paths lead nowhere! Why hadn’t he stayed in the forest? There he could have found some berries at least! There he could have sat down under a pine tree! Instead of walking in the midst of the fields under the scorching sun, following a path that led to the end of the world!

It seemed that if he followed this path back he would return to the forest; at least the sun would not be beating down there. But the peculiar nature of this space is such that if you follow the same road back you do not get back to where you started from.

God, how dreadful! A healthy man at the peak of his strength went for a walk in the forest and got lost! And he can’t find his way back home! What a humiliating state of affairs! What stupid forces had dragged him to this Irivka! When he got lost once in New York, he worked it out in the space of ten minutes! Whereas here it could all be over for you! How long had he been walking since the morning? His wristwatch had stopped. He was lost in both space and time. The path wound its way among the grass like a snake, not leading anywhere. Or did it lead to Hades — it was hot enough. Here he was; this was the flip side of making contact with the elements. In the sea, in the mountains, in the forest and on the steppe it was possible to get lost and not find your way out, and instead of elation you experienced terror.

But this is not the steppe zone! In this region you have to search hard if you want to find a boundless space like that! And yet! … Just as he was ready to fall on his back in the grass, stretch out his arms and await his end beneath the scorching sun, he caught sight of two female figures up ahead.