Thus she mumbles to herself (it’s just that—is it kórchi or korchí? the language is failing, failing, and don’t try to fool us with that “literature-in-exile” stuff!)—as she drags her disobedient, unloved body up and down the streets of an unfamiliar American city in which she has no friends, not a soul, and at the department she has to smile and answer each “How are you doing?” with “Fine”—yet another of those arithmetical rules, even though what kind of “fayn” can one possibly speak of, where the hell is it, who’s seen it around, that “fayn”—at one of the faculty parties the graceful and composed plump Chris, an administrative genius, mother of an eight-year-old girl, and of her husband, the eternal student (they survive on potatoes for weeks at a time, it’s a good thing they’ve been on sale at Giant Eagle lately, ninety-nine cents for a four-pound bag) confesses—flushed pink after downing the third glass of free wine in one gulp and lighting a cigarette (ready to talk her heart out)—that she’s got breast cancer and has been going for radiation therapy for five years now, and she’s only turned forty-one; while Ellen, always quick and agile, electrically charged with excited laughter whether in shorts, in a light summer dress with a shoulder strap sliding down her arm, or in a tight black skirt with a side-slit up to the hip, and a fluffy cloud of sparking deep-gold hair bouncing with every step—she’s almost fifty, divorced and childless, spasmodically clinging to the “one size fits all (ages)” image of a “sexy lady,” from which the march of time is relentlessly dislodging her, pushing her out the door no matter how much she drowns herself in work in order not to notice it—constantly waving her cigarette like a priest his censer, exuberant, shouting how much she loves, just loves her visits to the gynecologist—has an orgasm right in the stirrups, and her listeners laugh along, an echo of her enthusiasm, fantastic, she’s great, Ellen, the cool chick as that man would say—except that perhaps she gives just a li-ittle too much detail about herself: about how she was running late for class but the car wouldn’t start, and how she had to run out into the street and hitch a ride, no-no, she didn’t even need to raise her skirt, and how pleasant the businessman behind the wheel turned out to be, and what she told him, and how they exchanged business cards—all that schlock that one normally dumps on one’s family every evening, because
that’s the place where we, girls, recount, to the lovingly sensitive faces turned toward us, everything that happened to us that day, but with outsiders—with outsiders you really need skill to dump this shit and not bore them, you must package it up like candy, in the crinkly gold wrapper of a humorous novelette, to rustle it enticingly—and voilà, they’ve swallowed it, and for all appearances you’ve entertained the crowd—Ellen falls a little short here, because in this you do have to be a bit of an artist or, as some would say, artiste, but aside from that—aside from that she is in perfect form, boisterously dancing on the open platform of the train that rushes her down the tracks to the outer limit of that day on which she finally—flags, sags, stoops, flame extinguished, as though someone has unscrewed all those unnecessary bulbs, and, perhaps, will also begin to frequent the psychoanalyst, just like sixty-year-old Cathy from the department down the hall, whose husband left her a year ago and now it’s impossible to get her to retire, or perhaps she’ll secretly start drinking heavily at home, or get into meditation, or maybe get a dog—a purebred, it goes without saying. And then there’s also Alex, an aging Serbian poet who’s been roaming the world, shuffling from one university department to another, who claims with a dignified air: “I’m Yugoslavian,” as if in this way he, like God, can wipe away the war and everything that came with it, his typical way of starting a conversation—“When I was in Japan…” “When I spoke at a conference at the Prado and the cardinal was invited too…” “When I lived in London, just outside the city, they gave me a whole villa…”—you could burst out laughing at how much this resembles the reportages, in the good old Soviet days, of those rare few “friendship society” types occasionally graced with a trip abroad appearing before a depressed and green-with-envy audience, each member painfully aware that they themselves wouldn’t get “out there” in a million years; however, Alex has no such powers of self-reflection, nor powers to see or hear anything around him for that matter, being consumed as he is by the recitation of an enthusiastic panegyric to himself—to his books that have been translated into English, Spanish, Chinese, Alpha-Centauric; to his interviews and publications in such-and-such editions in such-and-such years; to how much he is paid by the page by Word and how much the New Yorker promises to pay—this monologue inside him seems not to cease for a second and occasionally reaches the point where it requires a set of ears—then Alex calls, stops to pick her up in his “Toyota” (each time inevitably mentioning that back home, in Belgrade, he used to have a “Mercedes”), and they go somewhere for a “dreenk,” two Slavic poets in a foreign land, oh yeah, and this land can be covered with wheat, rye, and gold, inviolable coast to coast, Atlantic to Pacific, there’s no way she’s going to sleep with him and besides, he’s far too much excited by his own oral biography to put the effort into pursuing her, but his poetry, which he’s hauled over by the armload including the translations into Chinese, is really not bad at all—although mainly of the “snapshot” variety, travel sketches, a tourist’s breakfast; still, in practically every poem a line peeks out that’s truly authentic, and before you know it the entire poem has closed in around it: occasionally even, sparks fly from something truly wonderful, one night she asks Alex how he handles the language problem, for years hearing Serbian only from his wife, does he not feel the language resources diminishing—and for the first time a somber, wolfish expression visits his face: it’s a problem, he admits as though forced to confess to a meticulously concealed physical defect—that’s actually why he agreed to work for an émigré newspaper—aha, that would be the same as if she were to take in a job correcting the language of the New York Ukrainian paper Svoboda (ON THE DATE OF 31 AUGUST 1994 RESPONDING TO THE APPEAL OF THE ALMIGHTY CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH SHE LEFT FOR THE UNIVERSE (the Universe! in response to an appeal! is she a cosmonaut, or, pardon me, an astronaut?), LEAVING BEHIND UNSPEAKABLE SADNESS AND SORROW (in other words, she took off without sadness and sorrow?) OUR DEAREST, UNFORGETTABLE, FAVORITE WIFE, AUNT, COUSIN, AND SISTER-IN-LAW (whoa, let me catch my breath!). NOT HAVING THE POWER TO THANK EVERYONE PERSONALLY FOR SO NUMEROUS EXPRESSIONS OF SYMPATHY: TELEPHONIC, WRITTEN, AND PERSONAL (hey, syntax! syntax, oops, sorry, syntaxa!) THAT’S WHY BY THIS PATH (how about trail? back alley? highway?) I EXPRESS TO ALL ACQUAINTANCES AND FRIENDS, AND FAMILY MY SINCEREST THANKS (okay now, try rewriting this thing so it makes some sense!)—and then she understands that this high from his own importance, this puppy excitement at every sign of his presence in the world—this is just one more way of creating in it a home for yourself, especially when there’s no mutual interaction with either your language or your country, and also that it must take some time to reach this condition—and it comes as no surprise to her that after that evening Alex stops calling—probably forever. Oh Lordy, all of it, everything, requires skill—to be ill, to be lonely, to be homeless: each of these things is an art, each requires talent and effort. “Fayn”—we’ll just have to learn.
Try to wriggle out, willow-woman. Catch the air.
Sink your roots deep through the sand, to the moist virgin earth.
GULAG—is when they drive an empty half-liter bottle
Between your legs—after which they address you as “ma’am.”
We are all from the camps. That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.
We search for love and find spasmodic cramps.
GULAG—is when you cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And there’s no-one who gets what that language is that you’re shouting…