He couldn’t care less about her poetry, just like he couldn’t care less about anything anywhere and always; he was led by the instinct of his own personal gift, and it was distracted by nothing. Knowing, with that dark, viscid knowledge—tribal and familial, which she carried within her since childhood like a swallowed rock and which, truthfully, drove her forward, forward, forward! by the insane fear of herself, too, falling into the ranks of the ordinary, not making it, going to the dogs like everyone in the previous generation, and the one before that, and the generation before that (those guys really went through hell—better not to think of it!), she spent her whole youth trying to break out of the vault filled with the poisonous stink of half-decayed talents, motionless lives rotting out, mildew and mold, the unwashed stench of futile endeavors: Ukrainian history—knowing, with that bloodline knowledge what kind of trapdoors that instinct of gift of his must have had to burst through, ramming them like a tank, in order to carry him out and up (always—up: his last works were also his strongest, they blazed with a light that was already otherworldly, like a starry sky over the desert—whereas in her own memory there was only row after row of “those who showed promise” who’d be raucously anointed to genius status and then roll en masse into the trodden ditch as soon as they had exhausted the vigor of youth!)—she, who would be overcome by nausea at the sight of the miserable native alkies in the mildewed remnants of their genius (if anybody’s interested, check out the following addresses: “Aeneus” in Kyiv, and “Red Guelder Rose” in Lviv, free admission, feeding, and especially giving drink to the animals is not only not forbidden, but encouraged)—immediately demonstrated with him (the first one in her life!) the capacity to take a back seat: it was the first time that she was dealing with a male winner. A Ukrainian man—and a winner: a bloody miracle, can you believe it? In her wildest dreams she would not have imagined such a thing—the seventies and eighties alone in a provincial town (a.k.a. in the underground) would have been enough to do you in, that same town that her parents had to flee, holding her, a seven-year-old, firmly under her arms as they slipped through the KGB blockade; her father, who had served his six (Stalin’s) years in the camps, was pursued, in the grip of terror, like a squirrel for the rest of his life by the specter of “recidivism”—nobody could handle a second arrest, even if they survived it they came out broken, each in his own way—I wonder if it wasn’t those same “inspector-boys” in rustling coats, quick, all with the same standard-issue haircuts, all dark-haired, whose backs her poorly focused, blurred child’s memory photographed as they rummaged through piles of books thrown over the floor surrounded by the all-of-a-sudden bare white walls of her first, no, her only home in her whole life—who later, having earned more stars and stripes, planted their deadly grip around the throat of the rebellious artist?—yes, my dear brother, and this damned blood-brotherhood of ours, like cellmates from the same concentration camp, shit, how many years, really, will that heritage be with us, and how the hell do we get rid of it, bleed it out? cough it out?—how?—my Kyiv friends, all mellow after a few drinks, reminisced on how they met him in 1982: they came out on some work-related trip, landed in one of the local coffee shops, and a baited-looking local approached them: “Guys, are you artists? I’ve got a studio nearby, come, I’ll show you my work, I’ve got coffee too”—well, okay, as long as you’re serving coffee, fine, pal, we’ll have some—but what makes you think we’re artists (they happened to be writers, actors, not exactly chopped liver, eh)?—“Uhm, but your beards”—hah! now that’s something, so having a beard out in that rat hole was enough to put you on the watch list? Really? That’s the way you squeeze your hand through the bars of a prison train-car window, casting a written note into the wind: maybe some good person will notice it and send it to the indicated address—peering out after the fluttering piece of paper, hungry hope in your eye: you’re sure you’re not artists?… And getting to the studio by back alleys, discreetly, circuitous routes: “It would be better if you weren’t seen with me…” Homeland and home, yes: Ukraine, 1982. And no British correspondents, no letters of support from leading figures of literature and art—who was it that got the Nobel that year, Marquez, I think? (Damned good writer, and the fact that rumor had it that he was a good friend of the USSR, well—“who cares?”) That story, which immediately made him so dear to her, so painfully felt from inside those hopeless years (which he overcame, won the match: by painting all that he painted!—while others drowned in drink, hung themselves, or, like her own father, stood smoking by the window for hours staring at the wall of the building across the way, getting lung cancer from the hopelessness of it all!)—that story she heard before the third day of the festival when he, under some lame pretext, managed to get himself to her hotel room, rudely awakening her from her sleep—everything, everything from the very beginning was based on chaos, on a violent break with established routine, on weakened senses, on wavering (like music on dying batteries) reflexes!—and he stood there, in an entryway as cramped as an elevator, his arms crossed on his chest, leaning against the door, his catlike eyes glowing at her expressively, and she was suddenly overwhelmed—she clenched her teeth so that they wouldn’t chatter—by a flood of strange, you wouldn’t say erotic, no!—a
different kind of queasy, anxious arousal—like before surgery or a school exam: something thundered and thickened, moving in overtop of her, something bad, dark, and ominous, something autonomous and thus real, she might have still leaned out of the way, pulled her head down and let it pass by, but there was no fear in her, there was—an already switched-on, excited, and vibrant readiness to rush right out to meet life just as soon as it picks up speed, takes off from its well-worn habitual seat: something real is a rare opportunity, it’s something that’s bigger than you, something you must grow to attain, breaking out of your skin to get there, leaving it behind, seven skins, nine skins, just don’t stop! Fine, I take up the challenge, look you in the eye! “Until tonight then?”—“Until tonight.”—“We’ll go for coffee?”—everything went up in turmoil, the whirlwind churned the leaves on the autumn roads and the town in which she was born and which had always been, somewhere at a distance like at the bottom of a lake, preserving her early, hidden, still sleeping childhood was now returning it to her—in an unbearably tender, misty light, this, actually, had begun on the first day already—the growing underground rumble of awakened memory, the recognizing of familiar streets: ah, so that’s what they’re like!—the display windows of the pharmacy on the corner, in the same place as twenty-five years ago—she stopped stock-still, choking on a surge of shining tears: this is where they put up the town Christmas tree, and she had her picture taken then with Santa Claus, a five-year-old girl in a bulky, furry coat, the smell of mandarins and lilac evening snow, its glitter under the streetlamps—and on the other side, a bit farther down, there was a theater, I think (matinee—holding Daddy’s hand—a documentary of some kind, about monkeys?)—Oh, it’s still there, even now, they told her with the forced benevolent smiles that one conjures to demonstrate sensitivity toward another person’s childhood, and only he, whom she dragged with her by the arm—to that place: “Shall we go to the park?”—“Wherever you wish, my lady, I am totally at your service” (an old-fashioned park by the river, and again, the stone steps, as though freshly washed, emerge from the mist after many years, the peeling balustrade, ah, so that’s where it comes from in my dreams!—and, oh dear God, this pulsating color, this languid, underwater lighting, cool bluish-green with walkways, trees, benches frozen in time, receding into the distance—my best poems, those most mine—are, therefore, also from here?)—“There was a birch bridge somewhere around here back then”—“It’s here now, too—let’s go, I’ll show you”—only he alone did not pretend to be appropriately moved, he didn’t pretend anything at all, he merely felt his way through her condition silently, focused and engrossed in his own thoughts, as he would do later at night feeling his way through to the cervix of her womb to exhale: hah, there it is!—they stood over the still pond covered in water plants the color of patina, “Look,” he nodded his head, “what Zen”—and suddenly painfully squeezed her shoulders: “Listen, I love you and your bridge. Can you do that?”—“Do what?”—“Can you say—I love you and your Zen? You can’t, because for you I’m just a person in the landscape: this landscape”—now that would have been the time to ask: and what am I for you? Because she really did let him enter her landscape—every one of her landscapes, consistently, one after the other, ending up finally in Pennsylvania, while he, setting his course after her (“My final love,” he boasted to his friends: they told her—while verses spurted from her like bubbles of air from the lungs of a drowning man: