“Lord, which way now?”—that’s what was written under a sketch that she spied in his workbook, which he carelessly left out on his desk: at the very tip, on a craggy peak of a mountain a shaven-headed man with dangerously defined facial features (like those of his author) balanced himself on one foot (all his faces were deliberately vague, all in some imperceptible way interchangeable and similar to each other, dispersing like ripples from an original that had been dropped into the water—the self-portrait that he never drew)—the man was holding a ladder pointed to the sky with both hands and asking God which way now, but the sky was empty. “I’ve always wanted only one thing—to reach my full potential.” Amazing coincidence, brother-dear, me too, but what exactly does it mean—to reach your full potential? Once upon a time—still beloved, still gleaming under her loving gaze like a freshly restored canvas: his eyes hard flashing emeralds, that unbearable (oh, I could scream!) profile from an old coin, that silvery, or rather glittery aluminum spiky hair (“You little porcupine!”—she laughed, stroking this dry, noble, sculptured head as she passionately pressed it between her breasts)—pure metal, stone, obsidian!—sitting in her kitchen, arms dangling between his knees, and staring motionlessly at the pattern on the floor tiles (that baggy sweater in which his tight, knotty body simply drowned she also fell in love with) he told her about his father—the old man was getting old out in a village somewhere in Podillia, let’s go visit him together, will you come with me? (and right away she imagined him slamming the car door and proudly saying: “Dad, this is my woman!”—that colloquial “woman” instead of “wife” on the lips of Ukrainian men always jarred her but this time—this time she would not object, she would step out with a smile like from the cover of a woman’s magazine in her gorgeous loose red Liz Claiborne coat and her black gathered boots with terribly high heels, right into the rain-sodden black earth—or what do they have down there? clay? sands?—raising her collar, her manicured, thin, musical fingers with nail polish to match her coat, swinging her long silver Arabian-style dangling earrings:
his proudly displayed trophy, total victory, with which a validated life renders an account before its progenitors)—his old man had spent his life in concentration camps, first German, then Soviet, “lapped slops from the trough”—he pronounced it like squeezing a pimple, with a certain predatory emphasis and sick pleasure at watching the puss-y core emerge—and finished his father’s story quietly without ever raising his eyes: “Slaves should not bear children.”—“How can you say that, how dare you, it’s a sin!”—“Because that stuff’s inherited.”—“The hell it is—what are you saying, that there’s no freedom inside you?”—“Wanting to break out is not yet freedom.” Break out!—those words shook her to the core, so easily pulled from her own vocabulary, like he’d known for a long time which page to open first—with those words he brought out into the open and thus confirmed, authenticated the infallibility of her tribal instinct that had switched on that first night when she recognized him: my darling, my dear, dear boy, come to me, come into me, I will embrace you from all sides, hide you with my body, let you be born anew, yes, together from today to eternity, obviously we’ll get married, never mind, we’re already married, and we’ll have a boy (“You have to give birth,” he’d said, catching his breath as he tore away from her lips like he could no longer bear to kiss standing up:—“there’s a lot of milk in you!”—in his apparently nightmarish marriage—though he, mercifully, spared her the details, making do with a painful gesture—dropping his face in his hands as though washing it away: “It was hell…”—he did have a son, all grown by now, a student, and rumor had it a super great kid, in general he was the type to only produce boys, this she could establish instantly, with lightning-quick penetrating insight from when she was still a girl—with every man, whether she simply met him or slept with him: who would it be with this man, a boy or a girl, whose sex was stronger?)—a blond baby with fluffy chick-down hair had appeared in her sleep several times already, after spinning around in space it headed, launched by raging power of her passion—toward him: he’ll be a sturdy, wonderful boy, pure as gold (and their whole multifarious tumultuous past, the books they read, his paintings, her piano lessons, God, how much has been learned, how much contemplated!—swirled into the air in a colorful vortex, coalesced, and instantly created in her mind—a nest, became a structure—rounded and complete with a living gravitational center: not bad at all to be born into a world like that, and we—we’ll be able to protect him, right? and anyway, how much of that Ukrainian intelligentsia is there among us anyway, pitiful, forcibly dragged back against the current of history—a tiny group and even that scattered: a dying species, almost-extinct clan, we should be breeding like crazy, and all the time, making love where and when we can, uniting in orgiastic insatiability into one, yelping and moaning mass of arms and legs, extending ourselves and populating this radioactive land anew!—our son, he, finally will be free of that legacy which we spent all of our youth settling accounts with—it’s been so painful, we may have actually paid it off by now)—the fierce, sharp sexual instinct of the breed, once apprehended in its full breadth and magnitude, consumed and propelled her at random, clearing everything in its path—who cares about a smashed-up car, what are distances, whether between cities or continents!—no matter about a fire with summonses and police reports (what a strange fire that was, the investigation wasn’t able to come up with anything, at a winter cottage where he had come up with a group of friends, he was lighting a fire in the fireplace in the wee hours of the morning, insisting on shish kebabs, he took off with his car, not yet smashed-up at that point, to the market, bought the meat—she remembered him carrying a heavy, bulging plastic shopping bag in front of him striped with rivulets of blood: the sleepless night had left her with a cloudy, uneasy feeling—a dry, bitter taste in her mouth, a strangely palpable sense of not having washed and having dirt under her nails, at the time she thought it was because of fatigue, too much booze and cigarettes; however, later, in normal condition conditions [well, not normal, but what you could call fantastic, with all the American consumer conveniences] it became clear—nope, that wasn’t the reason—the feeling was all the more odd because he was so obsessively clean, spending an hour each morning in the shower not counting the shave, she was even curious: what can a healthy man be doing in there for so long, masturbating? she never was able to smell his real scent: cigarettes—yes, deodorant—yes, but what does this man really smell like, the one you’ve been sharing table and bed with for two months, if you’ll pardon the elevated style?—even his sperm, it seems, had no smell, maybe because the second he came he would jump up and tear for the bathroom like a crazy man, hey, am I supposed to come with you, or what?
At the end of the autumn road flesh wilts,
And leaves rustle with the scratching of mice.
The horizon becomes steadily more bare—and The Lord
Stands among the trees, clothed in white…
So what now, Lord? What now?…