Darka, dear. Darka, can you hear me?
It was not your fault that you were called into this world by something other than love. Pray, wherever you are out there, for all of us—we still have to go on living.
Waking up in the morning (what for?), she lies on her stomach for a long time: the new day pours into her mind with a hail of exhausting and senseless obligations—order Xeroxes for her students, run off another term test on the departmental copier, stop off at the bank, the drugstore—she’s run out of vitamins, and it wouldn’t hurt to get some more panty hose, answer two letters, call the travel agency, oh God!—her ticket to New York, the one that was to be mailed to her, has somehow gotten lost, although, if you think about it, she needs New York now like a hole in the head—so she’ll get herself out on stage, so she’ll read in English the two or so poems that were translated with such huge effort, so she’ll drink a glass of wine standing up and swallow down a few shrimp dipped in tomato sauce, grin at two or three neatly ironed literary agents and some gentlemen from the PEN Club, perhaps will pop in for an hour or two to her once-beloved museums (“The fuck I need those museums for,” he hollered happily into the phone calling her in Cambridge, still from Ukraine, “the only thing I need to see in all of that America there is one dame!”—at the time it seemed like bravado: how can you consciously refuse something, cut off your life at the stump, when it’s so immeasurably interesting!—but now, look how she herself has lost all taste for exploration, her former insatiable, all-absorbing desire to discover something new—holy shit, am I dead already or what?… The first conversation they had on the subject turned out kind of stupid: “I’m going to America—will you go with me?”—“Sure,” he was laughing, “by car, as long as the diesel lasts.”—“I’m serious.”—“What will I do there?” You’ll paint, you dork, you’ll see the Metropolitan, and the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute in Chicago, the mirrored octahedrons, the cosmic, gigantic stalagmites that gather on the horizon as you drive up to the city, the arched breathing of the bridges and viaducts over the expressways, space from a fantasy film or a dream, terrifying and endless, there’s no stopping it, the open expanse, prairies without the cowboys, a light taste of madness, which flickers among the nighttime flashes of billboards: the mind, frightened of its own creation, because this civilization is entirely man-made and that’s why you’ve got the somnambulant’s aching longing of the saxophone, poured like the light of the moon over the desert, the reeling [black man drunk in the middle of the sidewalk] voice of a jazz-club singer, which pulls your soul out of your body with each languorous twist: “I’m all alone in this big city—Wilson, buddy, have some pity,” cigarette smoke undulating in the duskiness over the bar, over the billiard tables and the sound of cue sticks striking the balls, we are all alone here, free and alone, it’s wonderful—to build your life on your own, it’s frightening—to build your life on your own, you’ll see up close the faces of all the races brought together, the hues and tints—from melted chocolate [how shamelessly mauve are the shells of lips in the nakedness of their lining, how beastlike the distension of the nooks of nostrils!] to Asian chimera greenish tint—yellow moon, lemon, unripe avocado—all this is mixed in one crucible, what a wild film, deafening to the eyes, there’s no stopping it, colorful tents on the street like at a county fair, the chrysolite luster of display windows in broad daylight, and over all of that, on the billboards—bright caramel, smiling, several-meter-high faces of killed children: victims of “drunk driving,” little angels of this whole earthly valley of tears rising up to heaven, O Davey, O Kevin, O Mary Jane, where will we all be tomorrow?—you’ll see the sun setting over the Atlantic from the airplane window: it sinks rapidly, before your eyes, casting a bright-red path along the horizon, and snows of cloud gloam into limestone, into the rock of dark veins of ravines and then begin to break up, like ice on a river, into gray torsos of cooled steel-blue melted patches; only in the spot where the sun has sunk can you still make out a sharply defined island of glowing embers, but the ocean fog is already rolling in from all directions and the airplane enters the night, passing through it from end to end in about an hour, and now once again you see a little gray out the window, this time dawning—you will feel the planet breathing—like the pulsing soft crown of a newborn infant, it’s so close to God up there in the sky, because as we lift off and break out of our comfortable burrows, we open up to him the same way as when we are born or die—and you will break out, I believe it, I know it!—you will break out of the blind alley through which, like a stubborn fool, you persist in crawling toward your hospital-prison-lobotomy [and what the fuck is this self-indulgence anyway, boys—is despair not too great a luxury for Ukrainians who, after all, were granted for the first time this century a realistic chance of leading a full life?…], you will paint your greatest paintings, and fame—
real fame, the kind that no Ukrainian has yet achieved save perhaps Archipenko—will lead you—perhaps the first among us—into the blinding light of the projector of history, because you are worth more than their Shemiankin or even Neizvestnyi, because you truly are “such a damned good painter,” and it is you who deserve to have your own gallery in Soho, it must be out there somewhere waiting for you while you’re ruining your eyes every night there in your miserable little studio with no running water, where plaster from the ceiling falls on your just-made sculptures, I am so sick of this classic national defeatism—can’t take any more!—we’ll hustle about, we’ll search around asking for the “right people,” they’ll be able to see your stuff, this is just the right time, after all, there is a “Ukraine,” such as it is, art managers are beginning to look for new names, everything will be great, we’ll do it, God, I want so much for us to finally see something, for someone to finally hear us, and how much effort I’ve put into this business—effort down the drain, I can’t bear to think of it! dragging out West the most select books and slides from home, sticking them under people’s noses, pretending with smoke-and-mirrors around me that there’s some kind of illusory context to all this, waving my arms around all the lecterns—the stunned director of the Kennan Institute assured me afterward in a thank-you letter that “if the fate of Ukrainian literature is in the hands of people like yourself, one need not fear for its future”—not suspecting, of course, that the only thing in my hands is perhaps the handrail on a bus, and only if they push me away from that as well—it’s okay, bro, no worries, we’ll break out, I’ll pull, drag you out on my back, I’ll have enough strength for all of it: bring half of Ukraine to its feet, bring half of America over to Ukraine to take a look [and she really did pass over their continent like some kind of Pied Piper: students from her classes would sign up for the Peace Corps practically en masse—asking for “Ukraine,” colleagues from American universities began studying Ukrainian, flywheels of audacious projects would start up—joint publications, symposia, translated anthologies, good God, how many minds did she pollute!]—and to all of her inspired exhortations he would only give a wry smile: well-well, “We’ll see”; that “we’ll see” of his with time began to sound like a password for hopelessness, at first she would discount such lack of faith as a sign of provincial insecurity: it’s not for folks like us—“No, I would still like to hear you explain to me, how you could just—disappear like that, without a word, without a sign?” he’d bristle, eyes open wide: “I’m telling you, I didn’t believe I’d ever be coming here!”—well, so now you’ve come, and what did you get out of it, since you already knew so well in advance that “the fuck you needed all this for”? He brought that thick album with his drawings and he used it for all his paintings here: all those same little men with shaved heads and sharp features carrying on their spears, over hills through an orange desert, either moon-green large-eyed fish, or a gigantic forefinger of the left hand [why left?], or an embroidered banner fluttering in the wind, they were suspended between the flaming sky and the darkening earth, their childish, narrow bare feet walking on the jagged wheels of a grinding machine: this is how, he slyly squinted his eyes at her, God teaches poets to walk—she snorted in disagreement, or rather, in half disagreement: who knows, maybe it’s really so?). How, based on what does he continue to paint, if the world around him is uninteresting? You’re an unfortunate man, Mykola: you loved a car and you crashed it, you loved a woman and you broke her—on the night of their final breakup she dreamed (and this dream she actually remembered, carried it out of the darkness) that he was slowly walking away, back toward her—the back of his head with that spiky hair still so dear to her, his head lowered, shorts and well-starched white shirt with short, stiff sleeves sticking out: always the tough guy!—walking along a narrow plank heading down somewhere, where—she couldn’t tell, and calmly (for the first time in all the days spent with him—calmly!), lucidly, and matter-of-factly the realization came in her sleep: he won’t be saved, nope, he won’t.