Artem’s hand carefully, solicitously stroked my thigh through the slit of my skirt, climbing higher and higher above the knee, and I automatically thought, as I always did, about his wedding ring: I worried about it snagging my hose. I could have just moved away—after three months, that would’ve been enough—but I remained transfixed, bent over the table and riveted to the picture, where, I was now convinced, a silent secret drama played out between the woman and these two men. Artem breathed harder; his thumb found the crease between my legs and went to work on it through the hose and the panties. He was always a very diligent lover: a scholar and a bibliophile, he did everything as if armed with a solid list of reference materials, which sometimes made me feel like I was a rare artifact equipped with an invisible user’s manual, and other times like he was mortally afraid of me, and I’d rush to his rescue, ignoring the taste of long-refrigerated cheese that would linger in my mouth afterward—Artem’s beautiful penis, for some reason, was always cold, and so was his whole body.
But in that instant, eyes locked on the picture and nails cutting into the table, I suddenly felt a fierce arousal, much more intense than if I’d been watching porn—unfamiliarly menacing, desperate, and predatory, as if this were going to be my last time, as if a spotlight had found and blinded me, leaving nothing of me but a base, well-deep scream that did not sink, but instead rose, climbed as through a narrow shaft, pushing aside my aorta, breaking through my clenched teeth, and it didn’t matter anymore who—or what!—jerked up my skirt from behind, ripped down layers of fabric, faster, faster, I focused myself in the point where my salvation would come—and it came, instantly, like a summer storm—and someone’s paw closed over my mouth, and I realized that the scream that thundered in my ears had come from my own throat. I shook my head, refusing the paw, and blinked slowly—murky yellow smears swam in front of my eyes, and the first thing I could see clearly when they began to dissolve was the photograph with the five figures in it: their silhouettes burned with sharp white light, as if on a negative. I had to blink again, and a few more times—until the photograph cooled to its normal condition—and then observed that it wasn’t the picture that was shaking but the table, for the important reason that I was folded onto it in a rather uncomfortable pose, with Artem studiously pounding me from behind, while also attempting to keep one hand over my mouth—this was all happening at his workplace, after all, in the library storage basement, and could have turned quite piquant if a coworker peeked through the door, except that he always locked it as soon as I arrived.
It occurred to me in that instant—an inanimate and vacant blob of cognition, not even a real thought—that this was the only thing that attracted me: the unheated basement with its linoleum floors, the soporific yeasty smell of rotting paper, and the conspiratorially locked shabby door lent our pitiful little fling the exciting air of delinquency, like when you’re students and fuck like rabbits in every suitable nook, and quite simply erased from my memory whatever attempts Artem may have made to transplant the action into a regular apartment, with a regular bed.
I straightened my clothes quickly, checked myself in my compact mirror, all without looking at the happy, sweaty, and confused Artem, who felt the urge to show some uncalled-for tenderness, which, as the poet Pluzhnyk once said, “is born on the far side of passion,” but froze up in the face of my indecent efficiency and monosyllabic grunts. I may have made it look like I was fleeing from the site of shame and dishonor, but my mind, sharpened by the orgasm, ran like a super-computer clicking through an algorithm with maximum effectiveness and minimum use of energy: “You have my 1928 Kyiv guidebook, by Ernst, don’t you? You still need it? And would it be okay if I borrowed the photo, just for a while?” I slipped the photo between the yellow pages of the innocently extracted Ernst, pulled my purse closed around it, made sure I didn’t leave anything behind; Artem caught up with me when I was already halfway through the door with his kiss (sloppy) and the warning that he’d call at the end of the week (Why is it that men always have to stake a claim on the future when they say goodbye? Like I wouldn’t call him if I wanted him?)—and that’s it; that was really it. We did not see each other again, and when he called, I complained of how busy I was, said I’d love to, it would be heaven, but I can’t, I really can’t…. I’m quite good at that if I do say so myself.
Artem (thrilled about a chance to prop up a worn-out romance with a substantive obligation, as often happens when affairs are ending or beginning—when you’re lending books, CDs, and pictures, and inventing shared engagements that are hard to evade later) asked me at the door what I was going to do with the picture, and I mumbled something cryptic along the I’m-thinking-to-do-something-about-UIA lines; it’s a hot topic (as if I were rehearsing what I’d say to my producer). Of course, this was just a flaky-artist excuse—I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. I was firmly convinced that only Western Ukrainians had the right to write, film, or say anything about the Insurgent Army because it was their families who held, just under the surface, either “forest boys” themselves or someone deported “for abetting,” and when someone got deported, the whole village was sent along, just to be sure; so it’s a miracle the Soviets didn’t manage to pack them all off to the other side of Yenisei, as the Poles did when they cleaned out this side of Vistula. Why on earth would I go try to stick my two cents into what, to some, still feels like a bone crushing?
All I had in my personal history were Mom and Uncle Volodya’s, my stepfather’s, accounts of the 1947 hunger in Eastern Ukraine: Uncle Volodya (I never could bring myself to call him Papa Volodya, as he and Mom would have liked), then a fifteen-year-old Odessa boy, worked alongside adults netting fish from under the ice and kept his family alive. Around the ice holes, he said, all day long lingered swollen women on elephantine legs, immobile, like ghosts: they waited for the fry to slip out of the nets, snatched them off the ice, and gobbled them down, raw. To get bread—the blessed, salvific bread—both his Odessa and his mom’s Poltava communities outfitted expeditions to Western Ukraine (“in Western,” Uncle Volodya stubbornly kept saying, as if this illiterate patch on his generally very proper, for someone from Odessa, Ukrainian was inseparable from the events of the past and had to remain uncorrected; “in Western” was his, and “to Western Ukraine” belonged to a different generation). These hunting parties stuffed themselves, like sardines in a tin, into the deranged freight train #500-J that chugged from one station to the next with no order or timetable. Its ghoulish nickname was 500-Joy because it was liable to stop without warning somewhere in the middle of a field and stay there for five hours, or five minutes, and start again just as suddenly, leaving behind a shedding of the unlucky ones who jumped off to relieve themselves. So they learned not to look for cover, and just rolled off the train’s platforms and roofs—head over heels, men and women—all in a rush to bare their behinds with a single feverish thought: to make it, and to claw back into one’s spot before someone else had taken it. This constant fear of losing the spot was branded in Uncle Volodya’s memory, and his spot on that train must’ve been especially hard to win—a starved teenager shoving and elbowing grown men—but I was captivated by the vision of that sexless orgy of the hurried mass expulsion of bodily fluids and solids along the train, the ease with which people could be transformed into a herd.