“Is that proper language? Mind your discourse, Antosha!”
“Well, I didn’t go to discoursing school, hon. You know, I’m a humble man—a shooter, as we used to say in school… but, fuck me, I’ve had enough. I’ve eaten so much shit in my Soviet days that when the same Komsomol-GB rats throw me back into it and go ‘give me ten!’ it makes me want to hurl, and booze don’t cure it anymore. Plus, one can’t be drunk his whole life!”
This is somewhat surprising, coming as it is from Antosha who always and everywhere had been the first to inquire whether drinks were included.
“So what, you looking for a job?”
“Yep. That, by the way, is why I’m calling you. Come on, out with it, is it true that you’ve bought out all the footage we got on Olena Dovganivna?”
Not I, she thinks. Vadym simply solved that problem too, while he was at it. He chatted with the guys, did them a favor, looked out for himself, and, well, didn’t forget her consult. Plus, threw her a bone to make sure she’d shut up, would never again drag Vlada’s skeleton out of his closet. No wonder he turned it all around so quickly, and without her having to remind him.
“Where’d you hear that, Antosha?”
“Not like it’s rocket science. Who other than you would want that stuff? It’s obvious whose little fingerprints are all over this. Spit it out, Sis. You got it?”
“I do.”
“You witch,” Antosha drops his second compliment in a row, with genuine pleasure, like a dollop of cream into her coffee. “And what are you going to do with it?”
That’s a good question, Daryna Goshchynska thinks. A very good question indeed. She would love to know the answer. Now that the life, passed on to her down the line from Gela Dovgan, smolders somewhere inside her, a not-yet-visible spark, and at this thought a smile rolls out, by itself, onto her lips: what if she went ahead and said into the phone, as she did to Adrian about an hour earlier, “You know, I’m pregnant”?
(No, that’s not how I told Adrian. I said, “You were right, you know,” and he knew it instantly from my voice, from the way it strained to contain the triumphant bulk of the secret knowledge that cannot really be shared with anyone, even with you, my most precious, my love, you whose touch I yearn for, while you, on the other end of the city, are choking on the uncontainable shock of this new joy, while I long for it like for a drink of water on a scorching day. It would be wonderful to have you by my side the whole time, holding my hand, but what I would like best right now is to fall asleep—sink into long, translucent daytime sleep, blissfully unhurried like rapid filming, like smoke rising from a fire in a summer orchard—languor-sleep, doze-sleep, the sweet stillness of the body stripped of will, with the mind dimmed like a lamp not quite turned off—sleep through which I could still sense your presence—you working in the kitchen, you out on the balcony, carrying something from one place to another, nailing, moving things—making a place for the baby, perhaps? Noises that blend with the lisping of rain outside and the whoosh of tires on wet asphalt, with flashes of sunlight that swim around the room from the balcony door when it opens, then closes—and then you dive in with me, under my blanket, hugging me from behind, and purr in a low voice so that even asleep I can feel how hot I am, how your penis instantly hardens pressing against my buttocks—my dreams will be here cut short and will later resume at the same point; the mechanic from the ancient club of my youth will glue the film back together, and on this parallel reel that has been running before my eyes the whole time, without ever obscuring the room around me, with its shifting light, the breath of the man I love and the rain outside, there will be Gela—it is with her I most want to share this; she is the one I want to call and say: come—
and now she finally will come to me—by herself, without any go-betweens: now, that I can finally understand her, now that it’s not only she who needs me, but also I who need her—need her more than my mom, more than a sister or friend, more than any other woman in the world—
I will tell her she carries no blame. That she is now free. And also will tell her the war goes on, that the war never stops—now it is our war and we haven’t yet lost it—
and will ask her: Gela, you see things better from where you are, tell me—it is a girl, isn’t it? Will she be happy?)
“You know,” Daryna says into the phone, “she was pregnant.”
“Who?” Antosha’s voice asks, startled.
“Olena Dovganivna. She was pregnant when she died.”
“For real?”
“Uhu.”
“Get out. How’d you find out?”
“From the son of the old GB man who was in charge of the raid.”
“Fuck me. Pardon the discourse. His old man told him? I thought they’d signed papers like in Afghanistan—not a peep about combat operations, if anyone asks—you brought candy for the kids…”
“No, you’re right. It is the same with the GB, but his kid dug it up on his own. As an adult already.”
“Wow. Where did you find this guy?”
“Right here in Kyiv.”
“Mind-blowing,” Antosha says. She can hear him light a cigarette; his excitement spreads through the network. “Awesome. Shit… listen, Sis, so I was right? You’re gonna finish this film? By yourself?”
“Already got incorporated. As my own—don’t laugh at me—film agency. Am now hunting for cash.”
“I knew it! I knew it. I know you, you old witch… you! I’d smother you. In my arms. Tenderly. No. Hats off. Kiss the fair lady’s hand, my respect, my total respect. Goshchynska, you sly wench, take me in, will ya?”
“I…”
“You know you’ll have to shoot more footage! You got that offspring on record yet?”
“No, he refused. It was a private conversation.”
“All the more so!” Antosha exclaims, delighted: he is comforted to hear that she hasn’t recruited a new shooter. “D’you think those twenty-four hours we shot are gonna do it? Fat chance!”
“Twenty-three forty,” Daryna corrects automatically, not yet believing her own ears.
“All the more so! Doesn’t matter. How much of that is rough, come on, turn on your brain now, how much of that will end up on the floor? And now that you’ve dug up how it all ended, with that firefight in which she died, you can’t do without that scene—with or without the dude, you’ve got to show that somehow. Never mind all the other stuff…. How are you going to patch it all together, without a cameraman, who are you kidding? Meaning without me, the magnificent; it’s basically my film as much as yours! Come on, Dara, what do you say?”
“Antuan, have you not heard me? I’ve got no money to pay you!”
“You mean, like, at all?” he sounds unapologetically sarcastic: the fact that she was able to get twenty-four hours of footage back from the channel appears to have instilled in Antosha a rock-solid faith in her omnipotence, the financial kind included. “Hon, you just think, how much do I really need? It’s not like you’re starting from scratch. I’ve got my own camera, and for editing I’ll talk to the boys at Science and Nature, they’re living on bread and water there and would make us a great deal. You do have to cover travel, to shoot on location, somehow, but that’s not much…. You’ve bought the footage out of there—that’s the thing, and you did it!”
This is precisely what she’s been missing—words of support from someone who knows how it’s done from the inside out, first-hand—professional support, the guild behind her, the brotherhood. Their company. Their community.