I’m gonna bawl, Daryna thinks. How deeply, it turns out, this got wedged inside her—the resentment from last fall, the insult of the boys all plugging their ears and covering their eyes at her departure, each of them already burrowing deeper into his own hole. Antosha, who would have guessed? Antosha—Occam’s Razor—the old wino with his eye eternally askance at any show of uncompensated enthusiasm, like a countryman looking at a political agitator—is he really with her? It’s true, they’ve always had an ambient sort of bond, of that easy, unforced kind that emerges when two people feel good working together—and laughing together. That’s not an afterthought (at meetings and on location they always sat together, exchanging comments and snickering); it’s important, it keeps you warm. Antosha—despite all the cynicism of his act—is a warm person, but for him to give up a sure meal on the table and follow her, on a whim, into the wild blue yonder, it is not enough to be warm; it’s biblical—either hot, or cold, and she feels almost as ashamed, as if he’d suddenly proclaimed his love for her: he’s broken the stereotype. So this film means something for him, too? Something more than the number of shooting hours, remunerated according to a contract?
“I can still manage the travel, Antosha.”
This, actually, was what she and Aidy decided—so that if she didn’t find a sponsor, she could finish the film by herself, out of pocket, only they didn’t count on having a cameraman. But this was before she learned about Gela. She needs a cameraman, oh yes she does, and it would make her happy beyond words to have Antosha do it; he’s a wiz at his job—one of those last Mohicans, old enough to have witnessed the glory of filmmaking in the Kyiv-school tradition….
“So there!” Antosha triumphs. “What else do you want? You know I don’t take up much room; I’m skinny and don’t eat much, as long as I’ve got enough for a drink, I’m happy…. You’ll be saving on me!”
“Will you work for food? I can feed you. Like Lukash. They say that’s how he lived in the ’70s—whenever he’d visit whichever writer-neighbor of his, they’d go, ‘Oh, Mykola, perfect timing, we were just sitting down to dinner, come eat with us…’”
“Yeah, that was their way of justifying their own fat mugs. Alright, woman, don’t fuss. I can always find a gig; there’s life in this old dog yet! One commercial can keep me on the road with you for a month, working for food alone, if that’s how skimpy your operation’s going to be.”
“I’m not skimpy. If I get a grant—and there’s hope—I’ll pay you.”
“I knew it! I knew it. Slave driver. If I don’t get you by the balls, I won’t get snow in winter out of you,” Antosha sounds cheerier: the official part is over, and now he can go to the bar. “So what’s next? When do we start?”
“I didn’t know you were such a romantic soul, Antosha!”
The deal has been struck, and Antosha knows it, so he can allow himself to get serious and drop his usual hayseed tone.
“Dara, I am fifty-three. And, like everyone, I have my breaking point. You can tell yourself all you want that it doesn’t matter who it is running behind with your camera—spit it, wipe it, and don’t give a fuck where it goes from there, the stuff you shot, ’cause, like, it’s not your problem… but what am I going to tell my son? ‘Serve, my boy, as Grandpa did, and Grandpa didn’t give a shit?’ That’s from my army days, sorry….”
“He’s in his last year, isn’t he? Will graduate this summer?”
“Yep, from the same ol’ rez. What’s out there for him? Being the escort boy for the goons? I’d rather he didn’t tell himself one day that his father had been a total cocksucker all his life. I’d rather leave something behind. Something that could make him proud of me one day.”
“Antosha,” Daryna says, feeling her throat go numb. “Antosha. We’ll make a kick-ass film, you and I. You’ll see.”
“Of course,” Antosha agrees.
“I promise you. Even if no one ever buys it—you’ll show it to your kid.”
And Daryna will show it to Nika Boozerova. And Katrusya, she must see it—even if she’s too young to understand, she’ll remember it. When she grows older, Daryna will explain. They grow up so quickly! Children—those living clocks and all we can do is try to earn their forgiveness at some point in the future. And this person who will come (a girl? with tiny blonde braids?)—how will Daryna look her (him?) in the eye when they meet if she doesn’t make this? Her film. And Antosha, he is right: the film is his, too, and not only because he worked on it. It was Antosha’s eye, always, no matter how hungover, that unerringly found the best angle, that was hiding behind the camera during every one of those twenty-four hours—Vovchyk, her show’s director, had also done a ton of work on this, but what happened to his work has always been, for Vovchyk, “not his problem.” He didn’t have any trouble letting his employers have the final word about that. Antosha has not betrayed his work. He just hasn’t, and that’s it. Is this what Aidy, when he’s appraising all that antique workmanship, calls, with such purely masculine, guild-like pride (we women can never quite say it the same way)—a master?
“Of all the shit to worry about right now, why would you pick whether anyone’ll buy the thing?” the master grumbles. “I was just so happy, you know, when I heard you got the footage out of there. Good job, Dara, I thought, you stick it to those bitches… ’cause I’m telling you I’ve had it with them. You know me—I’m basically an ox: you can hitch me to the plow forever, and I won’t even moo; I’ll just swish my tail at the flies… the Ukrainian temperament, we’re all like that. Until they bend you beyond the breaking point. And then it’s the end of the line: the ox stops and you can forget your plowing. If you’d just told me you already had someone else lined up, I would be quitting the studio anyway. I’d go wherever, to hell and back, doesn’t matter. ’Cause what these bitches are cooking up there, it’s fucked up, I’m telling you. And the people have no idea, they don’t get which way the wind’s blowing.”
“You did. And I did. And I know others who did. And how many are out there that we don’t know about? It’s a big country, Antosha. They can’t just bend it however they want.”
“I’m sorry about Diogenes’ Lantern,” Antosha suddenly says. “Real sorry.”
“Uhu.”
“You were holding it, you know. The lantern. And one could see there were people in this country…. And now all you see is shit crawling out from the woodwork and nothing else. Why should it be so, Dara? Why are they always putting us down? All the time, look at any time in history, it’s the same thing all over again—someone’s stomping us into shit, so deep we can’t even see ourselves. Is that some fucking karma we got, or what?”
“Devil’s Playground,” she recalls. “That’s how someone put it to me recently. I mean, he said God’s, but it’s actually the Devil’s: he’s one of those people, you know, for whom these concepts are interchangeable, God-Devil, up-down, left-right… depending on the situation, what kind of a hand they get.”
“Uhu, and they seem to be fucking everywhere… and what are you gonna do about it, huh?”
“Make a film,” Daryna says. “Make a film, Antosha. What else would we do?”
It will be a film about betrayal, she tells Adrian when they are walking back through Tatarka from the restoration workshop. Daryna asked to come with him to see how they cleaned old icons.
“About betrayal? But we still don’t know the identity of the man who led the raid to the bunker; we only have our speculations—so whose betrayal, which?”
“Any. Of one’s country. Of love. Of oneself. Betrayal as a road that leads to death, but we’ve talked about that already—someone has to pay for every betrayal, one way or another, to restore the cosmic balance of forces that it violated. The greater the betrayal, the greater the sacrifice.”