“So when are you starting?”
“Tomorrow. I invited Antosha to have dinner with us, to discuss the changes to the script, he might think of something—there’re three of us now! There were three of us anyway. Without Antosha. Well, the little one hasn’t made the team yet.”
“Is that why you turned the place upside down today—you were going through your stuff?”
“Yes, and you know what I found? On my dictaphone, remember, it kept rolling in my purse on the way back from fishing with Boozerov, it recorded our entire conversation—at the very beginning, there’s a bit of Pavlo Ivanovych talking.”
“For real? How could that have happened?”
“Beats me—maybe the button got pressed, inside my purse, all the way back at the river, when he kept trying to send all that fish home with us. You can’t hear exactly what he is saying, so it’s just this irritating drone, as if from behind a wall, boo-boo-boo, persistent, like it’s trying to break through and just can’t, and it’s just the timbre and the intonations, nothing else; and you know, it gave me such a strange feeling, this voice, distilled like that to the pure essence of sound—as if I had heard it before, the same intonations, they were so dreadfully familiar, as if they belonged to someone very close… I’m not making this up, trust me. I didn’t even have it in me to erase that bit, even though it’s nothing to do with anything. And you know how it ends, the recording? With your voice—you asking what if I were pregnant. The first time you mentioned that. So weird…”
“Adrian shrugs: What’s so weird about it?”
“I don’t know,” Daryna slowly answers, thoughtful, as if still under the spell of that other voice—“I must be getting superstitious.”
They stop at a crosswalk. In the openings between buildings, the dusk, already pricked with streetlights, smoldering, bluish and ashen; the windows of the top floors flash with every shade of fire; and, in the dusk pooling below the red signals at intersections, the taillights of passing cars glow mysterious and sweet, like pomegranate seeds.
“Look.” She touches his elbow.
“At what?”
Look at how magnificent the city is in this light, she wants to say; this is the only time when you can sense its rhythmic breathing—when all the dirt people tracked in during the day is extinguished by dusk, and even the noise seems muffled, like when you instinctively lower your voice in low light; it does not last long, this time, half an hour perhaps—it is a change of rhythm like shifting gears or catching your breath: the tired masses of working folk, worn, an inexorably uniform look on their faces, head home to their concrete shells, and restaurants-theaters-bars have not yet taken on the next human wave, with its fresh charge of excitement. And in this interval, if you catch it just right, you can sense the city’s own pulse, those anxious currents of waiting, pleasure, and dread that thread through it—an inaudible music—and feel numb with the love for this city, so defenseless in fact, and hear the trees grow through it, unstoppable, fearsome—the cottonwoods on its boulevards, the apricot trees and the cherries in the cubical canyons between its high-rises—you can feel their explosive, autonomous force, the same will to grow that is now inside me, and that is not given to anything made by the human hand (we do not notice it during the day, but should people abandon the city, the force of the trees would break free and run rampant without constraint until the eyeless ruins of buildings begin to sink in the boiling woods, in the wild primeval thickets, the same as the ones from which the city once emerged, some two thousand years ago). If only she could film the city like this, caught at just the right moment—for the film’s opening. Despite the fact that it’s not, at first glance, connected to Gela’s story at all.
And, she tells Adrian, she would like to film the restoration workshop they’d visited. It resembles his dream shop of antiquities a little, the Utopia he told her about: with its unhurried, taciturn men in leather aprons, filled with a special inner dignity, with graphite-black fingers and an assured, almost genetic confidence in their way with objects—an atmosphere of unworldliness, so uncommon in the modern world, and, to an accidental visitor, all but church-like, and inseparable from honest work; the atmosphere she remembers from Vlada’s workshop, and up until recently one could glimpse it in the last relics of ancient artisanry: cobblers’ kiosks, TV repair shops, countless basement rooms smelling of wax and turpentine, where men fixed umbrellas, locks, eyeglass frames, and just about everything that could be fixed.
This disappeared in our lifetime; we watched it vanish, these pitiful remnants of the once-powerful Kyivan commonwealth, wiped out by the Great Ruin of the twentieth century: smiths, coopers, crockers, tanners, and lorimers, the once-glorious guilds that for centuries built up this city, founded churches and schools despite every alien tsar and magistrate—men who sat just like this in their tiny workshops two, and three, and five hundred years ago, and took with gravity into their hands the things people brought them, pronouncing their verdicts once and for all, as only men who know the true and good price for their work can. Not the price people pay at the market, but the one that is measured by the sum of expended life: the number of dioptres added to their sight over the years, the wheezing in their turpentine-laced lungs, their skin burned from constant heat, the high-contrast map of their wrinkles. The absolute concentration and surgical precision of movement with which a restorer, looking through a magnifying glass, dabbed away layers of age-old grit from a spot on an icon evoked in Daryna a downright sacramental reverence—a feeling remarkably similar to the one Gela’s story aroused in her. But this is also something she cannot convey to Adrian—she doesn’t know how to explain to him what these images could possibly have to do with a film about resistance. Except maybe as a metaphor for her own archival work—for her method (if that’s what it was): this persistent, ant-like, unwavering, peeling off of layer after layer, inch by inch….
This is also resistance, Adrian thinks. Daryna’s got it right. To work the way these restoration guys work—in utter self-dedication, for miniscule pay, purely out of devotion to what you do—that is resistance in its purest form, the essence of resistance, like that voice stripped of words down to a bare melodic lament. She’s got it right. An intelligent woman must, after all, have a leg up on an intelligent man because she is endowed with this additional perceptiveness, one we lack—one that stems from her sisterhood with every living thing, regardless of place and time….
A passing trolleybus blows a used ticket at his feet, and he bends down, moved by a sudden urge to pick it up, see, as he used to do when he was little, if the number is lucky, but he misses it: the ticket flies off, mixes with other litter at the edge of the sidewalk. There’s another thing I will never find out, he thinks, and shrugs, surprised at himself: I must be getting superstitious, too.
Aloud, he tells her that what he loves most about the city at dusk is its quiet courtyards—and gold rectangles of light from the windows cast onto the snow.
“Onto the snow? Why snow?” This surprises her a bit.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be snow,” he concedes, without real conviction; it could be on the asphalt. For some reason, he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, and she understands it—their thoughts, in the warm, exhaust-laced air of the spring evening, flowing in and out of each other, like intertwined fingers. The light turns to green and they step into the crosswalk like a pair of well-behaved children—holding hands and not even noticing they are.