As if all this weren’t enough, Vlada veered off the Boryspil highway at the same spot where the politician Viacheslav Chornovil crashed in 1999, and Vlada’s death stoked a new fire under the old rumors of foul play suspected in his accident; it was after these flared up again that I first had the inkling that her words about “many deaths” did not refer to Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident and a few other, less funereal, paintings on the theme of death, did not refer to her work at all, but communicated a much more literal—and menacing—insight she had come back to share. The place where she went off the road had long enjoyed a very bad reputation among Kyiv’s motorists; it was an evil, fateful spot: at least once every season, someone got into trouble there, lost traction on perfectly dry asphalt and swerved all the way out into the oncoming traffic, or collided with another car while passing it, or had his gas tank explode for no apparent reason—had it been the custom, along the preeminent Boryspil highway, to festoon its flanks with memorial wreaths and flower bouquets, as folks did along more common roads, the rainbow of colors at this spot would announce it from afar, like a cemetery entrance set in a lush bed of florists’ stands.
It seemed, then, that Vlada, as countryfolk say, found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was caught on the track laid by earlier deaths precisely at a time when her own life juices were sucked almost dry—she did have a very hard year, but what do I really know about that? What does Vadym really know about that, despite being territorially, at least, the closest person to her? How stunned he was—with a brief flash of a childlike delight, as if at a message relayed from her from a distant land, a sign of a persisting connection—when I told him about Vlada’s midnight terror of dying if she fell asleep. “You must be kidding?” Was it because he would’ve ignored it, would’ve told her to take some pills—so you’re stressed out, no big deal—or because she didn’t share with him anything he might have indulgently interpreted as silliness? After all, Vadym belonged to the class of people who were used to dealing with Problems That Had to Be Solved and not with Misfortunes That Had to Be Endured, and this, as they say in Odessa, is a big difference. It is the demarcation line that divides us into the strong and the weak of the world, and the reason why it is the strong who, at the end of the day, are the least equipped to deal with tragedy and therefore collapse dramatically when one befalls them: Vadym coped by drinking himself into a mute stupor and then climbing into his Land Cruiser and driving off into the night, toward Boryspil, as if he hoped to see Vlada somewhere along the way, so he had to be watched and fought nightly into bed, first by his friends, and later by some provincial relatives summoned to Kyiv for this purpose; but, for reasons that defy understanding, nothing ever happened to him on these nocturnal sojourns, except the money he lost paying the traffic cops, or, rather, whatever US dollar bills he grabbed and blindly thrust at them when they stopped him. What followed usually depended on the cops’ benevolence: one time they towed him to their station and kept him there for the night, pouring him strong tea from their thermoses and calling every single number in his address book until they roused a friend to come take him home—the ticket must have been especially impressive that night, or maybe he just ran into some really kind cops (Why not? Things happen.), some good folks who listened to him pour his soul out and tell them, over and over, how his Vlada perished, until he fell asleep on a cot, or they finally knocked him out, instantly and professionally, and who would blame them if they did?
It had never occurred to me before that, of the two of them, Vlada was the stronger one. The ancient mythical notion (branded into me since infancy by my mother) that the husband—the Man!—unless he was in jail or in hospital, must be “the leader” and “take care of everything” was apparently more persistent than I had suspected, outliving hell, high water, a ruined marriage, and a broken (multiple times) heart, providing the dusty peephole through which I viewed (without really seeing much) Vlada’s marriage as a fulfillment of our poor mothers’ ideaclass="underline" here—finally!—a strongman shielding you from all worldly mishaps with his mighty shoulders, both physical and financial; all you have to do is bloom, look pretty, and pursue spiritual improvement, without a care in the world, other than scheduling your interviews on national TV. The funniest thing is that women like that still existed in our mothers’ generation: the ladies who stayed home, cooked borsches, studied esoteric literature, patronized persecuted and unrecognized artists, occasionally penned or crafted something, and were held in high regard as impressive activists by their communities; but the fact that some humble hardworking husbands bankrolled all their activism—their artists, their books, and whatever went into their borsches, too—was never mentioned in polite society, just like it wasn’t proper to point out that a person has to piss and shit; the knack these ladies had for arranging their lives so comfortably belongs to the ancient feminine arts that were irretrievably lost by the end of the twentieth century, like weaving on an upright loom or treating hives with herb smoke. By the time we came around, the ladies were in their decline, widowed—their humble hardworking husbands, naturally, having all died first—we found them not grandmotherly even, but as a tribe of mothballed ancient girls who didn’t know how to go out alone or where the phone and electricity bills were; they responded to an innocent “How are you?” with a two-hour-long lecture on their existential condition, and generally seemed slightly batty, an impression that could not be alleviated even by the glow of their former glory and that was made all the stronger by how laughable they were, which, in turn, cast retroactive doubt on that much-publicized glory, the times that made it possible, and the incredible persistence of the ideals they embodied.