Only when Vadym collapsed without Vlada, like a sack dropped in the middle of the room, did I see how things really were between the two of them—but it didn’t make me feel any better. I remembered her the way she was when she first fell in love with him—it seemed like yesterday, but no, ’tis twice two years, my lord—how suddenly charming she was, as if her face, posture, and gestures were lit with a soft low light, and the lumbering Vadym melted in her presence like butter in the sun, clearly not having eyes for much of anything else, and it was all so darn nice that often, after I’d said goodbye and was alone, I’d catch myself still smiling and feel silly, like I had jam on my chin and no one told me. True love always becomes a source of warmth for the people around it, a small hearth, and I was also happy for Vlada in a purely woman’s way—happy that she got so lucky, and juiced, like on an essential vitamin, on the fact that her new affair, no less intense at thirty-eight than it would’ve been at eighteen, showed me, just as Vlada did back in 1990, during the student hunger strike, that, no matter our age, the possibilities continued to be endless, the future was open and would remain so for the rest of our lives—that it would forever beckon like a gate through which one glimpsed the misty-gold horizon.
No one could give me this feeling like she did, except men, for a very short time during the same period of being acutely in love—before the gates slowly screeched closed again. Where could a feeling like this come from in this eternally despoiled country that still lives according to the kolkhoz-era dictum, that one exhausts one’s entire stock of possibilities when young, and once that’s done, all one has left to do is live through one’s children? Something in me always revolted violently against this massively psychotic urge to hurry up and settle, make a tight nest out of life and curl up in it as if for a good night’s sleep; it must have been the memory of mom’s swift and sudden descent, after she got married for the second time, into a stolid, shapeless, middle-aged womanhood—so radical for the woman who, with Dad, remained trim and elegant, even through the worst of times, someone men turned to look at in the street. Being a clueless teenager at the time, I promptly blamed her transformation on my stepfather: Uncle Volodya may have be a hero and a saint in his surgery, and I didn’t doubt my mom’s assertion that he went above and beyond to make Father’s last months tolerable—although I doubted that it was necessary to extend her gratitude all the way to marrying the man—but, at home, this knight of scalpel and catgut lived like an absolute slob in old bubble-kneed sweatpants, that inescapable domestic uniform of Soviet men. He shocked me with hospital jokes that came in just above barracks humor on the idiocy scale—he’d say to someone on the phone, “Cunt you slick up?” and that was supposed to be funny. And he was acutely disgusting in every bodily function: he could be shaving in the bathroom with the door open and break wind like he was blowing out rusty valves, could keep on talking loudly from the bathroom over the unmistakable sound of his indomitable peeing, made me blush at the dinner table with his comments about the laxative or constipating properties of the meal; he approached eating very seriously, loved “grub,” and after a meal of rabbit stew at a friends’ house, while picking his teeth, would offer the insightful eulogy of “Yeah, this rabbit did not die for naught”—and everyone laughed, and Mom laughed, and didn’t even look awkward! After my sophomore year, after I took my very first camping trip, with guitars, fires, and sex on a windbreaker spread on the ground as an excuse to hightail it from a home ruled by this, as I dubbed him, “Odessa louse” into a marriage, I still hung on to my belligerent belief that it was he who pulled the plug on Mom; he cut the power, turned off the lights, dragged her down, and debased her to the endless, pointless culinary clucking, “Darynka, dear, I’ve canned some tomatoes for you and a couple of jars of eggplant, and the jam didn’t come out right, must’ve overcooked it, I’ll try again while the strawberries are in…”—she, who wrote poems when she was young, good ones!
I earnestly believed she was the innocent victim who could no longer be rescued, and that belief hurled me into my own life as if riding a rocket-powered broomstick, armed with the determination not to let anyone, ever drag me down; every hint of settling down threatened to do precisely that, tied my hands and loaded rocks into my shoes, and I needed more than one year, and a whole bunch of bumps and bruises, to come to the realization that a woman is never a victim in cases like Mom’s, even when that’s what she wants you to believe—that my mother, after she settled down, thank goodness, so solidly and conclusively, had nothing more to look forward to, except Uncle Volodya coming home to dinner, and must have pulled the plug, without much regret, herself—she had no use for it anymore.
All my peers were wired, more or less, for the same purpose: to settle down, soon and forever, as if someone were chasing after them and their lives depended on jumping into a bunker and sealing the doors—all except Vlada. She alone lived without the least concern for what her environment and upbringing dictated—and they dictated a comfortable bunker, and a father for Katrusya, because how could the child grow up without a father, and family friendships, and group vacations that could later be talked about on social occasions, and so on and so forth; an entire carefully knotted net that, by virtue of its own gravity, shapes your life without your participation, and it is only after the net is filled and the life’s minimum passing score is achieved that a woman can allow herself to let her hair down a little—have a solo show of her paintings in a trendy gallery, say, with the requisite presentation of a custom-suited husband who gallantly refills ladies’ drinks at the reception. Vlada, however, behaved as if she’d gone to a different school where they didn’t cover such things: She came and went mercurially, as she pleased, with whomever she pleased and where she pleased, looked fantastic doing so, and painted better and better, so that people began to feel intimidated, especially after she came into money, and it got harder to wave her off, dismissively—“Who, Matusevych? Give me a break! You call that a genius?”—because money, no matter how you slice it, has a way of validating its owner’s way of doing things.
For some reason, people had the hardest time recognizing the obvious: Vlada was born with the gift of inner freedom that usually comes packaged with talent and without which talent has no prayer—without it, you’ll waste yourself chasing applause—and this surplus freedom, like a topped-off tank of gas, let her rev through any external rules that were put in her way without a second thought; Vadym, once he entered her life, could get into the backseat or could man the pit stops and time her laps, but she never thought of their union as settling down, and was irked when her girlfriends insisted on implying precisely the opposite when they congratulated her on, among other things, making such a rich catch—“I’m no pauper myself,” she’d snarl back, incensed. Already then I could see what would be crudely and unattractively revealed after she died: that she was not the only one to whom her inborn surplus of freedom and confidence gave the strength to keep her own council—it nourished everyone around her, all of us, including Vadym. Vadym first and foremost.
Things I wouldn’t have noticed before now ached like fresh abrasions—such as the time when Vadym, drunk, sobbed, “How am I going to live now?” like a spoiled little boy who’s used to having his every wish instantly granted, rolling in a tantrum on the floor without his pants because there’s no one to jerk him back to his feet. “She set the bar for me!” and my mind went on adding businesslike entries to its spreadsheet: Is that so, then? You too, huh? At the funeral he also said, no longer hysterical and instead with measured manly grief, “She was the best thing in my life”—as if this confession could make our good Lord suddenly ashamed of what a great personal harm he’d done to the poor man, and again the ache grated through me: What about her, how are we to make meaning of her life now, isn’t that the most important thing? I could, of course, just blame his nonsense on shock: people are liable to blurt utter insanities in a state like that, and men especially—nothing to do about that, they know neither how to birth nor how to bury; life’s hardest, dirtiest jobs are reserved for women—and no one would expect perfect style from the grief-stricken man.