I guess I was still storing my perceptions for later, by virtue of habit—collecting and rehearsing them so I could share with Vlada, something I would catch myself doing for months—because at that moment, I recalled, as an animate voice in my internal dialogue, Vlada telling me, way back when, about the time when she was little and her father took her to the village to attend the funeral of his mother, the grandmother Vlada had never met. Vlada remembered waking up in the middle of the night and seeing through the open door the flickering candlelight in the other room: there, people were sitting vigil with the newly departed and the candles appeared to little Vlada to be growing into the darkness of their own accord, like fiery flowers, and she thought these were the fern blooms of the fairytales she’d heard, and even made a wish, only she couldn’t remember it; that night she heard the lamentation—“Real lamentation, Daryna, you don’t hear it like that anymore, not even in the country!”—she said it was like singing, a single musical phrase repeating itself, rising, sweeping up, as if running uphill, then sliding back down, helplessly, worn out like the van that took her and her father to the village through late autumn mud, wheels spinning on every hill, and this monotony contained a kind of all-embracing uncanny clarity, as if only this, the monotony, could truly express the beauty, and the agony, and the vanity of human effort on this earth. Little Vlada sat spellbound under her massive sheep’s wool blanket, afraid to breathe, her every bone gripped by the universal mourn that knew no consolation, and the female voice went on singing-wailing that one phrase, brimming with words, spilling out all deeds and affairs of the departed, listing them to someone intangible who was not in that room, as if it washed over them, one by one, and by doing so transformed them into noble regalia that shone brighter than gold, so that Vlada didn’t grasp right away that the song talked about her own grandma, whom she’d never met and who now lay there under the fiery dome of candlelight and would not rise again, no matter how she was implored, with the terrifying urgency of futile pleading that is known to men as despair, “Oh, rise, rise again, my dear, my bosom friend, my sister….” Vlada didn’t remember any other words—and they were not meant to be remembered, the lament an improvisation that is only sounded once and is not repeated or recalled—but she did remember a man’s low, slightly coarse voice murmuring from just outside her door in approval, “That’s some fine lamenting,” and that’s how the city child learned that the song was a lamentation and that it had witnesses other than herself, that there was an audience that had gathered to appreciate it. In that instant, Vlada said, the magic was gone: the mourner turned into a kind of an actor, and soon after she finished, Vlada caught her voice out of the general low hum of women’s voices—very businesslike, common, as if changed into dry clothes; it was answering someone or giving someone instructions about where to drape the embroidered rushnyky and how many. “I went back to sleep with this bitter feeling,” Vlada remembered, “as if I’d been cheated.”
Now that it was she who lay there, pillowed in a heap of flowers, her name struck me anew every time it was said during the liturgy, as if jolting me out of sleep—Lord, receive the soul of Thy servant Vladyslava, and pardon her her sins, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether witting or through ignorance—Vladyslava? This is about her? Lord, Vlada! Vladusya, no!—and tears burst from my eyes like from busted pipes, as I watched them lift her coffin, the one that cost “a fortune” and looked small as a child’s—you didn’t really notice how tiny Vlada was while she was alive; there was so incredibly much of her while she talked, moved, and laughed, and maybe that is why she looked held down by force in her coffin, not just dead but really killed, beaten in, and held up to be ogled, to expose how really defenseless she was. As she lay there like that and we stood around her and tried to utter something (I did, too!), and all our words were so small and pathetic—who could possibly give a damn about who she was to you, mister?—so ill-fitted, even if you put them all together, to measure the thing that was her interrupted life, the same words people would use to talk about other things, after they got home from the funeral and sat drinking tea in their kitchens, that’s when I could tell Vlada I’d have given anything to have someone do “some fine lamenting” over her as they once did over her grandma. I could have told her what we didn’t know before: how your throat swells with your enormous, tumorous muteness, when you don’t know this forgotten ancient ritual, the only one, as it became clear, fit for minutes like these, the one meant to wash a person’s life just as someone washes her body, as common words could never do, to wash—and raise it above the crowd’s heads to be seen above the coffin, to make it fine. This is not cheating, I said into the silence of my dead line; this was art, Vlada, only no one knew it anymore, and I didn’t either, and the only thing that would come out of me, had I dared to give my soul shape with singing, would be the half-choked mooing of a wounded cow.
And after this—slowly, drop by drop—the forgetting began.
Lord, is this really all?
Daryna Goshchynska gets up from behind her desk, walks to the window, and stands there for a long time, looking through the dark glass at the scattered flickering stars of city lights below. How little light there is in Kyiv—and it’s the capital. One can only imagine what the country looks like. Dark, dark. How poorly we live, Lord, and how bad we are at dying.
“Daryna?” Yurko, a colleague from the evening news, calls out, puzzled. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
A light switch clicks and the window pane projects—suddenly, so it gives her an unpleasant jolt—an image of a beautiful young woman; in the partial light that eats up the details, she is really young and extraordinarily, piercingly beautiful; it’s almost frightening, this beauty, something pagan, witchy. She’s got long, Egyptian eyebrows and dark lips as if sated with blood—this is not her televised self crafted to make viewers wonder about the designer of her suit and the brand of her lipstick. This face is something carved out of the night by the light of a bonfire—primeval, elementally gorgeous. Before she turns back to the world and Yurko, who has been talking at her all along, Daryna hungrily takes in this impenetrable face, both hers and not her own: so this is what she looks like when she is alone—much stronger than she feels.
She draws from this strength to give Yurko a dazzling smile. “I’m sorry; I was thinking… what did you say?”
“I’m saying, a young man just called for you.” Yurko’s eyes turn silky with insinuation. For a couple years already, their relationship has been balancing on the brink of flirting, which is not much, but no man likes to find himself a herald of another man’s arrival, and Yurko lets Daryna use the small pause, if she will, to explain herself, to dismiss, if only with a twist of an eyebrow, the young man as a second-class citizen. She does not, so he grins magnanimously somewhere in the direction of this man, “He was worried about where you were.”