Oh, I mastered that kind of cookery just fine and turned out my product with a practiced hand and my own feel for the ingredients. But these unwanted shards of someone else’s life, which could be discarded with such casual finality—and which had been so precious and full of meaning while the person was alive and perhaps loved in a way that made every such detail glow as a special gift—never failed to strike me as pathetically frail, like unearthed remnants of vanished civilizations. After all, wasn’t this about the only thing that remained
truly theirs
, something that could not be bequeathed or recycled, forged or refashioned to match new ideologies, publicized in newspapers and on TV until the last modicum of the departed person’s presence was stomped out, unraveled, lost under a thousand footprints?
After the death of Vlada Matusevych—Vlada whose dear little face with its pointy, birdlike features was posthumously rebranded by glossy women’s magazines until after a while even I could look at one of her mass-reproduced portraits without having my heart cramp—I had ample opportunity to learn that it is only such useless trifles of memory that have a chance to remain solidly present, and I kept one for myself: Vlada, the very definition of petite, had the habit of almost touching whomever she was talking to, of insinuating herself into their space with one smooth balletic pas—her back slightly bent and her head held high, looking like an unwinding lasso, or a cat about to leap into a tree—which unsettled even the most recalcitrant political gorillas. And for me, everything that used to be called Vlada Matusevych is contained—like an ocean in a drop of its water—in this one movement.
How could you show this on film? Even if you could, if you found it somewhere, on a friend’s cell-phone video or a clip from a birthday, a party, someone’s wedding—she was a fashionable artist; she was everywhere all the time, and there had been so much of her that in the first months after her death, Kyiv seemed deserted—even if you had it on film, what would it mean to anyone?
I have come to think that a person’s life is not so much, or rather is
not just
, the dramatically arched story with a handful of characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, and colleagues—anyone else?) that we pass on more or less in one piece to our descendants. It’s only from the outside that life looks like a narrative, or when viewed backwards through a pair of mental binoculars we put on when we have to fit ourselves into the small oculars of résumés, late-night kitchen confessions, and home-spun myths, trimming and shaping life into orderly eyefuls. When seen from the inside, life is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces, utterly useless for anyone other than its owner. A suitcase carried, irredeemably and forever, to the grave. Maybe a handful of odds and ends fall out along the way (a request for pear compote, a sinuous balletic pas like that of a cat about to pounce) and remain to rot in the minds of witnesses and mourners, so whenever I stumbled into one of those lost, disowned scraps I was filled with a vague but insistent shame of my inadequacy, as if this piece, this accidental survivor, contained the key—the lost secret code to the deep, subterranean core of the other person’s life—and now I have it, but I don’t know which door it unlocks or if such a door even exists.
***
I didn’t get this from TV, from the stories and people in front of the camera.
There was the day when, for some reason leafing through an old pulpy book from my father’s library, I ran into a note in the margin of a yellowed coarse page (Soviet newspaper stock) in Dad’s characteristically dense, thorny script (sometime in the seventh or eighth grade my own handwriting aspired to imitate his, but eventually mellowed out, untangled, and came to resemble Mom’s) written next to the apparently innocuous, idiotic critique, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness.
”
(God, the language! Still struggling to find its way out from
under the debris of Stalin’s pogroms, limping and dragging on broken-splintered bones.)
He underlined this critique with an impulsive, nearly straight line, and scrawled an equally triumphing
this!!!
with three exclamation marks in the margin. It struck me like a divinely inspired epiphany. In that instant I realized I didn’t know my father. He died when I was barely seventeen. I only remembered him the way he was in relationship to me as a teenager, a child, and from those memories, amended with a few cryptic posthumous (and petrified for lack of new material) remarks from Mom, his friends, colleagues, and his students—who seemed to have adored him unless they are all lying—I constructed a mental image: an avatar with the appearance of my father as I remembered him at forty-five, hospitalized and almost at the end of his bleak story, the kind not uncommon for his generation. And yet this man...no, wait...a much younger man (I did the math quickly: he would’ve been younger than I am now!) who read this book sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, before I was here (a mythical formula that inevitably prompts a child to ask, “And where was I?”), and scribbled his enthusiastic
this!!!
in the margins—exactly as I would have done had I found an idea I recognized as similar to my own, sympathetic to something I’d been thinking, turning over, worrying, living—was beyond the contours of the simulacrum I carried in my mind, as if the two—this one and the one in my head—didn’t know each other; or rather, I didn’t know this other, new one.
This man and I shared, I could tell, a vague but fundamental kinship; I could see so clearly (from inside, as we see ourselves in dreams) how in that instant the pieces of the puzzle triumphantly clicked into place in his mind—
this!!!
—a snap like the sound he might’ve made with his fingers, the thumb and the middle one, just as I do sometimes, in moments of intense excitement. And suddenly I recalled that he did have the habit of snapping his fingers and that it irked Mom, who told him it was vulgar and a bad example for the child, which made him sheepish—and this was new, too, because I’d never remembered him to be anything
but very confident. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.”
But something had been shaken loose in my memory, and another wave of recollection washed over me: one night I found the bunny I’d drawn in my school sketchbook covered in inexplicable blue spots, and I went bonkers—and Dad, mortified like a little boy caught red-handed, confessed that it was his fault; he wanted to make the bunny gray but just missed a bit with the color. At the time I seethed with righteous indignation; I could not grasp why he would’ve sneaked into my sketchbook and touched my paints—he who’d never put a drop of paint on a shred of paper in his entire life, who didn’t even know how to hold a brush!—and, for a long time, I’d bring up the ruined bunny whenever I needed to one-up him, because it never failed to shame him again. Only now, with this new internal vision, did I see this little prank as it must have felt to him, and realized that it wasn’t the act of spoiling my picture (for which I, the incurable perfectionist, still got an A!) that he was ashamed of, but his inability to resist his childish impulse—the sudden spark of curiosity, the urge to watch the paint billow in the jar of water, watch it fill the brush and color the white spots on the paper—and that he, a grown man and a
paterfamilias
, was caught in this momentary, unbefitting weakness.
All of this was unspooling, faster and faster, one thing pulling on another, as if the inky scribble in the margin, like a loose thread I grasped, had led to a vast sunken rhizome—a lace of feathery roots that retained the shape of an entirely different, unfamiliar life, one independent of a daughter, a wife, or any friends—but I had no means of seeing it clearly, up close. He had taken his suitcase with him.
I remember I climbed with my feet into the armchair and scoured the whole book, inventing a new reading method on the spot: not from left to right, or from right to left, but in concentric circles, chewing on the text, like the hungry caterpillar, beginning with the underlined phrase, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively
in sight of triumphing evilness.” I had no other key—no other trinket had slipped into my hands from the suitcase that had already been taken away from me—nothing that wouldn’t have turned into dust in the twenty years since Father died. So I pondered
this!!!
, so casual in the margin, like detective Columbo scrutinizing a set of uncommon tooth marks on a cigarette holder that he’d found next to the body; the only difference was I wasn’t looking for the murderer—I wanted to raise the dead.
What the book was about I couldn’t tell you under threat of torture, but by the end of my necromantic investigation I became firmly convinced that my father’s long “struggle against the system” (as we Ukrainians have been calling it since 1991)—his desperate knocking on all those imposing oak doors; his countless letters, complaints, reports, and petitions to the Kyiv City Council, the Solicitor General’s Office, the Ukrainian Central Communist Party Committee, and the Central Committee in Moscow (three or four bulging folders, held by strings tied into dead, eternal knots and stored in Mom’s attic); his trips to Moscow, each of which was supposed to resolve things once and for all, only every time they sent his query back to Kyiv and he had to start the cycle all over again—the whole gory mess that replaced his life and that finally sent him to the loony bin with the then-typical political diagnosis of “acute paranoid psychopathy,” stemmed from nothing other than my father’s secret knowledge that he, too, shared, like a shameful disease, Hamlet’s damned hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. And when the evil imperial machine rolled by, almost but not quite brushing him, it was this knowledge that prevented him from stepping back, that compelled him to throw himself in its path, and made him do so, again and again, each time recapturing the right to self-respect.
And I’m still convinced of it.
The crippled, poorly written phrase turned out to be his watermark, an enduring epitaph to his life, which ended just as crippled: try and fit it into the format of a documentary story and you’ll have to close with a drawn-out physical decline—a dimming
consciousness, struggling against the clamor of excruciating pain in every muscle caused by the rattling doses of insulin which the Soviet criminal psychiatry (as it later came to light) dispensed especially generously—and you’d have to show that hospital-issue robe, the color of cornflowers, which I remembered him wearing when Mom and I were finally allowed to come visit him in Dinpropetrovsk; and his skinny, yellow legs with bulging joints; and his stiff feet that stuck out from under the robe, like chicken feet from a shopping bag (enveloped in a well-aged sticky smell of urine or unwashed skin); and a slow, murky turn of dull eyeballs without a drop of reflected light, shriveled like an old man’s (signs of constant dehydration).
None of this has any heroic or romantic potential, especially when we remember that this dragged on for years, and that’s completely unentertaining, which is why such things get swallowed by “Five years later” or, in somebody else’s case, “Twenty-five years later.” Really, you can’t expect anyone to keep watching that long! (There’s no other way to make this kind of story into a film, no way to touch the audience—which means there is no story, no pitch, as any producer will tell you, better luck next time.) That’s the rub: my father’s daily struggles, in and before the hospital, not the days of his research and teaching career, but his battle with what ended it, and then ended him—the floods of letters he’d sent, the useless appointments he’d gone to, the whole absurd and exhausting war that was lost before it had even begun because once engaged, the system would not and could not yield. And that’s exactly what he was after, spending year after year in futile attempts to convince quite possibly the same people who had signed the orders he had come to protest that what they did was wrong. The entire narrative of his life, if we were to reconstruct it with documentary faithfulness—capturing all four folders and their knotted-to-death strings—had no point, only bitterness and waste. The point was in the epigraph, in the watermark. In a single, nearly straight line that was accidentally preserved.
There was another reason I knew this to be true. Exactly a year before, on a summer vacation in Crimea, by Kara-Dag, I had sneaked away from the rest of our group and spent half a day climbing the same cliff again and again, like Sisyphus, and leaping into the water below. The day was still and smothering hot, and every time I climbed I sweated like a horse, and my knees buckled, and my heart clattered somewhere in my throat. When I was little, I once hit the water with my stomach and had been afraid to dive ever since.
When I finally stumbled back into our camp at dusk, my legs twisted and turned under me as if I were hopelessly drunk, and it took all I had left to propel my body forward against the resistance of the air. My reputation as a daredevil, a thrill-loving adventure seeker who would do just about anything to get her adrenaline fix, had to have been carved in stone that night, and at dinner the men of the group couldn’t take their suspiciously twinkling eyes off me, apparently convinced that any of them could come up with much more pleasurable means of supplying me with adrenaline. A few of their wives turned unattractively skittish, which put a bit of a damper on the blissful intoxication I had achieved with the powerful cocktail of two substances that are so hard to obtain for a professional intellectual (Is that what I am? Can a journalist in our country be an intellectual?): utter physical exhaustion and pride in a job well done. “Whatever did you do this for?” asked the puzzled Irka Mocherniuk, the only person who really cared to know, and I said, “Not what for, but why.”
I dove because I was afraid of diving. I spent half a day doing great violence to myself on an empty shore under the blazing sun because the fear, once driven deep inside, lived on somewhere in my body like an invisible iron shackle that wouldn’t let me move. I chipped at it with each dive, wore it thin and finally got rid of it. From that day on, my life held one less fear.