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Authors: Oksana Zabuzhko
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foolishly did, it would be remembered as last seen on its way to that village, as Uncle Volodya told it, with a satisfied predatory smirk, which still held something of the boy in awe of a friendly power—someone’s in for an ass-kicking!—but which also was colored with a tingeof resentment and something a bit like envy, as in, sure, easy for them to fight, they didn’t swell on the ice with me,
Where’d they be then?
Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.
Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”
And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.
I just
could not
leave the photograph with Artem. It was
mine
—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by
someone else’s will
. That’s what it had felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)
The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.
And beyond that, I really knew nothing.
***
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m never going to make this film. Never.”
“Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.
Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want
you
to start thinking about it.)
Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your ecstatically adoring gaze that only lacked a pair of hands folded in prayer—of course you were intimidated, with me being a TV star and all), what shook me most, wrung me more cruelly than ever, was the expression I saw on your face when our lips parted: the look of a man who climbed to the top of the mountain, then turned around to look at the valley, and saw the earth swallow the city where he’d come from. You looked at me as if you didn’t recognize me, as if I oscillated and changed shapes every instant, and the flickering of ecstasy and horror on your face mirrored my shape-shifting, and for an instant, before we looked away, I glimpsed through your eyes the ground parting beneath; silently, with the sound on mute, buildings collapsed one after the other, as if filmed from an airplane by an awestruck cameraman.
Since then, the sensation became my own, and every so often I feel its short mournful pang: I am standing at the top of the mountain and you are looking at me, and there’s
Where’d they be then?
Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.
Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”
And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.
I just
could not
leave the photograph with Artem. It was
mine
—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by
someone else’s will
. That’s what it had felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)
The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.
And beyond that, I really knew nothing.
***
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m never going to make this film. Never.”
“Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.
Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want
you
to start thinking about it.)
Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your ecstatically adoring gaze that only lacked a pair of hands folded in prayer—of course you were intimidated, with me being a TV star and all), what shook me most, wrung me more cruelly than ever, was the expression I saw on your face when our lips parted: the look of a man who climbed to the top of the mountain, then turned around to look at the valley, and saw the earth swallow the city where he’d come from. You looked at me as if you didn’t recognize me, as if I oscillated and changed shapes every instant, and the flickering of ecstasy and horror on your face mirrored my shape-shifting, and for an instant, before we looked away, I glimpsed through your eyes the ground parting beneath; silently, with the sound on mute, buildings collapsed one after the other, as if filmed from an airplane by an awestruck cameraman.
Since then, the sensation became my own, and every so often I feel its short mournful pang: I am standing at the top of the mountain and you are looking at me, and there’s
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