FROM SPRING GAMES IN SUMMER GARDENS
selections
THE PILGRIM’S DANCE
PART 1
1
You really begin to understand women only when they leave you. It’s right then that they finally illuminate some kind of higher truth unknown to you to that point and with it slay you on the spot. You might have lived with a woman for forty years, but just as that moment arrives when she tells you she’s leaving, you find out something about yourself that had never occurred to you. And this, by the way, can be some totally inane thing, a complete nothing, nil, that at any other moment would have elicited just wild laughter, but not then, not at that moment, when she tosses it out at you as she’s saying good-bye. And the main thing is that she tosses it out! Something at which you just want to wildly burst out laughing. What? At such idiocy? Yes, strictly speaking, at it. Thus, it sounds like a verdict, like a final judgment that is driven into your forehead with a nail, into the very center of your forehead, right here between your eyebrows, and from that time on you have to wear this nail in the middle of your forehead, to touch it and think quite hard what it really all meant and what in actuality stood behind it.
From every young lady with whom I’ve been close, I’ve learned something new. Strictly speaking, at the time when we broke up. Perhaps someone might call this masochism, but when I’ve wanted to break-up with a young lady I’ve never said such a thing to her. I couldn’t have pasted together words such as these: “Pardon me, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else,” or “Everything’s over with us. Let’s break up.” I’ve listened with astonishment to several of my friends’ stories about the strange scenes that they’ve played out with young women they’ve broken up with. Some even arrange a farewell dinner that ended again with such similar farewell endearments. Oh no, that’s not for me. I did it in a simpler way. I have in mind simpler for me, and not for the young lady, for in fact all this was not simple for her. I did things so that they would break up with me. I began to play the role of a scoundrel—this isn’t a simple role if in your heart you’re actually not a scoundrel—but you want to come out dry from the water, you don’t feel like enduring any scenes, explaining your relations, maybe even earning a slap in the face, anything you feel like. All this so that the young lady will tell you to go to parts unknown and that the windy rhetoric will turn out to be shorter, that’s better for you. But, in reality, it never turned out short. It always lasted a long time. Always the young lady’s fault. It’s superfluous to say that I never guarded myself against slaps to my kisser. Finally understanding what kind of scoundrel she was dealing with, the young lady exploded into an uninhibited fountain of accusations that uncovered for me such bizarre facets of my “self” that it was impossible to comprehend even a single one of them: and why did you, my little dove, waste so much time with such a monster?
And do you know what? It made no sense to ask the irate young lady any such question. The answer would always sound like this: “I thought I could make you better!”
In the relations between two people, can there be a nobler wish than to make someone better? At the very moment of utterance of such a sacred intention, fanfares, flutes, and trombones enter, at such a moment you feel like embracing the young lady by her knees, kissing her shoes and begging: “Keep trying, make me better!” But no, if you’ve seriously aimed at breaking up with her, don’t relax, because all this is a fiction, no one will ever make anyone better in reality. You can mold from clay, but not from sand. You will remain the very same as when you first met, the only thing that can be expected from you is that when at some point you accommodate the young lady, you’ll strive to rid yourself of habits that irritate her, but only at those times when she’s there next to you. Certainly you in fact can become what the young lady thirsts for you to be, but if for you she is not a gift from heaven and you feel just a physical attraction, just her butt interests you, you can merely sneeze at all the conventions and you are the way you are in reality: inattentive, imprecise, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonorable, unreliable, ill-bred, mendacious, insolent, unsocial, conceited, shameless . . . .
The main thing here is not to get depressed and to take these accusations seriously. Otherwise, a vile thought might really steal in to allow yourself to be saved, to give in to reeducation and, constantly improving yourself on the wings of love, to become exemplary, to become ideal, and sometimes, stepping out on the balcony, to listen to the rustle of the wings behind your back.
Usually, my method of breaking up with a young lady will stick out to some as a bit protracted, but the process of becoming a scoundrel can’t last just a number of hours, or even days or weeks. But, nevertheless, I’ve been lucky with the young ladies, for some reason fate for the most part has constantly provided me with explosive frenetic women, ready at any suitable moment to scratch out my eyes, tear out a handful of my hair, scald me with boiling water, or tear my manuscripts to shreds. It is strictly speaking the manuscripts and books that for some reason evoke in them—evidently for a long time—a pent up ferocity: it was only literature that stood as an obstacle to complete possession of me. Consciousness of the fact that there is something more important and more valuable for me than their vagina, their butt, their breasts, their loving heart, than their lips with droplets of sperm, for their kitten-like caresses and even for their plum-filled fried dumplings, elicits in them aggression directed right at what is most valuable and dearest, by which a writer lives, and then at moments of hysteria they grab papers and tear them up, tossing bits of your writings in every direction, with their feet they step on half of a book, and with a wild scream pluck the other half upward—and where do they get such strength?—in ecstasy they’re ready to help themselves with their teeth, and here into the air a plundered Baudelaire flies down, and after him—Rilke, and after Rilke—Svidzynsky, [1] and you, as though you are mad, try to save what’s nearest and dearest to you, and, helpless, you must revert to your strength, twist her arm, knock her to the floor, rip her nightgown, and tearing her underwear with the very same ferocity that she had ripped up Rainer-Marie Rilke, you screw her, while she’s all tearful, sobbing, howling, moaning, agonizing, in front of the plundered Charles, Rainer-Marie, and Volodymyr.
Actually, with frenetic women who love to drink and smoke, it’s considerably easier to split up. Draw them out of their equilibrium— then spit once. It’s enough just to refuse to do something that you’ve done to that point without excess words, but beside that give such a shaky reason for your refusal that it grates the ear. For example, if you have constantly made coffee for her, but one time growl out to her request: “Make it yourself—I’m busy,” then you can be sure that at that very instant you should abruptly duck, otherwise a cup will crack right on your forehead. The very same reaction awaits you after a negative answer to the question: “Will you go along with me?” Then, in the best case, a slipper flies at your head, and in the worst—a shoe.
I don’t know how others react, but when I listen to groundless accusations from my beloved, then I feel offense, sadness and despair, as well as absolute helplessness, inasmuch as I am not capable of answering with the same astonishing fountain of words. The words are strewn out in such a way as if they were hurled into my face not individually, but in entire handfuls: they scorch and blind me, they jam my lips and span the air, and if in the first minute any kind of timid attempts to defend myself appear, to hide behind any of my own words, perhaps, and not so sharp and painful ones, then in the next minute—unexpectedly for me, I begin to feel in my heart a slight crust of responsibility, and in an instant I’m already unable to come to the conclusion that I’m not guilty of anything, and it begins to seem that these accusations are completely just, and I am being insulted not undeservedly, but with justification. And here I already discern in those words a note of indulgence; actually, I’m left the small apartment with the door open, a quite tiny apartment, but I can take advantage of this magnanimity and fly into it with arms crossed over my chest uttering: “Forgive me! Forgive me!” However I never did this, inasmuch as everything went according to plan. And it was only that nighttime ring of the phone that wasn’t according to plan. It stunned me with its unexpectedness.
2
Everything began completely innocently, and not because I had to hear what kind of swine I was. At first, my wife set off for the U.S. on some kind of shaky invitation to have just as shaky of an exhibit of her paintings. We said good-bye with intense embraces and nearly with tears in our eyes. She didn’t hide the fact that she intended to remain there, to find work and tried to convince me to go after her, inasmuch as I had an invitation to Canada. I didn’t take it seriously: for me to live in the U.S., there’d have to be at least a return of Soviet power in Ukraine.
My last vivid memory of her is a kiss through the air. But after that, a strange situation began: she disappeared, and for half a year I heard no news from her. Besides one—the shaky invitation turned out to have been so shaky that no one met her on arrival and she was barely able to find an artist acquaintance of hers and took up residence in his studio where she slept right on a table. A woman who had just returned from the U.S. passed along this disconcerting news to me by. My wife’s parents, of course, got letters from her, but they told me they didn’t have any news. Right at that moment, she phoned me and announced that we needed a divorce. And here, strictly speaking, I heard something about me that I never would have guessed: I didn’t have a clue that I was some kind of philanderer, that I chased after every skirt, that I slept with all my female colleagues and God knows who else, that I may even have hit on her mother, but that now at last I could fashion an idyllic existence with . . . and here she named about a half-dozen of my female colleagues, whom I not only hit on, but dreamt of marrying. The cascade of absurdity poured onto my head so unexpectedly that I couldn’t find a single argument to counter it, I choked on the nonsense the way a fish gasps for air. As for the fountain of her accusatory words, I managed only to gurgle out something inarticulate, and then she didn’t try to hear me out, but prattled like a machine gun, tossing out of herself a hundred words per second. That’s why it’s not surprising that I couldn’t remember a tenth of what flew into my ears later.
From what I remember anyway, a rather unattractive picture arose. For monsters such as me, there simply was no place on earth. There is nothing sacred! There was no hope to fix things up. I flirt with everything of the opposite sex on two legs. I’m a monster! A maniac! A vampire! I suck out energy, I drink blood and get enjoyment out of the torments of others.
After this, there were several phone conversations, just as agitated, in haste, she attacked, I defended myself without knowing that her attacks already made no sense whatsoever, she was just searching for justification for herself because during that time when I continued to live alone, she already had found a cozy little nest and was living with a dentist near New York. When I found out about it, I sensed a heavy winter’s ice floe slide off my chest and it became easier to breathe. I grew weary of fighting and understood all that I needed now—which was, strictly speaking, to turn into what she said I was: a maniac and a vampire. But for the purity of the experiment, I needed to convince myself that she never was.
Notes
[1] Volodymyr Svidzins'kyi (1885-1941) was a Ukrainian poet and translator. He died while under arrest during the evacuation of Kharkiv.
Translated by Michael M. Naydan