Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories by Oksana Zabuzhko

Author:Oksana Zabuzhko [Zabuzhko, Oksana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542019422
Google: AjibygEACAAJ
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

AN ALBUM FOR GUSTAV

TRANSLATED BY NINA MURRAY

He: When people ask me what the hardest part was, back during those days on the Maidan—and it’s usually foreigners who ask (Gustav is not the first), usually just to be polite, just to be asking something, because the only thing they remember from their press and cable news is that more than a million people (no one knew exactly how many anyway, and I bet no one will ever find out) came out into the streets of Kyiv and stood there, in the freezing cold and under snow—and you know they picture the Ukrainian winter as something out of the vast Asiatic steppes: birds frozen dead midflight, tongues stuck to metal spoons—so when they ask about the hardest thing, they are hoping to hear Hollywood-worthy horror tales of frostbitten cheeks and amputated limbs à la Jack London, and Manifest Destiny’s Go West, my son, since a conquest of the West (and they are certain that’s what we fought for—a piece of the West!) must need, in their mythology, be accompanied by purely masculine sacrifices; they ask in full anticipation of having you tell them what they have already imagined so that they can nod sympathetically and say, Wow. When people ask me this question and I try to answer, every time I feel like I come up against a solid wall inside myself, a profound lack of desire to explain anything, muddling in my inadequate English, to mutter that hard is not quite the right word, and it doesn’t really fit what we experienced during those three weeks. That, actually, it was later that things got “hard,” after everything was over, the rush was over, and we all had to go home, and become again anonymous strangers passing each other in the street, so that no matter how many times you clicked your busted lighter in the middle of the sidewalk in a hopeless attempt to light your cigarette, there would be no solicitous onslaught of helpful hands with ready flames offered to you from every direction. I remember how utterly lost I felt the first time this did not happen. After those three weeks I had forgotten completely what it was like to be alone in a mass of people, and this was only a few days later, and Khreshchatyk looked like the same street, and the people looked like the same people, only now they hurried along on their holiday errands and no one gave a damn if some loser could use a light—that was the moment when I, stunned for an instant by the chill of the sudden emptiness in the space that was only recently, days before, bubbling with thick familial, intimate warmth, a void not unlike the one left by the death of a loved one, understood finally and undeniably that it was all really over: we had begun to fall apart again, to segregate into the composite elements of a pedestrian mass, no different from a crowd

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