A Russian Story (2 page)

So Dounia, with the academic’s inherent propensity for orderliness, hoped to establish a common language for the picnic, but it did not work out. The proposed options were English or Russian. Thierry does not know Russian and he does not want to speak English. But Thierry cannot be excluded from consideration, since in most cases it is he who pays for the dinners in the restaurants on the university campus. Lada does not want to speak Russian, even though she answers to
Klava
. What is more, Lada asked why the Russophile Dounia does not speak French, since the heroes of the Russian classics actually spoke it better than they did Russian. Dounia replied: “
Bien sûr
, I speak French! It is not perfect, but it is acceptable.” Eugene does not speak French though.

“Didn’t you ever learn it?” Lada asked her ex-husband again.

“There was no incentive. Except for getting to know your new husband better.”

Eugene, as an erstwhile adherent of Nietzsche, learned German after English, and he did quite well at it. But all the French he knew was what he had picked up from Lada while they were together.

So the table continues to be dominated by a lack of linguistic agreement; however that does not lead to overt conflicts — only weak flashes of distant lights. Like those that wander in the darkness of the prairie of an autumn evening, eventually dying out. But something inextinguishable still remains, no matter how proud the newly-weds are of their ability to form wonderful relationships with their ex-spouses.

Thierry put his hand on Lada’s shoulder, but Eugene did not put his hand on Dounia’s shoulder, and in Lada’s eyes there is a scarcely perceptible flicker of triumph, which, it is fair to say, never disappears from the eyes of ex-wives when their ex-husbands see them in the company of their new ones. And in any case it was understood that she and Thierry were closer than he and Dounia were. But Eugene and Dounia had also developed a reasonably balanced relationship, never arguing, but never clarifying matters either.

“How beautiful!” exclaimed Dounia, looking at the road meandering amid the plains, and the swallows overhead. “I have been following this road for years, but I never tire of it.”

Since the beginning of their relationship Dounia and Eugene have often come here to this hill, where even in the dreadful summer heat a breeze blows among the bushes. Eugene has been driving for a long time now, but the itinerary has never varied. Dounia said this place reminded her of the Russian steppe, which she had read so much about but which she had never actually seen, because the only places she had visited in Russia were Moscow and St. Petersburg. She had begun, apparently quite spontaneously, singing
Steppes and steppes all around.
^*
When Eugene, feigning a similar spontaneity, took up the refrain
Among the steppes that are so wide,
^**
although the Ukrainian
recitative
is much more intricate than the primitive Russian folk tune, Dounia fell silent, and she no longer sings
Steppes and steppes all around
, on the hilltop amid the prairie. Nevertheless, they continue to come here and bring guests with them.

Dounia would immediately mount her hobby-horse. Whoever their guests were, she would always start banging on about her monograph on ‘Russian Sexuality’, which she has been writing all the years she has been living with Eugene, considering it the main purpose of her life. In Moscow, everyone is aware of this still unfinished book, because Mrs Dounia Gourman-Samarsky of Midwest University has given papers at conferences in Russia, presenting the respective chapters of her study. Russian colleagues have written to tell her that the Patriarch of Moscow intends to pronounce that her monograph is anathema, but in all sincerity Dounia does not understand why. What is the reason for this curse? Is it really because she gave several papers at respected universities, convincingly arguing that only Russian nineteenth century literature can speak about everything without actually saying anything? On the basis of scant details found in Russian classical authors, merely suggesting the depth of certain chasms, Dounia made unexpected findings. With the scientific directness of an obstetrician-gynaecologist, she examines how the fall of Anna Karenina occurred and how the landowner Totsky corrupted young Nastasia Filippovna. Right now Dounia Gourman was working on what Mark Volokhov was doing in the gazebo with the young girl Vera in Goncharov’s novel
The Precipice
.

“And the way the Muscovite treated Kateryna,
^*
that is of no interest to your wife?” asked Lada.

“We are not at Harvard,” replied Eugene.

“What has Harvard to do with it?” said Lada, confused.

“Only at Harvard could you obtain funding to pursue research on Kateryna,” explained Eugene.

At the beginning of his relationship with Dounia he heard the phrase
we are not at Harvard
almost three times a day. If he had really wanted to develop a specifically Ukrainian branch of Slavonic Studies, he would have had to establish personal contacts at Harvard! But here too, in this university in the middle of the prairie, where spirits of the past roam during autumn nights, glimmering like the eyes of mystical coyotes, there are quite good opportunities available to him, said Dounia, combing her wild red hair inherited either from her Irish mother or from her Jewish father, who came from a family of immigrants from Belarus.

Dounia does not speak Ukrainian, so again things turned out as she had feared, and this is actually the reason why she had tried to establish a common language at the picnic. Once again she did not understand quite correctly what Eugene and Lada were talking about and at an inappropriate moment she confirmed that she had indeed given a presentation at Harvard on Katerina Ivanovna’s distressing intimate relationship with old Marmeladov, which she had discovered after reading that great novel by the great Russian writer for the
n
th time.

“Can you imagine it, Klava, they approved my approach!” Dounia’s green eyes lit up as she, a provincial university professor — one from the Midwest at that — began to speak about her success at Harvard.

During the intellectual conversation between Lada, Dounia and Eugene, Thierry became discourteously bored.

“Mme Gourman,” he said, stressing the final syllable, “isn’t it time we drove back for dinner?”

“Oh, it’s only just five o’clock,” replied Dounia in French. “Since when does a Frenchman dine at five?”

So Thierry stood up, dragged Myroslav away from the table and started a mock fight with him. After several blows the young man pushed his stepfather over and sat on him triumphantly, and Thierry immediately pretended to be dead. For some reason Eugene recalled that when he had fooled about like this with his late father during family picnics at Pushcha-Vodytsia near Kyiv, his mother had always yelled at them, saying they had gone crazy, because they had over-eaten and now they were going to make themselves sick. But Lada disregards the antics of Thierry and Myroslav. The lad’s own father remarked that he and his son had long since lost that physical contact whereby a boy and a grown man enjoy jostling and sparring together. To be more precise, he and Myroslav had never had such contact.

However, although he does not spar with Myroslav like Thierry does, he communicates with his son in their native language, fulfilling his parental obligations even across the ocean — all the more so since, according to Myroslav, grandma Nina had become completely de-Ukrainianised; she had switched to Russian, saying that the late Nebuvaiko had foisted his Ukrainian on her. When Eugene lived at their house on Pushkin Street, his mother-in-law did not seem to have had anything ‘foisted’ on her; on the contrary, in family company it was she who gradually imposed constraints on her highly-placed husband. Eugene had no influence on the way his son communicated with his grandmother Nina. So at least he taught Myroslav not to switch to Russian with his stepmother, saying that she had an almost perfect command of Russian anyway, whereas his son did not yet have perfect English. So Myroslav, like Eugene, communicates with Dounia only in English.

But in the end Lada started speaking Russian with his stepmother anyway. She makes a show of being enthralled by the depth of her research; however, she actually makes fun of the enthusiastic Russianist, asking ridiculous questions that Dounia takes seriously.

“Now Dounia, how do you rate Ilya Oblomov’s sex life?”

“I can rate it such as it was! I have written an article on that too,” said Dounia, and her eyes lit up.

“And was that also at Harvard?”

“No, that was at Princeton, also a very prestigious university!”

“So you dig very deep, I see!”

“Yes. A great deal depends on sexuality. Almost everything! The Old Russians knew this long before Freud. But sexuality does not mean pornography, because then it would have no depth; it would be purely banal! The Russian classical writers understood this just as well as the French. Even better, actually.”

“Dounia, what could you say about the relationship between Khoma Brut and the damsel?”
^*

“Oh, those are your Ukrainian lands! Nothing is quite as it should be over there! I’ll just need some help from Eugene on this.”

“So funding is available for Gogol, and not only at Harvard?” Lada put on a clever show of being keenly interested.

“So you are not working yet?” He interrupts Lada, fed up of her mockery of the artless Dounia. Somehow everyone — Lada, Thierry and Myroslav — finds it necessary to make fun of his wife.

“Better call me
Traven
^**
,
” the young man told his stepmother when she shortened
Myros
to
My
and Dounia again failed to grasp what the cross-linguistic puns were about. She knew Gogol’s play
The Inspector General
by heart, though.

But Lada doesn’t work! She doesn’t work, she stays at home! She is a little housewife in a big house, that’s all! She had always dreamed of marrying a Frenchman, so she didn’t want Myroslav, but she had no wish to be concerned with merely choosing curtains to match the wallpaper! She wanted to teach at the university! She wanted to master the Provençal language, which no one in Provence knows. All her classmates at the Faculty of French Philology who married Frenchmen had long since divorced. They had dragged their former spouses off from Ukraine to France. That was usually the case if they had learned to speak French. But look what happened to me! Yes, that’s right! All the feminism of my youth went to pot, just like your love for Ukraine!”

“Like our love.”

To concede that those few years at the turn of the eighties to the nineties were the best years of his life would mean accepting that nothing good would ever happen in his life from then on. He didn’t want that.

So when was it that he had ceased to be sincere in his life? When he lost Lada? Or when he lost Ukraine — but did he? In today’s globalised world you don’t lose your homeland; it is subsumed in that universal globality. Occasionally, he would meet old acquaintances at international congresses. Some of them would come from Ukraine to give papers; some had long since been affiliated to foreign institutions.

Meanwhile, the years flew crazily by. They say that to emigrate is to be re-born. How old was he as an American? Not quite as old as Myroslav was now. And what did he have to look forward to? The cruise to the Galapagos Islands he and Dounia were planning for their Christmas holidays? The conference in the Azores where he had been offered the job of interpreter, a short time before that? Long gone are the days when the anticipation of future journeys aroused in him incredibly powerful sensations — you might almost say a cosmic shudder. The Ukrainian acquaintances he met around the world (he is bound to meet somebody in the Azores too) still find their long journeys mind-blowing. These journeys somehow prolong life, which proceeds on its way regardless of its quality.
You see, life will pass by just as the Azores passed by
, once wrote a Soviet Russian poet he found unforgettable, although generally speaking that poet is half-forgotten; he was a favourite of his mother’s — and probably still is.

The Soviet period in Russian literature was not Dounia’s cup of tea. Dounia loved Russian nineteenth-century prose. But reciting Russian poetry at the top of her voice — so loudly that the window-panes rattled — that’s what was in his mother’s repertoire. He hadn’t seen his mother for over five years. She had been a Russian literature teacher in a Kyiv school. She is retired now, and he sends her money by bank transfer. For over twenty years he has no longer listened to her views; he makes his own decisions about his life-style. The verse written by Russian poets, which she used to declaim with such enthusiasm as a commentary on everything that went on in the world or in their family, still resounds in his head — appropriately or inappropriately, as the case may be — rising to the surface of the mire which is the past.

I have instilled Rus
^*
into you — as if with a pump!
 — mother would say loudly, quoting the ambiguous Marina Tsvetaeva, poking her finger at her son; there was some truth in that, actually.

Eugene was distanced from the Russia that had been
pumped into him
by his mother 
—
indeed not just by her but by the entire Soviet way of life 
—
thanks to Ukraine, entering his life like an eccentric lover, a woman you perhaps wouldn’t marry, but would keep getting together with and breaking up with again until you died. One of you or the other. Well, it turned out that during his student years, traditionally considered to be the best of your life, he had had neither good friends nor a proper girlfriend. He began to experience all the powerful emotions of youth a little later, soon after the Soviet Union had begun to collapse and fall apart. During his final year at university he happened to attend a party at the house of some friends of his, and suddenly he found himself in a world of true fulfilment. There were young men there who you could talk to all night, yet in the morning you would leave with the feeling that you still had more to talk about. There were attractive girls who were not dying to get married, unlike the girls in his year who would do so virtually at the first opportunity that came along. You could talk with them all night too, sometimes even forgetting how beautiful they were, although you could actually combine the one with the other. He stayed the night with a girl after the very first party, and this was the beginning of his national initiation. After that night, Ukrainian became the language of love for him. It was not Lada. The girl thanked him for the joy they had shared, saying she would always have pleasant memories of that night. They still continued to see one another. There was no second time; things do not always work out, do they? But they would exchange the occasional sultry glance or knowing smile. If anything like that had taken place with one of the girls in his year, the hysterics would have started the very next day after she missed her period, and then the parents would have crucified her if she didn’t marry him as a matter of course.