A Russian Story (4 page)

… They did not sing as a chorus until the end of the eighties. He will never forget how they sang the national anthem in the metro when it was just a song, not yet the national anthem. There were about twenty of them, roughly half lads and half girls. He put his arms round a girl’s shoulders; it wasn’t Lada, but she was a classy girl anyhow. She lives in Chicago these days. They meet up occasionally. Once they recalled how they used to turn people’s heads in the metro; some gave them disapproving looks while others gave them looks of admiration. The latter were the majority, and some joined in and sang along with them. At the time, nobody knew how things would turn out.

“Solovki prison camp is crying its eyes out over us,” said one of them, when they got tired of singing. At those words they got a fresh lease of energy and they started singing one of those Ukrainian songs that people start singing instinctively, the ones that are unstoppable, that only bullets can silence!…”

In the early nineties there was no more singing. By then it was clear that history would not be reversed, and that our national anthem would not be banned. What did ensue was poverty. Sheer poverty, at first in the form of empty shops, but then the shelves were re-filled quite quickly, though the money one managed to find somehow was only just about enough to live on modestly for a week, yet you had to survive for a month until the next pittance. Then they stopped these payments as well. Suddenly, the meaning of the crucial line of the Lord’s Prayer that ran:
Give us this day our daily bread
became clear. Not when they give pay-outs in some decrepit agency where the hammer and sickle hasn’t yet been replaced with the Ukrainian trident, not when someone pays for a translation for a private client, not when Lada’s granny’s ring is sold (it’s too big for Lada’s tiny finger), but
this day, this day
!

But he had a good community of friends, who helped one another to obtain orders for translation work or to write articles for a paying journal, to submit contributions to well-financed conferences, who could advise how to apply for a grant from a private foundation or a scholarship at a foreign university. So he and Lada managed to survive in those days when admission to a buffet meant that Our Father had heard the prayer and given us this day our daily bread. If they got fifty dollars for contributing to a conference, a laughable fee in international terms, the two of them were able to live decently for a month. When the money brought back from abroad paid for things you couldn’t have earned enough to buy if it killed you. Alternatively, you could keep the money you brought back stashed away and you would know that even if they didn’t pay you for the next six months you wouldn’t die of starvation. Then something would turn up. Well, millions of fellow-citizens had no access to those conferences, those trips abroad or even to those buffets, but in those days of hyper-inflation and long-term debts incurred on the strength of his salary he felt himself far better off than in the days of boring Soviet stability. Lada occasionally went to France, he went to America. They would take off from gleaming overseas airports and land at filthy, godforsaken Boryspol, kiss on their reunion and travel into Kyiv in the darkness of night in dodgy cars, embrace on the back seat, quietly chuckling as they felt for the intimate places where the imported greenbacks were concealed.

And everything was great until Lada got pregnant. He had not expected that this event would make her so angry. She shouted, she sobbed and she uttered unmentionable words. He had already seen Lada in such a rage once before. It was the day before they decided to live together. He had a serious encounter that day with Lada and another girl as well, the one he hugged in the metro when they were singing the future national anthem in chorus. That girl was called Halya. He was slightly confused as to which girl he liked better; actually, there was also a certain charm in the idea of living with the two of them simultaneously. But he had already begun to talk with both of them about the idea that they should move in together for now and see how things went, and that put paid to the charm. Lada had an apartment on Pushkin Street, while Halya rented a studio flat in Vynohradar and would have been happy to share the payments with the young man. He was already staying overnight at both places and at both of them he had a toothbrush on the bathroom shelf.

Then one morning Lada, unable to reach him by phone at his home at Vitryani Hory, did not hesitate to go to Vynohradar and force her way into the flat rented by Halya, who was her friend as well as a classmate on a women’s studies course. A fight broke out and the girls were rolling about on the floor, where blood-stains and tufts of hair soon appeared. He did his best to separate the ferocious girls, but they both pushed him away, telling him to mind his own business. Several days after this colourful brawl he moved in with Lada. And not long after that Halya went off to America.

When Lada became pregnant her aggressiveness was directed towards him. She scratched his face and tried to grab him by the hair. It was all he could do to restrain her.

“Well, after all you are twenty eight, so why not?” he said, all docile.

“What about you going round with the bulge instead of me!”

“But that’s impossible! I’ll be the breadwinner!”

“Clever, aren’t you, you men! I suppose you’ll go to a building site or get hold of some goods to sell! You’ll earn money doing what you enjoy. You’ll write your articles, speak at conferences, organise summer schools. While I go around with the bulge! Then I’ll be in labour! Then I’ll have to shove out my tits for it!”

“But it’s just one child… you have to have it sometime…you said so yourself…”

“And just when I have the chance of a great women’s studies placement! Any cow can give birth. But you just try writing a project that gets you selected out of a hundred applicants!”

“Not only have I tried it, but I’ve done it! And I’m told I have a good chance of getting a scholarship to spend a year in the States!”

“And you would be off there without me?”

“If we finally got married, you could come as well.”

He didn’t actually know why no doctor would give Lada an abortion at that time, which meant that her pregnancy became a harsh reality, not some vague probability. Grandfather Vasyl was the only one who accepted it positively. Grandmother Nina supported her daughter, saying she too once gave birth to Lada, complicating her life, and she still hadn’t resolved matters. On top of that she is getting lumbered with a grandson, one she isn’t prepared to lovingly embrace.

Normal life was over. From now on, every day was a nightmare. Madame Nebuvaiko could burst into the bedroom of the future parents to ask whether they had arranged for the move to Eugene’s parents’ house yet. Let them retire and look after the little one. She and Vasyl Tarasovych couldn’t possibly cope with that. They had supported the young couple for some time and now it was the turn of the other side of the family. Eugene couldn’t recognise his mother-in-law, who until recently had been tolerant, who hadn’t ever interfered in Eugene and Lada’s life; the spaciousness and convenient layout of the flat on Pushkin Street had been conducive to that. His parents in their two-room high-rise flat on the outskirts would find it much harder to be tolerant.

Eugene was beginning to seriously consider the option of escaping to his parents’ place –without Lada and the child, of course. He was fed up of these rows. He needed a marriage like this like a hole in the head. Anyway, he and Lada weren’t officially married, which would actually make life simpler for both of them later on. Meanwhile, a convenient incident occurred. He saw Lada in a café on the Khreshchatik with some man. As it subsequently turned out, it was Thierry. Eugene and Lada did not live in a world where a man raises merry hell if he spots his wife in a café with some bloke. But after living on Pushkin Street for a few months in an atmosphere of daily hell-raising, he crudely expressed doubts about his paternity, slammed the door behind him, dropped the key in and returned to his parents’ house. He subconsciously thanked Lada’s feminist leanings which meant she never wanted them to run the family finances jointly, as he took with him the greenbacks he had brought back from his trips to America.

His parents were not at all pleased at his return. They enjoyed very much living on their own in their two-room flat. The very first night at home he was awoken by their disgruntled whispering — “Quiet, I don’t think he’s asleep.” The honeymoon was over, so to speak. In the morning they started heaping ignominy on their son:

“You rat! Running away from your pregnant wife!”

Then he said he would bring his pregnant wife home. Which immediately calmed his parents down; they were now more understanding of their son’s situation. Unlike him, they took the ‘he isn’t our child’ scenario to be a proven fact rather than something hypothetical.

“Why should we retire only to give ourselves all that hassle, fussing over your slapper Lada’s child fathered by goodness knows who?”

“That’s the daughters of party bosses for you! You should have found a less pretentious girl!”

“Yes, we always told you so!”

Eugene was informed of the birth of Myroslav. He went round to the house, held the baby in his arms for three minutes — it looked much the same as those that others of his age were gradually starting to have. Then grandmother Nina took the little one away and went out with him. Lada deposited a sack full of books at his feet; they must have been his, because he was disgustingly gratified.

Grandfather Vasyl named the boy Myroslav, because in Ukrainian this name meant he brought peace (
myr
) and fame (
slava
) to the family. As he and Lada were not legally married, Eugene signed the necessary papers, acknowledging the child as his and giving him his surname, so the new entry in the Ukrainian register of births read: Myroslav Evgenovych Samarsky.

But Eugene Samarsky did not return to the Nebuvaikos’ home. For sure, if he had made a serious effort to care for the little one they would have taken him back at Pushkin Street. But he didn’t feel like nursing the baby any more than Lada did. All the more so since he held a trump card, albeit a fake one — doubts over the paternity. Actually, he wasn’t in any doubt about his paternity and he could even say exactly when it had happened, to within a week. Lada had been to France six months previously; that was where she met Thierry. But she returned to Eugene’s open arms. Something might have taken place between her and Thierry at that time. But the Frenchman was in no way responsible for the birth of Myroslav.

Thierry and Lada began corresponding; he sent his letters to the main post office, to be collected as
poste restante
. This was an epistolary flirtation. Lada hadn’t yet made up her mind, as everything would be decided by her trip to the feminism summer school in Belgium that Thierry was also to attend. At that time Lada was proud that she had not accepted any money from Thierry, when he had had invited her to visit him and offered to pay her fare. No, as an independent woman, she would travel to Europe if it was paid for with her own hard-earned cash, or by some organisation, but not if it was paid for by men. Then there was suddenly this pregnancy and Eugene’s decision to go to America for a year. Any modern woman would go mad and lash out at a man who behaved so arrogantly. She was quite distraught, and she booked a telephone call to Thierry at that main post office. He came over and comforted her, saying that the main thing was for her to be taken care of. But he was staying put. He would have to get a divorce; unlike Lada, he was legally married.

Later on, after she and Thierry had finally sorted everything out, grandfather Vasyl said he wouldn’t let them have Myroslav. They could produce French children, but Myroslav would remain Ukrainian. He and grandmother Nina were still young and they would bring up the son that Nina had been reluctant to have, after Lada.

Dad had turned so many sensible Ukrainians into informers that, following Ghandi’s theory, he felt obliged to bring up at least one in a different environment.

“Was it all so serious?”

“It certainly was!” said Lada, naming one of their shared friends, and when Eugene expressed his great surprise she said she had known that young man before the great changes. But that was a quite different story; the time wasn’t ripe in Ukraine to go into that yet.

“But you were always fond of your father,” said Eugene, who well remembered Lada sitting on her father’s lap, with her arms round his neck, burying her fingers in his hair.

“I love him now too, and I miss him,” replied Lada.

“Do you miss him more than the little one?”

“What about you — who do you miss more in that America of yours? Your son or your father?” asked Lada in reply.

This conversation took place in Thierry’s house in the Camargue, where they were celebrating Myroslav’s fifth birthday. That was the second time Eugene had seen his son. Grandmother Nina had brought the dear chubby-cheeked lad to see his mother and his French stepfather. Nina looked rejuvenated, elegant and amicable; she had left her shrew’s mask back home in Pushkin Street, hidden away somewhere in a cupboard of Soviet provenance. Grandfather Vasyl had stayed behind to look after the house. Eugene never saw him again.

Eugene had come with Dounia. By then he had received a US residence permit, so he could travel anywhere in the world. Everyone was pleased, everything was sorted out, everything was fine. Little Myroslav recited short poems in French, English and Ukrainian, to the rapturous delight of everyone present. Thierry told Eugene, in English, that his house hadn’t seen such a cordial gathering since the late 17
^th
century. Incidentally, at that time he had not yet definitively acquired legal ownership of that house from his ex-wife, Lada’s predecessor, so it looked as though it would be sold. However, eventually things worked out differently for Thierry’s former wife, and Lada became the legal owner of a unique example of Baroque architecture.

Everything turned out well for Eugene as well. Or almost everything. Not exactly as he wanted, but well enough. Unlike Lada, although he had come to enjoy foreign travel, he never dreamed of emigrating. But fate was to decree otherwise, so it could not be helped, even if he had displayed three times as much vital determination.