I
OH SISTER, MY SISTER
TRANSLATED BY HALYNA HRYN
You should have had a sister—say four, no, five years younger. Disembodied female names circled above your entire childhood, switching places with each other, calling out to each other—you didn’t know how to connect them, and you didn’t dare give them to your dolls: they were not dolls’ names, not borrowed from living people, but rather from somewhere beyond. It was as if someone was trying to reach you through the moan of a name that bobbed up, unbeckoned, settled into your inner ear for a long, long time (all these names moaned, the one repeated most often was Ivánna)—someone wanted to be named. In second grade you had to transfer to a new school, and that was the first time you thought of a change of place as liberation, as breaking into a sphere where you could correct your own biography into that which should have been: you told your new classmates that you had a little sister, Ivánka, who didn’t go to school yet, and thus inadvertently did what your parents lacked the courage to do: you summoned to life a girl’s fair-haired head of fluffy curls lit up by sunshine. Later they would have inevitably turned darker, just as yours had. But your little lie was discovered, and once your daily verbal singing-brook dried up, its small current being the only place where Ivánka could move (you’d tell your desk mate in the morning, yawning wearily, “Ivánka was so cranky yesterday, wouldn’t fall asleep—we stayed up playing until ten”)—the fair-haired head of fluffy curls was also extinguished, forever falling out of that dimension where people grow and change.
Thus she was killed for the second time.
Because in fact you did have a sister. She had gills and a curled-up short tail instead of feet—like a small crayfish or a seahorse. A tadpole of a girl with a broad forehead like everyone else in your family. Her eyes, probably, had not opened yet, because actually, there wasn’t anything to look at: it was dark all around her. And moist. And warm. Her cells wanted one thing: to divide, unstoppably and constantly—inside, where she was, it must feel the way it does when your body is racked by involuntary shivers, yet without that panic of weakness that generally besets us at such times, because we have already learned that the body must be obedient. But in there, when the soul is only beginning to grow a body, the persistent tremor of quickly multiplying cells must feel like an incessant, quivering joy of arrival, of being carried, swiftly and assuredly, through a dark tunnel toward the light. And that’s why you could not shake the idea of fear—the first and last fear felt by your sister in this world, of whom there remained, like clothes on the shore left by someone who drowned, only the distant echo of a name (Ivánna, or perhaps another -anna) and an uncertain visage of a four-year-old girl’s fair fluffy curls lit up by the sun, of the fear that came from the outside, that tossed and tumbled that entire whale in which she blissfully rocked like a tiny Jonah—a terrifying push, a noiseless infrasound of a sliding avalanche, and the surrounding darkness suddenly no longer a bubbly refuge, but pumping danger with such deadly intensity that the girl-tadpole thrashed in panic and would have screamed, but she had no lungs yet for screaming, was only the thin petal of endoderm that vibrated wildly, in vain—it was too soon, too soon!—while all around fear persisted, pure fear, formless and omnipotent; she thrashed about in its very nexus, blindly poking in all directions looking for a safe haven, because she still had to build up her tiny body, her frail arms, her skinny limp legs with tiny curled-out feet, like a frog’s. Behind that fear something else was swiftly raising itself, something like a large lid designed for pressing down on a quashed tiny hot lump that didn’t even have a voice yet, nor any way of giving a sign down that tunnel to let them know she was there—I’m here already, right over here, just let me build up my body a bit more! . . . You, of course, knew nothing about such things then; you were five and must have been swaddling your doll in the living room on the couch, when you suddenly heard muted choked noises from the kitchen, where your parents sat talking after dinner, barking noises—noises made with a woman’s voice you did not recognize, because how could you know back then that a woman’s voice could produce them?—and a second later your mother’s cry sliced the air; yes, it was Mother’s, but what a different, sinister, inner deep-well cry—it would be branded into your memory for the rest of your life:
“Bastards! Animals! Damn them!”
Whispers, Father’s hushed persuading voice—like shuffling on an audiotape. You burst into the kitchen, and the sight (close up!) hit you between the eyes—your mother’s wet, red face, strands of hair plastered onto her forehead, and that was all that was bestowed on you from that episode: your role of an observer, a helpless witness that stands to the side with her hands occupied by a doll, or a stack of books.
The books—there was another distinct memory, from before that night—you couldn’t remember how much earlier—when men you did not know filled your apartment without taking off their coats, which instantly made the space feel cramped, and, with their backs to your parents, began digging through the bookcases and Daddy’s desk while Mom and Dad sat on the couch and said nothing, only whispering to each other from time to time. After some time (one hour, two? three?) you got bored sitting around like that and snuck away to your corner to fill your lap with books, Ukrainian Folk Riddles on top, in hardback with a dreamy little boy on the blue cover. You asked if you could be excused to go—at least on the balcony if you were not allowed outside—which was a rather rational thing to do for a five-year-old; you did seem to be about the only person in that one-act play to behave rationally, because, for example, your dad, whom they intercepted at the entrance to the building as he was returning from the institute, so he was the one to ring the doorbell and it ended up looking like he was the one who brought the men with him, when his wife opened the door, could only muster, completely shocked, “Natalia, look who joined me . . . ,” as if indeed these were guests dropping by for a cup of tea, and it’s not even hard to imagine how your mother, who was younger than you are now, your slender and warm mom, who always smelled nice, could, letting the man into the hallway, stutter out in reply, “Nice to meet you.” And it was only then that they presented their IDs. (When many years later, in another building, they stopped you just like that, in the hallway, you, without skipping a beat, as if you’d been waiting for them these twenty years, demanded to see their identity papers, although, if you really think about it, what the hell did you need them for?—but, perhaps, the whole point was that back then, when you were five years old, nobody identified themselves to you, nobody said, “Darka, please meet Mr. So-and-So,” nobody felt any need to explain anything to you, to make those men face you and explain who they were. In fact, the faces they have are those stiff folding ID cards with fine print on the left flap, which you wouldn’t have had time to read anyway because as soon as they open it, they instantly make that all-powerful piece of cardboard disappear again, smooth as magicians, as you were able to ascertain for yourself twenty years later.) At first it was only their backs, grey-coated backs without the slightest interest in your existence, but in the presence of which it was nonetheless forbidden to leave the apartment or move around it as you wished—even tiptoeing to the toilet occurred under their supervision—and only once did something almost like a face shoot out of that grey blockading density at you, and it didn’t really look at you because its eyelids were lowered—and that was exactly when you were standing there with your armful of books, topped by the Ukrainian Folk Riddles in hardcover with the drawing of the little blue boy lost in thought, with a finger on his forehead, and you asked your mother if you could at least go out to the balcony if you weren’t allowed to go outside; that’s when this almost-a-face said in Russian, “Let’s have a look at your books, dyevochka,” in a voice that also didn’t really have room for you, contained no indication, in fact, that it was addressing you. And you were not dyevochka, your name was Darka, so you stood there, surprised, on the caramel-colored parquet floor still sticky from the varnish (renovations just finished!) with your armful of books, staring, chin up at that almost-a-face, until your mom, your slender and warm mom, who always smelled so nice and who had been quietly rocking your baby sister inside her for three months already, wrapped her arms around you, made a violet-scented woolen cocoon of her sweater sleeves around you as if trying to absorb you back inside of her, where in fact there was no more room for you, and said, with a gentle breath into your ear, “Why don’t you go show that nice man what you’ve been reading.” Yes, why don’t you go and tell him all about it, or maybe even stand up tall there and recite a little poem for the guests, why don’t you—your mother’s instinct gave her the perfect strategy to domesticate the nice man, translate him into a familiar language, like that monster mutt who once chased you in a park and you got so scared, and ran, and cried, and tripped, falling to the sound of your own screams into the grass, while Mother, who had already calmed the dog down, laughed and brought him over to you: Look, silly, the doggy just wanted to play with you—the dog stood by, looking guilty—Don’t be afraid, he’s not scary at all, why don’t we go up and pet him. The strange thing was, this seemed to work on the KGB guy as well as it did on you, because when he returned the books to you after rummaging through them for a few minutes (squeezing the covers and spines carefully to see whether anything was hidden there), he braved playing along in the role so casually foisted upon him by this pale, deathly frightened woman, handed the books back to you as if he really were a nice man, awkwardly, like someone who had never had anything to do with children, and said, “Here you go, dyevochka . . . you got some nice books there.” The books were all shuffled into a different order, and you confidently pulled the blue dreamy boy to the top once again; however, something was no longer quite right—something sweet and pleasing, the books’ promise, had been extruded, removed, and you did not feel like taking them out on the balcony anymore. You held them in your arms, and this became your most precise, your only unequivocally clear memory of that September day: you are standing there, and your hands are occupied with your books.