Tell me—was sex with your husband good?”—“Very good!”—she blurted out truthfully, like a slap in the face—he practically curled into a balclass="underline" too bad, she no longer had the strength to force those patent phrases through her throat, to pretend, swallowing insult after insult, to brazenly demonstrate, like a whore for money, how very all-out cool he is (“You slut, dumping your tits out for all to see!” he hissed as though a bee had just bitten him when during their final days of communal habitation he caught sight of her half-naked body, angry at himself that he could still, against all common sense, want this woman with whom sex was nothing but mutual torment: “your cunt’s like a vice”—well, you shouldn’t have gone in with a crowbar: hopping under the covers at three in the morning, shoving me around, turning me over on my back, that businesslike manner of sticking your finger in where you’re not invited, that much I can do for myself and a whole lot better than you, more gently; my body defended itself against my own willfulness, oh yeah, fear, so thoughtlessly dismissed by me earlier, appeared out of nowhere, planted itself inside my body and grew: my body sensed something in this man that I could not—meantime I turned myself into a witch, a castrating Megaera with a vice in my loins: ever hear of “no”?!—and that’s when the bellowing of the trapped male would commence: “You know how many women I’ve had!”—Oh fuck your women, all one hundred thousand of them, I couldn’t care less, I don’t need to conquer you, I need to love you—love, can you understand that?!—therefore in her nakedness, we must admit he had a point, there truly was a shamelessness: it was a deliberate and offensive nakedness, that which is not meant to seduce but rather to express contempt—I can cut my toenails in front of you, shave my legs, not rinse the bathtub after I’m done, leaving dark curly hairs on the sides, wash up between my legs, masturbate—and not in the same way as when each such expression of physical liberty is taken as a gift, as one more precious sign of trust that evokes in you a hot torrent of grateful tenderness, not the way it was between us back home during those days when we would meet in unexpected quarters, crawling into some friend’s empty cottage through a window on a cold November night where the temperature was about seven degrees Celsius, drinking cognac in the dark, so as to warm up a little, without taking our coats off, and I was blowing into your rough, frozen hands and hiding them under my sweater because that was the warmest spot, and you both laughed and cried, catching your breath, not able to believe it: “Is this you? Can this really be you?”—that autumn was the autumn of keys; never in my life had I, homeless, carried around so many borrowed keys in my purse at the same time—it seemed as though I jangled with them as I ran, like a merry-go-round pony, attracting all eyes to me, which gave me, like that pony from the fair, an irrepressible desire to neigh happily—and when you, in that home that belonged to some unknown, were boiling water in two huge pots so that I could take a bath, drawing it by pail in the middle of the night from an invisible well in the yard, identifiable only by the occasional splash, while I hung around the doorway in nothing but a housecoat over my naked body feeling no cold; and later, when I locked the bathroom door and saw the soap still foamy after you in the soap dish, standing there gingerly on end the way you had a habit of carefully placing it—so that the water would drain, because mine was always flat on its belly soaking in a puddle—I stood looking at that soap and was so stupidly happy as I could only have been in my childhood, because only then had I had a home, I was tired, my love, I was so tired, and all I wanted was for you to be near me and to lather me up, but you locked me in that room and turned the key and took off somewhere into the night in that car looking for groceries—oh, God damn it, fuck those groceries, my good man, how much life do we really have and how much love that we should be slicing it neatly for breakfast and dinner!). “How many times were you in love?”—“Three,” he counted, shutting his eyes—“this is the fourth.”—“Seems like a few too many for such a short life—three great loves…”—“Why do they have to be great right away”—his eyes laughed and she thawed out with a smile in return—“maybe they were small and mousy—little tiny ones?” Who the hell talks that way about their love, even if it’s been trampled, even if it’s all in the past, even if it’s cut you in half like a truck severs a dog on the road, the way it did me that winter—the flight over the Atlantic: until five in the morning, right up until the taxi came to take me to the airport I waited—for a ring, if not of the doorbell (a thousand times, to exhaustion, my mind rewound the same clip: I open the door and you’re standing in the doorway, barely containing with the corners of your mouth that insanely happy radiance that wants to leap from your face: finally, oh God, take your coat off already, how could you do this to me, you look a mess, so what happened, I’ve been going crazy here!) then at least of the telephone, a word, a voice, the end of a thread that I could catch hold of and keep unraveling from one continent to another, I don’t believe it!—my insides screeched, scalded with grief, I don’t believe it!—the taxi unloaded me into the snowdrift at the entrance to the international flights hall, how empty it was, how dead—a crematorium—the lights of Boryspil at five a.m., destination Devil’s Dead End, the main gateway of the country, haha!—a country hopelessly unconnected to the nervous system that crisscrosses the planet, that thunders day and night, pumping through gigantic ganglions of ports, train terminals, and customs booths teeming streams of activated human neurons, Sheremetevo, JFK, Ben-Gurion, and wherever else I’ve been tossed about, even though all this is vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit and body, but—there is motion, but—there is the animal pursuit of life, the wolf’s bared teeth: another moment and I’ll catch you, grab you by the scruff of the neck!—but in Boryspil, awakened by the desperately echoing click of my high heels, only unfocused, sleepy faces were rising from the luggage piled up along the walls, slowly unfurling their features like nocturnal animals roused from their sleep: as though they lived here, Jewish households in an eternal state of waiting until a crack opens in the border gate and they can scoot out, and so that’s how my country saw me off, the country to which I, when all’s said and done, will return—you betcha, despite the fact that my well-meaning American friends advise me to apply for yet another grant and assure me that my chances are good, I will return, come crawling back to die like a wounded dog, tied to the leash of a language that nobody knows, while you be sure to honor my memory in the Review of Literary Journals, that’s right, and then there’s my article from the year before last in the Partisan Review, which wasn’t entirely stupid either, it was noticed, there was even a response in—wow!—the Times Literary Supplement; but the main point, my friends, you missed anyway, it seemed funny to you and no more: that the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake—I’m here! I’m still alive!—but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own—how the hell are you supposed to get out? She felt herself alive for a moment in Frankfurt where they changed planes: when running blindly down the corridor she ran into two upright-standing border guards, two identically red-haired burly German guys with identical splotchy freckles all over their arms who, checking her out with a healthy youthful curiosity and exchanging good-natured growls in their own language, examined her passport and asked, just for the hell of it, in distilled international English where she was going—to Boston? Oh, it’s very cold there right now, the coldest winter in a hundred years!—“I know,” she said, giving a perfunctory smile like she was striking a soggy match, and, warmed by the animal, purely physical vitality steaming from them she suddenly felt, for the first time in her life, a literal uncontrollable urge to wring her hands: no longer a mere folk-song expression, no!—wring your hands, your white hands, every finger, too; you’ll not find, my dear girl, a Cossack’s love more true—but rather the most urgent, insuppressible physical desire to wrest, with this desperate gesture, her still living body from the tight armor of agony that squeezed her from all sides: Mykola, Mykola, she wrote him later from Cambridge, into thin air, to his local post office for “general delivery” because there was no other address—what are you doing, my love? Why are you turning to dust that which could be such an insanely brilliant—life, passion, a flight of two forever-linked stars through the fin-de-siècle night? Shit, now might be a good time to reread that stuff—the style alone could inspire a fit of hysterical laughter!—School of Medicine! that’s where one should take courses in Ukrainian romanticism, in the psychiatry departments! “You’ll return my letters,” she instructed dryly as they parted, not that she had any great desire to own those letters, what’s over is over, hell with it—but to free from his possession any vestiges of herself that contained even weak signs of life, that still stung and very much so; he turned the lock instantly, raising high his dangerously well-endowed chin (no contest from all the super-sexed Hollywood spermatosauruses): “I wouldn’t think of it. They’re mine”—the only thing that’s yours, sweetheart, is what you’ve painted, and there’s no point fooling yourself: what you can’t get into totally, blindly, over your head, will never become yours. Write down those words, I’m giving you permission, why not. And one more thing, almost forgot: that’s why those loves of yours end up being so small and mousy—the little tiny ones.