Only love protects us from fear. But who (what) will protect love itself from fear?
(And there are more and more sex shops with every year, mechanical devices, oh, these advantages of the technological age, sex over the telephone, they got me that way once, too—at home, in my own home, where did you think: took me for a ride totally, never did find out who it was—at first a female voice disguised as a whisper—I took it to be a friend, a pretty screwed-up gaclass="underline" “Olka? Is that you?”—it was no Olka, as it turned out later, even though that thing seemed to confirm: yeah, me—and they began the scam: I’m in trouble, I’m calling from someone’s apartment: there’s two guys here, they say they want to rape me—either in the bum or in the mouth, there’s one of them coming now, I’m scared, “Where are you? I’ll call the police, give me your address!” but the non-Olka was gone and instead a young male voice, breathing threateningly, came on the line: “You’re her friend, right? You want me to let her go? Then moan for me”—what wouldn’t you do for a dear friend in trouble, it was disgusting—I tried to plug in my sense of humor, it’s okay, it’s like they’re asking you to sing a little song for them, but when finally, in reply to my helplessly painful cry of humiliation [you’re screaming from the abuse and they think it’s from pleasure, or maybe they’re not thinking that at all, maybe your pain is exactly what it takes to make them come?] the male voice abruptly snapped, “Done,” and a busy signal came in on the receiver, short beeps like drops of water from a leaky tap, I, wiping my moist forehead, nonetheless felt—laughs aside—raped: that was a young healthy man on the line, could it be that, damn it, he, too, was afraid of a live woman?)
Fear came early. Fear was passed on in the genes, one was to fear all beyond the immediate family circle—anyone who expressed any degree of interest in you was in fact spying for the KGB to find out what’s really going on at home and then those bad men will come again and put Daddy in prison. Especially suspect were those who tried to strike up “liberal” conversations. Around ninth grade, at the citywide Creative Writing Olympiad she met a whiz kid in big glasses from the math school. He had the skin of a freshly-peeled peach, rare for an adolescent, and glancing at him sideways she could see, behind the abnormally thick lenses, dark feminine eyelashes as thick as silk; and when he laughed, his whole body contracted as often happens with very nervous intellectual boys who aren’t allowed to go out to play by themselves, but are let out only when sitting on a sled bundled up in a wool shawl to well above the bridge of the nose. Such boys inevitably fell in love with her, that much couldn’t be helped, but in spite of it they were avid readers and liked to discuss what they read. And so one day the whiz kid from the math school, holding on to her elbow awkwardly and old-fashionedly (as if with an artificial limb) while he guided her around the slippery spots—it was winter then and the snow-covered sidewalks glistened with treacherous black mirrors—had the indiscretion to ask, by the way, had she read the banned Ukrainian author Vynnychenko? Instantly she felt her head pound: This is it! This is what Mother and Father warned about—and with that shrewd Lenin glint in her eye (she did sense it quite consciously to be Lenin’s), accompanied by oh, such a languorous pause as if to say, okay, let’s play with this, I can see right through you, she replied, “No, can’t say that I have,” and, having waited it out until the whiz kid confessed all he knew—about the democratic Ukrainian republic that waged war on the Soviets, about the Ukrainians living abroad (as she listened, practically swooning at such flirtation with danger, she no longer had the slightest doubt who this was talking to her)—she doused him with a bucket of ice, tapping out each syllable in precise Pioneer Girl fashion (“Attention!” “Right face!” “Forward… march!”) informing him that she hadn’t the slightest interest in émigré counterrevolutionary trash, and at a time when the international situation is as tense and complicated as it is and demands our vigilance, she has always been outraged by young people who listen to Voice-of-this and Voice-of-that radio broadcasts—he, staring wildly at her with both pairs of eyes seemed to forget all about breathing (“Little hedgehog, where was your head? Forgot to breathe, and now you’re dead!”)—that’ll teach him! She was more pleased with herself than ever before: her first test of maturity and she passed it without a hitch! No, she had always said she would never want to relive her adolescence—those desperate, unconscious attempts to break out—out of the dull concrete walls, out of the family nest choked inside, amid billows of pungent fear, miasmic haze, where one false move, one ill-considered revelation, and you splash into the murky waters to your death. On the radio that Father listened to every evening, squeezing ear-first into the speaker that sputtered with a deafening scrape and occasionally burst into a sharp, dangerously increasing metallic whistle—on the radio came memoirs of the dying Snegirov, lists of surgically removed intestines, ruptured kidneys and bladders, insulin shocks, forcibly inserted feeding tubes, puddles of blood and vomit on cement floors—summary reports from the slaughterhouse, a carving of carcasses: Marchenko, Stus, Popadiuk, every few weeks more names, young and handsome, youths not much older than yourself with thick manes of hair brushed back stiffly, you dreamed of them the way your girlfriends dreamed of movie stars, any day now he’ll come out of prison bearing scars and a mature masculinity, and you’ll meet—except that they never came out and the airwaves groaned with their agony, while Father sat on the other side listening helplessly, year after year, ever since the day he himself was thrown out of work, just sat in the house and listened to the radio. There was no breaking out—all around nothing but Communist Youth League meetings, political education classes, and the Russian language. One only ventured out there (like a four-year-old to a stool in the middle of the room to recite a poem for aunties and uncles) in order to reproduce, in ringing tones and tape-recorder accuracy, all that had been learned from them and them alone, and only this guaranteed safety—a Gold Medal on leaving high school, a Diploma of Red Distinction at university, and then ever so carefully along the tightrope—my God, all the garbage she had let pass through her brain!—and at age fifteen tumbling right into a depression, complaining of mysterious stomach pains, Daddy ran himself off his feet dragging her from doctor to doctor who found nothing wrong, for days she tossed in bed crying hysterically from the slightest sharp word—Daddy’s girl, apple of his eye, it was he who hovered, wings outstretched, over her first menstruation, calmly explaining that this is very good, this is what happens to all girls, just lie and rest, don’t get up. He brought her thinly sliced apples laid out on a saucer, like for a real sick girl, and so she lay there, curled up and very still, frightened by this new feeling—on the one hand shame at her secret being