The sky is high. The Czar is far.
I found this collage here. The text is Ukrainian. The author goes by vaenn. Please click to enlarge.
Maryxmas’ journal, by the way, is one of the most important contributions to the Ukrainian blogosphere, in my not-so-humble opinion. She’s not celebrating today. She feels sorry for both “those who lived to see Victory, and those who did not live.”
I, on the other hand, do want to celebrate, like I used to with my grandfather, Major General Pyotr Pavlovich Nistratov.
Everyone who suffered in the Great War.
On this day, my maternal great-grandmother screamed and tore at her chest in the narrow bed with the curtains drawn – her son would not return. It was embarrassing to celebrate anything. But my great-grandmother is long gone and, we hope, at peace, because even her picture in the silver frame smiles differently, or so I’m told.
We still have Volodya’s letters from the front, they stopped coming at Stalingrad.
Theirs not to reason why…
My grandfather always told me that combat slowed time – stretched it painfully thin across every part of his body. My paternal grandmother said every part of dead bodies she was forced to bury as a child hurt to look at – you weren’t safe looking at the hands, nor the boots, nor the matted hair. You weren’t safe anywhere, and you would never be safe – although time went on, children were born, and the old bones slept, and they dreamed.
The picture above was featured as a poster in the legendary 1970’s miniseries – “Can’t Change the Meeting Place” (the best translation that IMDB could come up with, apparently) – set in criminal-ridden Moscow right after the War. The miniseries featured Vladimir Visotskii and Vladimir Konkin, among a great supporting cast, most of whom are gone now as well. Notice the foreign flags, etc.
No one, save for my parents, really gave a damn about whether or not I’d have a hard time “fitting in,” “perserving [my] identity,” and “negotiating [my] cultural traditions in an alien environment.”
No one asked my parents as to whether or not teaching me sex ed went against their core beliefs (well, it didn’t, really, but whatever).
No one wanted to “embrace” the “diversity” that I supposedly represented (although people did ask me to “say something in Russian” a whole lot).
No one patted me on the back and applauded me for being “different.”
No one “invited” me to “dialogue.” If anything, I invited myself (and haven’t really shut up since – unless you count the times I’ve inserted my pedicured footsie straight into my mouth; I find that pink toenail polish does make those situations slightly less ugly).
NO ONE INVITED ME TO THEIR COUNTRY CLUB EITHER (unless it was a pool-party, ha! As if I’d fall for such obvious condescension!).
No one excused behaviour they perceived as odd with “mutliculturalism.” Even now – the fact that I wear make-up to the supermarket is perceived as totally weird by some of my fellow progressives (maybe not being conspicuously “ethnic” has something to do with this; whatever – a lot of women back home in Kiev do it, and I find it brightens up those drab toilet-paper aisles).
Since I’ve more or less settled in, I’ve discovered that no one cares as to whether or not I will explode in righteous fury at films such as “Blades of Glory” – you know, that slice of evil Western propaganda that suggests that all Ukrainains “have guns” and “smell like soup.” I mean, people were so upset for Persia and “300”! And for me – nothing. Not even a snarkier-than-usual review in the NYT. Not even a mention of these “gun-weary times” or something.
Should I be pissed? Dump a bowl of borsch on Will Ferrell? Sic my pet bear on John Heder? Start an aggrieved Facebook group?
Should I make up for my miserable middle school years by organizing, oh, I don’t know – the Ukrainian Liberation Front (ULF – other former “pinkos” welcome, provided we swap pirozki recipes), and chasing down the oppressors (whichever ones we can find) with pitchforks? Should I find someone to sue? Or just settle for burning my J. Crew catalogue?
Decisions, decisions.
I think about career. My grandmother was a successful physician and administrator who ended her working days after well over 50 years, more than half a century of infectious diseases and bureaucracies.
I think about old age. I know how much she misses work – the starched white coat, the nurses flipping on the electric kettle first thing in the morning, and the satisfying hiss announcing the first cup of tea before the first round of paperwork. I know how much she misses her health – a good hip and a good night of sleep in particular.
I think about femininity. Because ain’t she a woman and a lovely one at that? She laughs openly about getting custom-made bras for those enormous bosoms of hers, and she’s never once allowed anyone to make her feel dumb for them, or for her lipstick and skirts, for her chignon and lace-trimmed shawl. She never let beauty, or the loss of beauty, define the inner sanctum of her agile mind, but neither did she shun the beautiful, or hide it in shame.
My grandmother fell in love with my grandfather on a tennis court. They both wore white on that day, as she recalls, the white of snowdrops and first and last love. They didn’t need their parents to mediate their relationship for them, because they were both adults; their childhood ended where WWII began. My grandmother didn’t beg for daddy’s permission to live her life, because my great-grandfather trusted his daugher to choose her own way. My grandfather, an engineer, was man enough to not be threatened and appalled by a talented working woman; and man enough to satisfy her, as she tells me now with a wink and a nudge.
Oh the gentlemen are talking in another room,
And I listen, still and silent, like the peering moon.
Shadows cross the lick of light beneath my door,
While their boots knock ditties on the wooden floor.Through the wall I hear them singing
Of a woman who is far,
Of the march of the cossacks,
And the red eastern star.And before my dreams will claim me
I will hear their glasses clink;
“Here’s to home, and health, and future.”
“And to me,” I think.
I edited this from the original to better reflect what I was trying to get at when I first wrote down this memory (because it’s more of a memory than a poem, for sure) – the sense of being excluded, while, at the same time, the sweetness and familiarity of these male adults in the next room.
I had originally conceptualized a poem that did not rhyme, and was a whole lot more serious and probing. But the more I thought about it – the more I realized that the sleepy subject matter should be framed as a lullaby. And so it goes.
Natalia A. 