{seven o'clock, wandering around the block}
Somehow this story is exactly, precisely August to me, and also perfectly encapsulates and expresses this strange nostalgic sadness I have been feeling.
*
“Can you see me?”
“Yes, I can see you. You are so pale.”
“You cold?”
“No. You?”
“In the morning I have a flight to catch.”
“What? Really?”
“In the morning.”
“Since I’ve been with you, I’ve never been able to understand when you’re joking and when you’re being serious.”
“Where are your eyes? Aren’t you ashamed to talk like this?”
“It wasn’t enough...”
“Don’t talk about it.”
“Put your arms around me...”
*
The row of carts stretched to the river. On the last wagon, on the sacks, a girl stood in a blue-flecked dress of white linen. Behind her, the sun was setting, but it looked as if it were rising.
“Boys, take me for a ride!”
We were already in the boat, I was sitting with the oars on the yellowish water, where the sun was setting as if it were rising.
Pavlo called:
“And where is your old man?”
“Which one?”
“Yours!”
“Dad? Over near the mill.”
“Then come here, we’ll take you.”
I turned the boat to the bank, and gave her my hand. Something flashed, blinding us with a deadly-violet light that illuminated our faces. One of the wires between the poles over the river had dipped into the water.
“It split! The poor devils! It couldn’t have been insulated properly. And that’s all...” mumbled Dmytro, holding onto the girl with his grey stare.
“Don’t rock the boat, don’t rock it!”
“Come off it! Don’t be afraid, or we’ll take you back.”
“Then you better toss me. Row to the bank!” She gazed back at me. “I can’t swim.”
“I can’t swim either, so what?”
“What, you can’t?”
“I can’t. I’m afraid of water.”
“In our village, there is no stream, no pond. Actually, there was once a stream, but they started to drain the bank below the cabbages, it died away. It disappeared somewhere. Now there is neither stream nor cabbages.”
“Poor devils!”
“And where are you from?” Pavlo was pouring himself some horilka[1].
“You know Three-oaks? It’s three kilometres from there.”
“Yes, we know it. Hold on, Vasyl!”
“Pavlo, maybe you should’ve first offered something to our lady? What’s your name?”
“Nastya. But, nothing for me. You go ahead, drink.” She took a glass from Pavlo and passed it to me at the oars.
“Cheers, Nastya.”
“To your health. You want a cucumber, or an onion?”
“Cucumber.”
The girl rinsed a cucumber, and I took a bite from her hand. She salted it, and I took another bite, and another from her hands.
“We had tons of cherries this year, a whole bogful!” But her mention of the cherries was in vain: I didn’t ask for a second cucumber, and she quieted. Only she couldn’t keep her hand still – she placed it on her knee, then on the edge of the boat, and finally dipped it in the water. The sun was setting near her hand, in the amber water.
I said: “Let’s stop near the island, and sit and play some cards.”
“Row on!”
“Do you play, Nastya?”
“Cards? I do. In pairs, or alone. Perhaps, another cucumber?”
“Sure.”
She picked out the largest cucumber, and I took a bite from her golden, dripping hand. Water dripped from her elbow onto my bare foot. Nastya lifted her elbow and droplets fell onto the barrel of the rifle.
“What’s this, your gun?”
“A gun.”
“Last winter the rabbits nibbled ten hectares of apple trees.”
“And you lost the orchard?”
“It was totalled. Maybe a hundred trees survived.”
“Poor devils! Couldn’t wrap up the trees.”
“There wasn’t time. The head of the kolhos[2] was changing.” Nastya laughed. Her dark blue teeth shone delicately in the evening sun.
*
“You aren’t tired yet?”
“No. I must always have you near me. Before, I used to think that I simply couldn’t stand you in large doses. Now, when you weren’t here, I was quietly going crazy.”
“My love, you’ve always been so serious.”
“But not so much that we can’t joke about it, now.”
“True.”
“Do you remember him?”
“Who?”
“Well, the one, as they say, you ‘won me’ from?”
“No. Absolutely not. Not one thing.”
“I trust you in everything. I just don’t know if I can separate lies from truth. I’m afraid –
that I want to believe you, but on the other hand, he was a filthy liar, the one whose face you don’t remember, so now I can’t believe that everything’s good. Or really, I can, but I don’t want to, you know?”
“I understand.”
“And above all, know this. I don’t want to be confused, and I don’t want to believe you for the sake of it being easier and more peaceful. So you mustn’t lie to me, understand?”
“You know me! If I don’t tell lies, I’m not myself. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, lying is easier than speaking the truth. So I’m lying to you. Listen: I have to take a trip.
This time, it’s going to be long, and far. We won’t see each other for a year.”
“A year?”
“A year.”
“And where will you find yourself, my poor thing?”
“Working, dear one, working.”
“You’re leaving me.”
“Today we’ve got summer. So there’s autumn, winter, spring...”
“When we met, I decided to be for you a wife ‘with whom you’d have no trouble’. But you see, I’m neither a wife ‘whom he love’, nor ‘with whom he’s married’, or even a woman ‘with whom he is living.”
“You decided well.”
“I didn’t want you to have to make excuses for yourself, to throw yourself into love, more than you actually were. I wanted that you be with me as you are with yourself – more yourself, even, than you are alone.”
“When we met, I decided to win you away from the one whose face I don’t remember. I remember only you. I was intrigued: Would I win you, or not? The first evening I didn’t succeed, but the second evening I got you.”
“No, love. For me, it was the first evening. Certainly, you fall in love easily, and you can love every time like it’s the first, it’s this I understood that evening and night.”
“Yes, that’s it. What’s this you understood?”
“All the time we’ve had together, from that first evening and night right up until today, I’ve had this feeling that you’re checking on me, and that you don’t love me. You observe me. Often enough, I feel like a rabbit. So, I haven’t become a wife ‘with whom you’d have no trouble’. You see how...”
“I see. And it’s probably true.”
“Don’t run away. Be blunt with me.”
“Maybe, that’s enough about feelings?”
“It’s like you’ve slapped my face.”
“Not bad. Haven’t we got anything to eat? I’m so famished, I’m seeing stars. What have you got there?”
“Macaroni.”
“Well, there’s a meal, God help her. Still, pass it over here.”
“There’s also some of yesterday’s borshch.”
“I don’t want your borshch. You don’t know how to cook borshch. Firstly, you overcook the cabbage. You must put in the cabbage the very last so it stays hard and wiry. And the potatoes must be put in whole, not cut up. And as well as the seasonings, you need to put in some onions. Also whole. They’re sweet when cooked. Well, did I hit you hard?”
“It really doesn’t hurt.”
“ ‘Doesn’t hurt’! If you don’t learn to cook borshch, you’re lost: you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Clear?”
“Clearer than clear.”
“So, give me some macaroni and some of your old leftovers, I’ll eat it, so you won’t need to make such borshch anymore.”
“And who will cook for you on your trip?”
“You actually think that there won’t be anyone?”
“No, dear, there are women more beautiful and wiser that I am – yes, there are. Nearer, dearer, yes. More desirable, oh yes! Only there are none like me, just as there are none like you, understand? That I know, and that’s why I’m so worried by this trip. And I’m concerned about something else...”
“Tell me quickly what’s worrying you, I’m holding my breath! And pass the salt, this macaroni is like grass.”
“Wait. You can laugh later. Yes, I’m worried about something else. I can’t recall the name of the village. That summer we visited old grave mound. We made measurements and surveyed the exterior. Some old men came by, and one told me this: He was digging in his own garden near this mound, and dug up a sealed clay pot. He was overjoyed, he thought it was treasure. He opened it – it was liquid, dark and thick with a gorgeous fragrance. His old buddies came and with his wife they drank it. It was sweet and potent, they were on their knees. They drank it. It was wine. Later, they began to fear they might die. They didn’t. And so as not to test fate, they poured it out, rinsed it, and uncle then filled it with kvas[3]. And later the archaeologists came, and discovered that the pot was three hundred years old... Imagine! These people didn’t know what a rare, old wine they were drinking... So rare....”
“You’ve got a point. But, as you know, I find horilka superior.”
“Don’t evade me. Tell me so: “My darling, there is something in your arguments that won’t let me agree with you.”
“My darling, there is something in your arguments that won’t let me agree with you.”
*
The island was just your ordinary little island; it lived there in the middle of the river, between steep, sun-blanched banks amid its own miniature African jungle of waxy henbane, vigorous thistles, long-maned dogwood, pigweed and marvellous explosions of wildflowers. They shone like palmated, white stars over the pedestrian population of the island and gazed over the world expectant, and uncertain.
Few ever disturbed the island with their visits. Sometimes a gathering of ducks would approach the island, quacking below the hungry dry banks before quickly swimming downstream, into the kingdom of duckweed and willow branches.
“Here.”
With her long, solid legs the girl stepped up on the bank. Her eyes glanced around at the flowers, and quietly passed on to me. The sleepy sunshine fell down onto her shoulders, and her face looked dark against the sun.
I said:
“We’ll eat dinner with the flowers, yes?”
“Shall I go and pick some?”
“Go, but don’t be long.”
“I’ll be just a moment,” she said, not moving from her place. “I’ll be quick,” she said again, and her shadow passed my long evening shadow into the golden henbane.
“Vasyl, look, look!” the boys shouted, grabbing their rifles and crouching down. “Sit, sit down!”
Two ducks were flying our way from the mill. They were far away, and high up, but the sudden whistling of their wings gave our movements a primal instinctiveness, as if we were still neanderthals.
A grey ferociousness shone in Dmytro’s eyes, Pavlo couldn’t sit still, and so he crept off into the pigweed, and then he moved slowly upward through the weeds to the dyke where the ducks were descending. Dmytro rushed after him, drove something sharp into his foot, twitched his leg like a trussed rooster, and disappeared back into the shaggy pigweed.
My rifle looked at me imploringly from the boat, and if it had legs, it would have run after the boys crying: “Wait for me! Those ducks are for me, bang-bang, God help me!”
But here the scent of white flowers came out of the henbane. It came quiet and radiant, brushing my face so calm and light, just touching, then glancing deeply over the dark water, turning it white. The water silvered, shrugged her blue shoulders, and the sun’s rays, caressed in the white breeze, became saturated in whiteness. They floated fragrantly in the dove-coloured evening, over the white houses and above silver Synyukha.
I glanced at the rifle, but I didn’t pick it up. I walked toward the white flowers. My heart was clear and thin as the air, although somewhere in the depths of this clarity awakened a golden trumpet of anxiety. Its empty, sad sound burned in my chest. True, it was late: the trumpet blared in anguish, and the sweet alarm led me along its path, my heart leading me down shoeless and innocent.
The sun was setting as if it were rising, but layers of darkness streamed in the nostalgic air and the world looked like a zebra. Suddenly the girl appeared standing straight before me. In her hands was a bunch of white flowers.
I looked at her between the flowers, and between those white flowers she embraced me. There was a smell of lupines and water. Our heads fell out of the sinking sun.
[1] a grain alcohol, much like whisky or brandy. it burns.
[2] collective farm
[3] a sourish-sweet drink of malt and fermented black rye bread
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