A Russian Story Read Free

great deal depends on sexuality. Almost everything! The Old Russians knew this long before Freud. But sexuality does not mean pornography, because then it would have no depth; it would be purely banal! The Russian classical writers understood this just as well as the French. Even better, actually.”
    “Dounia, what could you say about the relationship between Khoma Brut and the damsel?” *
    “Oh, those are your Ukrainian lands! Nothing is quite as it should be over there! I’ll just need some help from Eugene on this.”
    “So funding is available for Gogol, and not only at Harvard?” Lada put on a clever show of being keenly interested.
    “So you are not working yet?” He interrupts Lada, fed up of her mockery of the artless Dounia. Somehow everyone — Lada, Thierry and Myroslav — finds it necessary to make fun of his wife.
    “Better call me
Traven ** ,
” the young man told his stepmother when she shortened
Myros
to
My
and Dounia again failed to grasp what the cross-linguistic puns were about. She knew Gogol’s play
The Inspector General
by heart, though.
    But Lada doesn’t work! She doesn’t work, she stays at home! She is a little housewife in a big house, that’s all! She had always dreamed of marrying a Frenchman, so she didn’t want Myroslav, but she had no wish to be concerned with merely choosing curtains to match the wallpaper! She wanted to teach at the university! She wanted to master the Provençal language, which no one in Provence knows. All her classmates at the Faculty of French Philology who married Frenchmen had long since divorced. They had dragged their former spouses off from Ukraine to France. That was usually the case if they had learned to speak French. But look what happened to me! Yes, that’s right! All the feminism of my youth went to pot, just like your love for Ukraine!”
    “Like our love.”

2. The best years of his life…
    To concede that those few years at the turn of the eighties to the nineties were the best years of his life would mean accepting that nothing good would ever happen in his life from then on. He didn’t want that.
    So when was it that he had ceased to be sincere in his life? When he lost Lada? Or when he lost Ukraine — but did he? In today’s globalised world you don’t lose your homeland; it is subsumed in that universal globality. Occasionally, he would meet old acquaintances at international congresses. Some of them would come from Ukraine to give papers; some had long since been affiliated to foreign institutions.
    Meanwhile, the years flew crazily by. They say that to emigrate is to be re-born. How old was he as an American? Not quite as old as Myroslav was now. And what did he have to look forward to? The cruise to the Galapagos Islands he and Dounia were planning for their Christmas holidays? The conference in the Azores where he had been offered the job of interpreter, a short time before that? Long gone are the days when the anticipation of future journeys aroused in him incredibly powerful sensations — you might almost say a cosmic shudder. The Ukrainian acquaintances he met around the world (he is bound to meet somebody in the Azores too) still find their long journeys mind-blowing. These journeys somehow prolong life, which proceeds on its way regardless of its quality.
You see, life will pass by just as the Azores passed by
, once wrote a Soviet Russian poet he found unforgettable, although generally speaking that poet is half-forgotten; he was a favourite of his mother’s — and probably still is.
    The Soviet period in Russian literature was not Dounia’s cup of tea. Dounia loved Russian nineteenth-century prose. But reciting Russian poetry at the top of her voice — so loudly that the window-panes rattled — that’s what was in his mother’s repertoire. He hadn’t seen his mother for over five years. She had been a Russian literature teacher in a Kyiv school. She is retired now, and he sends her money by bank