A Russian Story Read Free Page A

transfer. For over twenty years he has no longer listened to her views; he makes his own decisions about his life-style. The verse written by Russian poets, which she used to declaim with such enthusiasm as a commentary on everything that went on in the world or in their family, still resounds in his head — appropriately or inappropriately, as the case may be — rising to the surface of the mire which is the past.
    I have instilled Rus * into you — as if with a pump!
 — mother would say loudly, quoting the ambiguous Marina Tsvetaeva, poking her finger at her son; there was some truth in that, actually.
    Eugene was distanced from the Russia that had been
pumped into him
by his mother 
—
indeed not just by her but by the entire Soviet way of life 
—
thanks to Ukraine, entering his life like an eccentric lover, a woman you perhaps wouldn’t marry, but would keep getting together with and breaking up with again until you died. One of you or the other. Well, it turned out that during his student years, traditionally considered to be the best of your life, he had had neither good friends nor a proper girlfriend. He began to experience all the powerful emotions of youth a little later, soon after the Soviet Union had begun to collapse and fall apart. During his final year at university he happened to attend a party at the house of some friends of his, and suddenly he found himself in a world of true fulfilment. There were young men there who you could talk to all night, yet in the morning you would leave with the feeling that you still had more to talk about. There were attractive girls who were not dying to get married, unlike the girls in his year who would do so virtually at the first opportunity that came along. You could talk with them all night too, sometimes even forgetting how beautiful they were, although you could actually combine the one with the other. He stayed the night with a girl after the very first party, and this was the beginning of his national initiation. After that night, Ukrainian became the language of love for him. It was not Lada. The girl thanked him for the joy they had shared, saying she would always have pleasant memories of that night. They still continued to see one another. There was no second time; things do not always work out, do they? But they would exchange the occasional sultry glance or knowing smile. If anything like that had taken place with one of the girls in his year, the hysterics would have started the very next day after she missed her period, and then the parents would have crucified her if she didn’t marry him as a matter of course.
    Similar circles of sensible lads and trendy girls, trendy lads and sensible girls, formed and broke up again in the multimillion city of Kyiv, not only at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and not only involving the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian ideas. But this was where he ended up, and they took him in. Ukrainian became a language of communication for him, practically for the first time ever, rather than the language of the classroom, of theatrical performances or of poetry, and that was brilliant. Perhaps this was in tune with the spirit of the times, as it was then that people started talking out loud about how under the Soviet Union Ukraine was wilting, weakening, deteriorating and becoming less and less relevant to the Ukrainians themselves. By no means was it ‘flourishing and radiant’ as well-paid Soviet Ukrainian poets ingratiatingly chanted. These very same poets were already beginning to compose sentimental verse on the theme of change in society. Personally, he had no particular agenda in adopting new ideas; in the Ukrainian world he truly began to feel a kind of inner harmony and a will to live which he had never experienced before.
    He had started writing poetry a long time ago, though he didn’t consider himself a poet. The first verses he ever wrote were in Russian. Ukrainian rhyming verse was