A Russian Story Read Free Page B

easier to compose, more melodious, and made more sense. Sometimes he can still spontaneously recall some of the lines he jotted down on the back of a notepad containing his addresses and phone numbers. He could sing any song without getting out of tune, although he wasn’t endowed with a powerful voice. But singing in unison, when his friends’ voices powerfully augmented his own — that was an incredible feeling. To this day he can hear in his head the sound of those songs from over twenty years ago.
    His new friends not only spoke Ukrainian quite naturally, but they spoke with a cheerful irony on the topic of their own Ukrainianness. Strictly speaking, none of them was a native speaker of Ukrainian; all of them had at the appropriate stage in their lives begun their mumblings in Russian. It was a different matter with Ukrainian, which had become the language of their re-birth, a more fascinating language, more existential, the secret language of a select community. True, there were very few such people in the Ukrainian capital, even during the short-lived wave of patriotic fervour of those years. But their members were not outcasts or pariahs. On the contrary, they were a kind of nobility, though their biological origins were of no concern to them. They were at ease when speaking about their Russian or Jewish grandfathers and grandmothers and about their parents, bourgeois Kyivan conformists or Soviet careerists. He had first noticed Lada when she openly spoke about her father, head of the department of scientific communism, previously responsible for Soviet ideology at a fairly high level. We have the parents God gave us, and they are the only ones we will have. So we have to form our own way of life.
    Now he fully understands that his friends from those years also had their own no-go areas which they did not want to speak about; indeed they were unable to do so, even with their closest friends. But in those same years they revealed to him aspects of life which had been inaccessible to him in Soviet days. They did not speak only about national issues; that would have been boring. But they spoke about everything in Ukrainian, and at the time he felt that in Russian he would have been unable to discover the new meanings which were coming to light.
    He began to pay attention every time he heard Ukrainian being spoken in the Russian-speaking hubbub of Kyiv’s noisy streets, trolleybuses and coffee houses. He always listened in, to discover what kind of person was speaking. First there was a comical mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the intonation is Ukrainian, but the vocabulary… In their social circles they indiscriminately parrot this hybrid speech coming from the mouths of the uneducated and the semi-literate. But these country girls, on the other hand, are speaking Ukrainian surprisingly well. This means they are from a locality where the Ukrainian-Russian hybrid has not yet become established. For them Ukrainian is truly their native tongue. But they are unaware how good their Ukrainian is; soon they will learn city speech, possibly even losing their rural accent. And here is a Galician with his characteristic vocabulary and intonation patterns. He too is speaking his native tongue. And this person he is talking with — generally a Russian speaker, as you can immediately tell — attempts to demonstrate that he is able to switch to Ukrainian quite readily, if necessary. But he keeps hesitating and making funny mistakes. And here is someone else — a kind of a Soviet establishment figure — who begins speaking Ukrainian in a loud, booming voice, with execrable accuracy, though certain elusive characteristics of his speech tell you this is the moribund language of Soviet Ukraine. Professor Nebuvaiko used to talk like this, by the way. And when Ukrainian is spoken without rural or Galician intonation patterns, with no clumsy Kyivan expressions or inane Soviet sentimentality, this is an indication that somewhere