Mondegreen Read online

  But no matter what Haba would say to himself, no matter how he tried to convince himself, he would always become unsettled if he couldn’t see the metro map. What a provincial chump.

  ***

  Haba wound up in this city not too long ago. Approximately X number of years ago, at the beginning of a certain century. It doesn’t matter exactly when he left his occupied home. He grabbed his rags and moved to the city of the sacral Ukr-force. Many good things awaited him here. For example, the absence of the Islamic State, of the Ebola virus and of Russian tourists.10 But many surprises also emerged in everyday life. They jumped up from non-existence like a Jack in the Box and required attention. There were both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. There were those that, at the outset, would elicit neither positive nor negative energy but would nonetheless suck up a great deal of the refugee’s spiritual health. Like, let’s say, the metro, or the Obolon women.

  But the most overwhelming revelation was the Ukrainian language. It was melodious and delightful. On the one hand, this was the language that was spoken to little Haba in his childhood days by the nightingale, the mouse, the rooster, and the wonderful worm. Let alone the mare’s head. On the other hand, the fact of the matter was that he now had to converse with it, that worm, regularly.

  How can this be explained? It is difficult but what can you do.

  So, here’s the deal. Haba read in Ukrainian almost since he was a kid. He liked reading in Ukrainian, although it was much easier to read in Russian. And he wasn’t able to speak in Ukrainian at all. Because there was no one in his hometown with whom he could speak in that language. As an adult, he befriended a couple of smart and respectable Ukrainian-­speaking guys, but they only spoke Ukrainian amongst themselves, perhaps, preserving in that manner a dedication to the Ukrainianophile guild. Several times Haba asked them to speak to him in Ukrainian, to accept him into their circle of clandestine and nationally-­conscious individuals. And he, of course, promised not to tell anyone about this and that he would take this secret with him to the grave (only patriots would speak Ukrainian in the Donbas and the Ukrainian intelligentsia from beyond the Dnipro River almost never came here). Those wonderful molfars 11 of the Donbas would smile about this. They were evasive, they cordially expressed their shame. But when they would pick up some vodka and snacks and sit around a table they would nonetheless switch to Russian. It was easier for them that way.

  Haba understood this phenomenon. Assimilation was a completely reasonable desire in a city where, stretching back to Paleolithic times, the locals would ask Putin to bring his army (crazed mammoths circle around, pro-­Russian placards flutter by the regional administrative building).

  But the conduct of these guys was somewhat different. For example, they truly loved their language. But deep in their souls they believed that there was no sense conversing with inhabitants of the Donbas in this language. It was like casting pearls before swine. Ok, excusez-moi, maybe not so categorically—maybe not before swine but before, let’s say, hedgehogs, little worms, or cute squirrels. Before clumsy and deficient beavers and raccoons. But what the hell is the difference? These guys were ashamed of their language, and they were ashamed of themselves before this language. Both inferiority and a great, genuine Irish pride simmered in the compote of their startlingly-­provincial consciousness and there was nothing you that could be done. That is why, kiddos, Ukraine had no chances for finding mutual understanding between the various layers of the intellectual elite and for the formation of a unified nation of pork-fat eaters and Russki-­haters. No one was interested in establishing a common cultural space. Not to mention space travel or smart, fair, individual language quotas. At least not within the Donbas. But hold on—our Ukraine is the one and only—not a country, but a doll! (The teacher looks ponderingly at the class. The class (ponderingly)—at the teacher. A holiness glows from the students. Hallelujah, the children say in a choir. The school rises to the heavens and disappears among the clouds.)

  So then. Obviously, there was no sense in uttering something to oneself in Ukrainian. They could have sent you to the nuthouse for that. And then there would be no way back for Haba. So, what sense was there in conversing? None. Language needs to be living and vital. It’s the one that needs this—not us.

  The final kiss from the woman of your dreams, the travels of Marco Polo, a liturgy in a village church, where the only ones present are you and an old priest, the Mother of God in St. Cyril’s Church, angels painted by Vrubel, using psych-ward patients as models 12 (Pavlovsk Psychoneurologic Hospital No. 1, those angels live there to this day), a mug of hemlock offered to you by a pleasant person, talking for hours with deceased friends, and, first and foremost—a future love that reveals itself in the most fragile of premonitions—all of this is language. Something that is born from language, is sustained by language, and becomes language. Language is many things. But it must be needed. Because then you use it and it forms you. This mechanism works like the Eucharist. You receive its body, wash it down with cold raisin-­flavored kvas, and fly through the heavens from morning ‘til night.

  At any rate, that which Haba had accepted calmly before the war had become increasingly uncomfortable once it began. Not speaking the official language of Ukraine, especially while living in its capital, Kyiv, in a time of war just ain’t right. If you know what I mean.

  When Habinsky arrived in Kyiv, he observed that, for the most part, the city speaks the same wonderful language that the enemy does, just with more mistakes. The junta 13 considered itself to be a Ukrainian one, but the language that predominated in the city was Russian. Schrödinger’s famous cat paradox, in fact, dictates that Ukraine exists but you can’t see it. It’s both dead and alive, like our mother nature, or, in fact, Ukrainian statehood.

  But Haba was not flummoxed, and stuck to his plan. He studied Ukrainian on his own. And, to speed up the process, at some point he began talking to himself exclusively in Ukrainian. Because, he would ask himself, from where would authentic Ukrainian culture come to Kyiv if not from Donetsk?

  What is this insanity, you may ask, how can something good come out of Nazareth? That is, in a purely genetic, and thus, scholarly-­national, sense. In this Galilea, dear ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got pagans and coalminers. There, blood is so uncertainly and variably mixed with coal and with the grey clouds of the steppe that there can be no genetic hope for something groovy. Because genetics and vegetarianism, as everyone knows, are everything to us. Or perhaps not everything?

  Phillip will smile, check the level of oxygen in the coalmine and say: “Come and you’ll see with your own eyes, my dears, come and you’ll see!” And maybe someday you will dare to do so, but not now—no, not now, by any means.

  While still riding in Passenger Train Donetsk-Z—­Mother-Kyiv, Haba Habinsky decided to do everything possible and impossible to grasp that musical language, even if it were to take him a few years. At least at the level of Maeterlinck or, let’s say, Herbert Wells. And why not? But it turned out that, regarding language, who actually grasps whom is not so clear.

  ***

  In life, beginning with the day we are born, we are continuously subject to surprises. They can also be called the unexpecteds or the undesireds. These may sound a bit admixed but what can you do. So then, after two-three months of diligent study, it turned out that trying to learn the Ukrainian language, for an adult who has chosen to resettle, is mentally dangerous. The honest efforts of an individual who completely and fully desires to resettle (and not only in the geographical sense), to settle in a place (to set, to set up house, to make a settlement, to settle for, to settle up, to settle down, to settle on a place), and the young age associated with that language meet and transform into characters from folk stories and into various mythological figures, giving birth to ruinous protuberances of memory. And this, my friends, is truly terrifying.

  And before these characters appear, a person becomes frightened
to tears by a new, horrific and incomprehensible, linguistic memory. One day it lands right inside your brain—hello, my fluffy kitten—after which the refugee cannot understand what it was that they had actually experienced in their life and what they by no means hadn’t. Especially in Donetsk. Especially in the one that no longer exists and no longer will. And did it ever exist? Maybe not. And this is not a joke.

  Through the memories of a non-existent past, through folk tales and dreams, the refugee, and even more so this rarified version of him—the refugee-­polyglot—finally comes face to face with being. That which, following Parmenides, only is today, is never in the past, is never in the future. Language enters this polyglot completely, immovably, and excessively, like that concrete feeling of excitement 14 after good coitus, like May in February, like thoughts after death, or blue circles on dead water.

  And only later, this excessiveness of language, of course, finds very concrete, although not always comfortable or understood, representations. For example, already in those very first months after he began studying the language, this neo-­Kyivite began to receive rather regular visits from the mare’s head (or the MR 15). And although the worm, the nightingale, and the black and white rooster appeared much earlier, we must admit that this whole process, to put it mildly, did not improve the psychiatric state of this bilingual Ukrainian.

  But we shouldn’t complain. We needn’t waste time on useless grief. Enough, as a certain poetess wrote, no more complaining, no more crying.16 It’s better to get to the point and talk about the mare’s head. And, indeed, what is this phenomenon—this mare’s head? Besides all of the complexities in the question itself, the initial approach to it is very simple. If you know the mare well, then you potentially know everything you need to know about the mare’s head. You just have to imagine the gigantic head of a mare—only without the mare itself. That is, the head and the neck—an object with a diameter of about three-four yards. And on this head, draw proportionally sad eyes and a nose. Large yellow twisted teeth in the mare’s mouth should be a bit thinned-out like steel bones in the mouth of a sperm whale. You’ll say that there are no steel bones in the mouth of a sperm whale, but you’ll be incorrect: there are. The MR has a beautiful black mane. And draw a WWI-era war hat on top of it. The kind that Josef Švejk wore in the times of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire.

  The mare’s head is a familiar character for Haba. His grandma, whose Eastern Surzhyk-laden Ukrainian 17 was her native language, would tell him that folk tale about it countless times during the terrifying years of his childhood. Little Haba thought a lot about the MR when he turned three–four years old. And later, too, if you think about it, year after year, regardless of his maturation. Haba forgot neither the nightingale nor the insidious coalminer worm, who, in one of the tales (as it was recalled now) would seek out lazy kids at night and eat their ears.

  Imagine a child dozing off in bed, looking at lampposts outside his window (they flicker and quietly ring, like celestial spheres) and at little stars, smiling at the pink kitten that eats varenyky 18 with snow-white sour cream on the blue moon (in essence—Gogol, it’s all Gogol’s fault) and listening to the wind. But when midnight arrives, after the final horn sounds at the metallurgical factory (with its forlorn forging) the kid’s room becomes a headquarters for pain and unbelievable horror.

  Not a boy’s scream but a beastly, heavy howl fills the room. And the wind no longer sings but moans outside the window like a devil’s snowstorm, a snowsquall, a blizzard, or a whiteout (depends on which lexeme you fancy at this time). Shadows fly and cry. A five-cornered antique mirror rattles within its own frame. No longer able to reflect reality, it has blackened and become covered with metal wrinkles.

  The worm, with a long moustache (usually named Laurentius), in old-fashioned glasses and sorrowful blue eyes, and with a smoking cigarette held by tweezers, sits on a boy’s chest and ponderingly gnaws the child’s ears, periodically spitting out bright blood on the floor, inhales, and goes back to gnawing. Occasionally he bites. In that case, a bloody stream shoots out from the jugular into the ceiling. The crystal chandelier above the bed, all damp and pink, clinks, chinks, dings, and pings. A jangly beast. That ceiling lamp seemingly doesn’t know what’s going on. However, it is precisely from it that the cries of the little boy stem. A bloodied dad and mom don’t know what to do, or how to act.

  “It’s your fault,” the father yells, “You let him watch Soviet cartoons after 9PM when he should have been studying the Ukrainian alphabet.”

  “Damn you,” the mother begs, shaking her fist, “Damn you, oh father, the child needs to be saved, we can argue later.”

  The father grabs a guitar hanging on the wall and quickly tunes it.

  “One, two, three, four,” he grunts out, ignoring the wails of his favorite offspring. “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”

  “Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,” the mother chimes in.

  “Oh, I believe in yesterday,” they try taking it slow. The mom cries and sings, the dad, white as a wall, holds the rhythm steady, and the guitar too. Yes, all these bad things have arrived, have come together, and only a belief in yesterday allows you to carry on.

  The worm, hearing the first chords, stops sucking the boy’s ears and listens attentively. He closes his eyes and smiles. The little boy stops wailing, sniffles for a few more minutes, and groans, but grows calmer as his parents continue singing. Starting with the second verse, a quiet, blue, minty, cool rain that pours right from the ceiling gradually washes away the traces of the horror that has passed. The worm yawns, falls asleep, disappears.

  ***

  Of course, of all the ghosts of childhood, the only one that remains unforgettable is the MR. It is because of it, by the way, that Haba had always had trouble with women, from the beginning of his sex life and throughout his existence. He imagined that every woman had that folk tale creature within her and that it was just waiting for Haba to hesitate and lose his focus. And, as was usually the case, Haba would inevitably lose that focus like the last Lancelot, that is Lancelot of the Lake.19 He would fall in love with a beautiful and insidious Guinevere at the most inappropriate times in his life. And he was not able to get out of those situations without undergoing major damage. They all had the signs of everyday frivolity, useless stupidity, wonderful inevitability, and truly uncorrectable results. Idiocy, vividness, and otherworldliness—those are three butterflies on which he would base his love for women. A solid foundation, a firm bedrock. Like that MR that has been tumbling across Europe for centuries, stubbornly hunting for the ghost of communism.

  But it cannot be said that the MR really scared Haba much during puberty. Nothing special took place in those years. Just a normal period. You flip through the pages of encyclopedias and anthologies, you study the features of Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Mesopotamian culture. Do you remember all of those women, boy? All those beautiful nudes, a product of the creativity of notorious sapiens sapiens? There’s a good amount of them in art atlases, in various anthologies, in all kinds of histories of painting. How did you like India when you were thirteen, buddy? The Baroque? The Renaissance? The portrayal of women in the art of Peter Paul Rubens—that’s its own epoch. To a certain extent, the whole essence of puberty is personified in Rubens. Mounds of naked fat and meat are purportedly there to depict mythological scenes—that in fact is puberty in its purest form, not overshadowed with religious reflection.

  Woman as a study of transformation—that point of view constantly accompanied Habinsky. During his school years, the everyday and anytime tension of this discourse interfered with living and breathing. Women represented unbelievable joy, insurmountable longing, and unobtainable happiness. He should have had them all, all the world’s women, initially all at once, and then each one separately. The women of the past, present, and future. In love and in marriage. In long lasting relationships and beyond its borders. In passenge
r trains and subways, in the parks of Berlin and Vienna, Kyiv and Wroclaw. In quiet churches and loud hotels, in Lviv trolleys and Swedish barges, in the Ukrainian Carpathians and in the Italian Alps. In the current of anguish and in the Jacuzzi of unbearable joy. He should have had them. But he did not—unfortunately or fortunately. And not, of course, in that sense and not because of those reasons which you are surely thinking about at this time.

  If you need to know, in bed, when the time finally arrived, Haba turned out to be fabulous. Like a bream that has been captured by its glistening libido. Like a rabbit, brave, invincible, and unattainable in its love making. And still today he is able to make love seven years in a row non-stop with any woman who comes to him in his dreams and in his imagination. And only in the morning of the eighth year, he’ll sheepishly smile a bit and ask for a cup of coffee and a slice of cheese.

  “Listen,” he will say, “baby, can you make me a cup of coffee?”

  You, the playful sweetie, young and uncaptured for centuries, will weakly smile at him, spread your arms wide, begin romping about, playing, laughing, and tickling him. (All go to one place: all come from dust and to dust all return. Eccl.) And then you, supposedly not on purpose, will touch the inside of his thighs with your long-since returned to dust tongue (all go to one place, remember this for seven thousand years). You’ll maneuver it, beginning at the knees and moving up to the scrotum. And you will pause it there for a few seconds. Well, not on purpose, of course, because you’re a respectful girl, good-natured and proper. But on your way to getting the coffee you’ll decide to check out the tastes of it, of your invincible rabbit, your warrior and delicacy, your coalminer’s lantern of women’s happiness.