Free The Moscoviad by Yuri Andrukhovych Page A

do with You, but I’d like Your Sincerity to
know about the heart torments of your vassals.
    My trouble is
that I didn’t get married at the right time. Or that I got divorced at the
wrong time. But this happened in a different life, in those blessed days, as a
poet friend of mine says, when I was a chronic alcoholic. For now I keep good
hold of myself and almost don’t touch booze, but some three years ago my
profile and full face were known in all of Ukraine’s sobering stations. Then
one of those women who stroll along the windows of sobering stations and choose
some poor unfortunate souls according to their tastes, made me her capricious
choice. She took me home, washed me and fed me warm soup. At night she got a
better picture of me. “Wow,” she got excited, “you’re still quite young!” (And
indeed, I was less than thirty back then . . .)
    So she decided to
attach me to her bed. Dreamt that I would not get up from it at all. Meanwhile
she bought me clothes, food and the like, even Kent cigarettes because I didn’t
like the Soviet ones. For days I walked from one corner of her apartment to the
other and thought only about her. She did indeed in some strange way steal my
heart. At night, when we got to know and feel each other in deep, one could
sense no age difference. Besides, during this same period I took to the studio
of one of my artist friends a high school senior by the name of Vika, who was
in turn ten years younger than me; in other words, mother nature herself
established a wise balance in everything. I somehow was particularly pleased
that the age difference of my beloveds equaled a generation.
    I loved this high
school girl for knowing how to listen. She didn’t like and didn’t understand my
poems, but she pretended she was crazy about them. While she only dreamt of
falling on the couch as fast as possible and rotating on it a bit. Then I
started selecting particularly long and difficult pieces to make her go crazy
for as long as possible. When the stock of my own ran out (I’m not a metaphor
factory), I quietly began proffering (she had no clue all the same) my friends’
poems. She would shake all over when, having ecstatically turned my eyes and
intoning all the punctuation marks, I’d start reciting some
eight-hundred-line-long poem in free verse. Once she became hysterical during
“The Autumn Dogs of the Carpathians.” Another time she came during “Soccer in
the Monastery Courtyard.” 11 I was terribly pleased.
    Once she threw a
scene, a childishly naïve and freakish one, and declared that because of me she
grew to hate poetry for the rest of her life. But with a sweet orgiastic
hatred. It turned out she had been dreaming passionately about marrying me
after graduating from high school. To this I said my “no way,” although I loved
her very much, and finally fully concentrated on the woman, let’s call her Ms.
M., who picked me up by the sobering station.
    But nature
doesn’t tolerate imbalance. Ms. M. started mentioning her previous husbands and
lovers with increasing frequency and passion. For some reason she suddenly
developed this strange habit. And this in the minutes of the greatest intimacy.
Moreover, she started calling me with the names of my predecessors. It was
little consolation when she explained that she was only attracted to a
particular type of men, and that I really resembled each of her previous
partners. And frankly speaking, I do indeed have the looks that occur fairly
often. For some reason my parents did not make me a monster with a hump in the
back of my neck or a horn between my eyebrows. Somehow it happened. And still I
am convinced that on the inside I do not resemble anyone else. Which is why her
daily inadvertent mistakes were beginning to annoy me, as I had to answer to
some Valerian, Oswald or even Mykhail. 12
    In the end I
couldn’t take it any more and left. With the high school senior we had just
finished The Mahabharata , which she, the