Down Among the Fishes

Henik the Uruguayan — his love and luck

HENIK THE URUGUAYAN —HIS LOVE AND LUCKIt’s possible that the first pebble was dislodged by Henik Hadun the Uruguayan. That same slim, handsome Henik Hadun the Uruguayan who’s fond of cheap booze and chasing skirts, whose wife Katsya often moans about him to the other women of the village when they’re out working in the fields. Carpenter, beekeeper and all-round general handyman, in old trousers and usually with no shoes or socks on, he’s so closely tied to the earth that he may well have been the one who set the avalanche rolling… If I’m right, then it all started the following morning.

The grass in the yard had turned yellow with the heat, the sun was blazing down on us more and more fiercely. Even the fir trees sound different in the completely dry air than they do normally. These tall, majestic trees managed to look as though the all-consuming, scorching heat was of no concern to them whatsoever, but of course they do have roots which reach down almost as far as the Earth’s core. The ground beneath our feet is one mighty network of roots. A living world beneath the surface. The invisible part of God’s great miracle.

Granny flung her stick at one of the chickens. Her stick is an inseparable part of her. It’s both a symbol and a tool of her authority. She uses it to hit the chickens, wallop the cat or poke the cow. That’s her all over. True, she never actually hits them. The chicken flapped its wings a bit, just to show how frightened it was, and jumped away from the porch where it had been headed.

“I’ll give you what for!”, shouts granny as she always does when she tries to hit the animals. I never did understand what it was that she would give them.

I hand granny her stick. She’s washing herself at the battered old washbasin that stands in the yard. She’s placed her glasses on the shelf and rested her stick against the fir tree. I look at her — she’s all skin and bone, almost blind, and I’m sure she’s grown shorter. The hard skin of her hands is cracked and encrusted with earth that will never wash out. Her face — once so powerful, gaunt and sharp — has gone dry. Her grandchildren call her a witch whenever they come down to see us in Dobratyche. Her hands tremble as she pours water on her eyes. The hands are filthy, she’ll never get them clean.

Looking at her jogs my memory: I am lying in bed with really bad stomach ache and throwing up all the time. Some infection that children catch from dirty hands, the soil that gets ingrained in tiny cracks in the skin. Granny is cussing and swearing all the time while waiting for my parents to arrive from town. My being ill is stopping her from going out to the fields. Everyone gets the rough edge of her tongue: her thoughtless, worthless daughter who swanned off to town, leaving her behind with these ‘bleedin’ kids’, me and Ulia together, because they prevent her, Makrynya, from going out to the fields. “You wipe their bottoms, and they won’t so much as give you a drink of water in your old age.” The only thing she does for me, is to shove a bowl under my face when I’m being sick and then, cursing again, she takes it away. As soon as my parents turn up, she leaves us and runs off to the fields. She has no time for tablets or doctors. Still, for all that her hands were filthy, she did bring me up. Whereas I, with clean hands, was unable to do the same for my daughter.

“Gran, where’s the basket for the windfall apples?” I ask.

I know perfectly well where the basket is. When I’m ninety seven, my granddaughter is not going to ask me where something is, just to hear the sound of my voice. And every day, when she’s cooking something, she will never ask me to taste it to see if there’s enough salt in it. Simply because I will never have a granddaughter.

Granny, with a triumphant face that clearly says “What would you do without me?!” brings out the basket.

“Should I go down to the apple trees?” I ask, and again I know what the answer is going to be.

“No, no need for that, I’ll do it myself. You’d do better to go to the woods and see what mushrooms you can find, and make soup for supper.”

Granny is always looking for something to do, like collecting apples or weeding the rows of vegetables and flowers. Then I have to go and replant the growing onions, carrots and asters that she has torn out by the roots because she can’t see what she’s doing.

“O’er there, on the hill, the reapers are reaping?” A line from a Ukrainian song suddenly came drifting over the fence. For some reason there was a question mark distinctly audible at the end.

It was Henik the Uruguayan. His legs had given way, he grabbed hold of the fence, swayed a couple of times, and then, with a downward gesture of the hand that eloquently said “sod it”, he succumbed to the inevitable and collapsed on the ground at full stretch, after deftly placing his cap under his head.

“My wife, my dear heart, we don’t get along?” He continued to address questions to the sky until granny and I got to him.

He has a fine, silky smooth voice. His face is lean, his arms tanned by the sun and hard work.

“Henik, get up!” Granny gave him a poke with her stick. “The sun’s still up, and you’ve already had a skinful.”

“When the Sun goes down, love goes out the door,” Henik parried in response.

The nickname Uruguayan was passed down to Henik from his grandfather, who at the dawn of modern times had gone off to seek his fortune in Uruguay. So all his heirs were now called Uruguayans. When I was a child, I believed that this was their actual surname. Only later did I discover that their real surname was Hadun, the same as everyone else in Dobratyche.

Yes, that’s right. We all come from the same stock, with the same surname. We’re like each other: heavily built, with faces that look as though they’ve been rough-hewn out of wood with an axe, flat noses broad at the bridge, high, prominent foreheads, strong jawlines and uneven teeth. But no one can say that the people of Dobratyche are ugly; there’s an urge to live within us that gives us something more than mere saccharine beauty.

However, at this particular moment Henik Hadun’s urge to live had drained right out of him into the ground under the influence of alcohol. All he could do was declaim verses.

“Oh, ‘twere better had I ne’er known love,” he uttered, turned on one side and closed his eyes.

Granny and I exchanged glances.

“We’ll have to let Katsya know,” I said. “She can come and collect him.”

“She’ll never be able to lug him home. He’s far too heavy. Get the sheepskin coat and put it under him so he doesn’t lie right on the ground.” This is granny giving instructions.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to fetch the sheepskin coat. Remember our poet Mikhas Yarash? He’s better known around here as Mishyk Yarashyshyn. Think of him as Yarash’s missus’s grandson Mikey. Well, he appeared all of a sudden with a rake slung over one shoulder and wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “Irmoshyna can’t count”.* He was on his way back home from haymaking, and decided to call in on us.

“I’ll take him,” he said, quickly sizing up the situation. “I’ll leave the rake here. I was going to come round to see you anyway,” and now he was talking just to me. “I wanted to ask you how you can get Ukrainian spell check in Word.”

Mishyk lives quite close to us. It won’t be long, I reckon, before busloads of tourists come to visit the house where the Famous Poet lives. For the moment, though, not a day passes without some bearded intellectual type calling on him. Mikhas’ granny, Yarashykha herself, is a practical woman who gets them involved in all sorts of urgent domestic work such as haymaking. Today, however, Mishyk was going back home after haymaking on his own.

“It’s easy,“ I said. “Drop in when you come back for your rake, and I’ll show you.”

Mishyk grabbed Henik unceremonially under the armpits and brought him to his feet, brushed him down and said:

“Off we go, old man. Katsya’s waiting for you. She’ll pour you a glass of something good, I’m sure.”

Henik lifted an ironic eyebrow but allowed himself to be led home.

Mishyk was laughing when he got back. “I don’t know about a glass of something good. What he did get from Katsya was a good walloping. Henik had been up at the place that belongs to those venereologists, reroofing their root cellar. They were the ones who got him drunk. Katsya’s locked him in the house and gone off to have it out with them. So what about the spell checker?”

We went through into my room where the big table that served as my desk was. On it, next to the computer, stood a great pile of files and papers. I really had intended to do some work on them, but as things turned out, all my hopes were in vain. I didn’t have time to wipe my nose, let alone do anything constructive on the computer.

I switched my notebook on and showed Mishyk what he needed to do to load the spell checker.

The phone rang. I ran to the kitchen. It was Ulia calling from Norway, so we didn’t talk for long.

“How are things with you?” she asked. “Why don’t you pay your mobile phone bill? There’s no point in having one if it’s always blocked. How’s granny?”

“Everything’s OK. Don’t worry, just get your Vikings sorted out!”

“I’ll be arriving in three days’ time. I’ve bought the ticket already. You don’t need to meet me. What can I bring back from here?”

“Rain. It’s like the Sahara here!”

While waiting for me to finish on the phone, Mishyk was fiddling around with the different options on Word.

“Ulia’s coming, is she?” he asked.

Ulia is an archaeologist. She’s giving a paper at some conference or other in Norway. As far as I remember, the title of her paper is “Archaeological evidence for the presence of Vikings on the territory of the Principality of Polatsak* in the 10th century”. But maybe that’s not it. I may have got it completely wrong. I’m not all that strong when it comes to dealing with scholarly topics, even though I am a historian by training.

“Yes, in three days’ time.”

It was right at that moment that I got to witness an act of poetic creation. Poets forget completely about everything around them and go off into their own world. All of a sudden Mishyk seemed to be staring at something a long way away. He asked again about the spell checker, something that I had already explained to him only a few moments earlier. I quite enjoyed the spectacle of another poem taking shape in his head. Could he perhaps have a soft spot for Ulia? Was it the news of her imminent arrival that had had this effect on him? I patiently explained everything to him again.

Granny clattered into the house, bringing with her the windfall apples from our orchard. The noise aroused Mikhas from his reverie; he stood up and went home. Then he had to come back a bit later for his rake.

The sun continued to sear us with its ferocious heat. It became impossible to walk barefoot on the sand. The leaves on the lilac bushes had shrivelled up. You could at least cool off a little inside the house. While I was cleaning the mushrooms, I thought lazily — in that heat there was no other way to do anything — about Ulia’s arrival, about how happy she would be to see granny still strong and active. About how happy she would be to see me. I knew she would have to do no more than quickly cast an inquisitive glance in my direction to see, instantly, right through me. She is the only person who knows exactly what things are like between me and Anton. She is better than I am. She is my mirror image, except the image I see is better and purer, and doesn’t walk with a limp. When she was giving birth to her children, I felt the pain. When I was in prison, she lost weight. Our lives are like two streams; the waters run side-by-side but they never mingle.

I was still a student when I married Anton (Good Lord, where did my life go!?). He did well for himself in the business world, and we bought ourselves a flat in Mensk. Then, of course, I became trapped in the vicious circle of running between the kitchen and the dining room and back again, until I was given the diagnosis: You will never be able to have children. That was seventeen years ago.

“Your stories are full of extremes,” Dynko said to me not long ago. “A Frenchman comes to study the habits of townspeople who rent houses in the country for the summer. He gets himself murdered and his body is dumped on the municipal tip! Not very likely, is it?” What about the tasty aroma of food, cooking in the kitchen, the cool fragrance of clean linen in the cupboard, the gentle homely feel of a lamp-lit room in the evening, the waxy shine on the leaves of a ficus plant? How likely is it that all of that can in an instant be robbed of any meaning by a guilty verdict consisting of eight words: “You will never be able to have children”. Barren fig tree, seed cast on stony ground. And then there was Anton’s face — utterly lost, not knowing where to go or what to do.

And then there was the miracle. The birth of my daughter.

And then there was Death.

The doctor who first diagnosed my little daughter with cancer worked in Hospital no. 2. I simply don’t recall how I ever got out of there. Somewhere on Starazhouskaya Street I stopped being able to breathe. I collapsed against the rough wall of some old building. Everything went dark and I began to vomit, curled up on a manhole by a food store. I was lying on the snow, but the snow wasn’t cold. I came round when a little dog started barking right above me. A woman shook me by the shoulder:

“What’s wrong? Can you get up?”

It was Maria Vaytsyashonak with her little dog Murza. Two years later she would rescue me again. When I was high on drugs and oblivious to the world. She helped me get into the psychiatric hospital in Navinki and undergo treatment for my addiction.

When Anton and I got married, both of us experienced — as far as we possibly could — that thing called love. We were open to each other — as far as we possibly could be. We were drawn to each other. But then the stage of infatuation passed, and we entered into a stage of close friendship, so close that it seemed unbreakable. But break it did. It’s difficult to put up with a wife who happens to be a drug addict, even if you really want to. And he didn’t.

A drug addict for a wife. No children. No desire to go on living. No light in the eyes. No life in the hair. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when a woman phoned me out of the blue and — obviously relishing the moment — said, “In the circles they move in it’s considered bad form not to have a mistress. It’s simply a must-have in business. You must be either blind or completely out of your mind.” So there it is, then. No mind and no sight. Just soft in mind (no will to do anything) and body (rolls of cellulite on my hips). What was there to be surprised about?