The Orphanage Read online
Praise for Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia
“One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine. Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce. It brings to mind our own fiction from a time when we still felt like we had something to fight for and a chance we could win.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Absurdistan
“To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a poet, a novelist, a rock star, a protester, a symbol of his country’s desire for freedom and change, is to say the truth—but what is truth? Zhadan is a literary master of enormous force. At times he combines the energy of Jack Kerouac and atmospheric spell of Isaac Babel, at other times he is a balladeer of his country’s struggle. ‘Such strange things have been happening to us,’ he writes, of the streets where ‘winters are not like winters / winters live under assumed names.’ In Mesopotamia’s nine stories and thirty poems we find ourselves in the newly independent Ukraine, stunned by its grit, its rough backbone—and its tenderness. What do we discover here? That ‘Light is shaped by darkness, / and it’s all up to us.’ We also discover that Serhiy Zhadan is one of those rare things—almost impossible to find now in the West—a national bard, a chronicler. This is a book to live with.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
“To know Dublin, read your Joyce, for Macondo, García Márquez, and for Mesopotamia, Serhiy Zhadan. Of course this Mesopotamia is not the Birthplace of Civilization (or is it?), it’s Kharkiv, the Ukrainian Center of Nothing, located smack-dab on the Russian border, which, in Zhadan’s brilliant vision, is smack-dab in the middle of life lived beyond the fullest because any second could be your last, creaming with joy, madness, war, orgasm, stupidity, and a blinding light that smells like the essence of human spirit. We need to learn from Ukraine. Zhadan is a masterful teacher. The use of poetry as Notes—so far as I know, this has never been done before and is positively Nabokovian. This book is world-class literature.”—Bob Holman, author of Sing This One Back to Me
“To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a great Ukrainian novelist of whom you might not have heard does not begin to cover it. Serhiy Zhadan is one of the most important creators of European culture at work today. His novels, poems, and songs touch millions. This loving translation is a chance to see Ukraine in terms other than the familiar, but more importantly a chance to allow prose to mend your mind.”
—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
“Unlike Joyce’s Dublin, the cradle of Zhadan’s civilization is a place of refuge for young people fleeing hardscrabble lives in the provinces, and a hardscrabble home for natives buoyed by desire yet adrift amid the flotsam of a spent empire. The men and women in these comic and heartfelt pages endure the dynamic paralysis that comes over those who are all dressed up with nowhere to go. They aspire, struggle, fight, fail, drink, fuck, and then they fight some more. Amid the city’s detritus, they refuse to become part of it by continuing to love and dream. There is nothing marginal about them. They insist on being seen, heard, understood. They will charm and madden you. They will haunt your dreams, and you will never forget them.”—Askold Melnyczuk,
author of House of Widows
“Zhadan is the rock star of lyrical melancholy, and Mesopotamia is not just a book of short stories but a cosmos with Kharkiv-Babylon at its center. We meet its lovesick citizens at weddings and funerals; their visceral, fantastical lives unfold in the intensely prophetic atmosphere
of the upcoming war.”—Valzhyna Mort, author of Factory of Tears
“With tales at once earthy and phantasmagorical, sentimental and anarchic, Zhadan is an exhilarating chronicler of a new kind of borderlands.”—Sana Krasikov
“Serhiy Zhadan’s dazzling novel—here fantastically well translated—evokes voices that get under our skin and take us into the rich inner life
of people about whom we have long known nothing.”—Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution
“Mesopotamia offers a sublime experience of taking you right to the middle of a very specific world, where you eat and drink and love and fight and die with the characters, until you notice that that world has transcended the time and place and became part of the eternal human story.”—Lara Vapnyar, author of Still Here: A Novel
“Mesopotamia finds poetry in the most unlikely places—in the bars, tower blocks, and concrete boulevards of a Ukrainian city. By turns funny, shocking, and touching, weaving between the lyrical and the grotesque, Zhadan’s stories provide a lesson in belonging.”—Uilleam Blacker, University College London
“Mesopotamia is a portrait of post-Soviet Ukraine’s lost generation, of people who came of age in the disorienting conditions of crumbling Soviet order and stagnating social transformation. Serhiy Zhadan gives voice to his generation from Ukraine’s eastern regions bordering Russia. These are the people who have been missing from contemporary literature, whether in Ukrainian or in any other language. To understand the background to the crisis in this region, which has had such a major impact on the world recently, perhaps no other writer can provide insights as powerful as Zhadan.”—Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas
“Serhiy Zhadan has written a love song to contemporary Eastern Ukraine—vices, passions, and ghosts included. His Kharkiv is filled with gritty stairwells, red nightgowns, raw love, and a bit of magic. Costigan-Humes and Wheeler have brought Zhadan’s evocative prose to life for the English reader.”—Amelia Glaser, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands
The Orphanage
BOOKS BY SERHIY ZHADAN IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The Orphanage
What We Live For, What We Die For
Mesopotamia
Voroshilovgrad
Depeche Mode
The Orphanage
A Novel
SERHIY ZHADAN
TRANSLATED FROM THE UKRAINIAN
BY REILLY COSTIGAN-HUMES AND
ISAAC STACKHOUSE WHEELER
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation © 2021 by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.
All rights reserved.
The original Ukrainian edition was first published under the title Інтернат by Meridian Czernowitz, Chernivtsi in 2017. © Serhij Zhadan 2017. © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2018. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).
Set in Electra and Nobel types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.,
Durham, North Carolina.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939623
ISBN 978-0-300-24301-7 (paper : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
The Orphanage
“Go pick him up!” Pasha’s dad yells.
“He’s her son. She oughta pick him up,” Pasha
retorts.
“He’s your nephew,” the old-timer reminds him.
“So what?”
“And he’s my grandson.”
And the television is on the whole time. He never turns the television off, even at night. It’s like their very own eternal flame, burning to commemorate the dead rather than entertain the living. The old-timer watches the weather report like he’s expecting they’ll mention him by name. After it ends, he just sits there, like he can’t believe what he’s heard. Pasha doesn’t really watch TV, especially this past year—the news has been just plain scary. Pasha sits in his room on a couch by his desk, surrounded by textbooks, until he can’t stand it anymore. Then he jerks to his feet, goes outside. Springs protrude from the couch like twigs from a Boy Scout’s campfire. The furniture in the house is old, yet full of life—it’ll probably outlive its owners. Pasha’s sister suggested they at least get some new chairs, but he simply brushed her off. What’s the point of hauling stuff around? That’s like doing pull-ups when you’re seventy. Yeah, sure, go right ahead, just make sure you take some ibuprofen first. His sister hardly comes by anymore, so nobody’s talking about hauling furniture around anymore either.
Pasha liked their house; he’d lived here his whole life and planned to keep on living here. It was built by German POWs shortly after the war—a rather spacious duplex on the second street back from the train station. Their densely populated settlement, which was mostly home to railroad workers, was built around that station, so they’d often refer to their whole town as “the Station”—it gave them work, it gave them hope, like a heart blackened by locomotive smoke, pumping the blood of the local gullies and windbreaks. Life still revolved around the station, even now, with the depot as empty as a drained swimming pool and the repair shops unused, if you didn’t count the bums and swallows that slept there. There just weren’t any jobs now. Sure, maybe they lived in a so-called workers’ settlement, but they were the first to find themselves out of work. The shops were shut down, and the people scurried off in all directions, hiding in crowded apartment blocks with wells dried up by the scorching summer and cellars where the supplies had already run out by Christmas.
Pasha didn’t have anything to complain about, though—he was on the government payroll. “Yep, yep,” Pasha thought as he shut the front door, insulated with hospital blankets, behind him. “I’m on the government payroll, even if I’m not actually getting paid all that much.” The snow—blue-pink with deep, dark pores—reflects the evening sky and the approaching sunset. Sharp to the touch, smells of March water, conceals black, viscous earth, renders weather reports unnecessary—the winter will last long enough for everyone to get accustomed to it, suck it up, and learn to cope. And then something else will begin. For the time being, the world feels like a lump of snow in someone’s warm hands; it melts, releases its water, but the longer that goes on, the colder their hands get, the less warm motion they retain, the more icy stillness seeps into them. The water remains lethal, even as it melts. The sun drowns in an intricate system of watery mirrors and reflections. Nobody can really get warm—right after lunch, once the wet blaring of horns announcing shift changes at the station subsides, twilight sets in, and that illusory sensation of warmth, of a thaw, disappears again.
Pasha skirts the building and takes the soggy path through the trees. They had always shared the duplex with a railroad worker. Half the building belonged to him, half to Pasha’s tight-knit family—mom, dad, Pasha, and his older sister. About fifteen years ago, when Pasha’s family still all lived together, the railroad worker burned his half down. They put the fire out before it got to their half. The railroad worker didn’t feel like rebuilding—he went to the station, caught a train heading east, and disappeared from their lives forever. They knocked down his half of the building, whitewashed the burned wall, and went on with their lives. From the outside, the structure looked like half a loaf of bread on a store shelf. Pasha’s old man always bought those half-loaves so he wouldn’t have to pay too much or have too much left over. Living by the railroad taught him that.
Black trees in the snow, biting boughs against the red backdrop of the sky, their street on the other side of the fence, the neighbors’ little white houses, yellow lemons of electric light scattered here and there, gardens, fences, fireplaces emitting smoke like the warm January respiration of weary men standing out in the cold. Empty streets, no one in sight, train cars being coupled together, metal on metal, like someone rearranging iron furniture. And from the south, from the direction of the city, sporadic blasts have been coming in all day, since morning—sometimes intense, sometimes diffuse. An echo ripples high up in the air. The acoustics are distorted in the winter; you can never really tell where one is coming from or where it’s hitting. Fresh air, the smell of damp trees, tense silence. It only gets this quiet when everyone pipes down and starts listening. Pasha counts to a hundred and heads back. Ten. There were six last night. In the same interval. I wonder what they’ll say on the news.
Pasha sees his dad in the kitchen. He’s standing hunched over the table, packing an old duffel bag.
“Long trip ahead of ya?” Pasha asks.
What’s the point of asking, though? He’s going to pick up the kid, obviously. He makes a big show of tossing things into his bag: a newspaper (how can he reread old newspapers like that? It’s like looking at a completed crossword), glasses (Pasha’s always hassling him about those thick glasses that warp every image—“you might as well wear sunglasses, you can’t see a damn thing anyway”), pension card (he’ll get a free senior citizen bus ticket if he’s lucky), his cellphone, worn smooth like a rock in the sea, and a clean handkerchief. The old-timer washes and irons his handkerchiefs himself, doesn’t pass it off on his daughter. He takes out the ironing board once a month and smooths out his handkerchiefs, grayed by the passage of time, like he’s drying out devalued hryvnias that have been through the washing machine. Pasha’s always getting his old man tissues, but he keeps using his handkerchiefs—has been since the days he worked at the station, when tissues just flat out didn’t exist in this part of the world. He can hardly even use his cellphone, but he still takes it just about everywhere—beat-up frame, faded green button. Pasha puts minutes on there for him; he’s never learned how. Now he’s folding everything meticulously, rooting around in his bag, silently taking umbrage at something or other. It’s getting harder and harder to deal with him—can’t even talk to him without hurting his feelings. He’s like a little kid. Pasha walks over to the stove, begins drinking right out of the teapot. All the wells dried up in the summer. They’re too scared to drink from the tap—who knows what’s floating around in the pipes now? So they boil their water and steer clear of lakes and rivers. The old-timer is rooting around in his pockets, refusing to respond to Pasha.
“Fine,” Pasha says. “I’ll go get him.”
The old-timer isn’t just going to roll over, though. He takes out the newspaper, unfolds it, then folds it in four, and sticks it back in his bag. Dry yellow fingers anxiously tear the paper; he’s all hunched over the table, not even looking at Pasha, like he wants to prove something, take on the whole world.
“Did you hear what I said? I’ll go pick him up.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I said I’d pick him up,” Pasha repeats, a bit anxiously.
The old-timer makes a big show of picking up his newspaper and leaves, flinging open the door leading to the living room. A strip of soft light from the television reaches the dark hallway. Then he shuts the door abruptly, as though he’s locking himself inside an empty fridge.
DAY ONE
A January morning, long and motionless, like a line at the hospital. Morning briskness in the kitchen, slate twilight outside. Pasha walks over to the stove, and his nose instantly catches the sweetish smell of gas. For Pasha that smell is always associated with vigorous mornings—getting up for work, tossing textbooks and graded assignments into his briefcase, ducking into th
e kitchen, breathing in sweet gas, drinking strong tea, following it with black bread, assuring himself he’s living the good life, and running off to work once he’s fully convinced. That smell has been with him his whole life; any time he wakes up somewhere outside his own home without the morning stove, its aged burners crusted with ash, he has no appetite. Pasha peers out the window, considers the black snow and black sky, sits down at the table, and shakes his head, trying to gather his wits. Six a.m., January, Monday, one more day with no job to go to.
He grabs some assignments off the windowsill, leafs through them, puts them back immediately, gets up, goes over to the main room, peeks in. The old-timer’s sleeping in his chair. A blood-drenched man is crying out to him from the screen, to no avail—the sound’s been off since last night. Now you can’t get to him, no matter how loud you yell. Pasha stops for a second, looks at the blood. The yelling man shifts his eyes toward Pasha and starts yelling at him—don’t turn it off, listen, this is important, it involves you, too. But Pasha quickly finds the remote, squeezes the large red button like he’s trying to get toothpaste out of the tube, tosses the remote on the table, slips outside, and shuts the door carefully, so as not to wake his dad. But the door still creaks menacingly in the morning twilight. The old-timer wakes up immediately, finds the remote, and turns the TV back on. It’s showing something horrible, something that involves everyone. Pasha’s already running up to the station.
“Something’s off,” he thinks. “Something’s definitely off around here.” Not a living soul, not a single voice. No locomotive noise. No peddlers. It’s just above freezing, and water is leaking from the dark blue snowbanks—clouds in the sky, moisture hanging in the air, sometimes turning to barely perceptible drizzle, fog settling on the far-off tracks, no voices or footsteps coming out of that fog. “It’s still early,” Pasha thinks, anxious. “It’s still early, that’s all.” In the south, over there, by the city limits, a suspicious silence has settled. No blasts, no shredded air. A bus comes around the corner. Pasha exhales in relief. The buses are running, everything’s fine. Yeah, it’s just early, that’s all.