Maljartschuk Forgottenness

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7398423-5-2
Verlag: Bullaun Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Two tales intertwined in a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, the collective and the individual, between the stories of two people born on the same day, a century apart. The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882-1931), a once-significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time. As she plunges into her nation's history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question - what does it mean to remember?

Tanja Maljartschuk, born in Ivano-Frankivsk (1983), is an acclaimed contemporary Ukrainian writer with three novels and several collections of short prose and poetry to her name. She now writes in German as well as Ukrainian, and her work has been translated into more than ten languages. Her most recent awards are the Theodor Kramer Prize for Writing in Resistance and Exile (2023) and the Usedom Literature Prize (2022).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maljartschuk, Tanja

Weitere Mitwirkende

Tompkins, Zenia

Leseproben

I
IN THE BELLY OF THE BLUE WHALE
(Us)
THE MOST DIFFICULT THING TO EXPLAIN – even to myself – is why him? Where did this story of ours come from? Who are we to one another? No one, I reply. We’ve never met. (Our meeting was physically impossible.) We aren’t relatives, we aren’t fellow countrymen, we aren’t even of the same nationality. He was Polish, and I’m Ukrainian. He was an intellectual, a philosopher active in politics, a poet with a place in history. I’m just a person who manipulates words and ideas, with no real profession; I can write, or I can remain silent. Our lives were too disparate to comfortably fit into a shared narrative, if not for my irrational stubbornness. I’VE PULLED TOGETHER THREE POINTS where our lives intersected, two in space and one in time. That’s the best I’ve been able to do. There simply are no more. Here is the first one: He once spent a few days in my hometown. World War I had just ended. He was an envoy of the Ukrainian State and had an important engagement there. I, likewise, spent a few hours in his native village. I went there purposely. A villager with an old-fashioned moustache by the name of Petro, who now looks after his family estate, showed me around gladly but did ask, ‘So, who is he to you? Why are you interested? For an average tourist, you know too much.’ I replied that, well, I was just interested. Simply because. That it was hard to explain. Petro nodded that he understood. He squeezed my hand with his own coarse, calloused one. I didn’t admit that there was a third thing that united us, a strange coincidence that I had noticed quite recently and was cherishing as if it were the ultimate justification of my obsession. Our lives had intersected once in time as well. We were born on the same day, both on 17 April, only he exactly a hundred years before me. I now find myself thinking about time often and tell everyone that only with time does a sense of time come. That the further in time you go, the more palpable it becomes. The longer you live, the more of it there is. And all the other times – those in which I haven’t lived, but which I know existed – grow over the little grain of my individual time, stratify it, encrust it. That’s why it always seems as though I’ve lived interminably long and that the end should be arriving at any moment. THE END, IN FACT, had arrived: my heart started going into my throat. That’s how I described the sudden panic attacks, that feeling of being consumed by a tremendous fright when my heart, the central organ of my body, suddenly thundered and crept up to my throat, threatening to leap out onto the floor. I tried to describe my bouts with words (they’re my defence, my army; I am, after all, a woman of letters), but the words ravelled apart, as if someone were cooking them, stirring them sporadically with a wooden spoon. Words no longer meant anything. The end that I was experiencing, the end of all times within me, couldn’t be described the way I used to, the way I expected to. New words were needed, a new truth, and the search for them grabbed hold of my entire mind. OVER THE COURSE of my past ‘literary career,’ which entailed all of six slight books, I always worked on a computer. I never wrote by hand and, quite frankly, don’t know how to, so when the need arose, I painstakingly traced out scribbles and, for lack of practice, made a slew of mistakes. My computer, by contrast, felt like a weaving loom. In the past, I seemed to type on it as though weaving a rug, and I’d strive to make the text as colourful as possible. Now the process of writing reminds me more of playing a piano. I’m making music. I press the keys adeptly; I rhythmically lean my torso forwards; when the music tires, my fingers halt mid-air and then obediently drop down to the keyboard, forcing the needed letters to sound. Whereas in the past, when I wrote, I was weaving a colourful life path, these days I’m composing the inexorable music of the end, a requiem for my own self. That doesn’t mean that I’ll die tomorrow – not at all. Having survived and accepted one’s own end, it’s possible to still live as long as one pleases. THE FEELING OF MY HEART in my throat used to be so unbearable, especially in the beginning, that I would’ve thrown myself out the window had I been able to move in the moment: anything to stop the palpitations, the pain in my chest and temples, the shortness of breath, the dizziness, the nausea. Though it wasn’t the physical suffering that was truly unbearable, but the distortion of reality, my new perception of it – as if I were looking at life from the far side, the one from which there is no longer any return. It was the complete horror that we, the living, imagine death to be. Simultaneously, I was experiencing the loss (or the primordial absence?) of the slightest sense of meaning – the foundational one, the one from which everything begins. The question, ‘What for?’ eclipsed all the rest. The ‘who am I’ wasn’t important, just the ‘what for.’ The ‘when’ and ‘how’ didn’t matter either, only the ‘why.’ And so, at one such instance, while suffering from abysmal uselessness, I suddenly began to think about time as the thing that unites an endless rosary of senseless events; and also about the fact that only in the sequence of these events is there meaning; and that it’s not God, not love, not beauty, not the greatness of intellect that determines this world, but only time – the flow of time and the glimmering of human life within it. Human life is its sustenance. Time consumes everything living by the tonne, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it into a homogeneous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance. Yet it wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it. I thought to myself: I’ve already got one foot there, out in complete forgottenness. The process of my inevitable disappearance was initiated at the moment of my birth. And the longer I live, the more I vanish. My feelings and my emotions vanish, my pain and my joy; the places I’ve seen vanish, and the people I’ve met. My memories vanish, as do my thoughts. My conception of the world vanishes. My body vanishes, more and more every day. The world within me and around me vanishes, leaving no trace, and I can do nothing to safeguard it. IT WAS IN THE WAKE of this revelation that I took to reading old newspapers in large quantities. The fragility of human life in the face of the omnipotence of time can be felt most in the dusty pages of daily newspapers. There, these lives were still important. The headlines abounded with the dreams and fears of entire nations, discussions were conducted, scandals exploded, rebuttals were published, pharmacies and bookstores and travel agencies placed their ads, someone was collecting donations for war-crippled countrymen, someone else was announcing a literary soirée, and on the final page there were always one or two mediocre poems with patriotic themes, for the soul, until suddenly, poof! – and this gurgling time of the present had become the past, the mouth of the blue whale was already open and was beginning to gulp it all down, the editor sorrowfully shared that due to a lack of funding the newspaper was halting circulation, ‘but not for good!’ And not a single issue more. The end. Time had prevailed. The blue whale was swimming away. That’s what happened with the first Ukrainian newspaper, Dilo (Deed), which was published from 1880 to 1939 in Lviv. In 1939, a centuries-long history of this city came to a close. The Red Army’s entry into Lviv that year initiated a new – Soviet – era, the particular predilection of which was the killing of the past and a ban on memory. That’s what also happened with the other large Ukrainian newspaper, Rada (Council), which was published daily in Kyiv from 1906 to 1914. The publisher, Yevhen Chykalenko, had been forced to contribute considerable funds from his own pocket so that the newspaper would continue to exist because no one subscribed to it. The First World War addressed this problem in a definitive manner, and Yevhen Chykalenko breathed a sigh of relief because his conscience wouldn’t have permitted him to shut down the newspaper himself. He said that a newspaper was like a flag: if it was flying, that meant Ukraine was still in existence. But the fate of the newspaper Svoboda (Liberty), which the Ukrainian community in America began to publish in New York back in 1893 and still publishes to this day, was entirely different. This newspaper became my favourite not because it was the best, but because it saw everything and forgot nothing. One hundred and twenty uninterrupted years. Six generations of people united by one chronology. The murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the fall of the Soviet Union, or events on Ukrainian lands, like the fire in Husiatyn in 1893 and the Bolekhiv butcher Anton, who in 1934 cut off his own mother’s head with an axe. Or, for another example, the 20 June, 1931 issue, which reported in its pages that the gangster Al Capone had been arrested in Chicago. I mulled over this information for a moment, attempting to imagine what was going on in another part of the world that same year, in the villages of my grandmothers and grandfathers for instance, but the only thing that kept popping into my mind was that the women in those Ukrainian villages didn’t wear underwear because they simply didn’t have any, and...