Lucky Breaks

  lucky breaks

  Copyright © 2018 by Yevgenia Belorusets

  Translation and afterword copyright © 2022 by Eugene Ostashevsky

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published as Щасливі падіння (Shchaslivi padinnia) in 2018 by Ist Publishing (Kharkiv, Ukraine).

  The twenty-three images in this edition are from Yevgenia Belorusets’s photographic series But I Insist: It’s Not Even Yesterday Yet (2017) and War in the Park (2017).

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published by New Directions as NDP1525 in 2022

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Belorusets, Yevgenia, author. | Ostashevsky, Eugene, translator.

  Title: Lucky breaks / Yevgenia Belorusets ; translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky.

  Other titles: Shchaslivi padinnia. English

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : a New Directions Paperbook Original, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021046009 | ISBN 9780811229845 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811229852 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Belorusets, Yevgenia­—Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PG3491.44.L58435 S54 2022 | DDC 891.71/5—dc23/eng/20211020

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046009

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

  ndbooks.com

  Contents

  A note before the preface

  Preface: Interview (The Jaws of Fate)

  Those I Met

  A Needle in a Nightshirt

  The Woman Who Caught Babies in a Mitt

  March 8: The Woman Who Could Not Walk

  Two Women on the Airplane Stairs: No One Moves (March 9, Kyiv)

  The Woman Who Fell Sick

  The Florist

  The Manicurist

  My Sister

  Neighbor Histories

  A Woman Finds a Job

  The Woman with the Black, Broken Umbrella

  The Seer of Dreams

  The Lonely Woman

  Lena in Danger

  Chronicle of a Revolt

  The Power of Time

  Elena

  The Crash

  The Shillyshallier

  The Stars

  Transformations

  Lilacs

  A Woman at the Cosmetologist’s

  The Sisters

  Philosophy

  Light Attractors

  Three Songs of Lamentation

  For Example

  The Address, or Sketches for an Autobiography

  The Naive Woman

  A Brief Declaration on Waiting

  Translator’s afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Cover

  a note before the preface

  What can’t be given up?

  A pencil.

  A city.

  A street.

  You.

  What can’t be measured?

  My smile.

  Your concern.

  Our mutual misunderstanding.

  What do I believe in?

  I believe nobody can believe in anything definite. It even makes no sense to try. People only make-believe they believe.

  When the protagonist of a photography project I worked on from 2016 to 2018 in East Ukraine—a woman who was also its participant and coauthor—started this word game, it impressed me as a most fitting image and photograph of her.

  Separated from visual representation, written down in the form of consecutive lines of text, the game both stood witness to reality and invited me into it.

  You are reading a collection of tales that aspire to a certain quality of photography: the quality of escaping the author’s final control over the materiality of past events, encounters, conversations, histories. When I take photographs, I do not set for myself the goal of creating rows of images by means of technology, as Vilém Flusser defines photography. Rather, I am more interested in working with memories— the possibility of forming memories with the help of a photograph that claims to be true despite remaining someone’s fiction, a theatrical contrivance merely based on everyday life.

  All my previous photographic and textual work tried to capture some aspect of the historical reality of Ukraine that, for all its scale and significance, remains in shadow, unseen.

  The storylines of Lucky Breaks, two of which are photographic, do not represent the pivotal moments in the country’s present history but—one might think from a cursory glance—only what occurs on the sidelines. More precisely, they focus on the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies and experiences of everyday life.

  At least three separate themes, indirectly related to the conflict in East Ukraine, deal not with the conflict itself, but with the surmounting of the conflict through a dialectical process—by means of phantasmagoria, narrative, conversation, and the disclosure of certain situations to the viewer.

  The insignificant and the small, the accidental, the superfluous, the repressed—all of these things attract my attention because they will never turn into the trophies that Walter Benjamin talks about in “On the Concept of History”: The trophies that winners carry from the present into the future so that they might lay down their booty, like bricks, to construct the dominant historical narrative.

  Readers can decide for themselves if the documentation presented here (of the times, conditions, emotions, worldviews) disrupts the language of fiction, a language that over and over proves reductive and resistant to reality.

  In this book, the voices of different people resonate and clash; photographs and words also collide, neither given the chance to explain or to illustrate the other. Their interlocked coexistence doesn’t allow any one idea, any one voice—especially the author’s—to dominate.

  One of the two photographic series in this volume continues, in black-and-white, the photographic work I carried out over several years in the mines in East Ukraine, which are still in operation, although located in the conflict zone. Yet this particular short series was shot in peaceful Novovolynsk, a city in the west, near the border of Poland, where an industrial culture similar to that of the Donbas survives and evolves. This book represents the recent history of this culture by images that indicate something evasive but do not name it.

  With these photographic sequences and stories I want to show how collisions of different contexts inform and transform the manufacture of narratives, resulting in the rejection of any instruments of certainty.

  The woman whose words opened this note will appear in these pages. It will be utterly impossible to recognize her, as her manner of speech has become the foundation for my own.

  preface

  interview (the jaws of fate)

  i have been working on a preface for this book for many months now. What I wanted, above all, was a scientific approach. I planned to concisely set forth some facts about documentality and to deliver, if not the definitive, then a suitably severe verdict against i
t, only to employ a certain rhetorical maneuver and finally—citing the spot-on remark of a woman I know—to resolve once and for all why topicality is infinitely better than documentality, but not in every respect.

  I must admit that, after countless ruminations and epiphanies hazardously abutting despair, but without crossing over into despair proper, I managed to create a preface that was hard to tear your eyes away from. My hands tremble even now when I recall that specimen of significance so magnificently caparisoned.

  In the roar of the predawn highway an alcoholic overhears a remote chime that people in our parts call “the snap of the jaws of fate.” Its inaccessible beauty evokes the rhythm I had constructed in that text.

  Yet, if you think about it long enough, the role of a preface will turn out to be too narrow and undeservedly cramped for an utterance of such caliber. It is an utterance that ought to aim higher. It must serve as the foundation for everything else, yet it itself should not be made public by any means. (Publication is a false target!)

  Nor may it be put up for sale. It may perhaps be bartered for cultural values or handed out as an encouragement for those who are at least partially full, while those who are hungry might receive it as a momentary distraction from thoughts of sustenance. Yet lately I had an occasion to test out the said preface: it did not distract me, alas, it did not distract me. In one of the coming chapters I will make sure to return to the notable experience I acquired thereby, so that it can be described in great detail.

  But I cannot pass over in silence an incident that befell me not long ago—as a matter of fact, just yesterday.

  Our neighborhood is quite badly off, although from far away it appears fairly up to par—maybe even the best-off neighborhood in Kyiv. But I can tell that its façades of well-being hide profound and sincere ill-being. Yet how can something hidden remain sincere? No doubt it cannot. Still, the earnestness of this ill-being will stun anyone who dares to discover it. And yet, even here one must be honest with oneself and recognize how rare in our society is the daring that the discovery calls for!

  So it is no surprise that I felt disconcerted yesterday evening when, at the entrance to my building—where someone had screwed out and carried off the bulb that used to dimly illuminate the small area around the steps up to the doorway—I discovered first a long shadow, and then a figure that had separated from a wall awash in darkness and was menacingly extending an enormous hand in my direction.

  The voice of the person who spoke to me turned out to be soft and pleasant. A high, melodic voice inhibited by a tender, impulsive intonation. A woman stood before me, trying to explain something. She had been wanting to meet me for a long while now in order to ask me a few questions.

  “Maybe I can cook up some semblance of an interview from your answers,” she nervously suggested. “But it’s more likely that I will fail. I have to confess that I fail at much of what I set out to do. Practically all of my plans, desires, intentions, and goals run aground and go under. But you will kindly spare a few minutes of your time to answer my questions. Believe me, it’s not so difficult to answer, especially when the questions are already there in your hands. To formulate the questions—my responsibility completely—is the far more demanding task.”

  I couldn’t help but invite her in for a cup of coffee and hear out her questions, which troubled me before they were even asked. The fact is that any Ukrainian journalist, especially if she, for some unclear reason, displays an interest in art and literature, tends, as a rule, merely to abuse her freedom—and to do so in the most disgraceful manner. But since my marvelously composed preface had by then been disposed of, beyond recovery and retrieval, I was hoping that a brief conversation with an unknown journalist would prod me toward a fresh group of thoughts that I could then set forth before the other texts as an equivalent to a preface. I did understand perfectly well that a dialogue such as this wouldn’t touch upon any aspect of the themes and questions that must be elucidated—or at least brought up—in an actual preface to a book such as this. Yet I had no other choice.

  Because my initial preface turned out to be unfit for publication, you see, I also had to forego the book’s former title, as educational and deeply meaningful as it was. The original title was:

  A History of Taxation.

  And then, on the next page:

  Fragment from a Study of the Early History of Mankind.

  I will certainly never be able to think of a better title—that’s clear. “A history of taxation” encompasses not only all forms of human life but also those enjoyed by the representatives of the animal world, combining literary experimentation and scientific reliability within a single verbal image. Moreover, “the early history of mankind” narrows and focuses the book’s contents on the history of my country, for it is precisely here, in this place, that the history of any kind of mankind can find its origin.

  But what else was I to do? How could I, despite suffering such palpable losses, let events completely escape the sphere of my control, that is to say drop the reins, loosen the grip, let the book go without a title? A thousand ideas were rushing through my mind, but then I overheard a soft, alluringly remote sound go off in their torrent.

  “You’re not saying anything,” Andrea began. “I, meanwhile, am starting to suspect that you decided to speak to me out of pity, whereas you actually believe that our conversation won’t lead anywhere. And that confirms my fears, because, as I had already confessed, the majority of my intentions and even actions lead nowhere. I write for small regional papers that no one in Kyiv has ever heard of. North Donetsk News declines my articles one after another. And they have the right to do so, since I formerly wrote for Alchevsk Vespers, The Lights, and some other papers that also almost always declined my articles and proposals. After numerous discussions and rejections, I decided to pitch a regular column to The Dispatches to be called ‘The Diary of a Former Alchie’ but they declined this, too, without hearing my full pitch because to them the column’s title would be misconstrued by readers, thereby casting a shadow on the whole paper.

  “What am I supposed to do,” she continued, “if basically no one reads the articles I write? I’ve started to think that I’ve never written for any newspapers, that I never could have been able to write anything. I observe things, yes—that I’m good at, even magnificent. But as for writing, I don’t really know how to do it, nor do I really want to do it. I refuse to study this art, or craft, whose foundations repose on lies, self-delusion, and blind error.

  “As for you”—she would not let me get a word in edgewise—“I see you sitting inside your cozy little apartment, content with yourself, living the life of Riley or else dashing off one thing after another with enviable diligence, calculating, fitting one word to the next, certainly without feeling the uselessness, the senselessness, of what you’re doing, or plotting. You don’t need to be afraid of me! Consider the facts! You had the chance but you didn’t take it. And worse: day by day, week by week you were becoming encrusted, you even reached the point—and this makes me recoil in disgust—of ‘believing in yourself,’ so to speak! And now you count on me. You’re expecting that I—a person entirely unknown to you, a person who has lived through so much, who has experienced so much more than you—that I, myself, and no one else, will present you with questions I had prepared earlier, questions that cost me sleepless nights of formulations which I tried to iron out even while sleeping, or even while helping my little daughter with her homework! Some nice reckoning you got there! You’re anticipating, with your hideous, nauseating naiveté, that I would come clean, spill my questions, and let you again start impudently producing your so-called answers—so that you may again swim out into the unknown and paddle back with a verdict you will remain satisfied with!

  “You’re trying to get away? It’s no use! I too was trying to get away, to ride away, to move to Lviv, or to Kyiv, to anywhere else. But you can’t get
away. There’s a moment when cars stop driving out of town, and later you find out that commuter buses and jitney vans haven’t been running for a long time, and then it dawns on you that you have remained forever where, in fact, you had been lingering merely in order to leave that place at some decisive moment. You are now stuck, you’ve become a hostage, a prisoner of people and circumstances, just like in the movies you used to watch, except that now you’ve become an unwilling actor in that movie, only to discover, to your astonishment, that there isn’t and never was an art more petty, more heartless than contemporary cinema, all contemporary cinema without exception, including of course documentaries. Because when you wake up inside a work of whatever genre—comedic, heroic, documentary, military—the movie, to your astonishment, turns out to be unmoving, an infinitely protracted, monotonous, corrosive nightmare. And I would have really liked, with utmost sincerity, I would have liked to believe, as with any normal film, that this nightmare followed a plot development with a climax, an ending, and even an epilogue, but, from my observations, nothing of the sort takes place. Nothing goes anywhere. Nothing ever comes close to this supposedly ancient, time-tested, formulaic plotting.

  “Now, wait a second. I can see by your face that you are nodding at me two-facedly, without believing a single word. In order to prove these facts to you to be clear as day and equally incontestable, I have decided to install myself at your place for a duration, not just overnight but to move in for a while so that I might live as closely as possible to your life, to feel the fiber of your assurance, your bluster, your readiness to force an entirely unfamiliar person—somebody who has done you no wrong—to pose questions to you as you leaned back sloppily in your chair, raised your gaze to the ceiling, and deigned to answer, as if this person had nothing left in life other than suffering the torture of constructing these questions, fine-tuning them one to the next, and then asking and waiting for each question to be crowned with an answer, like an action encountering with its opposite reaction, roots with a trunk, or fate with a character.”