Forgottenness E-Book

Tanja Maljartschuk

• Herausgeber: Bullaun Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 391

Beschreibung

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?

Leseprobe

Praise for Forgottenness

‘It’s no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does.’

Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter(International Booker Prize 2023)

‘I didn’t want this beguiling and immersive novel to end. It’s that unusual creation, an intimate epic, and its characters continue to flood my thoughts. The translation does justice to the author’s virtuoso performance.’

Martina Devlin

‘Forgottenness is quietly magnificent. Through the interwoven Ukrainian lives therein, Maljartschuk has created a truly singular work, one that touches meaningfully and without pomp or pretension on selfhood, narrative, time and legacy. This is one of those rare books whose sentences unfurl through the silences we forget we’re living in.’

Lucy Sweeney Byrne, author of Paris Syndrome

‘In Forgottenness, Tanja Maljartschuk and translator Zenia Tompkins offer us a reminder of how readily we can forget – and a lesson in the vital importance of remembering. At once an electrifying personal narrative, and a vast European chronicle of war, memory and politics, this novel is timely and intensely charged.’

Neil Hegarty, author of The Jewel

‘This intriguing novel skilfully navigates the complexities, tensions and intrigues of Ukraine’s emerging identity in the early years of the 20th century, in parallel with a more contemporary story of a destructive obsession with the past. Forgottenness is an original, illuminating and inspiring novel that leaves a reader wanting to read more – much more – from this remarkable writer.’

Lia Mills

‘The unnamed narrator of Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness has the sense of having been “swallowed whole by the big blue whale of time”. She sets out to tell her own story through the story of Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–1931), a once renowned figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The result is a vivid, compelling exploration of the lives of two individuals, born a century apart, each grappling with Ukrainian identity, memory and survival. Amid the chaos of brutal occupations, shifting political borders and the Soviet policy of “destroying harmful history [and] lobotomizing memory”, Maljartschuk traces what it means to be denied language, culture and a homeland of one’s own.’

Catherine Dunne

‘Maljartschuk fruitfully explores themes of erasure and remembrance to meditate on what survives the onslaught of time.’

Publishers Weekly

‘[T]he past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions – the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms.’

The Atlantic

‘[Maljartschuk] stands out as an author who asks in which time we live, who wants to recognize and present the truth about it with literary and essayistic means.’

Theodor Kramer Prize for Writing in Resistance and Exile

‘An impressively sincere self-inquiry about identity.’

Jury of the Usedom Prize, led by Olga Tokarczuk

‘Maljartschuk is an outstanding storyteller who writes against the erasure of Ukrainian history.’

volksblatt.at

‘A literarily impressive novel that shows what it means when one’s identity consists of fear, obedience, and oblivion.’

buchmagazin

‘Tanja Maljartschuk sensitively links a fictional and a real, historical life story from Ukraine.’

Kleine Zeitung

‘An exceptionally ambitious work that captivates with its clear, level-headed language.’

Stern

‘The comforting thing about this book is its inconsolability. The blue whale closes its mouth and swims on.’

Frankfurter Rundschau

‘[Maljartschuk] breathes literary life into the forgotten era with poetic imagination and cinematic embellishments [....] By turning Vyacheslav Lypynskyi into a novel hero and making his daughter, with whom he had no contact, into a character who asks him questions at the end of his life, Maljartschuk strengthens the roots of the young Ukrainian historical consciousness, which is marked by the memory of setbacks and futile resistance. [...] Lypynskyi’s sense of solidarity and responsibility for the country colonized by his compatriots seems, from today’s perspective, almost like a harbinger of the European idea. And his advocacy of a territorial principle of the new Ukraine, which was to be home to inhabitants of different origins, denominations and languages, could well teach the fractured Ukrainian society of today something.’

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)

‘A novel that dares and wins: The way Tanya Maljartschuk intertwines the small and large stories of her characters, the way she tells the story of her homeland, in very different literary forms and yet always remaining true to her style, is as convincing as it is impressive.’

Die Tagezeitung (taz)

‘Maljartschuk [skillfully] weaves a fictional and a real life story into a poetic double portrait. Meticulously researched, the novel impresses with the wealth of material in its historical digressions as well as with the sensitive drawing of the souls of its protagonists.’

Kleine Zeitung

‘Her humorously melancholic novel is a dense yet successful attempt to erase a white mark in both Ukrainian and European history and to give it a face. Thus the novel, which states the “lack of trace of disappearance”, cleverly and artfully resists oblivion.’

Die Rheinpfalz

‘European literature has a new Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, and this time it’s a woman: her name is Tanya Maljartschuk.’

Vatican News

TANJA MALJARTSCHUK

Translated from Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

This translation is published in 2024 by

BULLAUN PRESS

Sligo, Ireland

www.bullaunpress.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Originally published in Ukrainian as Забуття

Copyright © 2016, 2024 Tanja Maljartschuk

Published in German as Blauwal der Erinnerung

Copyright © 2019 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, Germany

Translation copyright © 2024 by Liveright Publishing Corporation,

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The right of Tanja Maljartschuk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 7398423 4 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7398423 5 2

Bullaun Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Printed in Spain by Castuera.

This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

For Michael

Contents

I (Us) In the Belly of the Blue Whale

II (Him) Inhale, Exhale

III (Him) Kraków

IV (Me) The First Golden-Haired Man

V (Him) Shame

VI (Him) Kazimiera

VII (Me) Soot

VIII (Him) Rokicki’s Legacy

IX (Him) Tubercular Consumptives

X (Me) The Queen of Mould

XI (Him) Aragatz

XII (Him) A Spring So Impossible

XIII (Me) Sonia the Strongwoman

XIV (Us) The Internal Wild Steppe

XV (Him) Vienna

XVI (Me) Bomchyk Laughs and Eats

XVII (Him) Days Like Tears

XVIII (Me) The Knight of Darkness

XIX (Him) The Sans Diet

XX (Us) Rational Chicken Breeding

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 routinely, when the need arose, had to sit at home so that no one would see the ritual blood trickling down their calves.

Only later did my attention migrate to the big black upper case letters on the front page, which only an unscrupulous reader could have skipped past in favour of the arrest of a Chicago gangster. Three words in total, stamped in black ink. It was impossible to not see them. An eerie chill swept down my back. I reread the headline over and over until I stopped feeling anything. Over and over:

VIACHESLAV LYPYNSKYI DEAD

At the time, I didn’t know who he was or how he had died. But the death of this man must have been of considerable importance to someone in the Ukrainian diaspora if Svoboda was reporting it on the front page, neglecting the fates of Al Capone and his New York counterpart Dutch Schultz, who would also be thrown in jail days later. The announcement that the Russian writer Maxim Gorky had been admitted into the ranks of the Communist Party likewise didn’t outweigh the death notification in importance, nor did the suicide of the wife of the Rabbi of Vilnius, the cause of which was apparently a ‘nervous disorder.’ In this issue of Svoboda, nothing was more important than the death of Viacheslav Lypynskyi. In contrast to the hapless wife of the rabbi, whose name went altogether unreported, Lypynskyi’s name needed no explanation, otherwise he wouldn’t have been written about in the spot typically reserved for some sort of global catastrophe, such as, say, the devastating 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

I read the obituary below the black headline. An eminent historian and a prominent politician. He had left instructions to have his heart pierced after his death because he feared being buried alive. The heart puncture was performed in the Austrian sanatorium Wienerwald, the same one where the little-known writer Franz Kafka had unsuccessfully undergone treatment a few years earlier. Lypynskyi’s daughter Ewa and his brother Stanisław served as witnesses to the procedure.

AT THAT SAME TIME, in June 1931, my paternal grandfather had just turned five years old. His mother, my great-grandmother, who didn’t own any horses, used to harness herself to a plough in order to till up a hectare of land, and signed her name with an X. Their homeland, Ukraine – or more precisely, Eastern Halychyna – was still a part of Poland then.

My maternal grandmother was also alive then. Her mother, another great-grandmother of mine, had the best voice in her parts, but few got the chance to enjoy it because she died immediately after giving birth to her daughter. Her widower, a once-prosperous grain farmer, left his daughter on the steps of an orphanage and himself died of starvation in 1933. Their homeland – Malorossiia or ‘Little Russia,’ the Greater Ukraine that straddled the Dnipro River, the original Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – was de facto a part of Russia. Though can a land that kills really be called a ‘homeland’? I don’t know. I had ended up right in the belly of the blue whale. Swallowed whole, I still had the chance to resuscitate my story. Mine and his, Viacheslav Lypynskyi’s. My story through his story. I needed only to pretend that no one’s heart had been pierced and that it was still beating. Just now, in my throat.

II

INHALE, EXHALE

(Him)

ACTUALLY, THE ENTIRETY of the Ukrainian press reported his death, though did so with some delay. Viacheslav Lypynskyi died. Lypynskyi was dead. What a loss. Finally. Everyone knew Lypynskyi. It would be harder without him. Or easier? In any case, it would be lonelier, because he didn’t let anyone get bored. Ukrainian nobility died along with him. He was a mad tubercular consumptive. A recluse. It had been years since anyone had seen him. But everyone had continued to read what he wrote. And he wrote a lot. At times, ten letters a day. Did anyone even understand his scribbles? Did anyone even grasp what it was exactly he was trying to say? He was feared because he demanded dignity from people, contending that it was their duty. Who needed that? That’s precisely why no one liked him: everyone just endured him. And sighed with relief when he died. Lypynskyi’s enemies wrote laudatory obituaries. They had stockpiled drafts long before. Everyone had been waiting for his death. It’s a wonder he hadn’t died sooner.

__________

THEY CARRIED HIM out of his home in their arms. Outside, a car waited to take him to the sanatorium.

‘Will I see all this again?’ he asked himself, glancing around.

‘You’ll see it. You’ve lived through worse,’ replied Lypynskyi’s housekeeper Fräulein Yulia Rosenfeld. He was speaking in Ukrainian, she in German. Their interactions after many shared years were perfectly tuned. She understood him better than anyone else alive, knowing how to assess the state of his health on a given day solely by the depth and rate of his breathing. Analyzing Lypynskyi’s breathing was a fixation of hers – a hobby the housekeeper had managed to polish to perfection alongside the housework, the washing of his clothes, and the shining of shoes that Lypynskyi hadn’t worn in years.

Everyone called the fräulein Fin Yulí. Older than her employer by five years, never wed, a now grey-blonde, she was not one to mince words, but was also fair and loving. It was she who would often say, ‘Where are you rushing to? Breathe slower. O-o-one, two. Inha-a-ale, exhale.’

Lypynskyi would wave her off with exasperation. ‘I’m glad to still be breathing at all. Let me be.’

Inha-a-ale, exhale. Inha-a-ale, exhale.

Lypynskyi would try to calm his lungs – that is, the part of them that (so he thought) hadn’t become entirely perforated yet. Then Fin Yulí would open the windows wide, and the cold mountain wind would burst into the tidy room with a large bed in the middle. This bed had long served as Lypynskyi’s office. Snow-covered alpine peaks were visible from the window. Lypynskyi would close his eyes and breathe. O-o-one, two. Inha-a-ale, exhale. Two hours, three hours. As if rocking in a cradle stretched between two mountaintops over a deep valley. Bit by bit, his moustache, still fully black, would grow covered with hoarfrost.

__________

LYPYNSKYI’S DAUGHTER EWA was standing in the yard. She had made a special trip from Kraków after learning about the heart attack. It happened in late May: the doctor took six hours to arrive because horrible weather had enveloped the mountains and turbid waters filled with uprooted saplings were streaming from the highlands in stormy torrents, eroding even the main roads, to say nothing of the mountain paths. Lypynskyi had been very nervous. Fin Yulí stood at the window while he, like a child, asked every few minutes, ‘Is he here yet?’

‘Not yet, but soon.’

‘In my condition,’ he exclaimed, ‘I can’t afford to wait this long for a doctor.’

It was decided after that he would go to the sanatorium. Lypynskyi sold his archive to Andrii Sheptytskyi, the metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, so as to pay for the costly stay in Wienerwald. For the entire archive, which consisted of letters, manuscripts, notes, unpublished articles, and related materials, he received a few hundred dollars. That should suffice for the first while.

Viacheslav Lypynskyi had been preparing for death since childhood, but precisely then, as it stood right next to him in the forty-ninth year of his life, he began to resist it with all his might. He didn’t want to die. He would mutter under his breath, ‘Just a few years more,’ when he thought that no one was watching him. It would be good to finish writing a few more articles, to see a few more people, to do a few more things. To destroy his political enemies, of which Lypynskyi had a fair number. To spend a few days with his daughter. Perhaps go with her to the sea as he once had with her mother? It was just a shame that breezes did him such harm. Breezes and mistrals were his nemeses. Wind in its various forms – that’s what destroyed Lypynskyi. He was able to distinguish them by scent. Based on the wind’s scent, he knew the time of day. The wind that blows at five in the morning smells different from the one that replaces it at six. That scent is sharper, somewhat fresher, like morning soap. It was the winds that had directed him his entire life, in the very end making him a hostage of a certain small country in which, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no one would have lived of their own volition. The cold northwestern mistrals drove him out of Geneva, where he had spent a year studying sociology; then, together with the mighty western winds, they chased him out of Vienna, where, for almost a year, he had been an ambassador of the Ukrainian State headed by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; and the mistrals later became the reason for his departure from Berlin, where, convinced that an ‘enlightened monarchy’ was the only viable form of political governance for Ukraine, Lypynskyi was attempting to mitigate court intrigues and remind the exiled candidate for the post of Ukrainian monarch to maintain his honour, like a true hetman. Geneva, Vienna, Berlin. Listening to his lungs, the doctors would shake their heads every time and advise leaving. The winds expelled him from his life and condemned him to eternal imprisonment in those at once beautiful and detestable foothills of the Austrian Alps. The hamlet of Badegg, Post Office Tobelbad, Styria. Three kilometres to the railway station, a half hour by train to Graz, five hours by train to Vienna.

The house in Badegg, or, as he himself called it, das Sterbehaus, ‘the death house,’ hadn’t cost much at all – a total of fifty-five hundred shillings, or eight hundred dollars – but for Lypynskyi, who had long made do on twenty dollars a month, even this sum was sky-high. A certain philanthropist from Canada helped, as did Lypynskyi’s younger brother Stanisław. In exchange for his brother’s aid, Lypynskyi renounced any claims whatsoever to their parents’ estate in Ukraine, in the village Zaturtsi, not far from Lutsk. Stanisław, a successful agricultural selectionist, lived there now, where he mostly bred new types of wheat and potatoes. Their older brother Wlodzimierz was a doctor who lived in Lutsk, where he had been the first in the city to own an automobile. Though the Lypynski family – or rather, it would be more correct to say the Lipiński family – weren’t people of great means. They were middling Polish noblemen who kept afloat thanks only to good education and sensible estate management.

STANISŁAW ALSO CAME TO THE STERBEHAUS in Badegg when he heard about the heart attack. He had lost his shape somewhat, had acquired a paunch, and the features of his face had softened – as typically happens with happily married good souls, which he, no doubt, was.

Carrying Lypynskyi out of the house in his arms, he gently admonished him. ‘I told you, Wacław, that buying a house in this kind of backwater isn’t worth it. Why couldn’t you come stay with us in Zaturtsi? There’s enough room there, the nature is beautiful, there are barely any winds. Maria and the children would’ve been glad to have you. You know how they love you . . .’

‘Don’t call me Wacław,’ Lypynskyi rasped in response. His brother and daughter were speaking in Polish, Lypynskyi in Ukrainian.

THIS PHRASE, ‘DON’T CALL ME WACŁAW,’ had become Lypynskyi’s go-to weapon back when he was nineteen. He had just returned from the Kyiv Preparatory School to Zaturtsi for winter vacation. The whole family was gathered around the dinner table. Lypynskyi listened to their reports of local news in silence. The school uniform suited him particularly well, highlighting his slim but somewhat hunched and almost frail silhouette. His hair, thick and black as tar, was combed back prep-school-style.

‘Wacław, how are your studies going?’ his mother Klara Lipińska asked at last. Everyone looked at him, and the longer the silence lasted, the more their interest grew. Stanisław, Wlodzimierz, and their sister Wanda gazed intently. Only their father, Kazimierz Lipiński, with his characteristic insouciance, continued daintily eating the holiday cutlet. Lypynskyi timidly cleared his throat.

‘Wacław?’ Klara was still waiting for an answer. That’s when Lypynskyi first shot out his new weapon – the socially unacceptable one that he would later take out of its holster frequently to protect himself.

‘Don’t call me Wacław. I’m Viacheslav.’

His father nearly choked on the cutlet. His mother squealed. His brothers and sister exchanged silent glances. To make things worse, Lypynskyi was talking in Ukrainian, a language – though it wasn’t even a language, just a rural dialect, a hodgepodge of Polish and Russian – the Lipiński family had never heard emerge from the lips of an educated person, only from the local poor.

‘Did something happen that we should know about?’ Klara Lipińska asked, trying with all her might to remain calm. She was a small woman but an authoritative one.

‘I consider myself Ukrainian,’ the newly minted Viacheslav rejoined quietly, almost inaudibly. His confidence was gradually dissipating. His stoop was becoming ever more noticeable.

Finally, Klara Lipińska erupted. ‘What kind of Ukrainian are you? You’re a Pole, son! All of us are Poles, from our great-grandfathers on down!’

Lypynskyi’s head hung in silence. It was evident that he wasn’t in agreement, that he wasn’t planning to budge, but he didn’t have enough of an argument for an effective rebuff yet. This was what he always did in situations like this: he’d keep quiet, to brace himself to field the oncoming attack. Klara Lipińska knew this trait better than anyone and was now shaking with enfeebled rage. He had always been like that – unreliable, weak, emotionally fragile – and now, for the love of God, he had definitively gone mad.

At that the celebratory dinner ended. Everyone dispersed to their own corners, scowling. And that night, an unusually large amount of snow fell. Lypynskyi, lying in his room and staring at the ceiling, was scared that the roof would cave under such a load, and that he’d be buried under a white snowdrift, as if lying covered by a mound of soil in a freshly dug grave. Years later, he would at times find himself gripped by the sensation that he was lying at the very bottom of some sort of pit, where it was cold and lonely, and from down there, from deep down inside, the pit seemed even deeper than it really was, infinitely deep, as if there were no bottom at all, just an eternal fall downward, and Lypynskyi would raise his arms upward in desperation to catch on to something, anything, some sort of invisible handrail, to steady himself.

HIS DECISION, UPON GRADUATING from the Kyiv Preparatory School, to study agriculture at a university in Kraków somewhat reduced the tension in the family. Even though, at the time, land cultivation interested Lypynskyi no more than ladies’ hat trends, for a young man of his pedigree and financial means, agricultural education was a very rational choice: landowners had to know what to do with their hectares. And where else should a young Pole study if not in Kraków? He’ll outgrow it, hoped Klara Lipińska. Wacław is a smart boy. He’s just rebelling.

HIS BROTHER STANISŁAW burst out laughing when he heard the familiar and already long-belaboured ‘Don’t call me Wacław.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘you never did become a respectable Wacław.’

Now, in 1931, the philosophical and ideological conflicts between them had lost their acuteness. Stanisław, in calling his brother Wacław, did so intentionally, for fun, just to annoy him. Now that everything had already transpired, all the wars over and all the battles lost, names no longer mattered. There was no more cause for arguments. All that remained were perforations in the lungs.

O-o-one, two. Inha-a-ale, exhale.

They climbed into the car. Fin Yulí was going to the sanatorium too; Lypynskyi couldn’t imagine his stay there without her. Just as she had at home, she was supposed to adjust his pillows, make arrangements with the doctors, read newspapers aloud, serve him water at night, and place her hand on his forehead while uttering the words, ‘Everything’s all right. There’s no fever.’ She was supposed to listen to his patchy breathing and determine whether Lypynskyi was still alive. At times, he himself would doubt it, and then it would suffice to glance at Fin Yulí, and the housekeeper would reassuringly nod her head as if to say, Don’t fret, you’re alive.

The driver started the engine. It was seven in the morning. The trip would take four to five hours. On the wooden stairs of the house, Lypynskyi’s secretary of many years, Savur-Tsyprianovych – his loyal dog – was left standing. He waved his hand in farewell. A short red-moustached man of roughly the same age as Lypynskyi. Hailing from somewhere around Kyiv, though no one will find details about his place of birth in any encyclopedia. A ghost of a man. A shadow of a man.

TSYPRIANOVYCH HAD LIVED with Lypynskyi for the preceding eleven years after fleeing Kyiv, which had been seized by the Bolsheviks yet again, by freight train to Vienna. There he knew only one address – Hotel Bristol on Kärntner Ring 1 – and the fact that the Ukrainian ambassador resided there. He had arrived and positioned himself in the lobby next to the window; the porter measured the newcomer distrustfully from head to toe.

‘I’m here for Envoy Lypynskyi,’ announced Tsyprianovych, but the porter shook his head.

‘The envoy has relinquished his position and is in the process of moving to new quarters. He’s actually very ill. Give him some peace, for once.’

Tsyprianovych was at a loss. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. The porter repeated the same thing over and over: ‘Leave him in peace. Go on. There’s nothing worth waiting for here. You all flock to him like flies to carrion.’

‘Then who’s the Ukrainian envoy now?’ Tsyprianovych asked in despair.

The porter exploded, ‘How should I know, good man? As if I’m the one to ask!’

At that moment, Lypynskyi had descended into the foyer: groomed pointed whiskers, a meticulously combed head of black hair, and large eyes, surprisingly animated on such a withered body. A carriage was waiting for Lypynskyi at the entrance, which was supposed to drive him to a sanatorium in Baden for treatment. Fin Yulí was giving instructions to the cabman.

‘Herr Lypynskyi – ’ Tsyprianovych called out to him, then fearfully broke off because he didn’t know what to say next.

Lypynskyi stopped short and glanced inquisitively at Tsyprianovych.

‘Tell me where I should go, Mr. Lypynskyi.’

‘And who are you?’

‘Mykhailo Petrovych Savur-Tsyprianovych.’

‘I already told him that there’s nothing worth waiting for here,’ the porter interjected.

Lypynskyi was seized by a coughing fit. Fin Yulí extended a white kerchief monogrammed in red with W. Lipiński.

‘And what are your skills?’ Lypynskyi asked unexpectedly.

‘I’m a secretary,’ Tsyprianovych mumbled despondently. ‘I worked in the administration of the Directorate of Ukraine, in the office of the Ministry of Education. We were evacuated from Kyiv a month ago.’

‘What languages do you know?’

‘German, as you can see, and French and Russian.’

‘And do you know Ukrainian?’

‘That’s my native tongue.’

‘Come visit me in the sanatorium in Baden in a month. If we can reach an agreement, you’ll be my secretary. I’m looking for one right now.’

Tsyprianovych thanked him. His eyes welled with dog tears of devotion, but he brushed them away with the sleeves of his frayed frock coat. From the doorway, Lypynskyi added, ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’

‘I don’t, Mr Ambassador.’

‘I’m no longer an ambassador. Address me as you would anyone else from Ukraine, by my first name and patronymic – Viacheslav Kazymyrovych.’ He whispered something to the porter, then walked out of the hotel and climbed into the carriage.

‘You’re lucky,’ the porter grunted before instructing Tsyprianovych to follow him. ‘He’s a good man, so everyone takes advantage of him. I would chase the likes of you off to hell. Flocking here like flies to carrion . . .’

A month later, after agreeing on the terms of his employment, Tsyprianovych took up his new position. His responsibilities were diverse. Besides his regular duties as a secretary, he performed the more labour-intensive tasks around the house in Badegg, fetched the doctor in the event of an emergency (occasionally several times in a single night), and transported guests from the gate to the house in a dray. On Lypynskyi’s behalf, Tsyprianovych also corresponded with those Lypynskyi himself found wearisome. He composed his responses on the basis of previously written letters; he didn’t have the right to arbitrarily improvise, no matter how tempting it was. He met with Lypynskyi’s old friends in Vienna, queried them about their present lives, and then relayed everything in detail to his master. Sometimes he would fib a little, embellish things; other times he would fail to mention someone’s death. Tsyprianovych’s wages consisted of two dollars a month plus food and a roof over his head. Now and then Lypynskyi offered him additional bonuses, but Tsyprianovych usually declined them, aware that Lypynskyi didn’t have enough money for treatments. Tsyprianovych was healthy; he was never in need of much. His only problem was his aching teeth. Sometimes Lypynskyi would cover the cost of a dentist in town for the secretary, because in the rural area where they lived dentistry was performed by an ordinary doctor who knew only that teeth stopped hurting if you pulled them out.

Their mornings, set aside for work, looked like this: Fin Yulí would enter the room and open the window wide so that Lypynskyi could begin his respiratory regimen. His so-called ‘air therapy.’ Tsyprianovych would inquire matter-of-factly, ‘Are you going to write yourself today, or dictate?’

His query was pointless. It had been a long time since Lypynskyi had picked up a pencil. No one could make out his scribbles afterwards, not even he himself.

‘Dictate,’ would come in response, and Tsyprianovych would carry into the bedroom his idol, his deity – his typewriter. He was prepared to die for it. It nourished him wholesomely and completely like a cow in Halychyna nourishes its peasants. He would place it reverently on the table, then sit down next to it and knead his hands ritualistically.

‘I’m ready, Viacheslav Kazymyrovych. How many letters today?’

‘One. But make two copies. And I beg you, Tsyprianovych, don’t twist around what I say. Don’t correct what you think are my mistakes. Write what I dictate.’

‘But the word “commendable” is written with two m’s. Anyone you ask will confirm that for you.’

Lypynskyi waved him off, agitated at being corrected.

‘Then write as you know how. To hell with you. You’ll do it your own way all the same. My friends have told me many a time already that your typed letters differ from my handwritten ones and that sometimes they don’t recognize me in my own correspondence.’

Tsyprianovych had learned to not react to these kinds of attacks. Over his years of service, he softheartedly forgave Lypynskyi his linguistic quirks, which no respectable secretary would have tolerated. ‘Hooliganish,’ for example. Why, what kind of word is that? What does it even mean? ‘Hooliganish danger’ – and make of it what you will! Or ‘selfstatelessness.’ That’s both a joke and a sin! But Tsyprianovych tolerated it and, his teeth clenched, typed even greater nonsense.

‘To Ivan Krevetskyi.’ Lypynskyi gave the name of the recipient and waited while the secretary rapped out the standard heading on the typewriter: Badegg, Post Office Tobelbad, Austria. A snowstorm was blowing in through the window; bit by bit, Lypynskyi’s moustache and eyebrows were growing white.

Inha-a-ale, exhale.

‘Esteemed and Dear Mister Ivan!’ he began to dictate slowly. ‘On the occasion of the Christmas holidays and the New Year, I send you heartfelt wishes for all the best in the coming year. I thank you for your wishes and for remembering me. There is only one wish of yours I cannot understand: For a return to my native land? By whom and for what am I needed in this native land?’

Tsyprianovych’s typing slowed. He was getting cold.

‘No, I maintain hope that in the end God the Merciful will at least relieve me of any contact with the Ukrainian populace, to whom I gave everything I had and who thanked me with the gravest insult that can exist for an honest man. Not a single voice stood in my defence when the froth that now grows into moss on the wreckage and spreads befell me. Moss with a double s.’

‘I know how to spell “moss.” ’ Tsyprianovych was piqued. ‘You don’t need to tell me, Viacheslav Kazymyrovych.’

‘Forgive me, forgive me. I’m doing it out of habit. I’m continuing. My Ukraine has perished. I have nothing and no one to return to. Signed: He who is dead to the deceased.’

‘He who is dead to the deceased? What kind of signature is that? You’re still alive.’

‘Just write what I say.’

Tsyprianovych gave in, narrating aloud what he was typing. ‘He who is dead to the deceased. Dated: 30 December. Should I write the Rusyn Detsember or the more properly Ukrainian Hruden?’

‘Write Detsember.’

‘30 Detsember. With the utmost respect, Your Lypynskyi.’

Afterward, Lypynskyi asked to be left alone. From the corridor,

Tsyprianovych could hear him crying.

STANDING ON THE STEPS of the Sterbehaus and seeing off the car packed up for the sanatorium, Tsyprianovych had no idea that he was seeing his master for the last time. Otherwise, he would have somehow prepared himself. Perhaps he would have embraced him. They never embraced, only bickered, though they respected and depended on each other. One time, after a routine ‘orthographic’ argument, Tsyprianovych got so angry that he resigned and pointedly went to Vienna to look for another job. After spending two weeks at their mutual friend Zhuk’s and never receiving the apologetic letter from Lypynskyi he was waiting for, he returned. Lypynskyi wordlessly accepted him back. He had, in fact, written a letter of apology but hadn’t known what address to send it to.

There’s one photograph of them together. Lypynskyi in his predictable dressing gown with a cane in his hands, Tsyprianovych in a double-breasted baize shirt in a slanted plaid; the colors aren’t visible because the photograph is black-and-white. They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of the house in Badegg. Someone else’s children, possibly Stanisław’s, are in the background. It looks to be warm outside. The terrace is filled with blooming flowerpots. Both men are diminished in size, thinned from age, and narrow in the shoulders. Lypynskyi is gazing into the lens, Tsyprianovych somewhere off to the side. Lypynskyi’s head is egg-shaped, his nape completely bald already, his eyebrows knit. Tsyprianovych looks like a ghost of a man. No one will find details about his subsequent life in any encyclopedia. No one knows what happened to him afterwards. With the death of Lypynskyi, he too died.

THE ONLY THING that Tsyprianovych left behind was a very short but detailed, almost physiological, account of the final days of his master’s life. A magazine in Lviv published it a year after Lypynskyi’s death. Tsyprianovych reports that the final journey to the sanatorium went well: Lypynskyi was cheery and hopeful. At the sanatorium, he was immediately given an injection of camphor. The following day, after a thorough examination, Fin Yulí asked the doctor if there was any hope, and he, with a shake of the head, replied that Lypynskyi had come there to die. The housekeeper didn’t give much credence to the words, as she had heard such prognoses before. The brother and daughter, after lengthy conversations with the patient, departed. Lypynskyi rose only in the mornings in order to wash himself, seated. The housekeeper would read him German newspapers. The entire time, he was fully conscious. When he slept, his eyes stayed open. He kept repeating that he needed to survive for a few more years, muttered things about the sea and about salt, reminisced about his wife, whom he never again saw after the divorce in 1919. The housekeeper made arrangements to have a priest hear his confession, to which Lypynskyi agreed, but he expressed surprise, assuring her that he didn’t feel all that bad. At eight in the evening, after yet another injection of camphor, he complained that he was very tired and wanted to sleep. The housekeeper adjusted the pillows. He fell asleep, again with his eyes open. His breathing was, as usual, short and rapid. Fin Yulí dozed off beside him in a chair. Around half past ten, she heard him exhale deeply. She counted to five. He didn’t inhale again.