Spring of a Down - 7
се перяха небесните тайни
Journal of Seman Kushnyr
Odesa – 25 March 2022
I never meant to be so bad to you. Please forgive me, please forgive me, please forgive me, Yevtsye. God may be listening to me, but he has yet not found the right moment to answer. Or perhaps the answer is in music. God is not so light.
Will you forgive me? I look through the high bedroom window – a giant window from the letter half of the 19th century, that looks down on the trees and the ocean. Odesa must have been magnificent then.
I know why I have this room: most people with any money have left. And they have taken all the good wines, I know because I am drinking the husks of what is left in the sparkling flavor. That is down on Frantsuz’ky Boulevard where I go around to the back and let Ostap pull me in for the wines which have no value because there is almost no one to drink them. Then he pushes me before his boss chases me out. His boss thinks of money even though there is none to be had.
Ostap is a true friend of mine, and he reminds me that I am only sometimes a true friend.
The difference is that a true friend will always think of other people first especially the friends that he (Or she! I must remember to use a person absent word! Forgive me. Again. Always?) might have, whereas the somewhat friend will think of them only in passing or when they have enough money for his own needs. Even when drunk, Ostap thinks of his friends.
I do not know when the Russians will reach here. Ostap thinks that they will not but with such overwhelming forces, I can’t be as optimistic as he is. He curses us with a paradox: The War-Peace Paradox. War is terrible. War is hell. But War makes us smart. Therefore war promotes the smart leader and smart followers. And then the ranks are filled with the smart and the dead. Often both. Peace is rapturous. Peace is life. And so the dumb lead. Would you want to be chewed out by some who is smart? You vote for dumb. You follow dumb. Until there is War. Then snap to. Up goes the banner of smart and the dumb are retired. The US knew this in what they called World War II. In the USSR we called it The Great Patriotic War. The dumb were shot. Either by Hitler or Stalin. The smart who did not get out in time were shot. The wealthy were shot before the war. There is a four-stroke version of this. Near War but in time of peace, in perpetual peace, nearing war but hoping for peace, war to end all wars.
That is why I am writing these notes: I would rather call you or send you a bad email or write you a good letter. But that would take me admitting to the world that I was wrong, and you were right. It is so easy to do for myself but so hard to do for the person that I need to do it for. Can the word please be a refrain? I would repeat it endlessly if I knew it would be heard by you and by God. You know that even God would not stop a look from you that would make me fall from grace. I would happily be among the dead if my mother knew this. I do not know if I will see her again at her small gate on the outskirts of Kyiv.
However, the events of this time our time monumental to ignore, in the north, I have overheard that there was a ruckus at the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Several radioactive isotopes were absconded with, and it seems obvious that it is by the Russians. I know they deny it, it almost seems as if it is a verb tense in Russian. Yes, yes, yes, I read my grammar book. It is one of the ones I have left.
Do you remember when we used to dance? It seems so long ago. I wish, I want, I will, for those times to come again.
But back to more events. I cannot call them news because I hear only the shells landing. That is ‘news’ of the world, all else you will know before I send you email – I may have a source for an internet connection. I may not be the champion, but mud does not stop me.
What I must tell is that the ship belonging to the Russians, the Saratov, was struck by a missile, reportedly a Tochka ballistic type, but that has not been verified. This was near the point of Berdyansk that sticks out into the Sea of Azov. It was a hastily arranged command for the Russian fleet and was littered with cranes and the normal naval nostalgia. It was placed as a gun over Mariupol, the garden city with Daffodils in bloom. Do you remember the week we spent in Mariupol? Berdyank is nothing like that – instead, it is a military base with a flag to wave.
That is how I meet Ostap. It was late in the evening. I was roaring drunk and without a kopiyok to my name. The building hung low. Things were blurry and spiny. I hit a telephone pole. More than one. Then a thin man caught my hand. He said, “Do you know where you are going?”
With slurred speech, I named the pad when I was to crash.
“It will be locked by now. Would you like to share a bed? I am with friends.”
I said yes, in a manner of speaking. I was disgraced to say sleeping under the stars.
So, we weaved our way along the inside beach. I noticed that he was looking at the port. And I asked him why.
“Very soon there will be warships there, there is a building.”
What does that have two to do with you or me?
“I do not know about you, but I would find somewhere else to make a living.”
“Well, actually I do not have a living here.”
He looked me up and down, my belt was as tight as it would go, and it was loose for all that. My socks did not match. The shoes had a raggedy look. It was obvious that even though I wore a jacket, it was a ruin that passed itself off as a jacket.
“I am leaving in the middle of next week. Do you have money for a ticket to Odesa?”
I admitted that I did not.
“Are you willing to borrow money from me and take a bus?”
I did not know if I could trust him, but the options were limited from my perspective. Somebody had to put me in my place. So, I agreed. I glanced at the port and wondered what it would be like filled with warships, and I could not see it. I have never fought in a war, and only by ellipsis could I conceive of what it would be like. I only know that there will be only losers to this war, even if Ukraine disrupts a zone of victory.
And that was when I left with the thin man. I told him several of my indiscretions, and he listened but I knew would never talk about it to anyone else. This is why this journal and Ostap are my only true friends. Would you be the third? I cannot promise to be a friend in return, but I will try my best. It would be like a cleansing underneath my skin.
The heavenly secrets were washed away.[1]
[1] Title.