A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair
Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he
whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance
Death Fugue by Paul Celan
About a week after Eric arrived at Crossgates School, he began wetting his bed. No amount of prayer, and on this occasion he prayed desperately, had any effect on the source of these yellow rivers. When little Eric was at school in Sussex County, such natural manifestations of stress after being separated from home, from loved ones, from everything that is familiar, familiar and therefore safe, were considered a crime for which a punishment was to be imposed, namely, beating. Did the staff of the educational institution beat an eight-year-old boy for something over which he had no control? Yes, the physical punishment was carried out as it should have been, with verbal abuse added as a bonus:
“You dir-ty little boy,” said the executioner as he whipped the boy with a bone-handled whip.
This way: With treacherous rivers of urine, with punishment without guilt, with the matter of separation, began one of the most important books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the novel 1984, so began the English writer George Orwell.
Now I am a Ukrainian poet, journalist, and writer who is a research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. I received a special program and a temporary contract in 2023, when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine lasted for a year. My main function at the University’s department is to conduct workshops and meetings with American students whose studies somehow intersect with European issues.
A week before the election of the new president of the United States, my friend, Polish writer and translator Michał Tabaczynski, came to visit me. He flew in from Europe and traveled across the country from Trenton through New York, and ended up in Pennsylvania, because he plans to write a book about Pittsburgh. So during his visit, we were looking closely not only at the architecture, the people, and the tranquilized dinosaur skeletons of the Carnegie Museum, but we were more attentive to the city’s political landscape, which seemed quite peaceful. Michal was writing a long essay for the Polish media at the time about what he saw in this momentous time for the United States, and I suggested that he go east, to a place where the change of landscape, and the prospects, are so striking that you sober up on the way out of town.
We rented a jeep, put Michal’s old camera in the bag, and headed toward the Kaufman Residence.
I was a teenager when, in Odesa, I saw photos in an American glossy magazine of Fallingwater, an architectural marvel built in the thirties of the last century in Pennsylvania and designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1991, the American Institute of Architects named it “the greatest work of American architecture of all time” and in the 2000s it continues to be on the list of America’s favorite architecture. And in 1994, when I was fourteen, I remember this year well because In February, Ukrainian ice dancer Oksana Baiul wins the gold medal at the Olympic Games in Lillehammer, in the summer I traveled abroad for the first time to Poland and saw beautiful Krakow, and in the in December Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum and gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty and territorial integrity from the United States, Britain, and Russia. In between these years, a difficult but pleasant “era of hope” and illusions began in my country.
My mother is a countryside teacher, a labor veteran of Odesa region, she spent 55 years at school, her life program all her life was work and only work, preferably at the same job from youth to old age. Such a perimeter of request for life is inherent in the time in which she grew up and was formed. She fulfilled this program perfectly. In the elections, my mother and her colleagues always voted for those candidates who took voters to the theater, threw lavish banquets, took them on boats on Medical Worker’s Day or Teacher’s Day along the Black Sea coast, which is now filled with sea mines, and gave them flowers and candy on International Women’s Day. And on a larger scale, they delivered computers to school classrooms or repaired some spaces. My mother, as well as the vast majority of her environment, was not interested in the political programs of the candidates, the biography or history of the political forces they represented, or the money they used to build their election campaigns.
In the provinces, and even more so in the interior of the country, these processes were quite simple to implement. I recall a panel discussion in Odesa in the days before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The meeting was with an experienced politician, Member of the Bundestag Mariluise Beck, who, when I asked her what she thought about the situation:
“What should we do when pro-Russian candidates for the Parliament of Ukraine are continuously bribing the electorate in various forms and amounts?” the Bundestag member advised us to write about it in the newspapers.
At first, I thought that the experienced and beautiful politician was mocking me, all of us, and I was frankly angry, but then I thought that she was sincerely offering us a model of existence in another dimension that we could not possibly understand, and I quickly returned to my first conclusion. She was making a mockery of us because she was well aware of our realities. In 2012, Mariluise Beck was a member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where she has since served on the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. She observed the 2012 parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia. Under her patronage, a huge choir from Bremen flew to Odesa. The choir, I must admit, divinely sang Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and was a huge success for the young and talented German conductor Jan Huebner. Ukrainian newspapers wrote about it.
But let’s get back to Pennsylvania, where I am temporarily staying, where an average American, when mentioning my country, has two words that come to mind: Chornobyl and war, where for kilometers on the road to Fallingwater, judging by the campaign signs of the 2024 US presidential candidates, only Jesus Christ is in competition with Donald Trump.
We are here. Michal takes out his old camera. “The best work of American architecture of all time” fully meets my expectations, having been born in the distant peaceful times in Odesa. The landscape around the museum is also impressive, and we wander around a bit after the tour without a guide. The saleswoman in the Fallingwater shop is friendly and pretty, and I buy a postcard with a picture of one of the museum’s rooms and four simple pencils: two red and two black, and make small talk with her. Her long wavy golden hair shines in the rays of the glorious Pennsylvania of the past. Her smile literally dazzles me in the museum shop, she is beautiful in this light, in this place, she is about my age but suddenly sharp as a blade through my eyes, she reminds me of my closest person in the world, the person who loves me with absolute love – my mother, who has fourth stage brain cancer and right now, in Ukraine, is approaching death in frantic agony under the fire of Russian missiles. I instantly turn into a little girl who is far, far away from home and wetting someone’s warm and clean bed, for which she will definitely be punished again and again.
– How do you like living here, far from the big city, don’t you get bored?“ I ask a woman who looks nothing like my mother.
– Oh, we’re having a great time here!” says the shining saleswoman, “Nothing much happens, it’s quiet.
Pittsburgh
October 2024
