Editor’s note: an exclusive excerpt from the latest work by Yuriy Tarnawsky, co-founder of the New York Group, whose poetry and novels have pushed the boundaries of what is possible with language and form more than any other Ukrainian writer.
Written in an internal monologue style, driven by incessant denial of what has been said he developed in his 2011 story “Father,” Yuriy Tarnawsky’s The First-Person Dilogy mixes autobiographical data with fiction, to create a powerful, two-part music-like composition of syntax and semantics. The first novel, Sebastian in a Dream, was inspired by Georg Trakl’s famous eponymous poem and is patterned on J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, consisting of 30 variations, preceded and followed by the same aria, and deals with a semi-comatose man expecting the arrival of his real or imaginary son. Its companion, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which is based on El Greco’s masterpiece, also consists of 30 variations that roughly correspond to the thirty figures in the painting, describes a man who has come to die in the Spanish city of Toledo and visits each day the church in which the painting is housed, in order to see it.
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The following semi-autobiographical variation weaves through a remembrance of the author’s mother’s funeral during World War II, shortly before being uprooted from Ukraine:
Dancing
14
And this ten-year-old boy, he’s sitting in a willow tree leaning over a stream watching its waters flow to exotic lands, India, Africa, Venice, dreams of riding in a gondola in one of its canals, passenger or gondolier taking a beautiful lady somewhere, watching from the window of a palazzo from behind a moss-green velvet curtain beautiful ladies who are possibly in love with him as he is with them being taken someplace in golden gondolas, hears a high-pitched woman’s voice, a siren, that is, an air alarm siren calling his name, and he knows why, for what purpose, what reason, and he doesn’t want to respond to it, acts like you do when they try waking you up in the morning and your body, all of you refuses, keeps pretending they aren’t, that no one is trying to wake you up, that nothing is happening, that if they’re trying to wake you up and you won’t, they’ll leave you alone and you’ll sleep on, will keep on sleeping as long as you want to, and that the reason why they are trying to wake you up will go away, or even better, that it has never been there, has never existed, and that therefore you can safely go on sleeping, but the voice keeps calling him and he knows that even after it stops it will go on calling him in his mind, and that it will go on calling him there until he responds, until he does what it is urging him to do, which is to go to where he’s being called from, and so he decides to stop pretending, and climbs off the tree, and drags himself where he’s being called to, where they, that is it, his mother’s body is waiting for him, dragging his black shadow along with him along the dusty path running along the stream like a small but unbelievably heavy rock behind him, no, not a rock because it’d be too jumpy, and not that heavy either, the dragging is not that heavy either and is soft too, soft because of not being jumpy, like the body of a dead animal for instance, a cat or a dog, no, not a cat, a cat too small, too light, a dog, a midsized dog, a midsized black dog, black because of the color of the shadow, or still better, like his own limp body, small, small because of his age but also because it is in the middle of summer and close to noon, that is a little after noon, and then dragging them, that is, himself and the body of the dog or his own, through dense semi-abandoned neighbors’ orchards and over the tall fence enclosing the place he lives in and through the wide-open window of her bedroom inside it, and tiptoes, still dragging himself and his shadow although the latter is now almost invisible because of his being out of the sun but still of the same size and weight, that is still constituting the same burden, over to the side of the bed, and lifts the white sheet that has been pulled over her face, and sees it, that is the face looking as he’d expected it would look, and pulls the sheet back to its previous place, and they bury her a day later, and just after she’s buried his father comes from somewhere far away and dangerous, but two days later goes away to possibly never come back, and he himself is forced to leave his home practically alone, and years later buys a house with tall white walls to climb them alone or with others, and when he stops climbing and wonders stark-naked in the middle of the night in the woods with a woman he loves next to him, she stark naked too, clutching her huge pregnant belly, white and round like the full moon overhead in the cloudless sky as if holding it in her hands, then this means nothing? this means that no son named Oscar, I mean Sebastian will come out of her five or four or three or whatever months later? that this means no, that is, means yes, means nothing, nothing at all? then this means that it was just a dream, that is, fiction, in other words, a lie? but if so, then why, why you goddam sonofabitch, you almighty creator capable of turning darkness into light, nothing into earth and water and sky and all in six days so as to rest on the seventh, why you evil pointheaded hunchbacked freak with your sour-smelling breath from the hatred inside you burning up your stomach and mind they keep locked up in the heavenly garret out of shame so that nobody sees you, why did you not let her womb bear the fruit, to come out into the world like so many trillions upon trillions of others before and in the future to be called Sebastian, to grow up into a man resembling his father to come one day like a handsome young angel and stand in his door?ugggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh! you bastard! but that’s nothing, I mean that’s not all, there were others involved, a thirteen-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, and what about them? a thirteen-year-old girl who wouldn’t have a mother to take, that is, lead her through the shaky, quaking ground of puberty and a two-year-old boy who would never remember the warmth and taste of milk streaming out of his mother’s breast and would never have the need, I mean reason, the opportunity to utter that most beautiful, most cherished, most comforting syllable of all, Ma, so, what about them, you sonofabitch, you evil point-headed hunchbacked freak with your sour-smelling breath, what about them? and what about the father who lost his father when he was twelve years old and mother when he was twenty, who was forced to take the train home from school every day, and got there late at night, and had to get up after three hours of sleep to take the train back in the morning, this for six days a week for four or five years? and after he married and had three children, following his call of duty he went away to fight the enemy of his people, and then his wife died and he didn’t make it to her funeral, and in two days went away once again following his call of duty to possibly never come back, and then as they say worked his fingers, or was it elbows? to the bone, can’t remember which, and climbed walls of the apartments he lived in, unable to buy a house for the rest of his life, what about him? you sonofabitch, you evil point-headed hunchbacked freak with your sour-smelling breath, what about him? but that’s not all, that’s nothing, common, happens all the time, every day, I mean happens to many, many if not all, like to those bits, parts of a girl or a woman, a whatever, a person, top of the skull down to the upper jaw, the rest of it under the sidewalk or not there, shoulders, arms, knees, whatever, sticking up sharp above the sidewalk, wrapped in rags, the eyes huge, frightening, beautiful, seeing all, understanding, accusing, why? why me? why you sonofabitch, you evil point-headed hunchbacked freak with your sour-smelling breath, why me? and to rub it in, I, tanned bronze, coin-lean, stride in a long runner’s stride, Adidas wings on my feet, not two feet away past her/it, lock eyes with her/it, understand, agree, but move on and no more than a hundred feet away, no, not a hundred, fifty, some mere fifty feet away meet up with a beautiful blue-eyed girl, a girl about as beautiful as you can imagine, the Blue-Eyed Suzan, and melt with her in a kiss, a long, long kiss, ten, twenty, thirty seconds long, don’t know exactly how many but very long, to make sure that those remnants, I mean those bits, parts, broken pieces of a person piled up back there on the sidewalk, that she/it can see it, can see it well, doesn’t miss it, suffers every second of it, feels for a good long time what she/it will never experience, know, so that she/it will suffer more, but god, no, I don’t mean god, I just mean but, but that’s still nothing, still not all, should I begin rattling off the millions who died in concentration camps, gassed or of starvation, those who were starved to death in artificial famines, who sat for hours maybe days to die on stakes, who were burned at stakes, hanged and quartered, garroted, had chests cut open with obsidian knives and hearts ripped out, and, and, and, and, no time or space, no end, no, no, not a sonofabitch, not an evil point-headed hunchbacked freak with sour-smelling breath but a poor, miserable, helpless, quadriplegic of cosmic dimensions, faced with the task, desperate to the limit, pulled all his strength together and with his fingers and toes or maybe, no, likely just toes put together that handful of building blocks, strings, waves, quarks, whatever, sent them out into the void, nothing, and with the last ounce of energy, with the little toe on his left foot or his elbow, probably his elbow, set off the random number, I mean, event, random event generator to take over, rule in his place, and let everything happen that could, electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms, the ninety-eight, no, one hundred and eighteen, the one hundred eighteen elements, bright stars, black holes, constellations, nebulae, and us in the end, lies still now, never to move, tended by comets and bees.
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