3:AM Magazine

By Yuri Andrukhovych.

Absolutely Vodka

Vodka fatally depraves
male company.
There must be at least one woman –
otherwise it’s straight to the grave. In the
third hour, the beast awakes,
in the fourth, waving
of razorblades or axes becomes possible –
in the fifth – tearful confessions,
kissing of hands and feet.
At least one woman is indispensable
so it doesn’t all look so revolting.

This time, there was no lady,
and it was the fifth hour.

He tries to read something
in my palm.

Oh, he says, I can’t even
tell you the whole truth, y’know.
Say it, I say.

(I’m past caring, though I’m ready
right now, for anything – thirty years old, because
I’m ready because it’s the fifth hour, because I have a right
to the truth, because it’s all the same to me).

Oh, he says, I don’t even know
how to tell you, y’know.
Give it to me straight, I say.

(I don’t give a damn, even now – cut veins
or a bullet in the head – in my only-just thirty years
because I’m wasted, because it’s the fifth hour, because I want
to know, however awful it might be).

At the third attempt, he tells me
his ‘forty seven’. Ah – what relief!
A whole seventeen years! What space!
What transparency
on the horizons!

I remember it as if it were yesterday:
around three am
the whole gang bursts out into the fresh air
everything drunk, no cigarettes left,
stumbling, we cut through the darkness.

Then suddenly something like this:
I wipe my sweaty palm on the green grass, yes, exactly,
green because it’s the middle of April.

 

Nothing But Budapest

I could even wash the locomotives
at Keleti station –
just to be nearer Buda with her green
hills.
Not to say a word
to sit and listen,
as everyone around me talks about something in Hungarian.

According to Peter Zilahy
in the last few years
Hungarians have lost their world dominance
in suicide
and are now just somewhere in the top
five.

That might mean that they
are coming to more of an understanding with the world.
Meaning that more and more people understand their language.
It could just as well
not mean anything
but the fact that the conclusion is premature.

They called me a taxi
somewhere between one and two a.m., the driver
was about eighty
and didn’t speak any tourist language.
Just as well at that time of night
the journey from Pest to Buda
didn’t take long,
otherwise I would have had to master Hungarian
as quickly as possible
to try and keep the conversation going
which from one point of view isn’t easy
after two bottles of quickly drunk
‘Palinka’.

In front of the Freedom Bridge (Szabadság hid),
he, of course, forgetting that I’m not from here
(taking his age into account
not strange at all and even natural),
livened up and started to tell me a story.
As if I, in my everyday life,
washed locomotives at Keleti station
and could get the joke!

I seized the moment
when I could follow him and laugh.
Although the funniest thing was something else entirely:
he’d never heard of the name of the hotel
I was staying in.
I had to show him the way
with gestures, and only St Matthew’s cathedral (Mátyástemplom)
saved us both.

I paid him much more
than I owed him, after which I discovered
that half his teeth were missing –
he smiled so widely.
What did he wish me
as we parted?

Good night? Sleep well? Good luck
my son, you were my millionth passenger?

That remains his and my secret.
As with the dreadfully swollen young gypsy
sniffing glue from a plastic bag
the next day on Margaret Island (Margit sziget).
Our eyes met
and he kind of stretched out his hand –
go away, you didn’t see anything, disappear.
That remains our secret.

I don’t rule it out, that from time to time
he washes locomotives at Keleti station –
just to survive, gobble his sandwich,
drink beer,
just to be nearer Buda with her green
hills.

Just so as not to jump into that awful Danube,
with its black-grey water,
thereby moving his fatherland (Magyarország)
a few places higher
in the world rankings.

 

In Homeland Of Rotkäppen

They say that no one comes here in January.
Not a soul in the palace or the outbuildings,
padlocks on the doors, garden plants in bags,
statues the same, trees naked.
I’ve seen it somewhere before.

But in May everything blossoms
with patients.
Whole cavalcades of Germans
on rollerblades, on bikes.
Couples in love, the first brigade of pensioners
in shorts. Oh, and one more,
an artists commune,
a nest of romanticism! They buy
soft drinks in the orangerie and, endlessly delighted
by the uniqueness of the place, the time, themselves and others,
follow the program onwards –
to the statue
of Little Red Riding Hood.
(Apparently it was in these very woods
that unfortunate incident with the wolf).

As far as the patients themselves are concerned
they wander out onto the terrace
at the designated time, three times a day,
according to the program of gulping food,
filling the time with conversation in common languages
(Bettina von Arnim, they say, Bettina von Arnim.
It’s the password). It’s so beautiful, here, in May,
that you don’t want to do anything.

“Bettina von Arnim” – I say to the wine glass
and to the ashtray. Oh, unfortunate me!
Oh, ungrateful me! And why this nastiness?
And why am I so stubbornly thinking
of escape, of a straitjacket,
of prisoners’ striped pyjamas?

No one knows what to expect
from anyone. After all, that’s why we’re patients -
to mess around.

For the first three days
no one noticed his disappearance.

On the fourth day someone wondered
where the hell he’d got to, that jovial big-bellied Fin
with his flies permanently undone
and the smell of beer under his arms. (The above
details will not be formulated aloud, out of politeness.
Of course, something will be said,
something more neutral, like for example
“And where is our Finnish friend?”)

On the fifth day it will be time for the staff
to clean out his room.

And then the truth will out.

 

Werwolf Sutra

In German it’s called
Hochsitz.
That kind of wooden cabin on stilts
from which you can shoot
wild boar more easily. Some say,
deer.
But there are so many of them, they’re everywhere –
those little watch towers.
It’s as though the people here
live only for hunting or for dreams
about hunting.

You meet a lot of foxes here
(one of them ran across the path
on the first night), they put down
something for them, against rabies, so they can’t
go crazy anymore.

And those ruins, those former
army towns! Overgrown with field horsetail,
barracks, shooting yards, squares, outbuildings, guards posts,
painterly signatures on the walls of the gymnasiums,
writings on the walls of the wash houses and bogs.

It’s enough to make you want to raise your index finger
and announce “Ash of the Imperia”

Meanwhile this is about a much simpler thing.
At six in the morning (in Moscow it was eight)
they drove them out of the barracks.
Then all that idiocy with songs, morning drill
and washing, brain-washing, cleaning
the territory, the sprawling butter of breakfast, the day until evening,
so many days until the end of service.

This time it’s about
Privates Muhamedyarov, Fiedotov and Pereverten,
whose names for centuries (not for centuries!)
were written on the blackboards (of being?) along with the numbers
of their Kamaz trucks.

Fiedotov was in the middle, on the right Muhamedyarov,
on Fiedotov’s left side – Pereverten.

As far as the first two are concerned it’s clear: Russian, Tatar.
But that third one? Where’s he going with a name like that?

No one liked Pereverten for his innate cunning
and stupid surname.
They couldn’t not laugh at a name like that.
He didn’t know himself what it meant.

But in German it means
Werwolf! With a black palate!
The terror of all villages and towns around!
Romantic hero of fairy tales and ballads!

Oh indestructible, almost immortal werewolf!
Escape before they round you up!
Before they aim at you from their wooden towers!
Demobilisation inescapable! I know you can do it!
Resurrect! Become yourself, Pereverten!

 

Calling Dem

In April seventy eight
I lay on the floor in a student residence in Lviv,
almost unconscious from drinking
and eighteen years old.
Above me something was going on, my older
mates had guests, drank tea
with wine, chattered about art.
My head was whirling in the centrifuge.

It seems that it was unhappy love
and problems with the end of term essay.

Through the mist in my eyes
I caught sight of the dishevelled outline of Dem and fell
into a yet deeper abyss: impossible! Delirium
tremens: Dem in my room!

I don’t know if it’s good or bad anymore
but at the age of eighteen we still need
cults, icons, or rather idols.
Dem was an alternative painter.
Dem was a hippie, ‘sure’ guy, denim,
asocial, universal.
The pigs didn’t round him up every day.
Western snobs bought his paintings.
Like all fanatics I was ready to wash
the holes in his feet.
He was the saint of my cult, you know what I mean?

In October 2002
(Not bad, eh? A quarter century went by in the blink of an eye!)
they didn’t let him in to my poetry evening.
They say he was almost unconscious
from drinking and was in no fit state. Particularly not
for such an alternative meeting.
All that he left behind this time –
was some kind of lithograph
the size of a postage stamp, for me.
I don’t even know what to do with it.
It’s kind of weird to hang a postage stamp on the wall.

But I’m not talking about that –
I mean this eternal just-missing each other. So many faces
sucked beyond reach into the septic tanks!
They don’t even scream from there anymore,
they don’t even scream.

And so much of everything didn’t happen that no more
is going to happen now.

And on the other hand –
what a novel we wrote together, not realising
it ourselves! What a shit hot epic
over the space of a whole quarter century! Dem! You hear me?
Dem!!!

I’m screaming to you from my septic tank.

 

Sie Können Den Computer Jetzt Ausschalten

….until finally I realised:
I’d been sitting there for a good half hour
gazing dully into the screen
with its last sentence.
And session over, and you have to move
and shut the computer
and leave.

But what next? And can you ever get used to
those car accidents
that hit the bulls-eye?
To that electronic address
that lets you know the worst?
And how to express protest? And against what?
To howl at the walls, or to close the computer
forever?

Sashko Kryvenko.
Last night.
Left us forever.

Did I understand that right, I didn’t twist any of the facts?
‘Cause if this is a novel
these plot twists
are becoming monotonous,
the Author evidently in crisis.

SIE KÖNNEN DEN COMPUTER JETZT AUSSCHALTEN.
DON’T FORGET TO TURN THE TELEVISION OFF.
GOODNIGHT CHILDREN, GOODNIGHT.
THERE ARE NO MORE MESSAGES TODAY.

(Doubtless, all of us
at any moment might have
a car accident, a heart attack,
a white fever.
All of us – we’re mainly drinkers,
as our guardians on the Internet well know.
Our country came to terms with that long ago
and each similar piece of bad news
is taken with all due calm.
So why does it turn so dark, in the eyes?)

I go outside, to at least catch
some air and I can’t do it.

SIE KÖNNEN DEN COMPUTER JETZT
AUSSCHALTEN.

And only later – along with the air –
it comes to me,
brighter than bright:

There is one such place.
For those like Sashko Kryvenko.
And from there you can see everything.
And the point is not
that he is there, and we are here,
although that can’t fail to twist your guts
here in our green world.

The point is
that it’s called liberation
and despite everything, it’s inevitable
as any old car-accident.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. In 1985, together with Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvanets, he founded the popular literary performance group “Bu-Ba-Bu” (Burlesque-Bluster-Buffoonery). He has published four poetry books — Sky and Squares (1985), Downtown (1989), Exotic Birds and Plants (1991, new editions 1997 and 2002) and The Songs for A Dead Rooster (2004). Andrukhovych`s prose works, the novels Recreations (1992, new editions 1997, 2003, 2004), Moscoviada (1993, new editions 1997 and 2000), Perverzion (1996, new editions 1997, 1999, 2002, 2004), 12 Rings (2003) and Mystery (2007) have had a great impact on readers in Ukraine. Andrukhovych also writes literary essays (collected in Disorientation in Locality, 1999 and The Devil is in the Cheese, 2006). Together with Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk, he published My Europe (2000 and 2001).

Yuri Andrukhovych’s books have been translated and published in Poland, Germany, Canada, USA, Hungary, Finland, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Croatia and Bulgaria. He is laureate of four prestigious international literary awards: Herder Preis (Alfred Toepfer Stiftung, Hamburg, 2001), Erich-Maria Remarque Friedenspreis (Osnabrück, 2005), Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (2006) and the Central-European Literary Award ‘Angelus’ (Wroclaw, 2006).

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, March 13th, 2011.