Found Life Read online

  Goralik’s work has previously appeared only in discrete publications in English, none of them extended, so this volume is a first chance for English-language readers to get to know her work across its many forms (and even so it is only a fraction of what she has written). Readers should seek out more of her work: several texts in English translation, as well as a few that Goralik herself wrote in English, are available on her website, linorgoralik.com, and readers who want to follow what this prolific author will be doing long after Found Life appears can use that site as a good starting point. Outdated as of this writing but still extremely useful is her Russian-language site at the New Map of Russian Literature (Novaia karta russkoi literatury), http://www.litkarta.ru/russia/moscow/persons/goralik-l/, and she has Facebook pages to follow in both Russian and Hebrew. As this volume was in preparation, new material was appearing on the web and in print. To say that Linor Goralik’s career is a work in progress is an understatement: it is far too early to know what the shape of Goralik’s writing will be, but it is safe to predict that she will continue to write in miniature, mixed, and visual forms, and that her work will cross still more boundaries in the future.

  A final note about this translation, which comes to you from a very wide range of translators who worked separately and together to produce this book. Intense collaborative work for this project began in a graduate seminar on contemporary Russian literature at Harvard University in the spring of 2015, and then spread to include other Harvard graduate students as well as Maya Vinokour, who was finishing her PhD at Penn and who had been translating Goralik for a while. The group includes several very experienced translators as well as relative novices, and among the translators are a fiction writer, essayist, and poets; all are also scholars of Russian literature. They come from many different cultural backgrounds and are native speakers of multiple languages, including English and Russian. That diversity became an invaluable part of the translation process, as collaborators worked and reworked versions of these stylistically layered texts. Translators sought to create a flexible, spoken register for Goralik’s texts whether they are long or short, prose or poetry, comic strips or theatrical scenes. May their translations captivate an American audience curious about what Russian literature sounds like now—Linor Goralik’s work is the perfect place to start listening.

  Stephanie Sandler

  ____

  1. Published as one of her “Five Stories about Transgression.” For the Russian original, see Linor Goralik, “Piat’ istorii pro transgressiiu,” Colta.ru (May 22, 2017), http://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/14879.

  2. The Russian-language interview was on A School for Scandal (Shkola zlosloviia), the interview conducted by hosts Tatiana Tolstaya and Avdotya Smirnova, excerpted here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZiNBI4cf9s (accessed June 15, 2017). The question of self-definition opens the program.

  3. A partial version of this text has appeared in English, translated as “They Talk,” by Mikhail Iossel. It appeared in the collection Rasskazy, ed. Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker (Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2009), 21–32 and was reprinted in Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader, Book 1: Perestroika and the Post-Soviet Period, ed. Mark Lipovetsky and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 86–97.

  4. His comments appear on Goralik’s author page on the website A New Map of Russian Literature (Novaia karta russkoi literatury). See http://www.litkarta.ru/russia/moscow/persons/goralik-l/ (accessed June 23, 2017).

  PART I

  SHORT PROSE

  SHE SAID, HE SAID

  TRANSLATED BY AINSLEY MORSE AND MAYA VINOKOUR

  (With a few exceptions, the stories in this cycle are purely the product of authorial invention rather than “overheard conversations.”)

  —…I mean, half a year, can you imagine? To be honest, they’d already given up. Well, I could tell that at least Sveta had given up. Her mother had been driving him into the grave her whole life anyway, seems like she really couldn’t have cared less. So here they are, going to the dacha, her mom wanted to fix up the dacha to sell it, because she’s like: Sveta, ever since he went missing I just can’t stand being there. So then, Sveta tells me: “I’m upstairs sleeping and suddenly I hear my mother downstairs screaming, just screaming bloody murder, and I’m like: ‘Huh? Wha?’—and I race downstairs—and then I see my father, can you imagine?” She’s like: “Tanya, I’m telling you: it was like I saw a corpse. Another second and I’d have gone crazy. He looked so scary, standing there, hair down to his shoulders, dirty all over, thin, all eyes, Tanya, I was about to lose it, my legs were shaking…” Can you imagine? They had basically already buried him. So, what happened was, he was a sleepwalker. All summer he’d been walking around at night digging himself a burrow, and when the first frost came, when they were getting ready to leave the dacha, he went there and slept through the whole winter. And then he woke up in April. No, I mean, really, can you imagine? Crawled to the dacha, doesn’t remember anything, an-y-thing. I mean, talk about being sick and tired, right?

  —…the mother split the bedroom in half and made one half into a museum. I mean, she really divided it: she put up the wall like right down the middle of the double bed, so you have to roll over across the bed and lie on his spot to see the other half of the room. And she left everything there just like it was that morning when he left for work. Socks, and like, a wrinkled shirt, a glass on the nightstand. She fills it up with beer—it’s been thirty-one years now, you understand, right?—because the beer dries up—so that it’s all like it was that day. And nothing else. Just a room cut in half, frozen in time. And on the wall that’s, like, facing out, right? She has his picture, and underneath it says “missing,” they searched for him for like three days under the rubble, he worked on the top floors or else they’d have searched longer. I was there once, stuck it out for two minutes, so fucked up. And that was when she wasn’t home, so she wouldn’t be watching. They wrote about it in some newspaper, and their house is in a couple of tourist guides, she lets people in for a couple of hours on a certain day of the week.

  —…do you know how I realized spring had come? I found a skull in the vegetable garden. Right away I tried to find the hole. Nah, no hole. Just some bastard croaked in the vegetable garden.

  —…practically shaking. And all day, I mean all day I’m staggering around like a sick man, I honestly felt like I was coming unscrewed. And I decided I’m not going home, because I’m just fucking sick of her. I mean, six years, I’ve been living with this woman for six years now, and she pulls this kind of shit over some fucking detergent? I’m telling you, she’s sick in the head, just completely obsessed with her cleaning. She’s lost it. So she screams at me: “I’m fucking sick of this, get out of my sight, get the fuck out of here, you only think of yourself, I hope you die!” I say: “Listen to yourself, the words coming out of your mouth, you’re raising a daughter and this is how you talk?” Then she threw that sweater at me! And then Friday after that detergent—what can I say?—that’s it, I decided, we’re done. You say get out—fine, I’m gone! And that whole day, walking around, you know, I was thinking: OK, so I’ll spend the night at my mother’s, then tomorrow I’ll swing by to pick up some stuff while she’s at work, she has money right now, I’ll leave another couple hundred on the table too, you know, for my conscience—and that’s it, and she can go…I’ll talk to Natasha myself…And then, so we’re already on the way to lunch, but I forgot my phone, so I was like: hey guys, I’ll be right there, and I go back and—the phone’s ringing. And I pick up, thinking—whoever you are, go to hell—and then I hear—well, bawling. For real, she’s bawling like a beluga, sobbing and sniffling. My heart sinks, right away I think—something’s happened with Natasha. I’m like: “Lena, what’s wrong with her, what happened? Lena, tell me, what happened to her?” And she’s like: “Waaahhh…With whoooo?” I felt a weight lift right away. I really can’t handle it when she cries, it breaks my heart, I forget everything,
no bad blood or anything, just, you know…And I’m like: “Kitten, kitten, what is it, tell me?” And she’s just bawling. And she says: “In the paaaaper…” I’m like: “What, baby, what was in the paper?” I’m thinking, maybe some relatives or something. But she’s like: “Waaahhh…in the paper…that all men…uuuhhhh…That in twenty thousand years…I mean, not twenty…That you’ll all be extiiiinnct…the chromosome…Waaahhh…” “Lena, baby,” I say, “what are you talking about?” And she’s like: “The chromosome is disintegrating…waahhh…In a hundred thousand years you’ll all be goooone…It’ll just be uuuuussss….” And I’m like: “Lena, so what?” And she’s like: “Lyosha, my Lyosha, don’t go extinct, please! Come home, right now, pleeease!” And I forgot to buy the detergent again. She’s crazy, right?

  —…I mean, fifteen years old. So she was still in high school. They’d just started teaching the older grades Safe Sex and Sexual Health, and there she is, seven months along. And all of them—girls and boys both—had to carry these dolls with them around the clock, in order to understand what it means to be responsible for a child. So there she was—one hand on her belly and the other holding the doll.

  —…without the kids for the first time in something like six months. I spent the entire dinner telling poor Danya all about how I’m restructuring the whole legal department, poor guy, probably didn’t understand half of it, but I got really into it. But you know, the main thing is, now I’m a partner, I’m holding 20 percent, that’s around another forty-two thousand a year, I mean, just a completely new life for us, a completely new life. So then we’re in the car, I’m all sleepy and drunk, and Danya keeps harping on about how we have to transfer Eva ASAP out of “that den of liberalism”—that’s what he calls Sevenston—into Cornwеll Spring, and I’m sitting there thinking that Eva’s going to blow her stack, but I don’t have the energy to explain it to him…And I’m just listening to him, listening, he says something about the mortgage, that we have to do something…And I’m sitting there thinking: so does this mean I’m a grown-up, then? Am I a grown-up now or what?

  —…they’re on the plane already when they say: “Jacqueline, perhaps you’d like to change your clothes?” She’s all covered in his blood, her stockings are bloody and her white gloves too. And she’s like: “What? No! I want the whole world to see what those bastards did!” The rest of the movie’s kind of so-so, a bit long if you ask me, but still, for three days afterwards, you know what I was thinking about? That I would never take those gloves off. I wouldn’t be able to. If I were as much in love as she was, I would have worn those gloves for the rest of my life. I mean, well, probably I’d go crazy first and then I’d be a crazy old lady wearing gloves with President Kennedy’s blood on them. And I’d call them “John.” Both of ’em. Or maybe one of them John and the other one Robert. But I’d have gone crazy beforehand and wouldn’t know about Robert. I’m not making any sense, sorry. But she really was all covered in blood, even her stockings, and she was so…There was something in her eyes…A great woman. And Misha’s never even gotten beat up, you know? Not even just roughed up on the street.

  —…and he tries to talk to me for like two hours at a time. But I just don’t even have the energy for it, I just don’t. But he just keeps dragging it out, you know what I mean. And he keeps calling like that every night, every night, and I just don’t have anything to talk to him about, but he just needs to do it, you know? And I sort of understand, I do, but I just don’t have it in me…So yesterday he calls and is like: “So how’s it going?” And I’m just blah, I’m sleepy, and I tell him: “I’m sick, I want to go lie down.” And he asks: “Where does it hurt?” And I just say: “Everywhere.” And then he’s like: “Want me to kiss it…everywhere?” And I got so turned on…

  —…talk to somebody, I’m a person after all, I can’t go on like this either! But who can I talk to? Papa? He’ll just start crying, I mean, no way, what good would it do to talk to Papa? No point. But who can I talk to? Alik gets home from work every night at ten and plops down on the couch, shoes and all, one time I said something to him, and he was like: just let me die in peace, as if I’d somehow, you know, said something…I don’t know what. But I’m a person too, you know, I mean, I have to talk to someone! So one time I got out at the Lubyanka stop, on Pushechnaya Street, and there’s the big Children’s World store, and I just thought—well, you can all just go to hell! I went in and on the first floor, you know, where they have that carousel, I bought myself a plush rabbit. You know, the kind with long legs, made to look like it’s already worn-out? You know the kind I mean? Six hundred rubles, no joke, but can’t I do it, after all? The last time I bought myself jeans was nine months ago, well, don’t I get to spend six hundred rubles? Anyway, I shoved him in a bag and brought him home and then, when Alik went to sleep, I shut myself up in the bathroom, sat him down on a shelf and just told him everything, you know, poured my heart out till there wasn’t a drop left…That first night I was up till six in the morning. I was bawling, and taking pills, just doing all sorts of things…And after that there wasn’t a night when I couldn’t find a minute at least. I kept him hidden in a bag in the closet, you know, where the pipes are, we have a bag there with the enema stuff so no one ever even looks in there, and that’s where I kept him. And yesterday my dad had that thing again, so I gave him his meds and put him to bed and went off, to the rabbit, and once I started telling him about it I just couldn’t stop, I went on and on, talking and talking, and then I gave him a shake, you know, and I’m like: “Why so quiet?” And then he looks at me and says: “Listen, did it ever even occur to you to ask what’s up with me?”

  —…the wife comes home and the cat smells like someone else’s perfume.

  —…some milk, yogurt for him, you know, the kind of stuff you buy every evening. When we first moved there—such service! I could never believe it. Like, if you bought something once in one of the departments, when you come in the next time, they’re like: do you need some of that? How about some of this?—you know, like, what you usually get there. Marusya’s like: “Mama, everybody loves you.” And I’m like: “No, it’s just a nice supermarket, that’s good service,” and she says: “No, when you went to get your card I was watching, they don’t talk like that with the other customers.” I’m always the one to do the shopping, I swing by on my way home from work. So anyway, Papa was sick and I was trying to get home sooner, and I run in all, I’m all, you know—whew!—and the security guard’s like: “Haven’t seen your papa around in a while.” And I’m like: “What do you mean?” And he’s like: well, he usually comes by here every day, we all know him. “What???”—I say. And he’s like: “Well, you know, he makes his way through all the departments and says: ‘Sorry to bother you, my little Natasha is always forgetting everything. So when she comes by after work, would you please remind her about these cookies?’ And he’ll go to another department and say: ‘My little Natasha forgets everything, so please, if you don’t mind, when she drops in after work, do remind her about the Maasdam.’ Or, you know: ‘My daughter’s going to come by, you know, the tall one in the blue coat, so if you could just remind her about the mayonnaise, she’s quite forgetful…’ That’s what we call you, he says, we’re always like: ‘Little Natasha’s here.’” I turned right around and went home, I was practically shaking. And then Papa opens the door, sees that I don’t have any grocery bags and is like: “Little Natasha! Did you forget to go to the supermarket?” I swear to God, Olga, I’m going to hang myself.

  —…so just imagine you’re looking at a copy of 1950s Amateur Erotica and inside, on like page ten, there’s your mom covering up her left breast with a hand mixer. Sure, there’s really nothing wrong with that. But some book to get as a present, right? Anyway, I would never in my life have recognized her. Ever. So then the other day I come in, and she’s sitting there looking at it. She practically jumped. And I’m like—fuuuuuuck!!! And I just stand there. And then, you know what she says? She’s like:
“Don’t tell your father or he’ll divorce me.” And she’s crying. And the thing is, she’s covering up her breasts with her hands, in a robe! I about fucking lost it. I’ve been thinking, can I sue them? I really wish I could just kill them and be done with it.

  —…this lady, not too old, you know, pretty good-looking actually, wearing a stole with little tails, good makeup, and a girl with her, maybe around twenty or so. And I’m really enjoying, like, just looking at them, it’s nice that they’re sitting in a cafe in the middle of the day on December thirty-first, having coffee. I sit there half listening to them while I’m reading the menu and I’m thinking: probably an aunt and her niece, they’re really close, and here they’ve met up to say Happy New Year to each other, there’s really something very nice about this, then later the girl will probably go celebrate with her friends—basically, a nice familiar scene. So the girl’s telling the lady, you know, all about what’s going on with her, and I’m listening, I really love other people’s conversations. And she’s saying something about some Anya, that Anya’s dating her boss, and he took her on some trip, and then someone there got fired, the lady’s nodding, and then the girl’s like: “Anya, you know, her mom abandoned her too, but not like how you abandoned me…”—and then the rest of the sentence. But I couldn’t make that last part out, my ears just stopped working at that point.