A Little Touch of Drama

Valerian Pidmohyl'nyi A Little Touch of Drama Translated from Ukrainian by George S. N. and Moira Luckyj Originally published in Littleton Colorado by Ukrainian Academic Press, 1972 This electronic reprint was prepared for the Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature by Maxim Tarnawsky, 2006. CONTENTS (Chapters) An Ivy All Alone in the World Flowers from an Unknown Knight-Errant The Beautiful Siren—Irene Four in a Room, Apart from the Girl Two in a Room, Apart from the Girl Alone with a Girl in a Room Bayadere, You Enchant Me Bayadere, You Have Intoxicated Me A Homely Othello A Scandal in a Well-Born Family Mädel Klein, Mädel Fein What is New Under the Light of the Moon? Oh, Dear Lord, Why do You Punish the Girl? On a Spring Night All the Orchards are A-Whisper and Everything Speaks of Love Love is Only a Fireplace where the Best Dreams are Burnt An Elegy for Cheap Spectacles AN IVY ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD To spend my girlhood deep in love I’d like to live like a free bird, All choices open to my heart Which knows best what it craves. (from a very sentimental romance) There will come a time when this woman will feel like a girl. The knowledge of love’s pleasures will remain in her like the memory of a forbidden book read long ago. She will be reborn fora new life! (from a very good novel) The dense forest within which she walked with a sharp tremor in her heart and a tense body full of desire, was still and damp. Not a rustle, whistle, or crackle was to be heard; the heavy forest was dead and heartless behind the veil of the mounting air. She could not hear her footsteps on the ground and, as it were, floated further and deeper into the thicket while stern tree trunks seemed to step aside in front of her in an endless avenue leading to where she craved to go with her easy walk. She came to the edge of the forest. The invisible sun, somewhere behind her, cast a wide ray across the steppe and on a hill nearby she saw a church. She stopped and her heart stirred wildly in anticipation, nailing her to the spot with its every beat. For a monk was moving solemnly down from the church on the hill.. Now he raised his bearded face and the short space grew with every stop, hiding the church and horizon. She waited with hope and fear, feeling his approach as if it were a storm. Now he was raising his hand to her breasts and at that moment from behind his horrible body there sounded thousands of bells stretching out in an endless piercing sound which enveloped her like a wave, plunging her into darkness. Marta suddenly opened her eyes and automatically reached for the alarm clock which shook the entire room with its sharp, familiar, ugly ring. Her fingers eagerly tried to seize the cruel knob of the alarm, this early morning assailant of her young sleep. Enough, enough! She knows that it’s half past seven and time to get up, to wash, have breakfast and run to the office. But the alarm clock’s zeal has spent itself and a pale February morning was looking at the girl from behind the transparent window curtain. At that very moment Marta felt cold. She was lying on her back, uncovered, with an eiderdown and a blanket crumpled at her feet. She remained lying there for a moment, then slowly sat up in bed, pressing her hands against her face, to disperse the remnants of sleep. The shivered as she clearly felt the cold and began to get dressed quickly. Last night she hadn’t lit a fire in her room although four logs, the daily ration, had been brought in and lay together near the stove. She had come Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature Valerian Pidmohylnyi. A Little Touch of Drama 4 back late from the theatre, in a bad mood, so she was too lazy to start a fire and had gone to bed quickly, dissatisfied, with an indefinable weight on her breast which pressed gently but obstinately. It was a sort of spiritual boredom, a slight, unpleasant feeling of inner disorder as if some stray matter had fallen between the cogs of her soul and was slowing down their normal rhythm. But she soon fell asleep and, as always when she was sad or disappointed, sleep came to her gently and willingly. She didn’t even ask Liova to come in. But he wouldn’t be offended. In fact, she was tired of his dropping in, which had gone on for two years, his silent obsequiousness, colorless language and his imperturbable humility. Just think-she had turned him out of her room, called him a fool publicly, forbade him to see her for months and he had taken it all. Not once had he grown angry. Once, quite a long time ago, he had said that he loved her and it was an unforgivable mistake to have allowed him to say so in one of his moods of self-pity and loneliness. An unforgivable mistake. Now she had her shoes on and a rough wool dress which served as a housecoat. She opened the door energetically and went to the kitchen where it was even darker and colder with its frosted windowpanes. The young woman stopped here for a while and listened, although she knew that at that time the kitchen was usually empty. Her neighbour, Frau Holz, a German woman, had left to do her shopping half an hour earlier and the family of the co-op worker, Ivanchuk, would begin life half an hour later. This was what forced Marta to set her alarm for half past seven, although she would not be late for work if she got up at eight. She had a lively temperament and all her daily tasks she did surprisingly quickly. She was ready in seconds, swallowed her breakfast, paced about gaily and her coat and hat put themselves on automatically before she left the house. She was just the same at work so that her immediate supervisor, the manager of the statistical section of the Tobacco Trust, an unfriendly and taciturn man, once called her “an exemplary worker.” And yet every day she had to miss half an hour of sleep for several serious reasons. The point was that Marta loved to wash herself in cold water and then to dry her body with a rough towel till it was all red. This gave her encouragement for the entire day, otherwise she felt tired, lazy and unpleasant just like somebody used to cleaning her teeth every morning who one day doesn’t do it. Water was her greatest passion in life. She had grown up near the Dnieper, in Kaniv, where the river is wide and full. Her father, a village school teacher, was very fond of fishing and she herself, like a boy, had been his ardent assistant when she was a small girl. It was then that she developed a special attitude to water, as to a special, elemental force of life and the source of all craving and power. So to her, winter, which stopped the flow of the great waters, always seemed dead and evil. Thus to her daily ritual she secretly added the inner one unnoticed by any outsider, a Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature Valerian Pidmohylnyi. A Little Touch of Drama 5 voluptuousness which often forms the deep substratum of human habits, a voluptuousness born in old, forgotten days, out of youthful undeveloped desires, turning habit into the steady ritual of living, elevating it to the main trait in a personality. She imagined water always to be cool like an evening stream, when in the dusk boys and girls go together to the river bank and swim in the water a few feet apart. As a teenager she had felt a joyful pang of shame and daring when she ran from the place where she undressed into the river, hiding herself in the water from the piercing eyes of the boys. There was a web of prohibition spun around it since, her father did not approve of her communal evening swims. All this happened very long ago, or it seemed very long ago, since youth in its impetuosity marks the past with peaks and gaps. Afterwards, her father died, but he did this honourably, since in 1927 she had already gone through the commercial vocational school and had a not at all bad job in the office of the Tobacco Trust. She was lucky, because after two months’ work as a dull filing clerk she had been promoted, because of her ability, of course, to a clerical position in the statistical section of this huge institution with a salary of 60 rubles per month. Her flat on Zhylanska street she had found eight months ago and was, on the whole, pleased with it since her room was warm and the rent was five rubles a month. The low rent she owed to her neighbour, the co-op worker lvanchuk, who had pleaded for her with the landlord, the former owner, who lived in a different house across the yard. The only drawback of the room, and even this was relative, was that it was too large for one person. The co- op worker had remarked on the day she moved in: “This room has some spare space.

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