My double life
We are one month into the year of 2009, thanks goodness. This is a year of the Bull, something we have nearly forgotten with all the hullabaloo over gas. This powerful draft animal was not revered by many on the New Year’s Eve as people joked and argued about gas, this invisible precious substance whose existence, it turns out, can be proved only when it is missing. Meanwhile, it is worthwhile to remember about a year of the Bull. For example, the last time we had this kind of year the following symbolic experience happened to me.
At the time I was shooting my TV program “Toward the Night,” and one night I found myself in a night club, in a separate little room where they showed striptease for women. My cameraman was strictly banned from the room and had to capture me on video through glass as I sat there in that horrible room. Therefore, no one could come to my rescue if the three macho men, who were wriggling their bodies before the female patrons, began to take off their silvery bikinis and started to pull me onto the stage where they were acting out unbridled sex scenes with some hot wives. The wives were there quite legally — their husbands’ guards periodically showed their faces and told them how much more time they had for entertainment or when they needed to run to the Mercedeses waiting at the door.
To be honest, I had no reason to worry because we had an arrangement with the strippers that they would not show their tempting parts close to my glasses. My cameraman promised that if they did, he would come running with a heavy tripod and smash the whole thing to pieces. So we shot a piece about what motivates these guys to choose a job like this for themselves.
However, for me the intrigue was in something different — in the fact that in life things flow out of one vessel and into another. In other words, everything is interlinked with unbelievable, invisible connections.
The oldest stripper, the most experienced and popular one among the female visitors, led a double life. A horrible mystery surrounded his incredible life: if someone had learned the truth about him, I cannot even imagine how badly the enraged citizens would have beaten him. He feared this the most. The mystery was that during The Day this naked looker with ideal hips was the head of an animal farm near Kyiv. It was only at night that he took off his working clothes and put on silvery strings.
That year, the previous year of the Bull, I was looking for a suitable farm where I could shoot a piece with some remarkable bull for the New Year’s program and found myself on a farm headed by my friend, the night stripper. It took me a while to recognize him in the village-type man who walked in the aisles between the stalls, spoke the vernacular, solved problems, and with a strict face checked on women, who came out bowing their heads.
They whispered praises to their boss into my ear: he is such a good manager; he is kind and, despite his menacing looks, he is a great dancer: “No one in the village can dance like Vasylovych! And imagine this — he is not married!” I could barely suppress a wave of laughter that was about to overtake me: I knew for a fact that no one in the village could dance like he did. When Vasylovych heard the last words, he gave me the look of a dog that had found a place under a bush to relieve his nature and now was sending a desperate mute appeal to keep silent.
We shot a gorgeous piece about a bull; I said “Stand up!” standing next to that hulk of a bull. I said that the year was bound to be good and everyone would be fortunate—you simply needed to open up for happiness. Something like this anyway. Then we ate home-made sausages in a corner of a cattleshed and drank good-tasting moonshine, the women bawled songs, and Vasylovych opened his heart to me in a private conversation: he would quit that striptease job as soon as he would find the one girl he would be able to marry.
After a while I got a call from our studio: the guard said that a strange man with a pig was trying to get through the security, wanting to see me. I rushed to the TV center because I am responsible for my queer folk. It was the stripper — that is Vasylovych. He brought a baked piglet and all the accessories that go along with it. He said he remembered that our producer Zoia had a birthday around that time. But he had one more reason. He stood there and smiled—not seductively, as he did in the strip club, but like a happy fool, unable to check his mouth from sliding to the sides in a blissful smile. He had gotten married! That is, someone had fallen in love with him when he was wearing his head-of-the-farm working clothes. Just like that. So he came to report that he had quit his job at the night club, got married, and moved to a different village. He does not have a double life now. Finally, he has one life.
We had to devour the piglet right there in the studio to celebrate The Day when our friend got rid of all his fears. After the feast the only part that remained in one piece was the piglet’s head with a few sprigs of parsley sticking out from under the snout. With its little eyes it seemed to be gazing at this silly human world with great interest. Pigs are used to having their lives end like this, so they are free from fear and do not ask for the moon. People are just the contrary. They will do pole dancing in silvery strings, pretending to be macho men, while desperately fearing their real selves and not believing that they can be as they are.
This story is, perhaps, not proper for refined company. However, when we speak about life, we need to be fearless, because an attempt to bowdlerize a description of a person is the beginning of all the fake things that keep this person from being happy. Second, as I have already said, in life everything flows out of one vessel and into another. It is worthwhile to stop and think about this. All this happened exactly 12 years ago, in a year of the Bull.
After this Christmas, which was defiled by around-the-clock talks about gas, my memory obligingly took me to this story precisely when I was reflecting, with a heavy heart, on how disgusting it is to live in falsehood and tolerate petite and utterly uninteresting people who have been brought up to the surface of life like froth — in such a way that you have to take them into account. I was reflecting on how sick and tired I am of tolerating their thoughts, which visit them so rarely, and patiently watching how wise people try to answer their stupid questions. I was thinking that I do not want to waste my life waiting for this froth to sink back to the bottom and then wash my hands clean of their languid and wet handshakes and wipe the mud off my old icons.
Now this is already getting too long for a thought. It could turn into a very difficult and unpleasant text. I thought it was better to stop outpouring my post-Christmas reflections, which I was intending to contribute to the issue, and instead cheer up this confession before you with the story about Vasylovych. Honestly, this story is almost about me and you.
Let me just say that my heavy thoughts now have a simple happy ending: naturally, I cannot move to a different village for life but in this year of the Bull nothing, indeed nothing can keep a normal person from limiting herself to only the best and real, as Winston Churchill, my favorite author, once said.
