By Yuri ANDRUKHOVYCH, The Day
It was sure to turn up among my New York priorities this patinated bronze
lady, the gift of the French Republic, this "babe with an ice-cream cone,"
as some modern Ukrainian moonlighters call her, the Statue of Liberty.
And there came a day as if especially designed for her: it was particularly
sunny below a particularly blue sky. As my companion noted, the sky is
always ecstatically spacious near New York, and somehow panoramic, obviously,
because of the ocean nearby. I also assume that there could be other reasons,
perhaps New York City's extraordinary mission: they say that for some eschatological
reason Providence gathers all the world's greatest sinners on this patch
of America. The New York sky could be there to remind them of the inevitable,
for instance.
Thus, on that celestial day we took the special ferry and set off to
Liberty Island. And astern was left the whole skyscrapered Wall Street
complex, which has been seen thousands of times on television and postcards,
all this "America like it is," the financial and power center of the universe,
a place where most fantastic transactions with humanity's future are made,
whence the dollar manages reforms, crises, African fires, Transcarpathian
floods and other sudden disasters, and to no less sudden outbreaks of prosperity.
I wanted to quote from Maksim Gorky, but I decided to put off the referring
to the "Yellow Devil" until the evening, when this whole complex would
light up with its unbearably seductive illumination. Moreover, various
captions from Soviet-era Ukrainian pamphlets popped into my head, such
pearls of wittiness from the Perets (Pepper) satirical magazine
like "Babylon-on-the-Hudson," "The gander on Broadway," etc.
And looming ahead of us was the Statue of Liberty, to which we were
unrelentingly approaching with other idle tourists from a good dozen of
countries. Liza Minnelli's voice, with her evergreen "New York, New York"
was the only thing missing, for the sound of this very song is enough to
enchant a person forever and make him completely lose his head here.
It occurred to me that now that almost all modern refugees arrive here
by air, the statue has good reason to tarnish, for it was conceived for
those who came by sea. My companion and I pictured several weeks of rocking
decks, overcrowded fourth class compartments, nausea and vomit, childhood
diseases, fever, throwing the dead overboard, the American Dream, and the
great uncertainty. And finally here it is - Liberty! - every ship stuffed
with Irish, Italians, Greeks, Croats, Ukrainians, and naturally with Jews,
most often Hungarian or Polish ones, had to pass it before docking at Ellis
Island. Thus, one of Pushkin's Masonic prophecies, about Liberty which
"will joyfully meet us at the door,' came true.
However, first there were several weeks of quarantine on some of the
islands; later the administration limited this procedure to compulsory
sanitation treatment (smearing genitals and armpits with some stinky paste,
etc.) in specially designated barracks. All this had to be endured.
"Once I thought who was the first European woman that born the first
child here, on this land," my companion said, "and I decided that she was
a red-haired and bony, thin and dry, but terribly firm and stubborn Irishwoman.
I'm sure that's how it was."
The statue, on the other hand, personifies another kind of femininity.
Some snobs hire special helicopters to have a fly around it, hover near
her calm immense face and look at a distance of just a few feet into her
eyes, as large as alien flying saucers.
And there was nothing left for us but to get in the unending line ("What
are they giving out? Liberty!") and some hours finally make our way inside
that body through, its pedestal. At one point we, like everyone else, were
searched for explosives, and I was slackly joking in a vein like the old
Soviet propaganda clichОs on America. Then there was the ascension, exactly
one hundred and ninety two steps upward, as we were informed, because the
elevator was out of order. And now, to the very pinnacle of the monument,
upward, ever upward, together with the thousands of day-trippers like myself,
big and little children of the world. The people went in single file up
the narrow staircase, hoping, perhaps, that maybe then and there they would
understand what was hidden inside this sweet and timeworn word.






