A true-to-life story about the victims of style and conflict of generations
We met early in the morning when the very sight of the city was utterly unbearable. After a raucous night I and my friend, an inveterate music lover and reveler, found ourselves somewhere at the end of Holosiyivsky Park, in front of the Myr Hotel. We were at the streetcar stop and noticed her. She wore a bright yellow suit that made her look like an alien from a wrecked spaceship or a railroad worker, although the latter assumption seemed unlikely, considering her delicate figure. Her hair was cut very short, more than a crewcut, and what was left was painted over with colorful characters. What struck me as most unusual, however, was not the way she dressed or her hairstyle, but the look on her face, one of complete indifference to whatever was happening around her. Perhaps it was the way a dragon would view the smoking debris in place of a city it had just razed to the ground with its fiery breath. My friend, true to himself, tried to strike up a conversation. He talked her up. He was good at it, and I envied him. The girl replied in monosyllables, swallowing half of every word, either because she was tongue-tied or simply making fun of us. Finally we decided it was time to seize the last bastion and asked her name. She said Iona. I thought she ought to have said Iryna or Olena. Well, she said what she did, so Iona it would be.
I saw her next half a year later, in a Kyiv suburban nightclub, a ramshackle conversion of a decaying factory club. She was clad in her Martian attire, dancing very close to a huge loudspeaker emanating ear-splitting sounds. She danced the way an android would perform a saraband. Now, in that artificial world, Iona looked far more human, even cheerful. Surprisingly, she recognized me quickly. My friend and I had been lucky to meet her outdoors that time, it transpired, because usually she stayed home during the day, especially in the morning. In fact, she would spend weeks on end indoors without a glimpse of sun. This lifestyle lent her complexion a pale hue characteristic of all nocturnal human species. She would sleep during the day and leave after eleven p.m. to go to some party or other. I don’t know how but we made friends. She would always come alone, be it a club party or any sort of informal gathering, and she did not seem to mind. For some time we met quite regularly, yet I could not learn much about her. She spoke little of her discotheque history, nor could I understand how she earned a living, although she could afford frequent trips to Moscow (Iona liked it much better than Kyiv, saying “everything died out here all at once”). Her clothes played with blinding colors: violet, salad, pink. And she could wear a simple Crimplene [crease-resistant] dress with large printed flowers. Because of her almost childish manners I could not guess her age. She was lean and fragile like a teenager, had dark eyes and a look in them betraying years of hard experience. Except for hours of dancing at a discotheque and smiling meditation, she sought and partook in no other action. She refused alcoholic drinks and practically lived on a drug known as ecstasy. She offered it to me once and I declined.
She lived in a one room apartment in Troyeshchyna, an outlying residential district of Kyiv. One found it hard to describe the place as a dwelling. The interior was a striking mix of expensive clothes and poverty, well, not poverty but unbelievable emptiness, desolation. By way of furniture she had a velour couch with a burned hole, DJ vinyl revolving chair, a couple of kill-thy-neighbor type loudspeakers, and a multitude of spilling ashtrays. There were no pictures or posters on the walls, but on each wall there was a display of crazy paintings. And the kitchen presented an even more interesting sight. It had an atmosphere untouched by any cooking process, ever. It was strict and to the point. A stack of pillows, black walls pained with special felt-tip pens, and a weirdly shaped lamp alighting the wall patterns with mysterious shadows. It was a home club of sorts and it functioned effectively. The people living next door, even the district militia officer, seemed to have long put up with it.
There were times when I missed her, and she was away increasingly often, without warning, reappearing just as unexpectedly. No, it wasn’t love. Rather, a semi-narcotic dependence, an arresting habit with a touch of madness, which Iona would bring where and whenever she appeared. She was ageless and aloof, an expensive condiment without which the meat dish of life was tasteless. I still remember the time when she, on the spur of the moment, dragged me to a McDonald’s about midnight. There she bought a burger, reached into her small knapsack, produced a glass jar with live spiders, opened it, and served her pets a “hot meal,” while the other customers looked on pale and speechless with shock. During her last sudden and long absence I found myself looking for her. One late evening, in the Tube under Independence Square, I heard a noisy crowd and raucous laughter. It was as though a gang of hypertrophied children were playing leapfrog. As I got closer I saw that something of the kind was really taking place. A group of guffawing teenagers by the glass wall, wearing billowing sack trousers, obviously expensive, and blazers with wool stocking caps pulled just above their eyes. Some had roller skates and skateboards, others seemed to have some brains left. They were laughing at a girl dressed in a similar style. She sat with her back against the wall, her head bent low. Her headgear, a mix of beaked cap, skullcap, and nightcap, was on the floor in front of her. The girl was begging for money in a hoarse voice. Leaning against her headgear was a photo of smiling DiCaprio. This was not one of Iona’s antics, but I walked over to make sure. No, the girl and her friends were obviously from another pack, younger and more straightforward, one of those racing over the square’s granite pavement, screeching and whistling, gathering in huge crowds at all the open-air shows downtown, leaving slogans in broken or sliding characters on the fence surrounding new construction sites, a modern challenging type of cuneiform, listening to bittersweet and openly derisive music, making their bodies move just like the characters of their graffiti. The were still laughing, banging their skates and boards on the glass wall. Women selling flowers nearby look on disapprovingly. And the girl sitting by the wall was letting her hair down, staring at people hurrying by to the subway station, yelling, “Please give me what you can, I’m walleyed, need treatment, and so do my mother and grandmother. Please, we missed our train and we have no money left.” Suddenly I visualized her sinking her fangs into somebody’s neck. No, she wasn’t the type. Instead, I saw a vampire attacking her from behind, his teeth flashing thirstily and inexorably. The scene was wider now. The women with flowers, a militiaman hanging around indifferently, even passersby were now growling and pouncing on the kids by the wall. Their prey was tasty and the flowing blood was fresh. The delusion vanished after a moment, leaving me with the understanding that I would never see Iona in a waltzing gang like this one, in such a cheap horror show. Those boys and girls, calling themselves rap and hip- hop, charged with adrenaline, with their endless curved faces, with the color of the skin given them at birth by mistake, could only be donors and victims, sparrows caught in a net, butterflies smashed into spots of graffiti on the concrete walls of a dead-end street, something hot and fresh, in a bright package that could fed spiders in a glass jar. They could not be vampires, because from the outset they were programmed to surrender and demonstrate themselves, even if to satisfy their blotchy ambitions. Now I, adult and drained by the ravages of life, would make better company for Dracula, just like most those others walking past and around me. Iona was off the battlefield. She gave and took nothing. Yes, she could destroy something casually, passing by, including herself, but she would do so as just another additional step in her indifferent dance. Her spider-feeding antic at McDonald’s had been such one such pas in one of her night dances. She devoured no one and would not let anyone control her. She just did not care. She might as well have never existed.
The trouble with my story is the absence of an effective ending. No drama, destroyed lives, or other Soviet-style movie finale of the early perestroika period. It was just that Iona finally disappeared along with her incredible apartment. She vanished into thin air. She was deleted from all files. Where is that little sexless traveler now? In the stomach of what Leviathan? Getting high on cocaine somewhere in St. Petersburg? Dancing in the laminated interior of yet another nightclub still to go bankrupt? Or sitting alone, as usual, staring at yet another wall? Or perhaps sinking into the narcotic maze of Amsterdam?
In my version of reality, streetcars continue to howl abominably every morning.
