The Outhouse
Biography repeats itself, at first in a stutter then as an obsession. I am one of the many diasporic gophers: I stick my head from tunnels of another world, dig in curves, in semi-circles, in tunnels shaped like letters – these, here. The trouble with biography is its starting point – the one most distant from the reader and the storyteller, at the story’s most factual and least real grain — I mean, the location and date of one’s birth. If that’s where you’re starting, by the time you get to your actual self, that self is already under so much text, you can’t hear a thing. That’s too much like life itself! Say, I was born in Kirovograd, Ukraine on November 2nd, 1979. What does that fact have to do with you and me, reader?
Well then, where is the actual start of one’s biography, or anti-biography? I’ll tell you: if I were to write a memoir, I’d start it in the outhouse.
I’m talking about my grandparents’ outhouse, which is one of those physical locations I still think about all the time. It is utterly loaded with personal mythology – even though the last time I saw it was eight years ago, when I went to say the final goodbyes to my grandmother. It was a heavy moment, one I might end up talking about much later. Probably twenty-three years ago was the last time I used the old outhouse for its explicit purpose - but such chronologies are not what this is about, anyway.
Indulge me, reader, and allow me to paint you a picture instead: it was a small and sturdy structure, handsome and even cavalier in its noble, wine-dark colors, barely more than a meter in length and width, and though it seemed tall at the time, I’m sure it was no more than two meters high. The walls were made of cheap but sturdy wood. The outhouse was surrounded, going counter-clockwise, by a patch of waist-high mint, a walnut tree, enormous mutant-tulip, and a frail old tree, which had small bluish fruits called Damson plums. According to one theory, Damsons were first cultivated in Damascus, before being introduced in Europe, hence the name. Yet even the frail plum, a fellow Mediterranean in Ukrainian exile, was extremely fertile, as was the walnut, planted in the year of my birth, which I watched grow for as long as I remember. The mutant-tulip was the largest flower we had, a solitary enormous red head that roared out of the ground every spring at the foot of the walnut. It doesn’t take an agrarian with advanced degrees to explain the near-supernatural potency of all of these plants, and even if you’re one of those urban-suburban cats whose knowledge of the natural world is limited to murdering a few dusty plants on your kitchen window, you might still be able to imagine the sense of agency and satisfaction one derived, benefitting from these wonderful plants, nourished, undoubtedly, by the proximity to the odd, uncouth structure that is the emotional center of this meditation.
By the time I was born, the outhouse was kept, and used, solely for nostalgic purposes. We all had indoor plumbing. And if my father’s parents rushed to escape their not-so-distant outhouse-dotted past of wartime indignities, my mother’s parents kept theirs forever – as a small but formidable moon, orbiting the home they moved into shortly after the war, and stayed in, their whole lives since.
The outhouse was the first place where I really thought about death: I was very afraid of falling in. And often, much too often, almost every time I was there, I thought about what it might be like, for my parents, if I died right there and then – what they might say. Think about it: you’re in a place that already gets you in the mood for contemplation – as it is, you’re in a philosophical state of mind. And in this dreamy, free-associative state, you’re suspended, over a large, deep hole as you’re staring at layers and layers of your ancestral, family drek. And thinking of dying inside it all: horrible! Then again – why is some box or an ashtray better than your own family dung? These are the kinds of thoughts that came to me there. “Write what you know,” they say – the writing retreat people. Do you know what’s at the bottom of your abyss, reader?
Yes, there was a distinct sense of danger that I associated with using that outhouse. It was thrilling. Maybe it was a small portal to the old world, and to my family’s past, war-time past, which was hidden from me, only alluded to, when people drank too much at birthday parties, and got all lyrical. A portal, too, to the thoughts of afterlife, which is the closest to afterlife we ever get. Somehow that outhouse afterlife was far more real and possible than the oblivion I’m moving towards today with every next word I’m typing into the screen. Why do I remember the outhouse so fondly, and so often, reader? Because this is where, unbeknownst to myself, I first encountered the intellectual pleasures of philosophy, of poetry? Such are my beginnings as a writer? Do you have to like yourself & your past to write a memoir? Do you have to be proud of any of it?
Fat green flies buzzed and dangled in the thick cobwebs. Laughter and clinking of spoons at the outdoor table, under the low-hanging apple tree. The table, located, come to think of it, a little too close to the outhouse. Everything was so close together. Everyone was so close.
Not Quite Mississippi
One of the most heart-breaking and funniest things about children is how they find reality in the books we write, in the stories we tell, even when they are deliberately fictional, even phantasmagorical. Somehow, children recognize their world in these stories and trust it. Confuse its knotted meanings for the structure of consciousness itself, yes? Little Don Quixotes crouching on own couches, eyes bright with bookish, impossible dreams.
When I was nine, I ran away from home because I read the Soviet translation of Mark Twain and wanted to be Tom or Huck or at least to see them, to stand next to them by the fence.
For days, I walked around talking to the book’s characters, imagining the rushing river, and at some point, the story became too great to resist, leaving no room for reality as I had previously known it. I remember sitting in class one afternoon, saying goodbye to my classmates - silently. Made a prolonged eye-contact with one kid who gave me a jerky nod: what? It was winter. Small, cold, Ukrainian town – untouched snow everywhere. All but the essentials disappear in a snow like that. Big empty church with lush golden domes. Big synagogue repurposed by communists as a ballet school. Old-fashioned courtyards, stray dogs – shivery but gruff – soccer courts turned to hockey courts, trolleys and an ill-smelling, ever-thinning river Ingul with a bridge that always felt momentous, central, and utterly useless in counter-point to the nonentity that the river itself was. Sometimes the bridge is there so you could cross the river; in my hometown, the river was a barely passable excuse for its bridge. I crossed it the day I ran away - felt like the right thing to do.
Many years later, when we spoke about it, my mother said I ran away because I got a bad grade and didn’t want to tell. How oblivious we all are of each other – our spirit’s greatest stirrings look like petty angst on the outside.
Just yesterday, we sat around the table with friends, who told us how one day, they invited more people than they could host around their tiny table, and they so took off the door from its hinges and set it on a few crates. And is it not what a table is, with friends around it, in the best of times – the door into elsewhere, a door that’s now permanently open? Reader, can the story itself be an unhinged table, a misplaced door to the other side of this river I dreamt of?
I made it to the other side – back when I was nine – but did not get very far. My journey ended in less than two hours. I was cold, crying. Boarded a bus without a ticket, whispering unhinged tales to the imaginary conductor – he never approached me. Made it home, my parents panicked, on the phone with cops, papa taking out the belt. I remember refusing to respond to my parents’ incessant questions: Where did you go? Why did you go? I kept sobbing, repeating through tears: “I didn’t go the right way.” What does that mean? I no longer seemed to know, what the right way was, or where it led to. I certainly knew better than saying “Mississippi”. I meekly asked if I may go sit with my book again.
Reader, I did not tell my parents, and I did not tell my friends yesterday, thirty-odd years later, but I will tell you. Back then, I was running into a book, into a book-as-a-self, away from Ingul and towards that other, much bigger, flooding, muggy river I felt calling me with urgency I could not begin to explain back in the second grade. All I had available to me was nothingness, the nothingness of the white snow. It was a cold winter, and I got to where the path had ended, in the empty park. What was there to do? How do you get inside the book you want - from the nowhere of Ukrainian province, where I was born?
Of course, there’s the fact that I grew up to have run away at fifteen. To America, on my own, as an exchange student. This time, I did not run away from my parents, but from my – predicament? The page I stepped into is the one you’re reading now.
The Russian word pisat’ (just like Ukrainian pisati) means two very different things at once, depending on which syllable is accented. When the second syllable is emphasized, the word means “to write”. With the first syllable accented: “to pee”. Which is what I did, back in the second grade, at the end of my path, in the snowy nothingness of a provincial Ukrainian park, which marked the end of my journey, but also, the end of the world, which I felt I reached, and it was true.
What else can you do when you reach the final snowdrift, the buried burrow, white door at end of the world? I am asking you, reader: what are you gonna do? Write on it?
Vokzal
You ever had a feeling like you were going to say something and pack your whole universe into it, and after that you won’t have any universe left, or it will all be just echoes of that one time? Whenever I’m writing or talking, even with closest of friends, even alone, this thought kicks in, with the girth of an obsession, with strength of shield or a cage, and I choke on my sentences as if on a fishbone. As if there is actually a story like that, and I could just blurt it out.
And what if I could? What if there is? What if I’m going to tell it to you right now?
The other day, at the dinner table, my children asked: What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you? I told them about my second year in America, and the time when I had no money at all for two weeks straight, and three days in, after another late-night Dunkin Donuts discarded stale batch pickup, I called a rabbi I knew, who took me to the pantry at a tiny local Y. I was given a supply of canned tuna, gefilte, and canned boiled vegetables (string beans and carrots), which is what I ate for two weeks, with merciful mayo the Y provided as well. Not the worst experience of my life, but I wasn’t going to tell them about the time I thought I’d be deported, when a particularly challenging visa setup needed to be renewed, and I stood in the immobile, barely twitching line outside of the consulate in Kyiv, with intensity of fear that unfolded and pulsed and permanently erased swaths of the self inside of me — but most definitely, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me.
Skaz is a form of writing that channels the presence of the oral storyteller. Someone puts their spoon down and tells you a story, in real time, without the endless digestive backtracking, without rubbing the life off the over-edited clauses. The story doesn’t exist until it is being told because its memory is dormant until the circumstances of this occasion, and this encounter, rouse it. It’s anti-nostalgic, anti-diaristic, and so is its medium. See, there is no way to tell a story like that, a real story, without invoking an extinguished method of communication. The meaning needs to be passed through the machinery of a forgone accent, to be spit out and to position itself at a post so remote from itself that it could actually be seen. Paths to elsewhere open mid-way, people think you’re getting distracted, but what you’re really doing is walking, the borders, of the story – the one story – and you want to know the border, but you’re too afraid, least it ends, and you end with it.
Ukrainian Jews like me grow up talking endlessly about the War: that was always the heart of our skaz. I grew up not knowing anything about Jacob wrestling the angel, about Rabbi Shimon digging himself up to his neck in a cave, about Kabbalists journeying Nowhere to watch the copulating emanations of God. I didn’t know about shamanic Hasidic rebbes, even though most of them walked the same paths I did, a mere century earlier. What was I to sacralize myself through, see myself in? My grandfather remembered shreds of prayer, and became a butcher at the marketplace, after he came back from the War. Once, when I asked him about the scar of the bullet wound in his arm, he told me he saw the guy - a “fritz", he said – who shot him from behind a tree. There was no story to be told, but the tone’s depth was saturated with what we called, in Russian and Ukrainian both, dosada - a whole triple-octave of regret, slow drizzle of a grudge, lifelong embarrassment at having missed, at having lost and remained, alone, to describe it. Not a pure regret at all, but one with earthy music coming through the root of every word, loosening it.
I think that the worst thing that happened to me didn’t happened to me. My grandmother, the last time I came to visit her, told me a story and the way she told it to me was as if she was giving me an object she needed me to hold on to, something she held on to her whole life, and it was now my turn to hold it, as an obligation, the kind of obligation I learned about as a little child, long before I heard anything about the obligation to recite the story of Pesach, or light a twined candle of separation on Saturday night, or affix a scroll with yet another story-less story on my doorpost.
Maybe it’s not about hitting the breaks on a story, so my universe isn’t drained. It’s a reluctance to change hands. To hear it said out loud: that which must be preserved for sacred moments alone. Do we know each other? Do you see yourself in me as one would in a protagonist? What losses shaped the key you’re opening my door with?
My grandmother, the last time I saw her, spoke of a vokzal: a train station in a town whose name she could no longer recall, far from the tiny Ukrainian village she was born in. Evacuation orders were in, and she, about the age my daughter is now, and her younger sister, and their mother were on the last train out – a dangerously slow train out of Ukraine, which was about to be invaded by Nazis. All civilians were urged to move, especially Jews, and especially families of Communist functionaries, and she was both. Her father was long gone, somewhere in Moscow, summoned by the government officials, whom she could only imagine as distant shades hovering over her destiny. When they arrived the nameless vokzal, it was a de facto destination point, a nowhere from which the trains could continue no further, short on fuel, short on orders, short on rails as such. My grandmother contracted typhus on the way and was burning up with fever, their tiny family a dot among tens of thousands of starving refugee families sprawled all over the station and adjacent areas. I don’t know what she thought or imagined then, being only a little girl, or what her mother or sister thought or imagined as they sat, for endless hours without a plan, or hope. Suddenly, they heard a voice calling them – it was my great-grandfather, discharged from the capital to find his family in one of the numerous refugee vokzals scattered throughout the safe backwaters of the Eastern part of the Soviet Union. How he ended up at the right one without phones or letters or records, how he found others from their village, and subsequently found them, was not a question, but a moment filled with the light that burst through the final retelling, burst through history itself, and my grandmother passed it to me with a ginger, loving reverence one reserves for passing only a Torah scroll. She nearly died, but in the final hour, her family made it to the military hospital, where she slowly recovered and rejoined her father, through the war and beyond it, in a large Russian city, where the great-grandfather was posted, and where the Party provided his family with the kind of comfort and renumeration they could not dream of ever before.
The strange thing, though, was that one day before too long, their family found themselves on the selfsame vokzal and took a train back, to wrecked and blood-soaked Ukraine, post-War starvation and their old home, down the street from the mass grave, where our elderly relatives and neighbors who could not get out, were buried. But it was not nostalgia that brought them back, see. My great-grandpa was in love with a woman from the village they came from, and when he heard that she was still alive, he gave up his military position, the cushy Communist apartment, and turned his back on the Russian metropolis and the fancy school my grandmother attended, and brought them all back home.
It was there, too, that I was born.
I'm reading a superb new poetry collection by Iman Mersal, "The Threshold", tr. by Robyn Creswell (FSG, 2022). An older book I recently read was Der Nister's "Family Mashber" - a true classic of Yiddish literature. Also, big fan of Harriet Books (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books), a site of concise and thoughtful mini-reviews of poetry books.
Collage art on this page by Jake Marmer.
For a taste of the musical stylings of Jake Marmer, check out the below video and associated other on youtube.
