Gone
By John Gu
On Monday, I went for lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Lviv that I used to go to last year and ran into S___, a waitress I knew from that time. I can’t remember if she approached me first or if I saw her first, but when I noticed that she was there, I found her standing before me so suddenly that there seemed to be no break between her having seen me and her coming up to me.
She came up to me and said: “Давно...”
It had been nearly a year since I saw her in person. She looked like the photographs of herself that she occasionally posted on Instagram. Bespectacled, but very beautiful, with prominent cheeks, she resembled perhaps a young Charlize Theron. I was so caught off guard when she came up to me that I had no idea what to say, and it made me realize how strange a thing it is to be approached by a woman, to be approached by anyone at all.
Last year, I used to see her quite often because I went to this restaurant almost every day: it was one of the few places in the city where you could get a decent salad, and she was working here full time. I’d always thought she was cute but never bothered to try to flirt with her. She was either pretty, but too young, or else pretty, but probably uninterested, or else pretty, but I’m just here for the salads, lady. In September, I’d run into her at a cafe by the university on one of her days off, and encouraged by her smile, I’d asked her for her phone number.
Later, we’d gone out together for a walk in Lychakivsky Cemetery. It was one of those early autumn afternoons that draw out long shadows, and these were cast over the monumental grounds of the cemetery, whose spacious, manicured lawns gave it the aspect of a French garden. She was from Chernihiv, by the Belarusian border. She told me she’d taken the train to Lviv right after finishing high school with the idea of coming here to study, but the plans (vaguely described) had fallen through, and she’d decided to just stay and get a job instead. Compounding the anachronistically punishing and exploitive aspects of Ukrainian work culture, she had the living arrangements of a grisette: She told me she slept in a dorm in a hostel off Shevchenka street, complained about the dorm mates who kept her up at night. Later, on Facebook, I would find the photographs she’d posted of her room. She’d hung a string of lights over her bunk bed, a smattering of photographs on the wall beside. When I returned from a trip to Odessa, she kept putting me off for a second date. It was possible she’d seen on my Facebook the photographs of the girl I’d gone with to Odessa, and I didn’t press the issue.
She’d been sitting with a young man when I came in. And this was news to me. On her Facebook feed, I had seen the photos of the poetry readings she had been going to. The film screenings. The plays. And the activity on the comments sections of her posts, once completely empty had sprung to life. I knew she had more friends now, having settled into life in Lviv, but I had resisted speculation about her love life, making the surprise greater than it should have been.
“Давнонебув.” You were gone for a long time.
I told her I’d been travelling. I thought of the stories she’d posted on Facebook. She’d told me on our date at Lychakivsky cemetery that she would sometimes get on a train, and just go somewhere to see what it was like. I recalled the photographs of her feet on a cold beach on the Black Sea. Of my own travels, I could think of nothing to say. I’d been to Italy, to Turkey, to Georgia and Spain. But standing before her, I felt like no one. Or else I felt Nick-Carrawayish, lacking in any protagonistic aspect, existing chiefly as an observer of other people’s lives, hers specifically. With her handfuls of nothing: of air, of spirit, she’d been able to travel, and to make her travels, her life into something very beautiful. There were the photographs on her Instagram of all the Ukrainian cities she had visited. There were the prose poems she’d posted on Facebook, prefaced with “Напишу...” (I write). There was the idea, occasionally posted on Facebooks across the world (not hers, but so on so many others), that life itself is art.
Young people are no better at bohemianism, no more able at it, than grown ups. It’s just that its essential silliness, its dependence on a certain mode of fashion over financial security is more forgivable in young people. In her cheap, fashionable dresses, her pretentious reading on the grass, it had seemed a fair trade. Yes, it was a bit silly and try-hard, but the photographs were nice, after all, and the life they spoke to as haloed with wonder as anyone’s youth.
“Ябільшетутнепрацюю,” she told me. I don’t work here anymore.
I asked her where she worked.
“Яніденепрацюю.” I don’t work anywhere anymore, she said, laughing. “ЯпоїдузіЛьвова.” I’m leaving Lviv.
I asked her where she was going.
“Ященезнаю. Язбираюсьпоїхатизакордон.” I still don’t know. I’m just going to make a trip abroad. She told me she was thinking of going hitchhiking around Europe.
I felt a twitch at the corners of my mouth. I couldn’t tell if she saw this as an involuntary smile, or a reflexive frown. Both readings would have been accurate. It’s important... I began to say in Ukrainian. It’s important to go abroad.
“Так.”
The Ukrainian word for yes is one of the lightest sounds you can make, a tap of the tongue off the back of the front teeth. Was she smiling because of the sentiment that I had tried to convey in my halting Ukrainian? Or was she still just surprised and delighted to have seen me after all these months?
I was twenty years old when I left Texas. I’d gone to Virginia, where I’d slept on a couch and worked as a waiter. I had also put photographs on the wall. I’d dreamed of trains and travel, and I’d been poor enough, if nothing else, to be bohemian. It was through the filter of this experience that I was talking to her now, and this made things both lovely and strange. As if the ten years that separated me from the young man I had been then had warped upon itself and then deposited me before myself, or a kind of parallel-universe double, and everything was similar, and everything was wrong, and the only truth common to both universes seemed to be this forlorn conviction that I had failed somehow, failed myself and every other party involved, wanting, in spite of that, to linger in the warm glow of the casual, unexamined hope of the smiling face before me. But I didn’t know how to say this in Ukrainian. Or else I didn’t know how to say it at all.
Out of the corner of my eye, the young man she’d been sitting with shifted in his seat. I tried not to look his way. It wasn’t that I was jealous, I decided; I just didn’t trust what my face would do if I looked in his direction. Stumbling through our conversation in my plenty-rusty Ukrainian, I felt backfooted, discomposed.
She asked me if I was busy tomorrow. I dissimulated deliberation because I was too embarrassed to admit that I had no plans whatsoever. A little bit, I said, finally. She wondered aloud if maybe we could meet up. I doubted that we would, but her smile, and the bountiful happiness behind it, not merely magnanimous, but seemingly truly delighted, was enough for me to fake a smile back and say, yes (very lightly), yes, maybe we could. She told me she would message me. I wanted to give her a hug, but I settled for a kiss on the cheek, and she went to sit back down with her boyfriend again.
Feigning an aloofness I didn’t really feel, I sat down at a table at the far end of the restaurant and pulled out an issue of a magazine that I’d brought with me, tried to read some articles. For a long time, I resisted the urge to look up, for fear that she’d catch me looking at her across the room. When I did, finally, she was already gone.
END