A woman, mute and considered a holy, “sweet” fool by her fellow villagers, suffers such excruciating head pain that she’ll walk up to her neck into freezing water or dig herself a pit in the soil. She’s the title character – and pivotal agony – of the book that Andrey Kurkov (arguably Ukraine’s leading writer – and now war diarist) has described as “the best contemporary Ukrainian novel written since Ukrainian independence in 1991”. First published in 2003 and garlanded with awards throughout eastern Europe, this is its first English translation.
Unlike Kurkov, with his satirical, semi-surreal and rather more urban settings, Matios takes us deep into the very rural Carpathians, to a Hutsul village split in two by the river that marks the border with Romania. It’s tempting to read it as magic realism but you could argue that it’s a wholly realistic portrait of the Hutsuls’ own acceptance of everyday magic and the ever-intrusive hand of God. The events aren’t magic – the magic is in the soil, on the hillsides on which they pasture their cows and goats, in the trees from which they pick their plums and cherries.
Has Darusya been touched by the hand of God and is that why she has lost her wits? Or is another, more prosaic hand to blame and she is just another victim of human-made trauma?
The answer lies in what Matios calls “A Drama for Three Lives”, unscrolling in reverse chronological order, beginning in the 60s with “The Everyday Drama”. Here, we see our protagonist digging up dahlias by the root and carrying them round the village, swaddled in a blanket like infants. Or else shimmying up the pear tree to decorate it with tinsel: “Why should the tree be sad, when the autumn sun warms up, when Darusya isn’t racked with pain in her brain?”
The second life, “The Previous Drama”, takes us back to the early 50s. Ivan Tsvychok, a foul-mouthed, itinerant musician (his chosen instrument: the drymba or jew’s harp) has discovered Darusya’s secret: she is not entirely mute. When she visits her father’s grave, taking him a full picnic basket, she talks. Seeing that there is more to this woman than her “sweetness”, Ivan becomes her protector, her carer, and finally moves into her house.
Are they lovers? Even the locals can’t be sure: the entire narrative is punctuated by garden-fence chats between two villagers, one scandalised by Darusya, the other coming to her defence. These dialogues, written with an archness that would shame an Ealing comedy, offer respite from the intensity and monomania of Darusya’s life.
Like David with Saul, Ivan eases the agony inside her head with his drymba. Almost inevitably, the Soviet authorities, wary of this incomer, drive him from the village: “It’ll be peaceful, Ivan, in the next world. But while we are the authority – we must know everything.”
The final “Main Drama” takes us back to the early 40s, when the village becomes a cat’s-paw tossed between Romanians, Soviets and Germans and then Soviets again. Darusya’s father, in charge of the communal farm’s warehouse, is faced with the dilemma of keeping his family safe when the partisans burst in and demand resupply. It’s a circle that cannot be squared and so we come to witness the events that triggered Darusya’s silence.
This is a strange, and strangely intangible, tale, not especially helped by a translation that, in an attempt to capture the informality of the Hutsuls’ language, verges on patronising and occasionally slips into incomprehensibility. So it’s greatly to the story’s credit that its honesty, love and humanity shine unstoppably through. Matios offers a heartbreaking insight into what, historically, it has meant to be Ukrainian and what it is that they’re now fighting for.
Jonathan Myerson’s play 4am Kyiv Is Bombed is available on BBC Sounds
