Even today, whenever I spot a man who looks like Jim, my heart skips a beat and before I know it, I am rushing toward him, only to see a stranger’s face with a puzzled look in his eyes. Once again I stiffen with the realization that Jim is gone and will never return. My road takes me again to Baikove Cemetery. On top of this hill, amidst the whispering guelder roses, I can no longer feel his presence. All this is very unlike my beloved husband: the granite tombstone, the unmoving eyes. Here even my memories are fleeting, chaotic, angrily shaped, like a single nerve shrieking with pain. Even prayer does not have the blessed strength that calms and uplifts. It is only when I enter the study, turn on the computer, and surround myself with his books, articles, and telephones that I feel my husband’s unseen presence. I still keep receiving sizable manuscripts addressed to him, as well as phone calls — mostly from elderly people. I always listen carefully and reply, “My husband is far away.”
Often the voice on the other end sounds flabbergasted: “Has he gone to America!”
“Yes, America,” I whisper and hang up.
The silence stirs. It is restless, disrupted by endless requests for interviews, memoirs, as well as by slanderous, insane allegations that James Mace was not at all what Ukraine needed, that he was wrong, and so on. You get used to all this in time because a writer is a mediator and his wife has to assume responsibility for everything — for what he accomplished and what he had no time to accomplish; for what he did not manage to write or say. I think I will never manage to sort them out during my lifetime. Sometimes in public places, I think that my hearing and seeing capacities are incapacitated. I can no longer tell the rustling of leaves from the singing of birds from the buzzing of bees, from the hustle and bustle of a bazaar or supermarket — all I can hear is a humming that I can’t identify as voices or sounds.
Memories... We lived as though in a glass house; everything was open and obvious. We worked side by side at conferences, public appearances, seminars, during trips and nighttime conversations. Little in them was of a personal nature. James lived from topic to topic.
My excursions into the empyreans of poetry or prose alarmed him. He helped me finish my novel Andrii Pervozvannyi (St. Andrew the First-Called). He was really concerned about its fate. He found the money to publish it, and he was proud that his wife was a Ukrainian writer, but his research was supremely important. Here he could be childishly envious, even selfish. He knew that time was as important to me as to him. All I had to do was share some of my creative ideas, and he would occupy our computer and soon come up with an article or a column that had preoccupied me for a long time.
He was very sensitive to my doubts and thoughts. His formulations were short and to the point, and afterwards I would be at ease for a long time. It was difficult for him to live at the pace he set himself. I was the touchstone for his ideas: there were endless conversations about the economic situation, history, politics, and literature. These were witty lectures, and I was getting a crash course from Harvard University. In fact, James was my first real university. Thanks to his unique memory, he could recite the histories of France, Great Britain, Russia, and the Roman Empire year by year, providing details that later I would never find in any scholarly work.
He also possessed a special sense of time and space. It only seemed as though he was living in Ukraine in the here and now. In reality, he periodically lived with the Hutus and the Tutsis because he had an excellent knowledge of the history of the animosity between these two tribes; or he lived in Mexico, or took part in the meetings of the Curia Romana; and followed the paths of the creators of the Old and New Testaments. He was acquainted with biblical characters and knew the problems facing Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine. His profound knowledge of the history of civilization was unique, ranging from the Neanderthals to the Trypillian Culture, all the way to our present day. At times I had the impression that these unique qualities served to estrange him even from people he knew and loved. When he talked about [Ivan] Drach, for example, he instantly and accurately formulated his historical importance in time and space. This was not some kind of evaluative declaration but a clear-cut statement that it was Drach who broke Ukrainian stylistics by guiding it along the lines of European world perception. Jim wrote a short article about Drach, but it was never published. He also perceived his acquaintances in the context of ongoing history.
The subject of the Holodomor was broached more often than others. It haunted and tormented Jim. As a scholar, he knew the causes and consequences of this universal catastrophe. He knew exactly who had masterminded it and carried it out. But as a person, he could still see the eyes of hundreds of old men and women, although he told me little about his work in the US Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine. The whole thing truly pained his heart. He was there, he lived there; he was not an impartial observer. He was an active participant in this history, so he spoke on behalf of its victims and in their name. No one should be led astray by his scholarly definitions or dry, logical arguments. This topic burned out his soul and led to a tragic end. It was difficult to live with this.
You can change your future, but how can you reconcile with the past, particularly with James’s world perception, and with the current realities, all of whose pathologies originate from there? For him, the horror of the Holodomor did not happen yesterday: he experienced it every day, in all its details and in each and every death. Khvylovy was shooting himself before his very eyes. Together with Sosiura he “walked the golden streets of Kharkiv and wept.” Before his very eyes Andrii Holovko was raising the ax over the heads of his wife and child dying in the last agonies of starvation. Walking past the October Palace, he would give me a detailed description of all those iron closets into which handcuffed Ukrainian writers had been shoved. He would show me the place where a crane had stood, the one that had removed the corpses with hooks against the background of the constant rumble of machinery. James knew all their names by heart: “The Krushelnytskys, Vlyzko, Burevii, Falkivsky, Kosynka, Lebedynets, Tereshchenko, Skazynsky, Skuba... Twenty-eight. It has been established that there were 28. But how many more were there actually?”
One time we tried to gain entry to the cellars of the October Palace, but we were not let inside the premises that had been given a gilded and gleaming European-style renovation. James didn’t insist very much because he knew the layout of the offices and cellars, and knew that it was impossible to break through the curtain of the modern Ukrainian bureaucracy.
One day we were walking past the once famous Cafe Kulinarka on Khreshchatyk Street when James spotted a group of young writers: Yevhen Pashkovsky, Oleksandr Ulianenko, Volodymyr Tsybulko, Ihor Rymaruk, Vasyl Herasymchuk — I don’t remember all their names. He said quietly, “They were young, cheerful, and ambitious, just like them.” He was talking about the generation of the “Executed Renaissance.” I didn’t need any explanations. Already in those days his temporal swings did not surprise me. That was how he lived and saw the world.
I constantly found myself thinking that James thinks like an American Indian. This was during my trip to Oklahoma. At the time, the American press was full of headlines about the discovery of the remains of the oldest American, who had lain in the ground for 40,000 years. Archaeologists, demographers, historians, and paleontologists were rubbing their hands with anticipation. Numerous expeditions were ready to head for the excavation site. James only laughed, saying that nothing would come of this. True enough, the small Indian tribe didn’t allow any scholars access to the site. The remains were transferred to a different burial site, in keeping with ancient ceremonies. No one took measurements of the skull or studied the bone samples with the aid of a microscope. No one dared disturb the peace of the human being that had died so many eons ago. It was of little concern to the Indians how old the body was, how tall, and what gender it was. It was a person, their ancestor, so the body was accorded the same honors that are paid to family members, to a person who has just died. Today this is an Indian sanctuary and with extremely limited access to visitors. As it is, few people know its whereabouts. This unique sense of time is unfathomable to us, but it is germane precisely to this ancient culture. James never discussed this subject; it was a kind of taboo and an emotionally constant element of his psychology.
As someone who had been born in the West, in accepting democratic values he nonetheless carried in himself archaic habits of creating other dimensions, other substances that had been irretrievably lost to mankind. That is why I pay serious attention to discussions about the third eye that people have now lost. Something very serious must have happened to the Trypillian people who, after living for thousands of years without wars or violent deaths, suddenly found themselves in a trap marked by statelessness, oppression, and destruction. James often said that the main thing right now is the spiritual construction of the Ukrainian people, as a counteraction to the buildup of evil forces and dark energies. Only memory can counteract the total lobotomy and collapse of the human spirit. Only memory, however painful, can put an end to the madness of wars and hatred. By its nature memory humanizes and places people in social processes. It humanizes the individual.
James regarded the Holodomor of 1932-33 as a catastrophe on a biblical scale, an absolute violation of human nature and human rights, a weapon of mass destruction matching nuclear or hydrogen bombs. He made no secret of his hatred for that two-faced Janus, the System that while proclaiming, “Everything for the individual, in the name of the individual...” was creating the GULAG, the Belomorkanal, Katyn, Solovky, and Bykivnia. He never concealed his loathing of all those who, infected with the deadly Marxist-Leninist ideology, were continuing to infect entire social strata. He dearly loved Ukraine — not the way it was, but the way he believed it will inevitably be: a sunlit country inhabited by intelligent and happy people.
James believed in this with his entire being. He is still working on this.
Happy birthday, James, my love!
