KALIMBARIUM
That thing you called joy...
What colored cubes is it made of?
Yeah, I know you need to lift one corner of your mouth.
Surely, two is better - but that's for the advanced, it takes years of training.
And you need to walk proudly and straight, like a smiley on a stick.
Until everything clears up.
Clouds, fog, rainfall, uninvited guests with a belly full of TNT.
Everything will become crystal clear.
But will it make you happier?
When the war reached Kyiv, I spent my days playing the kalimba.
There was no other reliable source of joy in the house.
No one believes that a small kalimba can drown out rocket explosions.
(Of course, not the ones that put a window on you.)
I had never played it before.
When my wife gave me this gift, I tried to make sounds by hitting the reeds with a small hammer.
Not because I had never seen it played, but because sudden joy pushed aside my consciousness.
I almost killed this small, fragile instrument then.
My distant disabled relative survived the occupation of Bucha without leaving home.
He died a week after liberation, when he was finally able to see his cousin again. She had taken care of him for many years.
The heart survived the fear, but not the joy.
He was a very distant relative. At that time, I didn't even know of his existence. And I still do not know what he looked like.
A damaged nail prevented me from playing like everyone else - with my thumbs. I started playing with the other eight.
- What can I do? I only have four hands! - my wife once said.
While I was playing, she worked, painted pictures, cooked gluten-free food, looked for vitamins for everyone, calmed the children.
And I kept playing. That was the job. She herself asked me to play.
Everything was used: Christmas carols, Ukrainian lullabies, Soviet children's songs, Scottish jigs and reels, country tunes, Bach, Handel, Mozart and even Cage (or so it only seemed to me). Everything that could be played on the white keys of the piano. And what couldn't as well.
But more often the fingers came up with something of their own. Tripping over each other and choking with the desire to speak out. Clink-clink-clink...
- Please don't shout, I'm turning on the recording.
And what about singing? I didn't want to sing at all. Songs seemed then - and still seem now - to be something inappropriate, absurd. When any minute can be your last, the last thing you want is to decorate the words with chords and turns of melody. Everyone says there are more Ukrainian songs now. I don't hear them.
But the poets definitely got filled with importance. The poems crawl out on their own - often beyond the rhyme, beyond the meter, beyond the very desire to seem like something beautiful. An encyclopedic set of words, organized in a way that people don't talk, writers don't write, and even rappers don't rap. Strange angular constructions rub against each other and carve out the sparks of joy. Even where, according to the meaning, there's no place for joy.
When it all started, it was easier to rejoice.
It sounds strange, there was probably something hysterical in it.
The nation, as best it could, saved itself with laughter - and there were plenty of reasons!
The uptown bullies who took away an armored personnel carrier from Russian saboteurs.
Gypsies who stole a tank.
A resourceful granny who shot down a drone with a jar of pickles.
No one cared whether it really happened.
People were saving their psyche.
Three years later, it was already pretty tired of saving itself.
But then everyone hoped that this pseudo-apocalypse would soon end, and rejoiced at any hint of it.
My kalimba worked as a small factory of joy.
Children and scandals died down at these sounds.
A loud hooting outside the window was less disturbing.
The house turned into a large music box, where funny flat figures resembling people did their own thing, while a hidden mechanism organized the clicking sounds into something harmonious.
This flimsy shelter was not intended to protect bodies, but rather to protect heads. We lived in a cartoon for the little kids, while outside, behind a thin wall, a disaster movie with elements of black comedy was playing.
I trained myself to stretch the corners of my mouth while doing exercises.
As a result, the muscles that stretch the mouth became much more noticeable than the others.
Remember how Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the swamp by his hair?
It turns out that bald people can do that too.
At school, everyone is talking about the driver who was taking bread to the store. All they found was his arm and torso. All covered in tattoos and naked - it was torn off by the blast wave. The store is gone now too - fortunately, the shelling was late in the evening and the store was empty.
Fortunately.
And in my ears I hear the scream of an 80-year-old woman who burned alive at the end of our block. Two weeks ago, a drone swooped down right on an old nine-story building - the same as ours. The building survived, but the old woman did not. And the firefighters couldn't get there because the building was tightly surrounded by cars.
I wasn't going to remember this, honestly. Just don't get too dark, I told myself - you were going to talk about joy.
Every day I learn to be happy again.
I compose music consisting only of major chords.
I sent someone memes that everyone has known for a long time.
I have fun watching a cat who thinks we are all idiots. Looking at her complicated expression, it is hard to stay serious. But she must be reading it from someone!
Every day you can find a reason to be happy. Well, if not find it, then come up with it, invent it. Some are forgotten in a second. Some are remembered before going to bed. And some click like a kalimba - sweet and out of place. Like a switch that doesn't turn on anything, but reminds you to turn on the light.
Or just pulls you out of oblivion.