Two Versions of a Life at the Memorial Table

Forty days after Marat’s death, his friend Benia stands beneath a lamp, a shot glass in his hand, praising the dead man’s “manly qualities.” Marat’s widow, Alina, is nearby; around them sit friends who have known him since childhood. They join in the praise. Before long, these same people will remember a very different Marat.

This essay discusses plot details, including the ending, of “Marat,” a story in Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia.

Zhadan gives each life recounted at the table a private counterpart. Someone describes Marat’s goodness; the narrator then remembers what happened. Between the two versions, we can see which details have to disappear to make a suitable toast. And who agrees to let them disappear.

The story depends on who is listening

The gathering has a clear condition. Uncle Sasha, Marat’s uncle, stops the friends from leaving: they must remember the dead man kindly, or he will find no peace. Their task is settled before they choose their memories. They are there to affirm his virtues.

Benia tells a story about Marat resisting the temptation to drink at a boxing camp in Yalta. While Alina is present, the friends do not contradict him. Once she leaves for the house, the narrator remembers a different trip: Marat and a friend abandoned their actual training camp and went to Crimea with two girls. The tale of self-discipline conceals his betrayal of Alina.

This is what makes the humor uncomfortable. We hear a solemn speech, then receive the details that make it absurd. But the friends knew those details before the toast. They have not been taken in by an attractive story. They have helped it get told.

Alina’s presence changes what can be said aloud. That does not mean she knows nothing: in the memory of the Crimean trip, the narrator explicitly says she understood more than she was told. Protecting a person and protecting a convenient account of events are different things. The friends do not discuss the difference.

The witness was there too

Kostyk’s speech turns into a grim joke. He recalls Marat’s good heart: supposedly, Marat found a stranger in a park, gave him cardiac massage and saved his life. The narrator remembers a man whom Marat himself beat up. In his account, the request for cardiac massage comes from the victim.

Both versions contain the park, the stranger, a reference to cardiac massage and the police. What changes is who does what: the man who inflicted the harm becomes a rescuer. There is no need to invent everything from scratch. Familiar details can simply be rearranged.

The narrator, however, is no detached exposer of other people’s lies. During the assault, he and a friend pulled away the bartenders who were trying to stop Marat. He knows what the toast conceals because he took part. To recognize the distortion, we need to listen to him; to judge him, we need to remember what he did.

Meanwhile, Alina brings food, clears dishes and listens to the guests. The narrator admits that they remembered her only after most people had left. Men who can speak at length about goodness and responsibility are slow to notice the person working beside them. The dishes tell us more about care than another catalogue of virtues would.

The last memory changes the distance

After these comparisons, we might expect a final exposure of Marat. Instead, the story returns to childhood. Marat collects sleeping pigeons in a bag, then sits with the narrator on a roof, promising one day to buy everything around them: “Everything and everyone.” He even calls his friend his boxing pupil. The narrator corrects him: “You just beat me up twice.”

The gap between self-portrait and action remains. Yet when the narrator asks him to release the birds, Marat hesitates—and lets them go. This small concession does not erase the violence, betrayal or arrogance. It gives us a memory that will not fit neatly into the opposite sort of toast, one about a person in whom everything was bad.

Nor does the final image offer reassurance. Marat breaks off a piece of glass in which the moon is reflected, as though breaking the moon in half, and it grows darker. Zhadan leaves the beauty of the night city beside the boy’s possessive promise, the released birds and that abrupt gesture. Memory holds them together. At the table, there would scarcely have been words for this Marat.