Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

“Mom, what if I asked you what Dad and Uncle Volodya have in common?”

“He’s kind,” Olga Fedorivna responds instantly, as if she’d been waiting for this question for twenty years. “I’ve always told you—make sure a man’s kind, that’s the most important thing. Seriozha was kind. And Adrian, too.”

For the first time this morning Daryna can’t stifle a smile: the ease with which her mom ties into the same circle her own and her daughter’s men—the ones she knows—makes her forget, for an instant, the bottomless bog her boss had tried to drag her into last night. Images of her life’s kind men spin before her like in the Hutsul arkan dance—they’re all brothers; they all must be introduced to each other, so they all become friends. The circle flickers gathering speed, faster, faster, as it blends into a single being, a collected radiance of a single gaze that glows with tenderness—this lasts no more than an instant, and the vision disintegrates, but, how strange; she feels ever so slightly better, consoled. Somehow, her mother has managed to break her out of her gloom, alleviate the fear of loneliness. No, she won’t bend over for them, hell no. What her boss offered last night was more horrible than solitary confinement. Much more.

***

Once, in Polissya, Daryna got to see a quag—an unnaturally, acidly bright, motionless pool the color of light pickle mold in the middle of a marsh. From the distance, its utter stillness awed her: a blind, piercingly green eye of death. She remembers her sudden, intense urge to throw something into it—anything, just to break the spell of that uncanny stillness, to see, with her own eyes what it was like, what an end like that looked like, when the darkness sucks you in and there’s nothing to grasp on to; the mere thought of it makes everything inside go numb with terror, but still it lures, beckons to peek in.

He was burying all her professional aspirations alive and had not the slightest inkling of what he was doing. He never felt the studio darkness expand into infinity on the other side of the cam-eras; there was no one sitting in fear for him, ready to cough and creak their chairs in response to any falsity; he couldn’t care less about what he put on the air. Professionalism, for him, meant how, not what, and if the Insurgent Army theme was better left alone for the time being, then it wasn’t worth bothering with at all, and anyway, entertainment programming was the safest niche—he said it exactly like that, using that word, and it made her cringe, and then laugh with all the spite she had in her: ah, the niche again!

Nose already twitching with the nonexistent roach whiskers, he assured her she would be protected from politics, all that dirt, he gave his word. Sure, she’s “the face of the channel,” and it was never her business to care about the provenance of substances that bubble in its guts, so why should it start being her business now? That’s only logical. And then he told her—intimately, a little wearily almost like he’d had enough of her tetchy jibes, her crooked half-grins, and her little bitten-down lips, all of which had the singular purpose, as any idiot could see, of drumming up her price, a pretty woman’s usual ritual resistance before she gives in and takes the hardened dick into her mouth—how much she would be paid. Cash, of course, in an envelope, off the books.

She gasped silently, unsure of what face to make so he wouldn’t notice anything: she felt naked—no one had heard of such salaries in Ukrainian television before; the ceiling was five grand a month, unless, of course, you count those who got their kickbacks in envelopes, directly from their political clients, and their channel was never among the wealthy ones. She’d been getting two, and was fine with that. That’s when it went to her head, spinning, dizzying, for an instant: they could buy an apartment downtown if they sold Aidy’s digs—and better still—oh the impossible dream!—a small house in the country, in some near-Kyiv quaint alpine hamlet; it’s all “Alps” around Kyiv, everywhere you turn—hills, meadows, lakes, ponds, and not everything’s sold yet, although the prices are stratospheric indeed, but all they need is a little patch of land, like in Roslavychi, where Vlada had been planning to live with Vadym. And right away, with dazzling, sobering clarity, it occurred to her that Vlada’s death was also connected to this hidden churn of financial flows—with the invisible gigantic intestine where blood and oil mixed in the same pipe: Vadym was into oil, and Vlada was into Vadym, and she got the blood. What was it she said in that dream—“too many deaths”?

Frozen, Daryna felt the breath of the subterranean bog—its invisible vapors rose against her skin, fogged her mind. Bank accounts’ credit columns endowed with cell-like, self-replicating ability, the flickering of mysterious numbers on computer screens and stock-market monitors: all this was alive—it rose, throbbed, grew, moved. “I’d be curious,” she said to the boss, “I’d be really curious to know—where’s the mother lode?” Boss took it as an expression of admiration and winked, with bravado, just like that time at his housewarming party. “I mean,” she said, not yet aware of how close she’d come to lifting the manhole cover and seeing the blind acidly greenish glimmer below with her own eyes, “don’t get me wrong; I know I’m an expensive woman,...” (he gave her a sleazy snigger) “but I’m also aware that free cheese is only found in the mousetrap—braids don’t fetch that kind of dough!”

That was her swerving off road and cutting straight through the rough—she no longer cared; she knew her cause had already been lost and wanted to have one last satisfaction: to know the mechanism that was behind this, let it be her last journalistic investigation; she’s a professional after all, isn’t she? (For the fall, the anniversary of her friend’s death, she’d planned to make a separate film about Vlada, for Lantern—and for Vlada, too. Yep, and apparently Vlada’s no longer in touch with the times, and Vadym’s been showing up on TV more often, generally looking like he’s got his act together and is doing pretty well; why should we mess with the dead if we’ve got living people lining up, cash in hand?) The Donets’k surgeon, Vlada, Gela Dovganivna, whom she kept postponing, unable to find the key to her story—Lord, how proud she was of her show; how much she loved her heroes, always had butterflies in her stomach when she went to the website to read the viewers’ comments the morning after a new episode had aired. What’s happening to us, how low can we fall, what are we letting them do to us?

No, she did not burst into tears right there, in the boss’s office; she’d held her face screen-proof—like a cream puff, because fury was boiling inside her, and fury demanded action, immediate action. She interrogated; she went on the offensive; she cornered him; she didn’t know she had such breathless pace in her; she rode it like a witch on a broomstick, and he did not realize that this was merely a doomed man’s attempt to extract from his executioner the law that had sent him to the gallows—no, he looked at her with growing respect, as at a woman who was expertly, professionally raising her price. Good job. (She’s run so many times into this astonishing shortsightedness in otherwise intelligent people that she long stopped marveling at it: it was like a virus, increasingly widespread, that affected not only politicians, businesspeople, and members of her own journalistic tribe, but also artists of whom one commonly expects a more complex spiritual organization. Instead of living, people were scheming, playing out their combinations, and anything that was not part of their scheme was simply blocked in their consciousness, as if they had a blind spot.)

Boss really valued her, even the tip of his nose was all sweaty with tension she noted gleefully—she wasn’t the only one on whom the conversation was taking its toll! Alright, he sighed, about to slap his last ace, the joker up his sleeve, onto the table in a grand, bighearted sweep—cards down! He might be able to negotiate a bigger sum for her, he said, he’d do his best—if it works, they’ll “take her in” (he said this in Russian, when the talk turned to money, he switched completely into Russian) on the profits from the Miss New TV show. Is that so? It’s a very serious project, he warned, nervously twitching his sweaty nose (and Diogenes’ Lantern was NOT serious, she dictated mentally to her invisible attorney—the boss’s every word scorched her like a flame), only this must remain strictly between the two of them, okay? (This reminded her of someone else—oh yes, her captain from that office with fake leather doors of 1987 vintage: he also asked with the same sepulchral import for the conversation to remain between them.)

This was in her own interest, by the way, because he had Yurko pegged to host the Miss New TV pageant (Yurko!—she yelped inside—and Yurko will agree?), but only on an official salary—Yurko’s not in on the profits. How about that? They do value her!

“And what kind of show is that?”

“The usual kind, just another show, the main thing’s to select and sort the girls who applied, and then they’d be passed on to a different agency.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, only a few finalists will appear on the show, you know,” he explained.

And where would the money come from?, she almost asked like the last idiot—and that’s when it finally dawned on her.

“Motherfucker,” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

She thought she was smiling as it sometimes happens to people in shock. Boss’s face hung still before her in close-up, as if someone had hit the pause button (he’d never heard her utter such profanity; the words popped out by themselves, as if they were the last pieces needed to complete the puzzle). And under her gaze, this face, confirming her guess, was collapsing, slipping like a wall in earthquake coverage—from his eyes, where the inquiry (Is something wrong?) was replaced by the flash of realization (She won’t be his accomplice!) to the fright (What has he done?!), a moving shadow, to the deathly bleached wings of his nose, and then to the chin that somehow instantly lost shape and dropped like a clump of wet spackle. In the fraction of a second that she experienced as endlessly long minutes, this man seemed to have disintegrated right before her eyes, and she saw clearly what he would look like in his old age—if, of course, he lived that long. She could smell his fear as one smells the odor of a long-unwashed body. No, this is not a mistake, there’s been no mistake; she understood everything correctly—what kind of “a different agency” it was, and from where the profits were planned to come.

“So, we’re retraining into slave traders?”

“What are you talking about?” Eyes skittering, gathering his face back into a fist, “I haven’t told you anything.”

“And will you tell the girls? Will you tell them what kind of show they’re being invited to?”

“Oh please, give me a break,” he snarled, happy to find himself on solid ground again, on well-trodden territory. “What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms...”

She didn’t listen after that, something clicked in her ears like when the reel gets chewed up in a tape recorder. He sounded as if he’d memorized this text in advance and had only been waiting for a chance to unload it on someone—after all, one always needs to justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victim is always the murderer’s simplest excuse.

Yurko once managed to interview a professional hit man; they ran the footage with the man’s face hidden, but the killer was unexpectedly articulate, and when Yurko asked what it was like to murder people—what it feels like in action—the man responded with the same memorized preparedness, took it straight out of the gate: “I am not a killer; I am a weapon; I am simply a gun in other people’s hands.” She was astonished, then, to learn that a killer, too, could have his own brand of morality. Did Yurko know what role he’d been assigned? Or, would he repeat, when he found out, his usual joke about “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four”?

They say this legendary Petrenko does, in fact, exist, and appears every so often, like a ghost, on the Boryspil highway where he actually introduces himself that way to the drivers he pulls over: “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four!” Looking on, expectantly, as his victim opens his wallet.

Yurko actually has four kids from three (Isn’t it?) previous marriages, and supports all of them as a decent man should—always looking for side gigs. So does she really have the right to pin him against the wall and force him to choose by revealing the origins of the windfall that’s about to drench him? She tried to remember how many of Yurko’s kids were girls—three, or all four—but for some reason could only recall one of them, the fifteen-year old Nadiyka, who once came to the studio—perfect age for the sex trade, and also with braids, a blonde little thing...a sweet child.

Easy for you to say, Daryna, Yurko might reply, and if he didn’t say it, he’d still think it: you’ve got nothing tying you down; you do with your life as you please; you can slam those doors behind you whenever and wherever you want—and he’d have a point, of course; they’re far from being in the same boat. Still, something has to be done—not police, perhaps, but she’s got to find some resources to publicize this information—to make sure that the fifteen-year-old twits who’ll rush in herds from Zhmerinka and Konotop tomorrow to send their bikini shots into the contest on TV will know what kind of show, damn it, is planned for them!

The boss repeated again that their conversation had to stay inside the office. “And that is something I cannot promise you,” she said—still compelled by her team instinct, her atavistic reflexes, a recurrence of a partner’s duty: cards down, fair play.

“I would not advise you to make a fuss,” the boss answered, with unconcealed hostility. “I rather strongly would advise you not to. Trust me at my word.”

“Or else what?” she said cheerfully. (Looking him straight in the eye, straight in the eye just like dog trainers tell you not to do—as if for seventeen years she’d been spurred on by that captain’s elusive look, which hemmed her in, stitch by quick stitch, in another office, the look she never managed to crack, no matter how much she wanted to peek inside it, see, touch whatever it was that stirred in there, underneath.) “You’ll whack me, too?”

He recoiled as if she’d struck him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, flashed in her mind. She herself would not have been able to explain why she blurted it out—like a line from a long-accumulated case built for the prosecution. At that moment, she was not thinking at all—forgot all about—that old case in Chernivtsi that had launched the boss’s career, about the uninvestigated death of someone or another. She just flipped open, automatically, in response to his threat, her own hidden blade: pure bluff, improvisation in a fit of inspiration. Her advantage lay in the fact that during the entire conversation she’d felt surreally fearless—as if all this were happening to someone else, as if she’d landed inside a sci-fi movie, no, a Russian gangster miniseries, where she moved with dreamlike lightness.

And that’s when the boss began to scream, as is the custom of all weak and frightened people when they are defending themselves. In the first instant, she wondered if he, perchance, had lost his mind, raving that she ought to know better than to come here and lecture him all Mother Theresa–like...as if they’re all in shit and she’s the only one white and pure, as if she doesn’t sell the goods just like everyone else...when all it took for her was to bang someone like R. and voila, she’d won the channel a lump-sum loan that went, to the last penny, to underwriting her show, so that she could fuck it all up and leave them to clean up the mess...aha, and don’t look at him like that, fucking princess, some star she is...the nation’s conscience, is it?...cunt...he’ll have her know he’s just as good a professional as she!

Have some water, she counseled through her teeth. The sight of a man’s hysteria prompted in her nothing but a cold repulsion, and the drivel he was sputtering at her appeared at that moment so outrageous that it didn’t affect her at all. She had long ago relegated her short, wild affair with R. (who at the time had a seat on their sponsoring bank’s board of directors) to the archives and wished to recall none of it—neither their heavy, dark lovemaking that filled her body with a dull and joyless, bovine satiety (like the feeling one got sometimes after anal sex, only with R. it was every time), nor its worst final chapter when she was doing everything in her power to get away from him, and it was proving to be not at all as easy as she’d thought.

As soon as R. caught a whiff of her intention to desert, he turned aggressive like a bulldog with a bone. Once, he caught her arm and, with a lupine grin, squeezed it hard with two fingers, leaving a bruise that she had to cover with a tennis sweatband for a week afterward.

He hunted her, caught up with her in the worst possible places, brandishing his owner’s right to her to everyone around (he knew this infuriated her the most and hit where she was most vulnerable), ambushed her after work, took her “home” from receptions, where he arrived with the resolute look of a husband who’d come to make a scene (and she tottered out after him, choking on her hatred, like an obedient heron in her high heels, to assault him in the car, later—with her fuming tirade, breathlessly gulping her cigarette, the classic domestic horror).

Weeks after, exhausted and edgy, she finally yelled at him, in a kind of a haze, right in the middle of the street, everything she thought about him and ran in tears into the subway (for some reason the subway seemed the safest place to her—it was impossible to picture R. there). For months she was afraid, when she came home at night that she’d see his Grand Cherokee with its headlights turned off, like a sleeping brontosaurus in the darkness, next to her apartment building’s door.

Her initial infatuation, short-lived and addling like a jinx, took root in her acute curiosity about a breed of men she’d never encountered before: the ones who turn over big money and for that reason radiate an unassailable certainty that they’re also the ones who make the world itself turn on its axis—men of Vadym’s type; she thought she’d finally understood Vlada then.

She probably wouldn’t have fallen for R. so hard if it weren’t for Vlada. As though by doing so, she was walking in her tracks, following her, posthumously. Vlada lay in the overcrowded Baikov Cemetery, where one had to squeeze between graves to get to her like on the subway at rush hour—and Daryna, heart pounding and no underwear in sight, sped in the studio car to the meeting at the bank (back then, the boss always took her to these meetings with him), took a seat next to R., found his hand under the table and pushed it discreetly under her skirt, and listened, giggles and arousal swelling inside her, to his breath change as he fought to control himself so that no one would notice. (Once, finding a moment, he ran after her, shoved her almost brutally into the bathroom, threw her, breasts down onto the sink, and, entering her from behind, roared out like a sea lion in heat, “What a bitch!”)

This game was much more addictive than anything at a casino (where R. had also taken her), and in the early days she was pretty strung out—high on the ease of the power she had over this man, at her bidding to run after her, nose to her crotch like a dog, mowing down, like roadside markers, all the rules that had taken him to the top, and she thought she’d discovered for herself the same feeling that must have attached Vlada to Vadym—the joy of giving a man who used to think himself omnipotent a taste of freedom he had never known before. Only that was as far as any joy went for her with R.: she could never feel herself as just a woman, as one should in honest sex—just a woman, and just a man, the same thing for thousands of years, and new every time. R. never reached that level of freedom.

In a sense, he remained for her as he had begun: a specimen of a different species. At first, their feverish coupling—in his jeep, at his dacha, once even at his friend’s house, in a dark room lit only by the porn flickering on the TV screen—dazed her like a kind of a perversion, like sex with King Kong or Bigfoot, although there wasn’t really anything perverted about it, unless one counted his habit of photographing her in various intimate poses. (She asked then, half-kidding, whom he intended to blackmail with those pictures—because she didn’t give a damn. She was free to sleep with whomever she wanted and didn’t plan to run for Parliament; R. answered, unsmiling, don’t be so sure, leaving her with an uncertain suspicion that he was not, in fact, just shooting his own porn, but planned to keep a file on her just in case, to give him control over her, and in this there was also something acutely arousing, sinfully titillating.)

The turning point came in Holland, where she’d agreed to go with him on a two-week vacation and every morning, when she woke up next to him, felt like she was sticking her head into a bag—and neither the museums, nor the sea, nor the wonderful little seaside restaurant with lobsters, nor the low Rembrandtesque, phantasmagoric light of that country, reflected everywhere by water, could rescue her from that bag: R. loomed before it all—a heavy, dark mass without air holes.

One morning, having climbed out of bed before dawn and smoked a cigarette, on an empty stomach, by the window open to the gentle glimmer of the wet, scaly tiled roofs in the fog, she realized very clearly that she needed to excise this man from her life immediately—like a rotten tooth or a malignant tumor. R. was simply emotionally obtuse—packed hard inside, like dry ground. You can’t tell such things by sight; they only really come to light in bed. This must be the fate of many of the nouveau riche, and generally anyone who spends too much time with the same kind of pressure applied on the same, very narrow range of emotions: it’s as if parts of their soul atrophy. Life had pressed R. into a total spiritual impermeability, a chronic constipation of sorts—and she, Daryna, was his laxative.

He needed her because he needed the aerating, the breaking and turning of his petrified soil, both in sex and in his everyday life: that’s what casinos were for and racing his car, cutting lanes on the Zhytomir highway, and saunas with masseuses and sex-tourism to Thailand and a whole repertoire of other aids, all at the client’s disposal, that could stimulate the emotional peristalsis—having acquired estates, people now spend them on anything that makes them feel alive. She was for R. just such an aid, and that’s what she felt herself to be, after all their mechanical orgasms, she felt it in her ass, like she’d been screwed there.

This was, give or take, what she yelled at him in the end in the middle of the street, seeing nothing around her, and she knew she hit the bull’s-eye, that he’d disappear after that, excise himself from her life like a cankered growth—men like him did not go back to the site of their defeat. The thing is, though, that they don’t ever forgive those who were there to witness it.

And this was the fact she had overlooked: R. wasn’t simply her past, wasn’t simply a lover she’d left—much more brutally than she would’ve preferred. (She couldn’t stand violent breakups with sordid scenes and did, in fact, nurse at the bottom of her heart that idiotic notion of all her men somehow constituting something like a single extended family—she was, for instance, frightfully pleased to introduce Aidy to Sergiy and watch them shake hands; she loved them both at that moment.) He wasn’t someone with whom you could part and not see again for years in a city of three million, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a banker, or a journalist, for that matter (and they didn’t, fortunately, all frequent the same watering holes); R. was her enemy.

And he took his revenge in the simplest way available: first by giving the channel money and then by cutting it off; goodbye, we regret to inform you that our priorities have changed. Read: If I can no longer fuck your anchor, I’ll fuck you. Did he think that perhaps the channel’s bosses would then deliver her to his doorstep rolled up into a rug like an Oriental slave girl, and he’d be able to walk all over her in some uber-cynical manner? No, that’s unlikely—it was probably just his good business sense at work: What’s the point of paying if you don’t get anything in return? Simple as that, and no need to, as Antosha (or Occam’s Razor) says, multiply redundant essences.

“And don’t you pretend,” the boss hollered—much more confident now that he’d spotted her confusion, with decidedly more spiteful indignation—“don’t you even try to pretend like you didn’t know anything!”

But she did not; she knew nothing—that was the rub; there were lots of things she didn’t know and wished to continue not knowing: she shut her eyes and pinched her nose, just like everyone else. Silly little Daryna, little Red Riding Hood, climbing into bed to play with the wolf thinking him her grandma. There’s your sex with King Kong.

Out loud she laughed at him—because what else could she do—eww, how disgusting! The primitive, dumb as a tank, logical force of this whole edifice crushed her; how easily these two, the boss and R., had robbed her of her private life behind her back—what she used to consider her private life (as she said to R., oh so lightly: I sleep with whomever I please—and he did warn her, didn’t he—don’t be so sure)—converting it into dollars and cents, like they’d translated her into a hard, solid language they could understand. Knocked off her accuser’s high ground, she finally saw the anchorwoman Goshchynska through their eyes: an expensive woman, to be sure (and with a price tag attached!), what a bitch, a sexy cunt, a walking ad for contact lenses—I use them and toss them without regret. (What if that’s what R. thought—that she’d used him to get money for the channel?) “Unshakeoffable” as the boss had once complimented her comically, not knowing how to say “irresistable” in Ukrainian, and thus capable of being useful on screen: braids, a little top, welcome to our whorehouse; that was how they saw her, and that was the version they admired—that was the version they were willing to pay for, even to “take her in on the profits,” whether from the election carousel or the slave trade, whatever’s in season.

They saw her as one of them, and she had nothing with which to shield herself. Her work, all her professional accomplishments by themselves meant nothing to them but instead lay beyond the reach of their assessment scale, in the “blind spot.” They were just fun and games on the margins of the big business—aspirations for television with an intellectual gloss, celebration of heroes no one’s ever heard of—well, that’s nice, fit for an international contest somewhere, where it can fetch an award to hang under glass on the wall in the boss’s office, but essentially no one gives a flying fuck.

R., when she talked about her work (told him about her heroes, the idiot!), would smile a Buddha smile and say that her enthusiasm made him insanely horny (and would pull her hand into his pants, so she could see for herself). The same effect was produced in him by the enthusiasm with which she sucked delicious shreds of lobster flesh out of the shell in the little Dutch restaurant: an erection was another hard (doesn’t get much harder) language, tangible like money, into which they translated what they didn’t understand. And she had nothing else to show them as proof of her identity; she worked with them, she lived on the money they paid her, even—and she couldn’t strike this from her résumé either—occasionally slept with them (a woman’s curiosity can lead all kinds of places!). She was inside the system and felt quite at home there. Had she told her boss that after seven years on air she still felt the darkness in the studio of an audience extending to infinity on the other side of the screen—full of people to whom she was accountable, could even feel their breath—this confession, most likely, wouldn’t elicit even an erection from him: he’d just laugh and counsel her to spend more time outdoors. He had also become a different biological species—she’d been refusing to see it for too long.

It occurred to her that he really wanted her to stay with the channel. He wanted her to be the way they saw her; he was willing to fight for that. Not just for the profits, or for the “face of the channel.” This mattered to him: that they become equals, two of a kind, professionals, and he no less (better even—because he’s the one paid more) than she—to erase between them any gap that could not be translated into clear, hard language. The gap irked him.

And, exactly as with R., only without the screaming (on the contrary, dreadfully slowly and quietly because rage was choking her and made it hard for her to speak, even the room grew darker around her, as if dusk fell suddenly), she said things to him that she hadn’t intended to say and that would’ve probably been better left unsaid, because it’s not wise to be so old-fashioned as to declare war—like Prince Oleg to the Khazars—right in the face of the person you intend to war with (she knew she would do everything imaginable to kill their dastardly show). But, just as with R., telling the truth to the eyes of the person facing her was, in that moment, the only thing she could do to separate, to shield herself from their sticky grasp, like lowering the manhole cover on the cloacae below.

“Do you realize,” she said to the boss, “that you’re contagious? You’re like the guy with TB who goes around spitting into other people’s soup. Like in vampire movies: you’ve been bitten, and now you must bite everyone else so they become like you. And that sucks, brother. Big time.”

Amazingly enough, he kept silent. Then muttered in Russian, obviously working over something in his mind, “You’re insane.”

“Aha,” she said, rising to go, straightening to her full height in front of him on her high heels (he was short, a small man with a Napoleon complex), stepping like a hot-blooded racehorse—unshakeoffable. “That’s right, insane. It runs in the family, don’t you know?”

***

She only tells her mother the triumphant part, in an edited version, without too many details. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chimes in. She remembers that fifteen-year-old film that propelled the boss into big journalism—sure, sure, it was on TV—children in Chernivtsi struck down by a mysterious illness, terrible shots: a hospital room full of little girls and all of them bald as old men. You bet, a picture like that stays with you: science fiction, banshee purgatory. The kids would wake up one morning, get out of bed, and all their hair would stay on the pillow. Soft baby hair, a tiny silky scalp.

“No, Mom, that was later. And it’s got nothing to do with Chernobyl.”

A typical merging effect: the greater horror subsumes the smaller one. Chernobyl, Chernivtsi—they even sound similar, both start with Ch, easy to mix them up. Mix them up and then forget. Do they teach this in the Journalism Institute now: How to present information in the manner that makes it easiest to forget? And then paste over the poignant image in people’s minds with something from Star Wars—plenty of bald-headed little monsters in that story, all over the place really.

Boss had made his name with that horror clip about bald children, but no one remembers this fact anymore, and he himself never brings up his early days. Another man died then, his body the roadblock to any further independent investigations. Another man paid for the boss’s career.

But she didn’t even remember this, wasn’t thinking about that story at all during their conversation! The precision of her aim was something akin to what a body does in a moment of danger, when it knows which way to duck, all by itself. You just poke with your finger, not looking—and lose the whole arm to the gooey mess with the requisite dose of someone’s blood in it.

That time in Chernivtsi, Daryna explains to her mother, it was, presumably, an accident at a military plant to which the authorities never granted access. Moscow managed to close the case just before the Union fell apart. A rocket fuel spill, most likely. Who knows whose security services were involved—Moscow’s or ours—the fact remains that someone badly needed to have the whole story hushed up, whatever it took.

“So what you are saying,” Mom says, straining to digest the information, “is that the gentleman who was investigating the case was, in fact, murdered? And that your producer knew about it—and kept quiet?”

Why is it, exactly, that she finds this so hard to believe? Daryna feels something like her old filial exasperation.

“Mom, you’re like from Mars, or Venus, or something! What, Father’s colleagues didn’t quietly make their careers on someone else’s blood? When they’d driven the architect to killing himself—and then made him the scapegoat—and they all, except Father, signed the denunciation like good boys.” Now, wouldn’t it be interesting, flashes through her mind, to meet with those people now, whoever’s still alive, and see who they’d become. Do they also moonlight in human trafficking when business is slow? And while we’re at it, let’s see how their kids turned out, an instructive little show indeed—and suddenly she sees what she could’ve done with her father’s plot in which she could never find the story. Now, when she can’t make anything, barn door closed and no horse in sight, as Aidy says. “You’ve lived your life with all that, and now you’re surprised?”

“Yes, but that was then!” Olga Fedorivna protests. “Times have changed!”

It’s like generational egoism in reverse. Everything bad has already happened to us, and our children start from a clean slate. And the children cheerfully trot off into the world convinced that that’s exactly how things’ll turn out, and the parents egg them on: go on, kiddo, we’ve done our time, but you’ll have the good life now—lots and lots of it, all you want. And the kids, aside from this blessing, are armed with nothing, go bare as a bone. Stripped naked, that’s the thing.

“We all thought so too, Ma.”

If only one could know where “then” ends and where “now” begins. And how stubbornly blind this self-preserving human faith is—the faith that a clear watershed divides them. That it’s enough to turn the page—start a new calendar; change your name, passport, seal, and flag; meet and fall in love with a new man; forget everything that had once been and never (even alone with yourself) remember the dead—and the past will be made null and void. But there is no watershed, and the past pushes at you from every pore and crack, mixing with the present into dense inseparable dough—and you have very little chance of flailing your way out of it. Only we keep on consoling ourselves with our childish illusion that we can control the past because we can forget it. As if our forgetting would make it vanish, go away. Like Irka Mocherniuk’s rug rat when he got angry at her for slapping him and threatened, “I’m gonna make it all dalk for you now!” squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could.

Still, Mom can be forgiven, Daryna thinks—she did spend her working life in a museum, after all, got used to a cataloged kind of past, ordered and pinned to the corresponding dates, like a collection of dead butterflies: here’s “then,” and beginning from this point it is “now,” all nice and tidy. When Daryna was little, she loved visiting her mother at work. Back then, all the exhibits in the museum’s halls were above her head, glassy glimmers up there, mysterious and unattainable, and one of the adults would always pick her up so she could peek at the pictures under the glass—there were many, immeasurably more than in any book, she couldn’t dream of getting a good long look at all of them, and the incredible riches the adults possessed made her swoon delightfully—and that’s what it meant to be an adult: to have access to all the pictures in the world, like Ali Baba’s treasure caves, and she wished to grow up sooner, faster. And, well, it all came true just the way she wished, didn’t it? Of all things, she’s always had plenty of pictures.

And again, a wave of scorching pain swallows her, so hot she has to bite into her lip so as not to moan out loud: rot it all to pieces; she really was good at television! What happened, that it was no longer important—being good? Young journalists don’t even use this word anymore; they don’t say that someone is good at what he or she does; they say successful. A thief—if he has millions in offshore accounts—is a successful entrepreneur; a hopeless talentless putz—if his face is on every channel—is a successful journalist. And it’s us they learn from, Daryna thinks dully. Boss talks like that too, and not just about shows, but about people too. And he also says professional—that’s the highest compliment from him. Alright, let’s say so-and-so is a professional—and what about everyone else? Who are they? Amateurs? Then why the hell do they still have their jobs?

They had been a team once—when was that? So long ago. That was her real youth, first and foremost because of its sense of unlimited possibility: the wild nineties, free-sailing—just show initiative and money took care of itself; suburban mansions popped up and burst as merrily as bubbles on the puddles under a spring downpour, but the air was thick with ideas, the air swirled and roiled with them! In their old studio, their very first one, set up in a rented factory warehouse (the factory had shut down, let them have the space for a song), they’d pull up their chairs and sit up into the wee hours of the night, drafting the program grid, arguing and yelling at each other; the crumpled stubs of unfinished cigarettes spilled from overflowing ashtrays onto the table, and when the smoke got so bad their eyes watered, someone, most often Vasyl’ko in his nerdy bug-eyed, fogged-over glasses, would finally get up to open the window, throwing a jacket over her shoulders on his way back. Where are you now, Vasyl’ko? On what meager Canadian pasture do you nibble your bitter grass?

Last she heard from him was an e-card sent in late 2002, from some total armpit, Manitoba, where in winter the temperatures fall, like in Siberia, to twenty below, and the air’s so dry your lips crack to blood. What the hell was he doing there, in that desert? What was he wasting his life on? He was a natural—no one could draw people out like he did—he’d talk to a post and have it spilling its guts before you knew it. He had that effect on everyone, even the president, or, actually, back then just a candidate. (A remarkable show it was: that redneck never caught on that he was being stripped to his dirty laundry in view of the entire country and went all soft, started bragging about his poor postwar childhood and how back in ’55, dressed in his only threadbare suit coat from his native village, he rode in a coal car to take the institute entrance exams because he had no money to pay for a passenger ticket—and he shone, glowed with the sated pride of the victor who can now show the world a whole warehouse of suits in place of that old coat he’d ruined, and fine suits indeed!)

Vasyl’ko was the first to locate this little spring that powered, as it eventually turned out, the whole wind-up mechanism of our so-called elites—their deep, lusty thirst for revenge for all those Soviet-time humiliations, and to hell with the cost: back then, in the nineties, no one could yet see that the only thing these people desired, as they took their seats in our TV sets with an increasing sense of entitlement, was to climb Kyiv’s hills (knocking a few floors off the old buildings—so they don’t block their view of St. Sophia) and throw, right there on Yaroslav’s grave, the triumphant feast of new nomads. Vasyl’ko wasn’t after some deep social analysis, and never forced any conclusions upon his audiences—he just knew how to listen; really, it couldn’t be simpler; how to listen to what people were telling him and hear the incredible volumes they said about themselves, without noticing, when someone listened to them the way Vasyl’ko did. He could repeat any conversation, even one overheard by chance, almost word for word, and now everyone’s just yakking away over each other’s heads and nobody hears anybody.

The new crop—they’re totally checked out, blank, like they were born with the earbuds in. Nastya the intern, while her guest is talking, keeps herself entertained by rehearsing the different angles of her supermodel smile, waiting for him to finish until it’s her turn to voice the next question. While Vasyl’ko, a communication genius, who even in a ninety-second vox pop could present any random passerby as a one-in-a-million precious soul, is observing Canadian sparrows through his binoculars somewhere at the end of the world. That e-card he sent sported a bright-yellow-chested creature with a tuxedo-black tail, and Vasyl’ko wrote that it was a new hobby of his: bird-watching. Bird frigging watching.

And such stories were myriad; they were legion; they were everywhere you looked. People emigrated, disappeared, dropped off the radar; old phone numbers when she called, thinking—he’s the one I’d love to bring in for the new show!—were answered by strange voices. No, so-and-so had sold the apartment, and didn’t leave a forwarding address—as if an invisible tornado swept through their ranks, leaving only a few of them who had once been called the first echelon of the Ukrainian journalism, those who still remembered Vadyk Boiko and the first show he wrote and hosted on the only Ukrainian channel that was on the air back then. The whole country watched it, streets on his nights empty like after a flood, and then one winter day in 1992, Vadyk, very happy, bragged to a colleague about a pouch of papers he was about to publicize: “I’ve got ’em Commies right here. I’m gonna drop a bomb on them!” And forty minutes later a bomb exploded in his apartment, where they later found his burned-alive body plastered to the floor. The authorities announced a few theories that all boiled down to the victim having burned all by himself, and without anyone’s help whatsoever; they closed the case, and no one would bring up Vadym Boiko’s name on the air after that, as if he’d never existed.

Maybe if we had spent the rest of the nineties speaking and shouting about him, if we had kept reminding each other about him, if we’d gathered for an annual wake and aired it live every winter, all for one, in solidarity, on every channel while that was still possible, maybe then it would’ve taken them longer to take care of us? And the thing is, we all went so quietly, without a peep or a fight, and the Gongadze case doesn’t count: by the time Giya’s head (literally) rolled at the close of our wild nineties, the bitter and magnificent age of aspiration and hope, of skyrocketing careers and buried projects, of daily self-congratulatory banquets where we went to graze with a laugh at first—here, give me today’s wire; let’s see who’s got a release for dinner tonight—and later more and more selectively—ugh, I won’t go there, those bastards never have booze (The boozeless bastards were the last surviving holdouts of the Helsinki group who were still talking, mostly to themselves, about the lustration problem, but who cared about them anymore?)—by that time, although we still picked and chose our clients and put on superior airs negotiating the price of whitewashing some rotten company’s reputation, we were already tame as guinea pigs—we’d gotten used to beer at Eric’s, and jazz jams at 44, to flying to Antalya and Hurghada on vacation. We had already partaken of designer boutiques and our first discount cards. We were well-fed, well-groomed guinea pigs, with glossy fur—those of us who managed to find our way to the flood of money currents—we had no instinct for danger, and that, perhaps, was the main mark of our generation: bare as bones, armed with nothing but our parents’ blessing of go-ahead-kiddo-and-you’ll-have-the-good-life, we stuck our heads into the trap happily and with an easy heart, even with a sense of our own relevance; we took pride in our glossy furs, in being paid, and being paid well—for being talented and insightful, of course, what else?—and then it was too late. We went along, thinking, in our naïveté, that we were shaping the new television landscape—we measured our ratings, thought up new shows, and, like children, felt unbelievably cool when we said “in Ukrainian here for the first time”—and what we really did was dance on blood, and that unavenged, unreprised blood ate at us from inside, insidious as lead-laced water.

“What came of us, oh, what came of us?” squealed Irochka Bilozir on every channel—another burnt-out star of the nineties, relegated soon after to the faceless infantry ranks of synthetic Russian pop; her helpless squealing, as it later turned out, was the true chorus of that era, only no one heard it when they should have been listening: Something wrong was really “coming” of us, but so inconspicuously, day by day, drop by drop, how could anyone notice?

People were changing—they didn’t just drop off the radar, out of the country, out of the profession, lost to the margins, to the Internet, to small-town newspapers that no one ever reads, to radio frequencies barely buzzing along on foreign grants and dying almost before you could find them on the dial—even those who stayed on the radar were no longer the same. Something broke in them, their internal resistance disappeared: where you could, not so long ago, a mere two, three, five years ago, find a solid, good shoulder to lean on, things suddenly slipped and lost shape—softly, viscously, with eyes shifting and hiding in the hangover swell of the eyelids. “For free, Daryna, only your mom kisses you; let’s make a deal: you show me what you’ve got and I’ll show you mine”—and the especially principled editors put five-fold markup on the especially libelous dirt on their own pals and would not budge a cent, all in the name of their sacred friendship. “Don’t take it personally, bro,” they’d say afterward to the victim, “how’d it be if we ran an interview with you?”—and the victims agreed.

The multiplying personnel gaps were then filled, like a karst cave with water, with the watery-green teenagers, who had absolutely no clue, wanted to know even less, and were only too eager to take on the most blatantly partisan political product. Oil barons enthroned their mistresses in the so-called Lifestyle Interest sector, morality and culture included, and the hordes of serf souls delivered the shows for their silicone-lipped, porn-shells turnkey, so all the ladies had to do was roll in and read prepared text at the camera. And the same guys who once, in the early nineties, broke their backs to raise, like proverbial barns, the most resonant media projects (which later sank, quietly, noiselessly, into the pile of rubbish, and smashed crippled shadows crawled out from under the ruins for a long time afterward, limping to reception buffets where they could eat for two days in advance), the guys who in 1990 lugged bundles of the first independent Ukrainian newspapers from Lithuanian printers and took the police clubs to the kidneys for their efforts—these same guys, saddled with premature beer bellies and bald spots, went to earn their living as whipping boys for parliamentarians—as press secretaries to various political roughnecks who were liable to bid them fetch their mineral water in thunderously unprintable language right in front of the press corps. And the whipping boys quickly learned to affect permanent holy-fool grins that were supposed to evince their complete philosophical invincibility against the whole vanity of vanities of this world, full-contact Buddhism as Antosha used to say, listening askance, like whores to an inappropriately chatty client, whenever Goshchynska got on her soapbox about her heroes—as if calculating, in their minds, what kind of money was paid for the box, and how much of it they could hope to snatch for themselves.

At some point all professional topics just expired, suddenly and at once; people stopped talking seriously about what they did, because no one did anything seriously anymore except make money. At some point—What did it look like? When did it come?—very suddenly, they all stopped caring, as if the once-released virus of the latent disease that had been eating away at them from inside finally did its job, and the only thing left to do was to record the rigor mortis. And not even rigor but a viscous, boggy mass that sucked you in everywhere you turned, and the sense at yet another dinner that the people mobbing the tables with their plates and glasses, slurping in unison, clattering tablewares and getting instantly drunk (many never sobering up again) were not living and—no sense denying—yet rather successful in this life, these corpses, decomposed into the already-runny, porridge-like consistency: reach out to touch them with your hand and the goo would swallow your whole arm. This vision came to Daryna more than once or twice—a hot, scorching thrust at the nape, the cerebellum, like a blast from a champagne cork (or a gunshot—straight at the nape, into the pituitary, muzzle pressed into the hollow between the hemispheres).

Once, soon after Vlada’s funeral, it came again—at a restaurant, at some celebratory occasion, at the point when the tables are stripped down to the soiled dinnerware, sweating waiters stumble splashing dessert onto the parquet floors, and the conversations lose coherence, scattering into a chaos of solo monologues, a lady of Balzacian age resolved to speak about Vlada and kept squawking, peacock-like, like whizzing a saw through a log, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t believe that she is dead!” And one of the men, totally wasted, grunted peaceably back at her, a deep echo rung from a bell, “Who of us is alive?” Daryna remembered the cold shiver and, at the same time, the scorch of fire that burst into her nape like a bullet, and instantly sobered her up. Pushed her, like a cork, to the surface of the general chaotic noise, as if lifting her up to the ceiling from where, as she looked disengaged at the stirred-up maelstrom of people and leftovers, she thought with superstitious horror that it’s true; he’s right—there are no living souls here—this is the underworld.

Vlada—how did she know this? And this angle, this point of view from the ceiling? She had a painting, in the Secrets cycle, titled After the Blast. It was a view from above, and in the middle, a splattered circle of light like a multistrand crystal chandelier spun fast on its hook, shattered into animation-sliced circles like ripples spreading on water. Vlada was always fighting stasis; she used to say the Old Masters’ work already contained both animation and cinematography, and, in comparison to them, we gained in technique and lost in imagination: we’ve grown lazy and forgotten that one can communicate everything, absolutely everything by painterly means alone, even sound, as Picasso did in Guernica, the noise of the air raid brought across with dimmed lights and swinging lightbulbs. And that’s what Vlada also achieved to a degree in this painting: Her blazing circle of light was like a multilayered wheel knocked off the chariot of the terrible Advertisement God, spun with raging, blend-into-a-single-blot speed; and beneath, a field the color of rot was peppered with a dense black confetti of tiny human shapes like remnants of a defeated army—each with a logoed shopping bag (the bags were shrunken photographs glued onto the canvas). Hugo Boss, MaxMara, Steilmann, Brioni—a brand-name spill.

The critics commented acerbically that Matusevych painted “an explosion at a shopping mall” and should demand remuneration from all those brands for advertising them. But in fact she had painted a war—the one we were losing every day, without ever knowing it, as we sped, helter-skelter, across that rusty rotting field. And as it turned out, it was only our bodies that kept moving. We were running in the underworld. We’d been blown to smithereens somewhere along the way. We didn’t know there were mines, no one had told us: we kept running, panting, clutching our brand names to our chests, our apartments, our cell phones and automobiles—and still thought we were alive, because no one had told us we were already dead.

“Too many deaths,” Vlada had said in Daryna’s dream—and really, it’s like someone had knocked the bottom off the fairytale barrel, and a legion of deaths had broken free. Something happened to death itself at the century’s turn, a transformation that had gone unnoticed for too long: like a new note from the orchestra that at first seems an accidental false noise and then grows to redefine the whole symphony, a new form of death swelled and took root—death without cause. Up until then it was commonly believed that people died of illness, of old age, in accidents, or at someone’s hand—that a matter as grave as the cutting short of a life must always have cause and death had been quite accommodating, finding new pretexts for itself every time. But at the turn of the century it suddenly quit playing by the rules, lost its mind, and among the old, still comprehensible deaths squatted with growing impunity this new death—a death deranged.

Young men were killed in their sleep by their hearts, which had never ached and then suddenly stopped; young women drowned silently in shallow bathtubs, under the shrouds of still-warm bubbles; a person tripped, fell on a sidewalk—and did not get up again. As if all it took were a single casual breath, a single careless tap of death’s fingers—and several lively, busy little shapes with logoed bags in their hands fell with phantom ease, like in a computer game. People did not notice that they ceased being shocked by the news of a classmate one hadn’t seen for several years no longer alive, a colleague one could finally pay back for that old loan long been buried. “Darn!” Yurko once griped. “He’d promised a tutor for my kid!” Death stopped being an event—people reacted the same as if the deceased had moved out of the country, making sure to erase the old addresses from their contact lists; death no longer demanded an explanation. Somehow, all at once, the tethers that held one to life grew loose—rotten threads that could pull apart any moment. As if in all the crowds that flowed through the streets, that flooded offices and cafés, supermarkets and stadiums, airports and subways, there was no longer, in all those people together, enough total life to require any kind of effort to pry a physically healthy person out of it. On the contrary, it took an effort to hang on to life. And to remain alive was a feat achieved by only a few.

All this could have been screamed blindly, with the inspiration of hatred that, once ruptured, shoots far in every direction, like an abscess that’d been swelling with pus for years: It’s you, you; it’s all your fault! And what a relief that would have been—to find, finally, an entity of which one could demand the account! But Daryna is silent. She resists the urge to leap upon this slippery surface and speed along with a surfer’s breathtaking ease—dear Lord, how many times has she witnessed scenes just like that between mothers and daughters? What terrible things were confided to her by the same old Irka Mocherniuk, who always said that her mother had castrated her father, and had screamed at her mother, at the peak of her own marital problems, that their entire generation should’ve been sterilized like they did in China so they wouldn’t have had any children? And Irka’s mother called Daryna and cried on the phone telling her all this, begging her to “influence” her Irochka, as if Daryna and Irochka still went to school together and sat at one desk. But Daryna herself is resolutely incapable of forcing anything like that out of her throat: it gets stuck. Unlike her friends, she no longer feels entitled to judge as she had when she was nineteen. And not because it’s been twenty years since then—there are no statutes of limitations between parents and children. It’s because, in her case—as she realizes very clearly—it would be unfair to judge her parents: they did give her something.

She is lucky: she is “insane,” and it’s hereditary.

She really had no inkling, before yesterday, of how powerful the instinct of resistance to evil would prove to be in her—more powerful than any desire or longing, than any possible temptation. And it wouldn’t have been this strong if her father hadn’t died because of it. And if her mother hadn’t approved of his choice.

Incredible, but that’s how it was.

Daryna feels a new, detached kind of respect, as if they were strangers, for this couple, Olya and Tolya. Otollya. Erased, shattered, destroyed—like the fairytale palace clad in gentle dove-gray shades of the interior, adorned by ornate shadows, the parquetry, the lamps.... Everything’s gone, nothing remains—nothing you can touch, show on TV, price out in hard currency. Utterly incomprehensible how this force could have passed into her. They didn’t even tell her anything explicitly when she was little, her parents; they didn’t exhort or admonish, just as all her classmates’ parents rarely dared confide to their children anything that did not fit with the commonly accepted modus vivendi. (Irka was only told in 1990 that her grandfather actually died in the Gulag and not at the front; and Vlada remembered, not without irony, how Matusevych Senior very secretly whispered to her, in the eighth grade sometime, that he was actually for socialism, but without Russia, but she had to keep mum about it, or else—this was enough to pack you off to the camps, people got seven years for less!) Daryna’s parents were no dissidents by any stretch either, and no textbooks would ever mention their names. They merely had the strength to do what they thought was right—and take the full measure of what one had to take in that country in return for doing so, death included.

And somehow (How?) this strength of theirs—the one that seemed so wasted because it hadn’t translated into anything tangible—turned out great enough to confer upon their child her own margin of safety. So that in a different era, in a different country, packed with deaths like a can with sardines this child would remain alive.

That much was true: she was alive, and no one could take it away from her.

What was it Grandpa Nietzsche said? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger? Okay, maybe not everything. But sometimes, the thing that does kill us makes our children stronger.

Still, she never wanted to have children of her own.

And that’s when she suddenly remembers—all but slaps herself on the forehead, a habit of Aidy’s she’s adopted—breaking the flow of her mother’s consolatory monologue (which she hadn’t been listening to anyway, tuned it out, something about how “now” is not the same as “then,” and that things have a way of figuring themselves out). She remembers from whose lips she recently, this fall, heard that abrading, inappropriately official Anatoliivna. Amazing, actually, that she’d forgotten to ask her mom, totally crossed her out of that story with the Security Bureau archives where Aidy had gone a few more times, and all for naught: they kept saying they couldn’t locate Great-Aunt Gela’s case, and now what, no more movies for her, so what’s the point anyway? She remembers clearly, painfully, as if from a previous life, the sun-drenched corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska, their first assault on the newly built archives, her own single-minded focus on her quest and feels astounded by how happy she had been so recently—and how many unnoticed details she let scatter away from her sight in her happy single-mindedness, like pebbles from under the hooves of a racehorse barreling around the track—but there it is, the tiny rock, wedged into the cracked hoof, never would’ve thought of it if they hadn’t reined her in.

“I’m sorry, Mom, can I interrupt you?”

Olga Fedorivna obediently stops talking.

“I keep forgetting to ask you about this one thing. Does the name Boozerov mean anything to you?”

Silence.

“Mom? Hello? Can you hear me?”

Did they get disconnected or something?

“Boozerov?” Mom finally responds—in a very surprised, young alto, the voice that had once belonged to a brunette in a bright-yellow dress. “That was our curator’s name. How do you know him?”

“What curator?” Daryna thinks she must’ve missed something: The job didn’t exist back in Mom’s day, did it? What was there to curate if there weren’t any independent art shows or private galleries, none of it?

“The KGB curator, who else? Every Soviet institution had its own KGB curator, it was a special job they had.”

“Oh.”

So in some way times have changed a little—if the meaning of the word has changed.

“Not Pavlo Ivanovych by chance?”

“That’s it! Pavlo Ivanovych, Pashenka we called him. He was young, younger than me, he couldn’t have been thirty then; he was born after the war already.... Such a hottie!” Mom’s voice takes on a refreshed but clearly vintage tart disapproval as if being a “hottie” was an aggravating circumstance for a GB man. “He had that dark complexion, you know, and those big eyes like olives.... He should’ve gone into movies instead of the KGB; he looked like Omar Sharif. How do you know him?”

“Met him at the Security Bureau’s archives, when we went looking for Adrian’s great-aunt’s case. He’s still got those eyes—like an Arabian stallion’s. He sends his regards.”

“Fancy that, he hasn’t forgotten me!” Olga Fedorivna marvels tartly again. “So he’s at the archives now? No more tracking people for him?” She’s regained her composure already, like she’s fixed up, with both hands, her still-lush hair, fluffing it up with her fingers—a mannerism of hers, and Daryna can almost see her do it at this instant. “He used to have these long interviews with me, back before they took your father in for the psychiatric assessment—wanted me to, you know, influence your father. Latched on to me like a leech. We had a small staff at the museum, nothing really for a curator to do, so he worked me to pieces trying to earn his star.

“Once, I remember, I got really pissed at him; I was at the end of my rope already. What’s the point of your meetings? I asked him. What do you want from me? It’s not enough that you ran my husband to the ground; now because of you my boss is giving me three kinds of hell—our directress then, we used to call her Ilse Koch among ourselves, was on a tear, ran my life like in a concentration camp: anytime I all but dashed out for ten minutes to buy a pretzel on the corner, I had to write an explanatory report! I just couldn’t do right by her. She wanted me out of there—must’ve freaked at a black sheep in her flock. Well, he sort of looked a bit ashamed then. Swore he thought very highly of me, and wrote a very good report about me. And maybe he wasn’t lying, because just after that the directress relaxed a little, left me alone. And he disappeared after that—they transferred him somewhere and I heard our museum had a different curator, but he never contacted me and I didn’t see him. I figured our Pashenka made a slip somewhere, because he was all sort of droopy and mopey in those last days. Said to me then that he wished he had a wife who’d stand up for him like I did for Tolya.”

In her mother’s voice, as if plumped up from inside, Daryna clearly hears notes of pride. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s what kept her going all that time when she was alone? The sign, sent to her through Pavlo Ivanovych, that she was also doing everything right?

“Whatever did they want from you? They only wanted to pin mismanagement on him, not subterfuge.”

“Like you could ever tell with them, Daryna! They just had to get into everything, and spoil it all. Kept asking me if my husband had an irritable temper—he must’ve been collecting material for their psychiatrists, but I didn’t think of that until later...and wanted me to make Father take back all his petitions. ‘Don’t you want to live in peace?’ he asked. I told him of course I do, but I also want to respect my husband, and my husband would never agree to such abomination—libel an innocent person, and posthumously! I remember he blinked at me in this stunned way and said, ‘So that’s the kind of woman you are!’ I wondered, a little,” Mom adds sheepishly, “if he’d taken a bit of a shine to me.”

“Hey, that’s violation of procedure! The valiant Soviet CheKa men were strictly prohibited from having any sentiments toward their charges. There were special instructions about that, I’ve read those.”

“Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Daryna feels herself blush at this memory, the way she snorted, snapped, stomped her foot like a little Billy Goat Gruff. And what do you know, Pavlo Ivanovych is basically family! Somewhere in the same archive where Olena Dovganivna’s case is buried, sit Pavlo Ivanovych’s reports about Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna, year of birth 1939, Ukrainian, unaffiliated, married, husband—no, that’s no longer relevant, it’s best to skip that field.

“A pleasure to know that she’s raised such a famous daughter”—with the Russian stress. Because what—she might not have raised one? The retired terrorist, doe-eyed Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov with his substantial behind and liver crusts in the corners of his mouth, loving father of a Conservatory student wrote, thirty years ago, when he didn’t yet have those crusts and was making his career in the so-called field operations, a good report about her mother. Are we to understand that if he had written a bad one, Mom would’ve been, just like Dad, thrown out on the street, or, worse, would’ve gotten a prison sentence? And what would’ve happened then to her? God knows, but nothing good, that’s for sure—political prisoners’ children didn’t even get access to higher education until after the Soviet Union collapsed. She’d have landed in some horrible children’s home, most likely. Or maybe Aunt Lyusya would’ve stepped in, taken her to live with her in Poltavshchyna? Even then, her chances of growing up to be famous would’ve been zero; that’s probably why he said what he did. She’s not going to stay famous for long, though, and, generally speaking, it is not at all clear what she’s supposed to do with herself from now on—but that’s not Pavlo Ivanovych’s fault.

And at once she’s overtaken again by that same, vestibular-like, short-circuit dizziness that happened to her once before, in the spring, the day she stayed late at the studio watching her interview with Vlada and Adrian called to tell her about his dream. For a fraction of a second—this can’t last longer, a living human being can’t take this for much longer—she is carried upwards by the speeding elevator or a giant Ferris wheel—not above space as in Vlada’s painting, but above time, above yesterday’s office with the boss’s gesticulating little shape inside it, and reflected from it, in direct retreating perspective, the other, 1987 office with fake, leather-padded doors, above the wet highlights of the Dutch tile roofs behind the hotel window, and still further, through an enfilade of rooms opening into each other, where a seventies’ kitchen boils with the pot of bubble-swelling laundry on the stove and the puddle that had been the snowman spreads on the rust-colored painted plank floor, and her young father stands on the landing with his head tossed back; from above, in bird’s-eye view, for a slipping tail of an instant, she sees it all pulse together, set into motion like cracked-off hummocks in the world ocean, plugged into some giant, boundless power field, and sees the thin—flickering and countless—dazzling threads running through it all, piercing her life—and stretching beyond it, beyond the horizon of the visible to compose a deliberate, no, deliberating, living design, Dovganivna—Adrian—Boozerov—Mom—herself—Vlada—R.—boss—captain.... Another moment, whose very imminence fills her with knee-buckling awe, and it seems they all, living and dead, will push their times together like chairs to a table, will take their places in the plugged-in map of the stars and everything will become clear—what, everything?—but nothing.

The moment passes, the whole picture, without ever having come together, scatters into pieces, into flat shards of memories with which you could never erect the Tower of Babel, and Daryna is left sitting on her messy, crumpled bed, blinking at the curtain brightened by the sunlight to egg-yolk yellow with the shadow of the window frame on it like a cross distorted in a magnifying glass.... Threads, her mind turns over belated like a hard, sticky piece of candy that won’t crack. Threads, thready threads. Mom—herself—Boozerov. No, that’s not right: Dovganivna—herself—Aidy—Boozerov. No, she can’t bring it back; it’s all gone. Again, like that time in the spring—it flared and died.

But she does retain one thing from this flare: the being above—in relation to what happened the night before as well. She’s broken free of the boss’s yesterday office; it doesn’t oppress her anymore. She does, in fact, feel better.

“Thanks, Ma,” Daryna says into the receiver she is still clutching in her hand; her knuckles stand out as if made from mother-of-pearl. “I know now what I have to do.”

She’ll go to Boozerov herself. And she will bring Gela’s case to light—to heck with the film, if that’s how things turned out, it’s not about the film—she needs to find out where these threads that run through her life come from, whence this capillary lace of human destinies. And she’ll also meet with Vadym: he’s the only elected representative with whom she could be considered almost friends—they have Vlada in common. He is her only immediate chance of undercutting those bastards’ show with which they plan to cover up someone else’s slave trade. This is what’s really important.

And what she’s to do with herself, where she’s to look for work, and whether she’s to look for a job at all—that’s all like scree underfoot, the common rubbish of life’s prose, in the same department as what to make for dinner tonight. That’s how she is seeing it at the moment—in big, clear terms, with her vision corrected—and she knows it’s the right way of seeing.

“See, I know you’re my smart girl!” her mom brightens up. “You’ll see; it’ll all turn out okay.”

“How else, Ma?”

“Only do be careful!” Of course, Mom is Mom.

Daryna barely contains herself before she responds the same way as to her boss last night, and can’t help but smile, “I’ll do my best, Ma.”

“Alright, you take care of yourself now!”

“You too, Ma. Call if you need anything.”

That’s a ritual phrase between them, and it means if you need money. This time, for the first time it doesn’t sound completely heartfelt: her savings, Daryna hopes, will last her a while, but how long can they actually last if she also needs to help the old folks? Aidy, after all, also has a dad on an engineer’s salary—it’s enough for the food, but not for the medication he needs. That’s how it all begins, that’s how they leak and flood, our little cardboard houses. Nah, to hell with it, she doesn’t want to go slopping around in all that again.

After she puts down the receiver, Daryna rises and, just as she is, in her flimsy nightshirt, goes to the window, throws the curtains open, and gasps with surprise. So that’s where her clarity came from, that’s what lit the curtain with the yellow light that she barely noticed for the entire hour she was on the phone: It’s the snow! The first snow came in the night!

Spellbound, she looks at the instantly lightened street, at the heavy white lashes of trees in the park next door and the roofs turned white, turned Christmas-y, like a picture in a children’s book: smoke is rising from one chimney, and the whole view looks as though the city had drawn a deep breath and stayed still in the blissful smile of relief. Her city—they can’t take that away from her, either.

“So,” Daryna says out loud, addressing no one in particular. “Let’s fight back, shall we?”