Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

There were three of us like that, that year—Gotsik, Zahar, and myself—and that’s who he taught, collecting quizzes from the rest of the class and giving them to us to grade. It was in his seminars that I first experienced that dazzling exultation that comes from the energy of a thought set free—and it’s never come back as powerfully since. The brilliance, the clarity when chaos begins to make sense under the quickening assault of your thought and finally—poof!—turns into the slim crystal of a formula—there’s nothing else like it. A complete loss of self and a sense of omnipotence at once—you step out on a break reeling like you’re drunk and feel sweat running down between your shoulder blades. Skydiving’s got nothing on it.

So I do know how it felt to them—Einstein, Bohr, all those dudes who could. The whole thing is in not letting your assault slacken. In knowing how to keep it up. For years, if need be, that’s the thing. For years.

Instead, I split.

It’s been a long time since I dreamt of complete, perfect solutions—and I used to, they came for a while even after I left the lab—as if my unemployed thought, evicted from its home, moved to the basement of my mind and kept stubbornly running her Singer sewing machine there: night after night formulas lit up on my screen (I still remember that cold metallic glow from below!), appeared, as if spelled out by an invisible hand, bloomed like seaweed, like underwater flowers, one time a whole scheme came together in space as if made out of snowflakes, like the fairytale about the Snow Queen; and in my dream I somehow knew that the space was four-dimensional, but didn’t remember the proof itself in the morning, only retained a general impression—of spellbinding, freezing beauty. Or maybe I did remember but didn’t write it down—because what would I’ve done with it? The day then dropped into my mind like a dirty sponge and erased everything it didn’t need without a trace. Fifteen years ago Strutynsky used to say I had a unique cognitive apparatus—I interrupted him with a question in the middle of a lecture and the old bloodsucker’s eyes flashed like laser-beams: “Vatamanyuk,” he said, fixing me with an enamored stare that made me blush, “you have a unique cognitive apparatus.” The glory of that moment lasted me until I graduated. It sputtered for a long time, that apparatus—spinning empty, like an engine without fuel. Fading oscillation, a faint SOS signal, dying, dying...I doubt it could be revved again to cosmic speeds now.

Gotsik’s now a postdoc somewhere in Minnesota; Zahar’s top management at a German trade firm, develops their strategy. Or maybe Danish, I don’t remember. No physicist came of him, that’s a fact. Nothing’s ever come of anyone doing science in their free time. Science is not your folk art, be so kind to observe.

Maybe I could get a stand-up routine going: Old whore crying over her lost chastity? In the subway, with that ocarina accompaniment?

To tell myself, straight, what I’ll never have the guts to tell her about myself: Adrian Vatamanyuk, you’re a loser. Yes, you’re only thirty-four, and you’ve accomplished certain things in this life, you eat your bread with butter and even caviar, have a business and like it (love it, in fact), own an apartment in Kyiv—one of Europe’s most expensive cities, let’s not forget, and a small capital—have friends, and finally, the most important thing, the love of your life. Your defeat is looking quite successful. Indeed, so successful that no one, except you, can see it.

It is nested so deep inside me that it’s long ceased being a foreign body. It’s become part of me.

I didn’t break down. No, no one broke me. I got scared. And my breaking point was truly the day I caught myself looking for a cigarette butt I could pick up and put in my pocket. I’d seen our engineers finishing someone else’s before—the guys would “disinfect” them by running the filter ends through a match flame. Half of our class had fled into business already; rumor had it some of the faculty had turned to small “shuttle trade”; someone had seen Assistant Professor Rybachuk at the flea market with spare parts and burnt-out lightbulbs (which people bought to screw in at work, after taking the good ones from work home for themselves)—although not in Kyiv itself but in Irpin: there was a “professors’ flea market” there for those who still would’ve been ashamed to have anyone they knew, let alone a student of theirs, come by their spread. It was only later that our professorate caught on to the notion that grades, exams, and diplomas were also commodities for which one could charge students money without having to stand out in the cold or even to leave the building; and back in the nineties the country still roiled in a violent chemical reaction whose outcomes carried some to the top and sank others to the bottom.

There, at the bottom, in the increasingly visible deposit were accumulated the paupers, the hoboes with dollies and plaid oilskin bags the size of suitcases, people with no age, with dead eyes and faces that looked like they’d been sewn from linen crumpled damp and never ironed out. A few years ago, at the door to Pantagruel, I was assaulted, with demented roaring and open arms, by one such half-decomposed Lazarus fresh out of the grave; with horror, I recognized him to be Sashko Krasnokutsky from my class—we’d solemnly declared ourselves milk brothers once, after we’d found out we’d both slept with the same ever-willing lab tech from the radio physics department, Ilonka-the-Barbie.

“We’d sucked at one tit!” Sashko had roared happily at me then, and his roar hadn’t changed since his student days at all, still sounded like a bike without a muffler, only it wasn’t so easy to tell that it was, in fact, Sashko, that was doing the roaring: he was missing front teeth, and kept slurping up his spit. There was something caricaturish about our run-in at the restaurant, from which I’d just rolled out all fat and glossy like the bronze cat they had by the door—stuffed with a good dinner and a half bottle of Beaujolais Villages—and here was this toothless monster like something dug out of a trash heap slapping me on the shoulders with the choking roar, fit for the loony bin, “Huw’sh it shakin, bud!” This could have looked like a prank, like a skit based on the well-known joke about the two old classmates:

“And how’s your life?”

“I haven’t eaten in three days!”

“Hey, man, that’s no good; you gotta make yourself do it!”

Only a purposely bad skit, crude and grotesque, as life always looks when it aims to imitate folklore and other literature. Plus there was one “but,” one departure from the text: Sashko wasn’t about to complain to me about not having eaten for three days, not at all. In fact, he seemed to be completely oblivious to the dramatic contrast between us and went on babbling as obliviously and cheerfully as if it were he and not I who’d just finished some young Beaujolais, and about three bottles instead of half.

From his lisping I more or less gathered the poor slob played the stock market, and played himself clear out of his home, the oldest story in the world. Basically—went after wool and came back shorn. But the horrifying thing was that Sashko wasn’t pretending or bullshitting when he gabbled about it in a casual, could-happen-to-anyone tone, chuckling now and then as if this were something amusing and unimportant—and next stammered enthusiastically with his toothless mouth about his “exshellent proshpects.” Never mind that the only prospect he could’ve been hoping for was a good nursing home: he really could not see himself from outside. Apparently, at some point on the descending slope of his life, he shut his eyes and checked out, refusing to watch the horror of it once and for all, and probably saw a completely different version of himself when he looked in the mirror—the one who used to walk around with his pockets stuffed full of condoms and banged Ilonka-the-Barbie, who eventually married her department head and went with him to the Sorbonne.

I gave him a twenty on some face-saving pretext, even though he didn’t ask for money, and he was so happy that I thought he’d latch on to me like a tick after that, whine for my telephone number and so on, but he said goodbye quickly with the air of a man late for a business meeting and trotted off through the park. A little later when I drove down Zolotovoritska, I saw him duck into a bar on the corner, saw the tense expression of his back (exactly that: the expression of his back), and that’s when it finally dawned on me where he lit out for in such a rush: the bar had gambling machines.

It was as if someone had shown me an alternative version of my own life. What could have happened to me if I hadn’t one day, watching for a cigarette stub underfoot, seen myself from outside and been horrified: Holy shit, is it that easy? Snap, and you’re on the trash heap and several generations’ worth of survival experience—of those packed off into camps, stripped of their property as kulaks, deported, the heroes of Grandpa’s tales about Karlag, all their long-forgotten skills, “I saw me a stub with a line of red lipstick and broke from the ranks after it”—defrosting in you as they’d been taken out of the freezer?

I remember the exact spot where it hit me—on Shevchenko Boulevard, not far from the University subway station. Like something shook me out of a coma, and I looked around, stunned, slowly recognizing the place. In moments like this, your mind, for some reason, always fixes the place like a postcard: it’s late fall, slush, drizzle, dim streetlights; street stands line the Botanic Garden’s fence, and the garden’s dark presence looms below, the massed domes of St. Volodymyr cathedral in the brown sky above. It was as if I were seeing it all at once, from above—the gigantic, steep Kyiv slope down which I was being carried like a parachutist; I felt this downward motion in my body as it sometimes happens in dreams—down, into the dark, scraping against the spikes of the fence and the naked branches of the Botanic Garden.

All young and brilliant, the winner of every academic competition and Strutynsky’s own pet, I was plummeting, going down without any resistance, pulled into the last residual sputtering of a stopped machine, only this time the machine was real. My research lab was in agony; our entire system of research institutes was in agony; all our applied and fundamental physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, that had spent the previous half-century feeding and clothing themselves off the accumulation of increasingly more perfect means of destruction—and now that only the Russians, of all Soviet heirs, had the privilege of killing anyone—had come to a grinding halt. So our jackals feasted on the scraps from the Russian’s table—falling over each other to pawn off deathly junk on whatever Asian/African fiefs were buying, so they could beat one another to buying live giraffes for their dachas, dialing the fuck out on all our science for decades to come.

What solar batteries, you moron!—I almost groaned out loud, right there in the street, seeing, as clear as on a graph, the remaining trajectory of my motion: lower and lower, down into the deep-water murk, with a thin line of tiny bubbles, into despair, the hopeless peddling-piddling of whatever came my way (I’d already sold two of Grandpa’s cigarette cases and eaten through the get). Everything inside me rebelled, every little cell squealed, “No!” And my entire fucking unique cognitive apparatus that had been hitched to the thermionic generator hammered feverishly, revving out of inertia, and dragged me in the opposite direction—up, clinging to every alternative I hadn’t bothered to consider before. I called my cigarette-case guys that same night.

I didn’t slam any doors as Lolly did. I, when you think about it, didn’t quit anything abruptly, the smartass that I am—like all Galicians, Igor would say (he’s one of those who’d binged on the Brothers Gadiukin band in their day and came to believe, once and forever, that Galicians constitute a special breed of people). Officially, I can always go back; officially I’m still a PhD candidate in the Semiconductors Department. Weekend scientist, that’s me. People think you can do that. That it’s like an office manager’s job: you come in, turn on your computer, work however long, shut it all down, and walk away—free as a bird. Some clients, when they learn I’m a scientist, and a techie to boot, look at me with new respect: that’s an extra layer of cool. Shit that’s cool. In moments like that, I feel like a male prostitute who’s killed his patron and is now peddling her things. No one except me knows that I had to bury a part of myself—forever; that’s it, lights out, it’s all gone. That I live with my own corpse. As do all my peers, actually, only for some of them it’s worse. For most of them, to be precise.

I took Sashko Krasnokutsky, who lunged at me out of the darkness and then fell back into it, to be a fortuitous—that’s how selfish I am!—sign from Providence. A visual aid illustrating what it was that horrified me that day on Shevchenko Boulevard—and that I did well getting horrified. Sashko’s arc led down, mine—exponentially, up: E to the nth degree. That’s how it seemed to me then.

For a while, it even soothed the constantly stinging pain of dull dissatisfaction with myself. I recognized this pain in others, too, especially from the way people drank, the way they celebrated a contract, the way they worked so hard to prove to themselves that “life is good” that they ended up face down in their salads. Hell no, I told myself: two cognacs or three glasses of dry wine, and not a drop more. Plus the swimming pool, plus the gym. I was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the time—a big cheese, like that heron among the birds. The only thing I missed—my dreams: I didn’t remember them anymore. Nothing to do with alcohol—just, a part of me went cold like an unused room in a house.

And unused rooms, as is only to be expected, are where ghosts move in.

“Adrian Ambrozich, yu hev a meetin et haf past faiv.”

Yulichka emerges at the door, barely covered below the navel by her new maxi-belt. Where’d she get the idea that she’s got legs fit to be peeled to the root like that?

Out, you moron!—I barely keep from barking, but the pure love of truth keeps my mouth shut: my secretary is no moron. Instead, I do something I’d never in a million years expect from myself: I get up, go right up to her (her perfume’s rather nice), bend down, and run my hand over the entire length of her satiny-black-hosed, calvary-bowed thighs—she could press them together and you’d still fit your head between her knees—bottom up, all the way, to her crack, to her very pubic bone sheathed in her micro-skirt, and squeeze it so hard that my brave Yulichka hisses. Hisses but doesn’t give in, what a trooper, take one for the team. That’s what I thought—a G-string. And it doesn’t cut in?

“Thank you, Yulichka,” I say, leaning her away from me like a tin soldier, but not letting go of her nether regions. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you—would you mind buying yourself a suit? An English one, you know, a traditional cut, a bit conservative—just the thing for the antiques business. Remember that old man who’d promised us a cuckoo clock? Where’d he disappear to—did you, by chance, scare him off with your, mmm, glamorous outfit?”

“I’ll call him back,” Yulichka mutters as if hypnotized, throat caught, voice softened.

“That’d be great,” I say just as nicely, and let her go. The whole interaction holds about as much eroticism as if I’d held on to a doorknob for a while, but it still makes me feel a tiny bit better: nothing improves one’s mood like a spot-check of female deployability, even if you’ve no use for it whatsoever. Well, at least now my secretary’ll remember that it’s not all gold that’s wet. Staff development, that’s it. It appears I’m also a petty tyrant, who’d have thought.

“That’s the only comment I have—otherwise, you’re doing a wonderful job,” I grin, friendly as a crocodile, as she disappears behind the door—not to cry in the bathroom, I hope. I don’t want girls crying because of me. And I shouldn’t be taking it out on my subordinates. It’s no one’s fault I took a left turn at Albuquerque, as the cartoon goes.

And at “haf past faiv” I do, in fact, have a meeting—with my, generously speaking, expert. Half past five, both hands drooped down—a moment when time is impotent. Half past five, Adrian Ambrozievich, half past five. Fie on you, bite your tongue!—Granny Lina used to say. Am I turning superstitious or something?

In fact, the difference between me and Sashko Krasnokutsky was not that great: we were both moving further away from ourselves, from whatever was the best in us—meaning, we were both heading for the bottom. Because the bottom is not scavenging in trashcans—the bottom is precisely this: rejecting whatever’s best in you. The arc of my descent was more comfortable and smelled better, that’s all. And if you want to talk about signs from Providence—that was one, without a doubt, manifested as clear as could be, short only of a statue talking. Or a burning bush. Only I, self-satisfied moron that I was, was liable to blow off a direct fiery warning from a thorn bush too. The dumbest thing is I did not recognize myself in Sashko—did not see that I lived a lie I told myself, just as he did. Did not see that we were both sick with the same illness, only in him it had reached the symptomatic stage and in me it had not. Something shoved it straight into my face, and I blew it. I should’ve seen Sashko as a magnified projection of myself, and instead I fanned my tail and turned up my nose like a snob: I ain’t my brother’s keeper. And he’s my brother, milk-brother, isn’t he—we held on to the same tit. Whose keeper am I?

Every man’s natural need—to be a keeper, to protect that with which God trusted you, to hold your place in this universe—with arms, if need be, and to the end. Oleksiy, the security guard, once told me that when his child was born he understood, for the first time, a line he’d remembered since school, from some classic author—I’ll shoot if they come. That author had some scoundrel landlord saying this when his land was being taken away from him, or something like that, or maybe that’s just the way it worked in the Soviet textbook—that the landlord was a scoundrel, and maybe in fact he was a good guy. At any rate, the way Oleksiy said it sent shivers down my spine. The last thing I’d expect of the guy was such artfully crystallized philosophy. The man’s plain as a door, younger than me, a former cop—left his post after he and his bosses locked horns over something—loves his wife beyond belief, glows all over when he talks about her, quit smoking when she got pregnant. And built them a house in his Obuhov, where his parents live—everything like in that song. His own house: wife and child. And the dad who keeps a Kalashnikov under a bench somewhere—in case “they come.” I shake his hand now every time I see him now, something I didn’t use to do. I could count on the fingers of one hand the people I’ve met who have the courage to live their own lives. Their own, and not just whatever came their way.

“I’ll shoot if they come”—it’s perfectly lucid; it has the beauty and clarity of a simple solution. And I didn’t shoot because no one came for me—I came for myself. And now I’m “shooting” to keep the tax rats away. Fucking hero. From, shame to say, a whole line of soldiers, as the song goes, keep the shrapnel coming down the line; Ukrainian rebels don’t retreat in a fight.

Lolly did gasp with such delight that first time we met: “You’re Olena Dovganivna’s grandnephew?” The way she looked at me—I went faint (from that first glance—in sickness and in health, till death do us part): She looked at me with the same thrill of recognition as Strutynsky once had when he said to me, “Vatamanyuk, you have a unique cognitive apparatus.” You are the only two people—Lolly, don’t take offense for my lumping you in with the old gnome; he was a great man and a great scientist, God rest his soul—who saw in me something greater than myself. Something, entrusted to me by fate, that demanded effort: the unrelenting assault, the stretching of my neck till sweat ran down my back to grow tall enough to measure up to that greatness inside me. You saw something I had to reach for. You and no one else.

We met right about the time when I stank of self-satisfaction like a whole duty-free store at an international airport. Thought myself a heck of a cool cat. Riding that same wave, less than a month after my run-in with Sashko outside of Pantagruel. Since then, Lolly and I have gone to that little park on Zolotovoritska a million times, to the café across from that casino-bar with the machines where Sashko trundled off to hoping to win his life back with the twenty I’d given him, and we go to the opposite side, too—to the Cosmopolitan, and the pub on the corner: we’ve stomped all over that spot, spun our presence like spider webs around it, but I’ve never taken her to Pantagruel. The woman of your life—what a cheesy banality you’d think, straight out of a cabaret repertoire, a bad restaurant chanson—you’d never say it out loud unless you were a total moron. But whoever originally thought this up was no moron. Every banality, it seems, is just a truth that’s been too often repeated—like a mantra, until it lost all meaning. It doesn’t stop being a truth—it’s just that now everyone has to discover its original meaning, worn off from frequent use, anew. The woman of your life—the one who gives you back your life. Your own, the way it was supposed to be—if you, asshole, hadn’t flushed it down the toilet. If you hadn’t split, refusing to maintain the effort.

How old is she? Dad asked about Lolly, when we came to record his memories (and all that footage, the entire archive, almost two years of Lolly’s work is now just going to rot because the channel owns it!). I told him she was five years older than me. (Actually, six and a bit—I don’t know why I felt compelled to understate the gap.) I waited for the old man to bring up Mom—maybe not up front, as in, she reminds me of your mom (although Lolly does resemble Mom a little; she, too, has something of an alpinist in her, knock on wood), but for him to recall the story of his own life’s biggest love because that would’ve meant that he accepted Lolly and understood how serious this relationship is for me. Instead, he went all soft and sentimental, though somehow missing the point: oh, he responded, delighted, “You’ve always liked older girls, remember you were three and the neighbors’ little girl was four and a half and you went around telling everyone you guys were getting married? Tailed her everywhere she went, gave her your teddy bear—remember?” I remembered neither the girl nor the teddy bear, but still got all sentimental myself: it’s always nice to confirm that time is a relative value, that a person does not change in any fundamental way over the years, and that blondish rug rat in the old photo with pieces of string tied around his plump little wrists and the current knuckle-dragger of six foot six, two hundred and five, are one and the same, after all.

When I later told Lolly about the girl with the teddy bear, she had a good laugh, and then said, once again astounding me by giving voice, unerringly, to my own unspoken thought, “Do you think it’s possible your dad was actually thinking about himself—about something he himself remembered from when he was three years old, from that night when they roused him to kiss Aunt Gela goodbye—that’s what I was asking him about. What if his mind had just stayed on that track?” She’s so smart, my little Dr. Freud. The woman who enters your life and pierces it through, literally, like a threaded needle—gathering, threading the bits and pieces scattered through time into a complete picture that had begun to stringing itself together long before you came to this world. The woman who can reach deeper than your own memory—and that’s why, with her, you always know who you are.

The first sign she was The One: Lolly gave me back my dreams. Turned on the lights in the unused rooms. Doesn’t matter if some of those dreams turned out not to be my own, as if during my absence, while I was obtusely stuffing my mind with tax reports and client co-optation strategies, looking first for an intelligent accountant, then for a good lawyer, followed by reliable experts and reliable bribe-takers in the city government, and other shit, of which there was so much that the mind could not keep up and suffered from chronic constipation—while I was doing all that, someone else had moved into the unused rooms. Someone I don’t have a clue about, have no idea why he’s wandering around in there with his flashlight like in an old-timey picture show, showing me pieces of some unknown old movie, or what this has to do with me and my family. That it does have something to do with us I can guess by the fact that the family, too, has been frequenting my dreams—but in a bizarre way, as if in passing: Great-Aunt Gela walks through me as if I weren’t there and speaks to Lolly directly, like I’m no longer their go-between—alright, that’s fine, I’m not jealous, but it’s upsetting a bit, you know, who’s whose blood? Whose dad got pulled out of his bed at the tender age of three for a goodbye kiss, and then taken to Kazakhstan in the cattle car, on dry rations alone, so that when the convoy gave Granny Lina her half cup of water at stations, she held each sip in her mouth and had the child suck it out along with her spit? (Dad himself does not remember that journey, but he talked about it as though he were reading from notes—the way he heard it from Granny.)

“So one could say,” Lolly said to Dad kindly, sympathetically, in the tiny living room, where he sat before the cameras stiffly as if in a plaster corset, afraid to shift his pose, between the Hutsul rug crucified on the wall and the hutch with the few unshattered remains of the old Korets china set (under the camera lights I was suddenly blinded by the pitiful squalor of these trappings of a Soviet home where I grew up, pieced together painstakingly from the splintered-off fragments of the old world), “that you were, essentially, persecuted as a child solely for the fact that your aunt fought in the nationalist resistance?”

Dad made a small embarrassed sound: he didn’t find the designation of a “persecuted child” especially appealing—he would’ve preferred to cut a decidedly manlier figure before his daughter-in-law-to-be, and he surprised me by telling the story—I almost wondered if he weren’t making it up on the spot, at least I’d never heard it before—of how when they were already in Kazakhstan, in the settlement, he, a five-year-old runt, rushed to defend his mom against a guard, sinking his teeth into the man’s arm until he drew blood. “He got all mad, ‘You,’ he spat, ‘Bandera spawn, we’d do better to shoot all you fuckers’—but he let Mom go!” Then Dad laughed, pulling together the dense (so much denser now, I thought) wrinkles from his entire face, glowing just like his five-year-old self—thrilled anew with his first display of masculine valiance—and I saw he was telling the truth.

“You never told me this,” I said later, to which he, still elated, responded cheerfully, “Forgot all about it myself, don’t even know how it came back right then!” That’s how I discovered that I am not the only one for whom Lolly can turn on lights in unused rooms. It’s her gift—drawing out hidden information from people, like pushing a button: Click!—and the light goes on. (“You should’ve been a detective,” I joked—“Yep, like Columbo!” she played along. We’ve already developed our own repertoire of set phrases and words whose only purpose is to replace touch because you can’t really live your life in each other’s arms—that’s what loving words are for, to hold each other with them—and now we’ll have to strike some things out of this repertoire, so as not to put salt into her wounds—my Lolly’s no longer Columbo.)

Incredible how much of this kind of stuff, long forgotten in our family, she’s brought back into the light in this way of hers. And it was all gradually coming together—all the disconnected facts I remembered from what Granny and Grandpa told me, fragments of recollections, episodes unattached to dates, people who had died long ago or were scattered around the world—all this was settling, piece by piece, into a chronological order, into bins sequentially ordered by year. (I was thrilled, of course—I never had the time to organize the family history, but now I’ve come to regard the fact that Lolly was delivering it to me for free as an inextricable part of our life together, as a family. And now the foundation’s sliding under this life, too, the thing that had made us first accomplices and later lovers was being taken away.)

And still for Lolly all that wasn’t enough. There were times I’d say, listen, don’t you think you could call it good already—you’ve got four generations of the Dovgans down pat, good as your own kin—and she’d just shake her head: all this I’ve put together so far may not even get used, for a thirty-minute film—if it’s to be any good—you need a good thirty hours of footage, and twenty-nine of that will end up on the floor, and I’m still missing—she’d be snapping her fingers in the air—the main twist, the answer, that! The answer—to what? In those moments I felt myself to be the go-between. As if Lolly, by some mysterious trick, had leapfrogged over me in time, had jumped over my back and landed in the place of Granny Lina, the main keeper of all our family’s stories.

Only Granny Lina ran out of time. After Grandpa’s death, she’d been meaning for years to write down her memoirs, even got a special thick notebook bound in dark-green, fake leather. Dad and I encouraged her every way we could, but nothing ever came of it: after Granny was gone, all we found in her special notebook were a few pages illegibly laced with columns of dates and initials that looked like an alphabet of a dead language or a cipher of a wiped-out spy ring—like all Dovgans, Granny Lina did not like writing; even her letters, always short, reminded me of doctors’ prescriptions.

One thing I did always like about them though was her unchanging form of address—“Beloved Adrian”—which once allowed me to pass them off in a summer camp as letters from a fantasy girlfriend. In psychology, Lolly says, this is called transfer-ence—or maybe sublimation if I’m not mixing them up again. But I really loved Granny Lina, and I believe she loved me, too. It was she who sang to me before sleep when I was little; she could sing just as well as Mom, only all her songs were unlullaby-like, tragic—I recognized one of them later, when Zhdankin sang it in 1989 at the Chervona Ruta Festival (“black furrows plowed, and the bullets sprout, sprout, hey, hey...”)—as if Granny, sitting next to my little bed, were mourning someone. It was only later that I learned that Adrian was supposed to be the name of her second son—my uncle, due to be born in exile, but who was born prematurely and laid down in an unmarked mass grave on the steppe where Temirtau now stands, next to the banished adults, camp prisoners, and Japanese POWs.

The city they were building was later called a Komsomol project, like all Soviet cities built by prisoners, and it’s still burning up the sky somewhere in the middle of the Kazakh steppe with its forest of yellow smoke plumes—“foxtails.” Temirtau, the city of metallurgists, with the highest cancer mortality rate in the world. “Some get medals, some get proud, some get the city Temirtau,” Grandpa often repeated the local saying, and might as well been reading his obit, because thirty years later Temirtau cancer caught up with him, too—but at least in his own bed, and not in a ditch on a foreign steppe.

I don’t even know how Granny had come up with this name, Adrian. It wasn’t in the family—in the whole last century I don’t know anyone who was called that. Dad was named Ambroziy in honor of Grandfather Dovgan, Granny’s father and my great-grandfather, who in the Polish days was a rather famous doctor in Lviv—one of the few Ukrainian doctors whom the Poles, like the Russians, otherwise big fans of the “blending of the people,” never did kick out of the city and into some ethnically Polish lands—he must’ve really known his doctoring stuff, that gramps. Accordingly, the second son should have been named after the grandfather from the other side, Iosyp. Iosyp Vatamanyuk—sounds fine to me. Or, did Granny think that was too plain, too country? On the Vatamanyuk side, all men for generations have been Mykhailos, and Grytskos, and Vasyls, like Grandfather’s younger brother, the one who perished in Kolyma.

Grandfather was the first in his family to go to Gymnasium; he passed his exit exams, the matura as it was called—“done turned a gentleman” by the standards of the day—ironically, the same year the Soviets came. He was a good student, but did not receive a distinction because of this one Polish professor, he said, who couldn’t stand the sight of Ukrainian students, and humiliated them every chance he got. And Grandpa, on top of that, once openly refused to sing, at some official occasion, the Polish military march from 1918—and at this point in the story he’d always whine, incredibly off-key, “We-e-e the first briga-a-de, ri-i-flemen campa-aign,” making the march sound like goats bleating to illustrate his point more convincingly.

Were I in that Pole’s shoes, I’d get mad, too, when I heard that. Although the thing that stunned me most when I was little was how one could just declare to the teacher, out loud, “I won’t sing the occupier’s songs!”—and only pay for it by losing a stupid A somewhere on your atestat. (In second or third grade, I spent some time seriously contemplating repeating this experiment on our choir teacher, who called us up one by one to squeal without accompaniment before the whole class, “Vast is my Native Land,” but I ultimately decided not to venture beyond shooting spitballs through tubes—really disemboweled ballpoint pens—during her lessons, all the rage at the time.) And when in ’39 the Soviets came, that very first autumn in Grandpa’s town they put to the wall everyone who graduated with distinction, line by line according to the Gymnasium’s rosters—Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, not sorting who was “genteel” and who was “peasant,” everyone whose atestats had that summa cum laude that Grandpa, thanks to his Ukrainophobe professor (I wonder if they shot him, too) never got.

As Granny Lina used to say, there’s no bad that doesn’t come to good. Had Gramps kept his peace and been a good boy, he, too, would have gotten a dose of lead from the Soviet government for his distinction, just so he wouldn’t go around being smart. Go figure, then, how you’re supposed to live—singing like they tell you to, or, better, putting your foot down, saying, I won’t and you can all go to hell?

He and Granny met later, under the Germans, when Grandpa was already in the underground—but they were still kids, basically. Although, people back then seemed to mature sooner than we do now. Such a romantic story it was, like in a movie: Grandpa with a briefcase full of OUN leaflets got caught in a raid, and Granny Lina just happened to be there, in his way; he whispered, “Help me, miss!” and she got it, instantly, and threw herself into his arms, pretending to be his girlfriend, and, before the Germans got him, took his briefcase and got home without any trouble at all. Germans didn’t search girls, wasn’t their custom. Granny used to say she didn’t even remember what he looked like really—only that he was decent and had brown eyes, which turned out to be blue. How, one has to wonder, did a seventeen-year-old girl know how to act in that situation, who taught her? Gramps, never one to gawk, managed to ask for her name before they hauled him off, and found her after they let him out. By ’45, they already had little Ambroziy, my dad.

But still—why am I Adrian?

It’s sort of disturbing to think I will never find out. That I don’t have anyone left to ask. That there are things people didn’t tell you before they ran out of time—departed for destinations much more distant than Latin America, way beyond the coverage zone, and the church in its role of mobile service provider has long thrown in the towel: no hints, clues, or leads—you’re on your own. They abandoned you, the keepers of your secrets—naked, not a thread to cover yourself with, and you’re just doomed to spin in this world, your whole life like shit in an ice-hole, basically knowing and understanding nothing about yourself. They did deal you a few cards beside what’s written in your medical chart under Family History (cancer—well, at least it’s not schizophrenia), and you play life the best you can, but blindly because most of the cards come face down, and you never know if the one you’re drawing next will be an ace or a single six. Come on, man, come on, you hear from all sides, knocking on doors, breaking through your windows, come on, no time to think.

“Adrianabrozich!”

The knocking—it’s Yulichka. Does a man here ever have a chance to focus and finish a decent thought? What’s that goose screaming about?

Yulichka stands at the door, holding on to the frame like she’s being pursued by gangsters in an action flick—spooked, her face drooping, and for that reason really resembling a goose.

“What happened?” I ask as sternly as I can manage. “What, are we being raided? By the Red partisans, perhaps?”

Yulichka stares at me with her yellow goose eyes: she’s lost. Of course, she never met Lyonchik Kolodub; she came later, when he was already gone. For an instant, I feel intensely sorry that no one remembers him anymore—the last romantic from the tribe of Komsomol rats, and I don’t even have anyone with whom I could share the insight that just now occurred to me: that Lyonchik must have run all the way to Latin America, not after cocoa-skinned mulatto girls, but after the shadow of his Gypsy grandfather, the unfortunate partisan chicken thief. To seek there, among the slackers just like him, blissed out on the world’s best pot, his lost ideal motherland: red-cockaded soldiers, Kalashnikovs over their shoulders, firewater at their belts, and Lenin so young and so fair. All good Komsomol men go to Latin America after they die. Shit, am I getting so old no one in my circle remembers the friends of my youth?

And only then do I grasp the fact that someone has really scared Yulichka, and I finally rise from behind my desk—crack the ceiling of my own thoughts with my head. (Mom once taught me that a man must always rise in the presence of a woman, but seven years in Ukrainian business relieved me of all the good manners imparted to me in childhood.)

“What’s going on?”

“Telefon!” Yulichka exhales noisily, and it scares her even more: the word drops too inappropriately for her stormy entrance, and I’ve already put her down on the appropriateness front today. “I don’t knou, Adrian Ambrozich...Veri strendzh kolls...”

“What do you mean, strendzh? Like threats?”

It appears I still have a pretty good grip on my voice (the slight hoarseness can be written off to my sleepiness)—enough not to betray a sickening shift in my stomach—with a chill filling the gap that’s opened up. That’s the last thing I need today. Could I really have crossed someone? Me, barely a stringer in the bush leagues? I’m just the dregs, a bottom-feeder not even worth the bother.... But how, what could they want?

“Yulichka.” I come around the desk, take her hands (icy cold, like a frozen chicken) into mine; I’m all shelter in the storm now, her good daddy. “You just calm down, okay? Everything will be fine,” I assure her, already with complete certainty, and believe it myself—as if I were casting, through some incomprehensible leap in space, my protective spell on Lolly, not on her. “Let’s take it slow: Who called, and what did they say?”

“I...I don’t knou.” Yulichka makes a visible effort to focus. “I don’t anderstend, it’s oll so strendzh.... Several taims in a rou—it ringz, and wen I pick ap—hissin, very laud, Adrian Ambrozich, I’ve never herd anysin laik zat! Crackle, haulin, laik wind in ze wires.... Clicks, and somesin laik,” she looks at me cautiously, “laik mashin gun shutin.... ”

“And do you know what mashin gun shutin actually sounds like?” I ask lightly, to calm her down, while my mind quickly cycles through the possibilities. Doesn’t sound like wiretapping—and who the hell would ever want to bug my phone, what am I, some political bigwig? Although I wouldn’t put it past those bastards, they’ve all gone insane with the elections now. They say every summer camp around Kyiv is packed with hired guns from Moscow that our mobsters have brought in to have them win the elections for them. So what if one of those “working groups” that sits up all night hatching increasingly outlandish scenarios suddenly got the itch to tap, say, every tenth name on the voters’ list? Or maybe, hmm, what if it’s Yulichka’s nerves? That’s weird, I never noticed any trouble; she’s such a sensible miss, always has a plan for ten steps ahead, an ideal secretary really.

“Zose were gunshots, Adrian Ambrozich.” Yulichka pulls back her thawed little paws and fixes her skirt, apparently recalling the talking-to she got earlier today. “Don’t iven sink, I’m not gallucinatin. And I knou wot gunshots sound laik—mai first boifrend worked for Savlohov.”

Whoa now! Now it’s me who feels like a total moron: this fact of Yulichka’s biography is news to me. A gangster’s mistress, no shit. Surprise, surprise. How old was she then—seventeen?

“And where’s that boyfriend of yours now?” I ask, very nicely.

“At ze Woods Cemetery,” Yulichka answers politely, like at an interview.

Of course, where else? I’ll have to give her a raise—I’ll never find another secretary like this, that’s for sure. A floozy who, having come to Kyiv from Melitopol (or Mariupol—where is she from?—it’s all the same anyway), lands in a gangster’s bed—that’s nothing unusual, even, in a certain sense, quite natural; but that after all the shoot-outs back then, when, sometimes, you’d go to a store for a loaf of bread and it’d be full of cops and dudes in black face masks lying on the floor, and some of them ain’t moving, those were the days!—that she didn’t end up at “ze Woods Cemetery” or walking the streets herself—that takes some serious wits. And luck, too, and that’s not the least important thing in business, not least at all. So this means Yulichka, too, got lucky. Like me, like all of us. Except, of course, those who didn’t.

For the first time I notice that Yulichka, under her highlighted, porn-starlet bangs, fluffed like cream for cappuccino, has the face of a dramatic actress—someone for heroic roles, big-boned and willful, the Cherokee-cheekboned face of a mature woman. It’s as if she’s been out of focus for me before, and now everything’s come into place. She’s a trooper—one of those who’d chew through a steel wire, if need be.

“Okay, so what you are trying to tell me, my heroic Melitopol princess, is that someone was trying to get through to us while semiautomatic weapons were being fired off behind his back? A client calling straight from a hunt, perhaps, from a reserve or something?” They’ve carved up the whole country into those reserves already, the bitches—we almost drove into one with the guys once, just outside of Trahtemyrov, ten miles from Kaniv. Had a mind to check out this one bay on the Dnieper. Vovchyk raved the whole way about how he’d gone there back in the day for hippie camps, and how it’s beautiful, out of this world, and what insane energy it’s got—Hetmans’ old lands! What we found was a wire fence and turnpikes welded shut, and gorillas with AKs over their shoulders who sullenly grunted at us to “Keep drivin’!” Only in the next village, which looked like something from a nightmare—graveyard quiet, not a thing stirring—a permanently terrified woman whom we barely got to talk to us, finally whispered that it’s now a preserve where they breed wild pigs, and where “the bosses” come in black jeeps to hunt, and that those pigs dug up her whole vegetable garden, and we should go drive out of there as fast as we could “or they’ll kill you and no one will find you.” And now some assholes like that scared my Yulichka, too—“Must’ve called straight from the pigs’ den, no?”

“If it had bin laik zat, I wudn’t hev got scared.”

Yeah, that sounds about right. She doesn’t look like she would.

“Adrian Ambrozich, I anderstend you don’t beliv me.... Zis was somesin else.... Zere were voices too.”

“That must’ve been at the station. You just got connected into someone else’s call.”

“Like hell I did!” Yulichka explodes in the unmistakable tone of a truck-stop girl. She can’t help it; we all, in moments of emotional upheaval, revert to our native vernacular, and no secretary course can fix that. “Zat was no fuck—” she slams on the brakes at full tilt, correcting herself, “no conversashen et oll—voicez laik militari orders, dogs, a mashin gun burst, and in ze end a blast.... And it waz laik wind houlin ze hole taim, we never had such horribl connection, even wiz Avstralia wen, remember, zat avstralian Ukrainian bot an aikon from us? It did zis three or for taims in a rou, I can’t even tell how much taim passd. And zen—zen a woman’s voice, right in ze reciver, straight into my ear, veri cloz.... Zat’s wen I got scared. In Ukrainian...”

I give a purposely loud whistle (don’t whistle indoors, Grandpa used to say, you’ll call up the Devil!). “Well if it were ‘in Ukrainian’ no wonder you got scared!”

“Adrianambrozich, you shudn’t laf from me.” Yulichka looks at me with unfriendly coolness, like at a sick man who might be contagious, and I decide not to make fun of her “from me.” “It’s non of mai biseness of course, and I don’t really anderstend wat I hev to do with zis at all.... I didn’t recognaiz ze voice, but it waz completely clear.” She belligerently thrusts her Cherokee chin at me. “Forgive me, Adrian.”

Has she lost it? She’s lost it, hasn’t she? What is this nonsense?

“Forgive me, Adrian,” Yulichka repeats, as if to an idiot. “And somethin about a chaild, laik she’s expectin a chaild, but I didn’t remembe, got scared, can’t ripeat exactli.... ”

“You’re sure you’re not imagining it?” I say automatically, because I know she’s not imagining it. And I can see she’s not pulling a prank on me—and I can tell she knows she’s got me, although she doesn’t know which part of what she said did it. Her eyes flash with triumphant vindictive satisfaction: this is her moment of power over me, only she doesn’t know how to take advantage of it, and how to make this moment last longer—women never know how to do that, the bed is the only form of power they know, and if a woman doesn’t turn you on, she’ll always be nowhere with all the other advantages she has over you because she won’t know how to use them—and thank God for that.

What if she’s shooting up in the bathroom on the sly? Or doing acid?—and then, as an ideal secretary, she hallucinates more or less professionally on the phone? Only why would her auditory hallucinations be in unison with my own thoughts—why would we be on the same brain wave, completely in sync, as if we were connected as closely as I’ve only let a single woman become connected to me in my entire life? At first, the thought singed me, a blazing shot of horror through my brain, that it was Lolly asking my forgiveness, saying goodbye to me forever because she was expecting a child from another man (The one she’d flown to Holland with, to eat lobsters on the beach?)—a theory just insane enough to be instantly discarded. No, this was something else, something even crazier.

Yulichka broke into my thoughts as though she’d been summoned by them, as the universe’s direct response to the claims and complaints rumbling in my head like so much intestinal gas, and I believe that she really heard something and got scared because she did not know she was tuned into my brain waves, only I can’t make heads or tails of any of this either, and do not find this tuning in particularly enjoyable—the same as if Yulichka had penetrated my dreams: such things are only pleasant with someone close, and this Mariupol Amazon is no one to me, nothing, a secretary, no more. Well, that’s what you get with a perfect secretary, is the sarcastic retort that pops up in my mind: she can even take calls from the other world!

The other world? Why—the other world? Or is that Adrian who was being asked to forgive precisely the “chaild,” the one Granny Lina expected in exile? And it was Granny’s voice that materialized in Yulichka’s phone, summoned by my remembering? But how exactly could it materialize—and with dogs, machine guns, and explosions to boot? I’d forgotten my radio technology, crap. I’ll have to dig around in the literature. I wonder if sound can, say, in a highly resistant medium, get stuck in time? But, for how long—half a century? Total bull. Or maybe I’m one of those, what are they called, somnambulists, and Yulichka and I are under some kind of collective hypnosis? Like in those Moscow sessions that were all over the zombie-tube in the late eighties: stadiums full of people, a gorilla-like psychotherapist in the middle of the field, and a string of hypnotized folks before him, flailing their arms and shaking their heads like a team of demented soccer players—no wonder a country like that croaked soon after. Calm down, Adrianambrozich, calm down now; don’t let yourself get rattled over nothing.

Easy to say, calm down: I feel like I’ve been caught in an invisible fishing net and it’s dragging me somewhere where my feet don’t reach bottom. In such cases, the only sensible way to proceed is to let go and quit jerking around, because aside from wasting your energy, the jerking does you no good. This presence in my life of some invisible outside force that keeps making itself known, like in those dreams, does not demand understanding; and that’s the thing Lolly cannot seem to recognize, my diligent toots, like a straight-A student who firmly believes that every problem has a solution and she just needs to find it. No, this force demands only obedience, and the best thing you can do, once something like this has claimed your life and is running some sort of a unipolar current through you in an unknown direction, is simply to submit to it and let it carry you like water, ride it like surf....

When Mom died I was too little to know anything about this, but I still remember, a whole year before her death, being gripped and torn, so I sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, by waves of suddenly surging dread that Mom would die. They say it often happens to teens, and there is nothing mystical about it—the usual prepubescent rollercoaster. But the sense, from back then, of doors opened onto the cosmic cold and the draft of a strange will blowing through them—a will stronger than anything I could have imagined then or could imagine now—I kept this feeling. I remembered it like a dog remembers a scent. And so when it comes again, when the doors creak open—I recognize it.

Only I don’t know how to obey.

(If back then, when I was twelve, I hadn’t let Mom go on that last trek to Goverla, if I’d latched on to her clothes and screamed, “Don’t go!”—would she be alive now? Although, on that actual day I didn’t have any sense of foreboding, no one did—not even Dad.)

I cannot let go because the fear for Lolly grips me. An irrational, instinctive fear—the dread that I won’t recognize the moment when I need to latch on to clothes—hers this time. The fear of being under fire from all sides, like those wild pigs in the preserve: you don’t know where to aim when they come.

Or who is coming.

Still, what if the “chaild” is actually me? And it’s Mom who was asking for my forgiveness? (For what?) Lolly, Granny, Mom, Great-Aunt Gela—so many women already hold me in their net, ensnare me with their presence, and now Yulichka wants a piece of that action, too—like they’ve all conspired behind my back, sending each other their secret signals. Women, of course—they have to be more sensitive to any drafts stirred up in the universe; they, with their monthly bleedings, must be well familiar with this anonymous force that takes you over unilaterally leaving you to simply change your pads obediently. Women ought to be wise as snakes; they ought to be the ones showing us the right way to live, so why are they always so damn helpless?

Calm down, Adrian, keep it down man.

“Well, that’s quite a story.” I smile at Yulichka with Olympic composure. “I think I read this somewhere, or maybe it was a movie—this guy comes to a new town, checks into a hotel, and just like you, right then, overhears someone else’s conversation on the phone. And in the conversation they’re making plans to kill someone, so the guy then spends the rest of the movie trying to decide if he should go to the police—but he doesn’t know any names, or dates—so he’d just look like an idiot. Alright, sweetie, is that all? No one else called?”

Yulichka coolly flutters her heavily mascaraed lashes at me. I recognized this same tense mistrust from the guard at the Tax Inspection office the other day—a hick who’s convinced that the whole world is just waiting for a chance to rip him off—when I tried to tell him a joke. The poor sucker didn’t even smile. But the mention of her immediate professional duties produces its usual effect in Yulichka, like a “sic ’em” command to a police dog, and she sets obediently to reporting who else called while I, here in my little alcove that’s loftily referred to as the office, was indulging in my philosophical meditations instead of doing work. (Which was, actually, the right idea: when reality starts to leak, there’s no better way to show it who’s boss than to plunge into the piddly, routine stuff, like organizing my acquisitions log—only it looks like our reality is leaking for real this time, despite my attempts to derail it.)

“End you hev a meetin et hav past faiv,” Yulichka reminds me for the umpteenth time.

I assure her, with somewhat exaggerated gratitude, that even Julius Caesar couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because while holding five things in your mind at once is pretty impressive for a man—we men are all single-taskers; we can only focus on one thing at a time, but fully and to the end (and if you couldn’t, and split, that’s your own problem)—no man, let him be ten times Julius Caesar, your namesake, by the way, could ever dream of keeping track of as many things at once as do you, my priceless, for which you earn my awe and respect!

At our modest dinner, I will ask the professor to certify with his distinguished signature the authenticity of a pretty dubious Novakivsky. (I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the work is not by Novakivsky, but by one of his students. It will do just fine for the rake who’s got his eye on the piece—he’s already abused his privilege to move half the National Museum into his lair, enough’s enough!) And once the dear professor, after a bit of posturing, agrees (he’s never once refused), I’ll also ask him, for dessert so to speak, a little extra after the main business of the day, to find Yulichka a spot as a distance student in his art history BA program (which is why the poor thing’s been lunging at the end of her leash with diligence—reminded me five times about this meeting!).

This entire, well-rehearsed ritual of ours, in which he acts the impoverished aristocrat who’s bringing me, the obtuse nouveau riche, the light of science and knowledge, and I pretend to eat it all right up, is in about forty minutes. I’ve time to spare, only it’s already rush hour; the streets are jammed, Kyiv’s been choking like a deathbed asthmatic lately. The way you have to crawl through downtown now, you’d rather run cross-country in a gas mask; and what the fuck, I ask you, are we feeding a mayor for? A cell phone, obviously, is not something the professor would have, can’t warn him if you run into a jam, so it’s better not to be late and not to make the old man nervous, the easier to work him at dinner. Alright, he-rre we go, back and up—temples tingle pleasantly as if filled with champagne, the dark wave falls noisily away, rings fade from before my eyes. Consider me fit to roll out in public—triumphantly, like a brand-new BMW from the garage.

See you later, Yulichka. (Yep, gawkers—a young couple, the miss in a muskrat fur coat, welded to the cabinet with the Soviet porcelain, and Yulichka, like a Cerberus-bitch, looming nearby, acting the guide but actually watching they don’t steal anything. I don’t need to stay; if they feel like buying a porcelain vixen or a young pioneer in shalwar, Yulichka’ll handle everything on her own; she’s a bright girl. She’ll be priceless once she actually learns a couple of things.) I embrace the whole group with one mighty smile as I walk by, and that’s how they remain imprinted on my retina, the trio, with three heads turned toward me, like a magnified copy of something manufactured by the Konakiv Porcelain Factory—see you later, goodbye, go to hell.

And only when I am in the car putting the key into the ignition do I see that my hands are still shaking.

“WHO ARE YOU?”

This comes out by itself, like a breath. How naïve—there are never answers to questions like these. I don’t even know if it’s a “who” or if there is more than one, maybe a whole platoon studying me through their crosshairs from the invisible afar. Before, there were only dreams. Now a phone call. That’s closer, warmer, as in the children’s game. They are coming closer, rapping on the window, breathing on the back of my head, into my face, with their dogs, their explosions, their bursts of machine-gun fire, forgive them, Adrian. Brr. No, warmer is clearly not the right word—the hell it’s warmer. It’s like snow poured down your spine.

Let me sit here just another minute, I ask “him”—“them,” head resting on my fists atop the steering wheel. It’s not like I’m afraid to be driving right now. I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to bore again, like a dull corkscrew, into the exhausted flesh of this deranged, wildly sprouting city, into the falling dusk and the crawling current of hoarse cars, through the drifts of dirty snow piled by the curbs, cars sometimes buried inside them, and past the water-filled ruts splattered with flashes of reflected lights along the sidewalk, accompanied by the squealing of car horns where traffic begins to coagulate into clots, which make you squeal out loud. And all so that I can arrive on time to a place where I will lie and be lied to, so that I can later lie somewhere else and get some money for it—Lord, what a waste.

Lord! You see what a fuckup I am—I’ve nothing to show You in my defense. I did not spend sleepless nights thinking of how to make this world a better place—although the world would, probably, become a better place if solar power got even five percent of the time people spent on gas pipelines (like that gas will flow forever!—go to Dashava, look at what’s left when gas wells are sucked dry). But I’m not one of those who breaks through walls. And I didn’t do much laying of life for friends—once only knocked the teeth out of a rake. Our asshole union organizer went after the weakest guy in our group and worked him over on the kolkhoz trip so hard the guy had to be taken away in an ambulance. Turned out to be a diabetic, didn’t actually have to come with us, could’ve gotten excused without a fuss, but was ashamed before a girl he liked; after they’d taken him to the ICU, I went up and socked that capo right in the mug like every one of us wanted to do, because if no one did, we’d all have felt like accomplices later. Afterward, though, I often shook hands with other scoundrels knowing full well they were scoundrels, but their scoundrelism had nothing to do with me at the moment, and what could be worse than that?

Be hot or cold but not tepid—that’s what You said, Lord, and I’ve been tepid so many times in this life I can’t stand myself. Whatever gift I had, I flushed down the toilet, and I don’t know how to love my neighbor like I should because I know I haven’t given so many folks their due that I can’t even count them anymore. And I’m not even sure that I actually love people—not friends, or family, but people. I love objects; that’s true. I love things made by human hands—that may be the only shred of physicist that survived in me.

When I unscrew the lid from an old watch and spread it on a velvet cloth, like Grandpa used to do, the miniscule nails, perfect, like living beings, the clever mechanism carefully tucked inside, as if in a small nest, it’s like a warm soft paw touches me from inside. These things are still alive; they breathe—unlike the ones sweeping us under their mass-manufactured avalanche today. And although I refuse to change the world myself, I still love this substance that somebody else’s hands had once tamed, in which one can still glimpse the folded trajectory of another’s thought like the light of a dead star. Gold sand, a sparkling trail. Sweat between shoulder blades during a break between classes.

Look—Grandpa showed me when I was little—a transparent-blue dragonfly, a reed, a sun-drenched splash—look how perfect the dragonfly’s fuselage is, you couldn’t dream of making a thing like that! Old things still have that same thrill that rang that day in Grandpa’s voice—a human’s joy at being in the presence of the perfection of living forms. The joy of overcoming chaos. When all these things die out, crumble, move from antique stores to pressurized museum chambers, this joy will vanish from our life together with them. Then we’ll be completely stuck in a sanitized, dead space filled with radically different things—ergonomic and anonymous, like disposable needles. And what’ll be left for us to do then but eat our own shit and scream that God is dead?

Lord! Yes, I’m a fuckup, and yes, of all You’ve given me, I only managed to keep a few mere crumbs from slipping between my fingers, but if there is any truth in my life, it’s in the fact that I did not betray them, not one from the army of those anonymous craftsmen who had the ant-like persistence to transform the world, bit by bit, passing it on to me the way it still was when I was a child. My store is just my way of trying to keep that world alive for just a little bit longer, against the avalanche. My way of being loyal—tepid maybe, fucked up, yes. But at least in this I am not lying.

And the woman I love—and I know you see I love her, Lord. I’ve never loved anyone in my life like I love her. I really could die for her if it came to that; she feels this in me, this ability of mine—to be loyal. Maybe that’s why she loves me, the fuckup.

Keep her, Lord—no matter what happens to me, if something really were to happen to me, and all these specters storming at me from their other worlds are for a reason. If they’ve set to shake my soul (“I love you hard and shake you harder,” Granny Lina used to say to me when I was little—or was it Mom who said it?) until that poor soul drops clear out of my body like the pit from a cherry—to heck with me, whatever, only I beg you Lord, keep this woman because I love her!

How strange, moisture between my fingers.... Could I be crying?

I raise my head. It’s gotten dark, and the sky above the city went out like the screen of a giant computer—only the artificial keyboard light remains, a neon-pale blaze above the roofs—the nocturnal aura of the metropolis. And—here you go!—right before my car, two elongated golden rectangles have fallen onto the snow, stretching across the entire well of the yard from a second-floor apartment window. Like God’s smile, I swear, like a sign of consent.... If an angel in white robes had alit right now onto the hood of my car and nodded soothingly, meaning, everything’s fine, dude, don’t sweat it—I doubt I’d be happier to see him.

For some reason I am always moved by the light falling from a window at night—like a promise of a sweet mystery. Or a vision from a forgotten dream. I’ve even come to love the yard of my Troieschyna apartment block ever since I saw that lacy light from the barred windows at night—and what, you would ask, is so special about that? But there it is, glowing-laughing, and I can’t take my eyes off it—thrown onto the snow, like a stained-glass window in church, the tall gold-haloed window. It has to be tall, like in church, and in old-Kyiv townhomes, and our Lviv ones also have windows like those—and it seems any moment now a woman’s shadow would appear there as though on a movie screen, retreat, then surface again, hold still leaning against the frame, like she’s is waiting to spot someone invisible below. And as if a trail of someone’s footprints sits darker than the night on the white steps to the building’s door, and makes my heart squeeze with something never fulfilled and so dear—my beloved yard, the rejected Kyiv Secession of the cement-boom era—no, cities, like things, also have souls, and all the generations of barbarians, our own and the ones now invading, cannot shake it loose.

For a moment, everything grows still, inside and around me. As though everything were falling into its proper place, and I, too, were in my proper place. Here, behind this dark window, also barred, facing the yard, is my little alcove; here is my store, and I am an antiquarian. And I know already that I will remember this moment forever—stopped, torn out of the current, like a swollen drop suddenly filled with weight.

Forgive me, Adrian.

I’ve forgiven. I’ve forgiven everyone. I hold no grudge against anyone. Do you hear me, Mom?

The first chords of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” suddenly thunder gravely, from here, from inside the car, and they make me jump like a blast of the archangel’s trumpet. The next instant I realize the sound is coming from my cell, which has fallen out of my pocket and is lying on the floor—I reach for it, knocking my head against the wheel, absolutely certain that I am about to hear Mom’s voice. I’m certain I will know it at once, even though the only thing I can seem to recall is an age-distorted recording on the ancient Vesna recorder’s reel. (An amazingly low, rattling contralto recites Mavka’s final monologue from Lesia Ukrainka’s “Forest Song”—“Ah, for that body do not sigh”—and unless you knew that Mom had just over a year left, that strange voice would not evoke any special emotion.)

Okay, okay, God, where’s that button—“does anybody kno-o-ow what we are living for”—at last, a direct link, at last I’ll hear what they want from me and what I have to do—a direct link to my fate.

“Puss, where’d you go? I’ve called twice already,” says my fate in the dearest voice in the world that makes everything inside me come instantly back to life, makes blood run through my veins afresh, and I giggle, consoled, but, strangely, disappointed. What a log head, how could I’ve forgotten that this is Lolly’s new personal theme song? She’s got it on repeat all day long. Although if you ask me, you’d do better climbing gallows than going to any shows to that tune—but my funny girl put her foot down, and says I don’t understand.

“I’ll be home soon, Lolly. I’ve got one more meeting to sit through. Should I buy anything? We have bread?”

This is real happiness—when you can ask her these simple, everyday things, and drive home at night with a grocery bag in the back seat, and see, still from the car, the light in the fourth-floor window (a rectangle of light on the asphalt), behind which she’s rooting around your apartment, or sitting at the computer, or listening to Queen—and at any moment her shadow may appear on the curtain, as though on a movie screen, and hold still, leaning against the frame: Did someone just pull up below? It’s me, my love. I’m here, four flights leaping over every other step—and I’m with you.

“Actually, I’m still in town myself, Aidy, just got out.” Lolly speaks as if she were walking on an icy sidewalk, looking for the right place to plant her foot. “I had a meeting with Vadym.”

“And?” But I can guess from her voice already: bad news again.

“Not good, puss. Not good at all.”

She’d thought that with his help she could put a check on those fuckers planning to sell women through TV. Did she get nowhere with him? Or was it something worse?

“Dead end, wasn’t it?”

“Yep. Deep ass. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

“Now, that’s a wise decision! Let’s do that. I’m meeting my expert at half past five at The Cupid. Just go there!”

Damn that expert, and that bloodsucker client who can’t live without a Novakivsky on top of everything he’d already stolen, and Yulichka with her freaking career—now, when I just need to hold my girl, hug her shoulders, because she’s about to cry.

“Won’t I be in the way?”

She’d never asked that before, she didn’t have this meek—heartbreaking—resignation to being shown the door if she were in the way—the Daryna Goshchynska people recognized in the street and asked for an autograph could only be in the way when she chose to; she had the right to be in the way.... Lolly, if only you knew how sorry I am—with a lump in my throat....

“You ask that again and I’ll beat you up!”

“With a fist?” She seems to warm up a bit, sensing a game.

“Why a fist—a boot.”

“Is that, like, not to leave any bruises?”

“Sure. How could one leave bruises on such a nice butt?”

“You friggin’ aesthete!” my sad girl finally chuckles. “Alright, I’ll pop into a hunting store on the way; take a look at those boots.”

“You can’t use those. You want the military ones, tarpaulin.”

“You perv. What are they, stronger?”

“Sure. Strength and beauty. Two in one.”

Another chuckle, then:

“Puss?”

“I love you.”

And that’s it, and I don’t need to know anything else. Such a bright, solid wave of warmth. I grin like an idiot to the golden rectangles on the snow, and the grandly overturned cubes of the trash bins deeper in the yard, like a stage set for a Greek drama. And look, Lolly—too bad you can’t see this!—look at the offended dignity of that humongous black cat crossing the yard toward the overturned stage set. Who could ever make such a perfect creature go out in the cold, his whole manner begs, as clearly as if the words were spelled out in the air above in a comic book bubble? I’m so full of feeling, I honk sending him dashing away, all that dignity instantly forgotten, like a small-time thief caught red-handed. It’s so funny; I can’t help laughing. Lord, how beautiful the world still is, and how beautiful it is to be living in it. My dear girl, fear nothing, no one can do anything to us, just keep loving me, you hear? Just don’t leave me alone.

“Who’re you honking at there?”

“I’m saluting. In your honor. Now I’ll just go twist my Mykola Semenovych into a German knot, so he won’t be in our way, and place his mortal remains at your feet.”

“You seem to be getting pretty aggressive. Is that because night’s falling?”

“Lolly. You little wonder, my Lolly, I miss you already.”

“You’re the wonder. Alright, I’m going to The Cupid.”

“And I’m flying. On wings of love. Wheels up already.”

“Wheels? Is that what they now call it?”

“Fie, you shameless wench.”

“Be careful, the roads are slick.”

“I will, I promise. Mua.”

“Same to you.”

My fingers aren’t shaking anymore—turn the key and my trusty Golf tears off the spot with a happy squeal, as if it got bored waiting for me. At the street exit, under the arch, where I have to brake, the cat, flat to the ground, like a yogini, head pulled between his shoulders—didn’t get very far!—watches me with a mistrustful gaze much like Yulichka’s. Takes all I have not to wave at him through the window: So long, beastie!