Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

And so now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this new feeling. They look at me from these old photos as if I owe them something—I shrink and shy in their heavy gaze that reaches so far beyond the moment captured by the camera, unsure about what it is they expect of me. It’s as if they don’t know if they can trust me, like they need to size me up, to see if I am good enough for the family, how serious my intentions really are. (Good Lord, what nonsense am I thinking?!) These women with their cloche hats and their thighs sheathed in sun-spotted Jazz-Age dresses (it is a clear summer day, and there are trees in the background that might still be growing in the same spot, and a dog, his tongue wearily lolling from his mouth) and their buttoned-up, sporty-looking boys in turtlenecks and breeches, and men with black moustaches like butterfly wings above their lips, later called Hitler moustaches (but Hitler hadn’t yet come to power, and across the Zbruch River no one had yet stacked mummified-alive corpses like hay, and Lemyk hadn’t shot Consul Mailov, and Matseiko hadn’t taken aim at Minister Pieracki...).

And then here are those after the war, in incomparably poorer rags, who managed to live despite it all, the remainers, or better, the survivors, meaning the nonetheless living. (Which sounds so much kinder, doesn’t it?) And here is a tiny snapshot after the deportation, with oppressive, low-slung volcanoes on the horizon (Kolyma? Transbaikal?), and the boy in the foreground is struck with a completely different leanness, not the athletic kind but the thoroughly plebeian, hunger-worn kind. He wears a baggy jacket with hideously padded Terminator shoulders, and so does the young woman with poodle-like curls next to him. Both are laughing into the camera; their heads are close together yet their hands are behind their backs, as if still under the armed guards’ command, but laughing joyfully nonetheless, laughing from their hearts—their entire beings so happy about something. What is it, one wonders, that could make them so happy there?

Something painfully familiar flashes in the tight ripples around the man’s mouth, like déjà vu or a dream you can’t recall in the morning. I must have seen this same expression in your face, must have caught its fleeting, uncanny breath on your features, gone in an instant without a trace, a message from a long-gone soul who has only this one way of reminding us about himself—and if I look carefully (What exactly do you imagine I’ve been doing here all this time, gulping down eyeful after eyeful?), I can find something of yours in many of these faces, something imperceptibly altered but shared nonetheless, as if an errant beam of an invisible torchlight, dancing over them, flashed you out of an accidental fold of another’s features or in a turn of another’s head. Here, here it is; it almost coheres but again merely almost, and the dream of unrecognition goes on, growing slowly more nightmarish, as if now I am chasing a fleeing ghost.

“Here’s my paternal great-uncle,” you introduce with a note of involuntary solemnity, or perhaps it just sounds solemn to me, and I define silently: Paternal great-uncle means the brother of your paternal grandfather. My lips stretch idiotically in the smile of a well-brought-up girl who is working hard to be liked by these adults—pleasure to meet you—and suddenly a blinding, shimmering veil of tears slips across my sight, and I hurry to swallow them, blinking them away before you notice because, like all mama’s boys, you automatically interpret a woman’s tears as a personal reproach, instantly growing sullen, as if you’ve been struck, as if, except for you, there is nothing for a woman to cry about in this world. I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t have it in me to resist the numbing spread of this insane, universal tenderness that pools under my skin like blood from a thousand wounds—this visceral, glandular, animal pity for these dead, for their youth, their speech, their laughter no longer audible from where we are, their piercingly pitiful, childlike innocence to the impenetrable gloom that awaits them. Or, perhaps, it is the pity I feel for you and me, for the two orphans abandoned to fend for themselves—like Hansel and Gretel in the dark, dark forest—two lonely shipwrecks washed up onto the shore of the new century by the last, life-draining effort of so many ruined generations of men and women whose only achievement in the long run was to bring us into this world. And on this we ought to congratulate them posthumously, because most of their peers didn’t even manage that.

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m not.”

“Please, what is it?” (with your brooding, almost injured face and your immediate impulse to hold me against your chest, to stroke my hair, to shush).

“It’s okay. It’s over now, I’m sorry.” Let’s go on. To the 1960s chignons and nylon raincoats, to the things that already pop up in our own childhood memories, things that are no longer photographic but fully corporeal, with a feel and a smell: I remember how loudly one of these raincoats rustled when we hid under it in the wardrobe. And, oh, I had a toy bunny just like that, in short pants and a lace ruff! I just can’t remember what it did when you wound it up. Beat on its drum?

Looks like I’m still playing the little girl’s role; and you’ve got the adult part this time: You are the ambassador for all your dead. You do look like you’ve grown older just in the time spent with them, grown out of the lankiness, the floppy-eared-ness of that loose-limbed boy who walked as if scooping up some extra space, and whom I followed with my eyes from behind my window, until he disappeared around the corner, a thread unspooling, only the thread came out of myself—my own body—like a silkworm’s.

Sometimes I am overcome by an almost maternal pride—as if I were the one who brought you into this world, so well put-together, with such relaxed grace in every gesture. The previous generation of “exemplary boys”—those Soviet ones who were destined to be “pioneers,” “Komsomol men,” and then “Communists” (and turned out exactly so)—moved differently, more stiffly, with the implacable military uniformity of the future pyzhyk hat wearers, still so easy to spot in any international airport that one doesn’t have to think twice about coming right up and chatting with them in Russian. And perhaps that’s why I couldn’t ever stand them—those exemplary ones—and why I—the straight-A student with big bows in her hair—gravitated inexorably to the punks, although, of course, you are no punk, and there is no one to whom you could be compared—there were no such boys in the days of my youth; they hadn’t been bred yet. This must be whence my fits of maternal pride, this feeling never known with any man before. Not the “look what I’ve got” feeling on those mornings when I wake up first and, pulling back the covers, stare with hungry curiosity anew at the man stretched out on his back beside me, and weigh, like a merchant, my life’s loot in pounds; and not the blood-bubbling thrill, like a burst of champagne, when I am approaching from a distance and you haven’t seen me yet: “And a man like this loves me!” Not the first, or the second, but a kind of a spellbound, puppy-like wonder, as if I’ve shaken off sleep, rubbed my eyes, and still cannot believe it. Can this be my man, exactly as I imagined him? (And I have always imagined him since my now-distant school days!) So alive, so real, so much more unexpected, nuanced, and interesting than I myself could ever have invented; so big and skillful with his let me do this and really so much better at every task than I am (even at cutting bread—he gets paper-thin, uniformly even slices, a pleasure to behold, while all I can manage are thick unwieldy chunks, lopsided and saw-edged as if a hungry beast mauled the poor loaf). And most importantly (I boast to my girlfriends silently, and then aloud, no qualms whatsoever), most importantly, he does everything with this amazingly natural ease and simplicity that must have something to do with his infinitely touching grace, like a young animal’s—the complete lack of any need, rooted in the body, to pretend to be something other than himself (to march in step, to keep eyes on the head of the man in front, to look the boss in the eyes and lie with an unclouded gaze).

No, I certainly could not bestow upon him this gift of organic dignity, no drawer of my imagination held such a treasure, and never before had I encountered a person who could pass through falsehoods with the same calm ease, emerging utterly untouched by their falsity. Here my contribution amounts to staring in amazement—slack-jawed, like a child at a magician—and pondering how wonderful it is, after all, that it was not I who conjured you! For the first time, practically in my entire life, I can finally say it’s great that I have no control whatsoever over what you are and what you might yet become. Even better, I don’t want any. I am afraid of it; any intervention on my part would be for the worse.

You, naturally, entertain no such notions. Who knows what kind of notions you do entertain about me? Sometimes I get a bit scared—love generally is a scary thing, happy love no less than unhappy, only for some reason no one ever talks about that.

Fear blew through that very first moment when you—smiling as if at an old friend—set out toward me across the bedlam of the TV studio and the chaos seemed to dissipate before you—to disappear from the frame—so irrelevant was it to you as you stepped over the thickets of tangled cords and swerved around treacherous machinery with the grace of a nocturnal animal in the dark woods, and inside me suddenly surged the intoxicating sensation of a mind at the brink of collapse. As if the invisible wall that separates us from chaos slid apart, and one could now expect anything: this new young man of unclear origins could be a psycho, for example, one of those maniacs who keeps calling and lies in wait at the studio entrance—only psychos don’t have such openly childish smiles (and, simultaneously, as if on a parallel track, sped the rueful thought, he must have a girlfriend, a young one, one of those hip ones in a strappy top and tight little pants); and that’s when I heard your voice addressing me and froze for an instant, because you dropped this outrageous question as casually as if we had played in the same sandbox, only you’d stepped out for, oh, thirty years or so, but now you’re back and...

“Have you been looking for me?”

That was a hell of an introduction!

“Why would I be looking for you?” I shot back, quite sensibly, as I willed the cracking wall back into place and the surrounding world into a semblance of normalcy, but the world had already turned—like a dress, inside out—and I saw myself through this young man’s eyes: still in makeup from the recent recording, as if cut out from a TV screen, which always produces in newbies a staggering effect—like the familiar flat picture has been replaced with a 3-D one and alive on top of that (you can try it on for size, see how this woman fits—how she’s just tall enough for the top of her head to brush against your lips). My face like a cream puff, hair brushed smoothly back so that no one would be left ungraced by the sight of my exquisite ears, the rest of me packaged into a leather vest and a white musketeer blouse from Bianco (thanks to the sponsors mentioned in the final credits), with black—and, by the way, seriously tight—jeans. All the cameramen love getting shots of me entering the set from afar, full-length and legs in the frame. You can tell I fixed what I was wearing that day in my memory, forever—that unmistakable sign of all momentous events in our lives—although at that moment, my TV-star getup was strapped on tight like a bulletproof vest, in full combat mode.

What is it you imagine you want, kid? And who the hell are you anyway, for me to be “looking for” you?

“I was told you’re looking to make a film about Olena Dovganivna.”

Aha.

“That was my granny. My great-aunt, actually,” you added with a quick apologetic smile.

He does have a sweet smile, I thought then; it lights his face like the sun breaking through the clouds, though his lips move only a little. Something at first made me classify him as one of the Russian-speaking, bracing myself for the forced, just-learned Ukrainian, tight as a new shoe, with foreign phonemes rubbed raw like blisters—“lookedd,” “toldd” (for Christ’s sake, unclench your teeth already!)—and the cringe-inducing hobbling through phrases as they translate them, word for word. It’s like watching a drunk try to stay upright. Our producer talks like that, very deliberately, “I think calls into the air (meaning on-air calls) must be cut short.” Or, “We are in need of a stronger show, with unique countenance.” Unique what? Oh, content, unique content. Even the young man’s purely Galician, “That was my granny,” didn’t prove anything since the linguistic neophytes eagerly borrowed the Galicians’ colorful words—folksy phrases and even the trademark lilting intonations—only to deploy them in most unnatural ways, believing all the while that this is exactly what one ought to sound like when one speaks pure and authentic Ukrainian, which, to be fair, they may never have heard spoken by anyone other than a Galician. And it’s not like Galicians can’t speak Russian either. As soon as they land in Kyiv, they switch and chirp merrily along, as if they were keeping Ukrainian for their own secret use, behind layers of mysterious rites and seals of conspiracy.

Nor did it matter much that this boy introduced himself as the grandnephew of the Insurgent Army warrior, the woman who has gripped my imagination from the instant I saw her image on a faded archival shot—so radically different from her peasant-faced fellow insurgents, so neat and refined (“smart,” as the locals would say), even in her guerrilla uniform, the army-issue belt wrapped around her small waist with such flawless style it wasn’t as if she had just climbed out of an underground lair but was simply dressed for a hunt across her family’s lands (you could almost imagine a riding crop in hand behind her back and her pack of purebred hounds just outside the frame, straining their leashes and whimpering with excitement).

No, the boy’s ostensibly intimate—blood!—bond to her (admittedly, one could glimpse a resemblance in his lips, his eyes) was not, in itself, a recommendation. Our old gang (Where are they now?) remembers all too well how in the early nineties the great-grandson of the legendary nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky introduced himself as “a thoroughly Russian person” at “democratic” haunts along Khreshchatyk—all those long-defunct “Dips” and “Culinary Cafés”—and could even be prompted to read Russian monarchist poems of his own composition, which no doubt made his ancestors spin in their graves like chicken on a spit. And we won’t even say anything about the descendants of the less-notorious historical personages. Ukrainian families changed faiths, languages, and national flags in practically every generation—sometimes faster than fashion, like addicts going through needles: a shot in the arm and toss this one out the window, grab a new one, and so on, for the entire span of our recorded history, beginning, most likely, with Kostyantyn Ostroz’ky who founded the Ostrog Academy to counter the Polish expansion only to see his granddaughter convert to Catholicism and deliver the Academy—lock, stock, and barrel—to the very Jesuits her granddaddy had spent his entire life fighting. This would appear to be our only national tradition that survives to this day—this compulsion to offer ourselves up to whoever rules the day—so you can’t expect me to swallow this kind of bait, strung like the Bible on a line of “begats.”

And to add to your disappointment, love, I must confess that I did not observe any fateful switches clicking in me to meld your grinning mug with the oh-so-compelling visage of the woman whose story tantalized my imagination, nor did I sense any immediate spiritual kinship, or an exciting twist of fate, or any other such nonsense that could be interpreted, in a pinch, to portend the events that were about to stun us. Hate to break it to you, sweetie, but I felt nothing, nothing whatsoever, even if you don’t believe me and get upset, because How could this be? Zilch, nada. Aside from the momentary loss of self, prompted by the suddenly parted wall—a feeling akin to a vestibular hallucination, as when you didn’t smoke quite enough pot at a party: the world’s ablaze but the fear’s still with you.

And to be completely honest, I did not really expect much from this new connection to Dovganivna’s family—even though I had begun to look for someone, not yet sure who exactly—because experience has taught me that the hero’s relatives, and especially those of the once-removed variety, are of little use. The best one can hope to wring out of them, with luck, is a few old photos from the family album if they haven’t been lost forever to arrests or searches, and maybe—with some special, incredible luck—a shred of an utterly irrelevant personal memory, something that Mom, or an aunt, or an uncle’s sister-in-law (women are better memory keepers) mentioned while knitting mittens or stuffing varenyki—a meaningless, accidental dollop of information rolling around in someone’s mind like an unidentifiable piece of a lost gadget or the cap, at the bottom of a drawer, to a long-drained bottle of cough syrup. A useless, random recollection that, say, shortly before his death the now-famous ancestor asked for pear compote, which stuns you for a moment while you search for an appropriate response: Is this something Proustian, a madeleine dipped in tea? Or they might tell you that the dining table on the family home’s (destroyed, naturally) verandah was made out of unvarnished planks of wood, rough to the touch in that way that pine is, you know—uh-huh, thank you very much, that’s very interesting, but I’m afraid we’re running out of film. Meaning that for the last fifteen minutes the director has been making faces at me like he’s about to vomit and sawing his throat with his hand, until his histrionics make me laugh and I lose the thread of the conversation—although in fact I find such memory garbage no less compelling than the story that we cut, squeeze, condense, spice up, and serve to the public in a neat thirty-minute package.

Oh, I mastered that kind of cookery just fine and turned out my product with a practiced hand and my own feel for the ingredients. But these unwanted shards of someone else’s life, which could be discarded with such casual finality—and which had been so precious and full of meaning while the person was alive and perhaps loved in a way that made every such detail glow as a special gift—never failed to strike me as pathetically frail, like unearthed remnants of vanished civilizations. After all, wasn’t this about the only thing that remained truly theirs, something that could not be bequeathed or recycled, forged or refashioned to match new ideologies, publicized in newspapers and on TV until the last modicum of the departed person’s presence was stomped out, unraveled, lost under a thousand footprints?

After the death of Vlada Matusevych—Vlada whose dear little face with its pointy, birdlike features was posthumously rebranded by glossy women’s magazines until after a while even I could look at one of her mass-reproduced portraits without having my heart cramp—I had ample opportunity to learn that it is only such useless trifles of memory that have a chance to remain solidly present, and I kept one for myself: Vlada, the very definition of petite, had the habit of almost touching whomever she was talking to, of insinuating herself into their space with one smooth balletic pas—her back slightly bent and her head held high, looking like an unwinding lasso, or a cat about to leap into a tree—which unsettled even the most recalcitrant political gorillas. And for me, everything that used to be called Vlada Matusevych is contained—like an ocean in a drop of its water—in this one movement.

How could you show this on film? Even if you could, if you found it somewhere, on a friend’s cell-phone video or a clip from a birthday, a party, someone’s wedding—she was a fashionable artist; she was everywhere all the time, and there had been so much of her that in the first months after her death, Kyiv seemed deserted—even if you had it on film, what would it mean to anyone?

I have come to think that a person’s life is not so much, or rather is not just, the dramatically arched story with a handful of characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, and colleagues—anyone else?) that we pass on more or less in one piece to our descendants. It’s only from the outside that life looks like a narrative, or when viewed backwards through a pair of mental binoculars we put on when we have to fit ourselves into the small oculars of résumés, late-night kitchen confessions, and home-spun myths, trimming and shaping life into orderly eyefuls. When seen from the inside, life is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces, utterly useless for anyone other than its owner. A suitcase carried, irredeemably and forever, to the grave. Maybe a handful of odds and ends fall out along the way (a request for pear compote, a sinuous balletic pas like that of a cat about to pounce) and remain to rot in the minds of witnesses and mourners, so whenever I stumbled into one of those lost, disowned scraps I was filled with a vague but insistent shame of my inadequacy, as if this piece, this accidental survivor, contained the key—the lost secret code to the deep, subterranean core of the other person’s life—and now I have it, but I don’t know which door it unlocks or if such a door even exists.

***

There was the day when, for some reason leafing through an old pulpy book from my father’s library, I ran into a note in the margin of a yellowed coarse page (Soviet newspaper stock) in Dad’s characteristically dense, thorny script (sometime in the seventh or eighth grade my own handwriting aspired to imitate his, but eventually mellowed out, untangled, and came to resemble Mom’s) written next to the apparently innocuous, idiotic critique, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness.” (God, the language! Still struggling to find its way out from under the debris of Stalin’s pogroms, limping and dragging on broken-splintered bones.)

He underlined this critique with an impulsive, nearly straight line, and scrawled an equally triumphing this!!! with three exclamation marks in the margin. It struck me like a divinely inspired epiphany. In that instant I realized I didn’t know my father. He died when I was barely seventeen. I only remembered him the way he was in relationship to me as a teenager, a child, and from those memories, amended with a few cryptic posthumous (and petrified for lack of new material) remarks from Mom, his friends, colleagues, and his students—who seemed to have adored him unless they are all lying—I constructed a mental image: an avatar with the appearance of my father as I remembered him at forty-five, hospitalized and almost at the end of his bleak story, the kind not uncommon for his generation. And yet this man...no, wait...a much younger man (I did the math quickly: he would’ve been younger than I am now!) who read this book sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, before I was here (a mythical formula that inevitably prompts a child to ask, “And where was I?”), and scribbled his enthusiastic this!!! in the margins—exactly as I would have done had I found an idea I recognized as similar to my own, sympathetic to something I’d been thinking, turning over, worrying, living—was beyond the contours of the simulacrum I carried in my mind, as if the two—this one and the one in my head—didn’t know each other; or rather, I didn’t know this other, new one.

This man and I shared, I could tell, a vague but fundamental kinship; I could see so clearly (from inside, as we see ourselves in dreams) how in that instant the pieces of the puzzle triumphantly clicked into place in his mind—this!!!—a snap like the sound he might’ve made with his fingers, the thumb and the middle one, just as I do sometimes, in moments of intense excitement. And suddenly I recalled that he did have the habit of snapping his fingers and that it irked Mom, who told him it was vulgar and a bad example for the child, which made him sheepish—and this was new, too, because I’d never remembered him to be anything but very confident. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.”

But something had been shaken loose in my memory, and another wave of recollection washed over me: one night I found the bunny I’d drawn in my school sketchbook covered in inexplicable blue spots, and I went bonkers—and Dad, mortified like a little boy caught red-handed, confessed that it was his fault; he wanted to make the bunny gray but just missed a bit with the color. At the time I seethed with righteous indignation; I could not grasp why he would’ve sneaked into my sketchbook and touched my paints—he who’d never put a drop of paint on a shred of paper in his entire life, who didn’t even know how to hold a brush!—and, for a long time, I’d bring up the ruined bunny whenever I needed to one-up him, because it never failed to shame him again. Only now, with this new internal vision, did I see this little prank as it must have felt to him, and realized that it wasn’t the act of spoiling my picture (for which I, the incurable perfectionist, still got an A!) that he was ashamed of, but his inability to resist his childish impulse—the sudden spark of curiosity, the urge to watch the paint billow in the jar of water, watch it fill the brush and color the white spots on the paper—and that he, a grown man and a paterfamilias, was caught in this momentary, unbefitting weakness.

All of this was unspooling, faster and faster, one thing pulling on another, as if the inky scribble in the margin, like a loose thread I grasped, had led to a vast sunken rhizome—a lace of feathery roots that retained the shape of an entirely different, unfamiliar life, one independent of a daughter, a wife, or any friends—but I had no means of seeing it clearly, up close. He had taken his suitcase with him.

I remember I climbed with my feet into the armchair and scoured the whole book, inventing a new reading method on the spot: not from left to right, or from right to left, but in concentric circles, chewing on the text, like the hungry caterpillar, beginning with the underlined phrase, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness.” I had no other key—no other trinket had slipped into my hands from the suitcase that had already been taken away from me—nothing that wouldn’t have turned into dust in the twenty years since Father died. So I pondered this!!!, so casual in the margin, like detective Columbo scrutinizing a set of uncommon tooth marks on a cigarette holder that he’d found next to the body; the only difference was I wasn’t looking for the murderer—I wanted to raise the dead.

What the book was about I couldn’t tell you under threat of torture, but by the end of my necromantic investigation I became firmly convinced that my father’s long “struggle against the system” (as we Ukrainians have been calling it since 1991)—his desperate knocking on all those imposing oak doors; his countless letters, complaints, reports, and petitions to the Kyiv City Council, the Solicitor General’s Office, the Ukrainian Central Communist Party Committee, and the Central Committee in Moscow (three or four bulging folders, held by strings tied into dead, eternal knots and stored in Mom’s attic); his trips to Moscow, each of which was supposed to resolve things once and for all, only every time they sent his query back to Kyiv and he had to start the cycle all over again—the whole gory mess that replaced his life and that finally sent him to the loony bin with the then-typical political diagnosis of “acute paranoid psychopathy,” stemmed from nothing other than my father’s secret knowledge that he, too, shared, like a shameful disease, Hamlet’s damned hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. And when the evil imperial machine rolled by, almost but not quite brushing him, it was this knowledge that prevented him from stepping back, that compelled him to throw himself in its path, and made him do so, again and again, each time recapturing the right to self-respect.

And I’m still convinced of it.

The crippled, poorly written phrase turned out to be his watermark, an enduring epitaph to his life, which ended just as crippled: try and fit it into the format of a documentary story and you’ll have to close with a drawn-out physical decline—a dimming consciousness, struggling against the clamor of excruciating pain in every muscle caused by the rattling doses of insulin which the Soviet criminal psychiatry (as it later came to light) dispensed especially generously—and you’d have to show that hospital-issue robe, the color of cornflowers, which I remembered him wearing when Mom and I were finally allowed to come visit him in Dinpropetrovsk; and his skinny, yellow legs with bulging joints; and his stiff feet that stuck out from under the robe, like chicken feet from a shopping bag (enveloped in a well-aged sticky smell of urine or unwashed skin); and a slow, murky turn of dull eyeballs without a drop of reflected light, shriveled like an old man’s (signs of constant dehydration).

None of this has any heroic or romantic potential, especially when we remember that this dragged on for years, and that’s completely unentertaining, which is why such things get swallowed by “Five years later” or, in somebody else’s case, “Twenty-five years later.” Really, you can’t expect anyone to keep watching that long! (There’s no other way to make this kind of story into a film, no way to touch the audience—which means there is no story, no pitch, as any producer will tell you, better luck next time.) That’s the rub: my father’s daily struggles, in and before the hospital, not the days of his research and teaching career, but his battle with what ended it, and then ended him—the floods of letters he’d sent, the useless appointments he’d gone to, the whole absurd and exhausting war that was lost before it had even begun because once engaged, the system would not and could not yield. And that’s exactly what he was after, spending year after year in futile attempts to convince quite possibly the same people who had signed the orders he had come to protest that what they did was wrong. The entire narrative of his life, if we were to reconstruct it with documentary faithfulness—capturing all four folders and their knotted-to-death strings—had no point, only bitterness and waste. The point was in the epigraph, in the watermark. In a single, nearly straight line that was accidentally preserved.

There was another reason I knew this to be true. Exactly a year before, on a summer vacation in Crimea, by Kara-Dag, I had sneaked away from the rest of our group and spent half a day climbing the same cliff again and again, like Sisyphus, and leaping into the water below. The day was still and smothering hot, and every time I climbed I sweated like a horse, and my knees buckled, and my heart clattered somewhere in my throat. When I was little, I once hit the water with my stomach and had been afraid to dive ever since.

When I finally stumbled back into our camp at dusk, my legs twisted and turned under me as if I were hopelessly drunk, and it took all I had left to propel my body forward against the resistance of the air. My reputation as a daredevil, a thrill-loving adventure seeker who would do just about anything to get her adrenaline fix, had to have been carved in stone that night, and at dinner the men of the group couldn’t take their suspiciously twinkling eyes off me, apparently convinced that any of them could come up with much more pleasurable means of supplying me with adrenaline. A few of their wives turned unattractively skittish, which put a bit of a damper on the blissful intoxication I had achieved with the powerful cocktail of two substances that are so hard to obtain for a professional intellectual (Is that what I am? Can a journalist in our country be an intellectual?): utter physical exhaustion and pride in a job well done. “Whatever did you do this for?” asked the puzzled Irka Mocherniuk, the only person who really cared to know, and I said, “Not what for, but why.”

I dove because I was afraid of diving. I spent half a day doing great violence to myself on an empty shore under the blazing sun because the fear, once driven deep inside, lived on somewhere in my body like an invisible iron shackle that wouldn’t let me move. I chipped at it with each dive, wore it thin and finally got rid of it. From that day on, my life held one less fear.

My father’s note in the margins of that book helped me understand that he spent his whole life doing the same thing—climbing a cliff and leaping off. And not because he was some sort of natural hero, in fact, probably quite the opposite: he must’ve had to force himself do it every time. He had to break the shackles, to overcome “Hamlet’s hesitation.” At the beginning, he may have even believed that the whole case was a product of a high-ranking bureaucrat’s wickedness and, if someone could just remove this evil impulse, like a speck of dust from an eye, the terrible, criminal ruination would stop and he wouldn’t have to bear witness to what he called “the turning of a palace into a pigsty.”

The Palace Ukraina was completed in the fall of 1970, and we went to the opening celebration as a family—this was the first palace in my life, a reality that finally gave shape to that fairytale word, something that matched the word’s dazzling radiance and incomprehensible, immeasurable scale, flooding the shallow lagoon of my child-sized imagination. Since then, Ukraina, the most palatial of all concert halls, was where I imagined all kings and princesses to live, because it was simply the best in its festive 1970 incarnation, grander than anything I’ve seen to this day—the Klovsky Palace was obviously not fit for even the poorest princess, and the Mariyinksy was still closed to the public. Ukraina was in an utterly different league than all those Soviet-era Happiness Palaces, which I considered to be nothing but pretense since they looked no different from the structures that house winter farmers’ markets. I have a vague memory (a view from the back of the crowd—women and children, on such great state occasions, were supposed to stay out of the way) of my father in the immense ocean of light that was the foyer, surrounded by tall (from my five-year-old vantage point), laughing men shaking each other’s hands and of my own proud knowledge of my father’s importance: “Daddy built this!”

Of course, he didn’t really build it; he was just one of the experts who performed the engineering calculations, a newly-minted PhD with a suitably themed dissertation, a humble nut in a great machine really—if he stepped away, no one would have noticed. Several days later the man who actually built the place—the lead architect who had to have been there in that laughing swarm of Very Important Men receiving their congratulations and basking in his glory—left the office of the Central Committee’s Secretary, went to the bathroom, locked the stall, and hung himself on his own belt. His palace turned out to be too good for Kyiv. It overshadowed the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and that was not just indecency and arrogance, but a grave political misstep for which the Kyiv authorities were getting their asses thoroughly kicked, and those asses had to be saved by making steps, taking measures, and finding someone to blame, preferably, by opening a criminal inquiry into the theft of construction materials, but when their best candidate for the role of the thieving conspirator so blatantly refused to play along—going so far as to hang himself in the Committee’s very own building—the inquiry, thank God and His new charge, was first postponed, and then disappeared altogether, as if flushed down the toilet, without a trace, so that soon everyone forgot about it, perfectly naturally, considering how often these things happened, impossible to keep track of them all.

Instead, Palace Ukraina was promptly closed “for renovation” and its interior efficiently stripped of the tasteful finishes, and everything—the carefully varnished beech parquet floors; the dove-gray, worsted-wool upholstery; the stained-glass lamps—was replaced with whatever was cruder, cheaper, and plebeian, so that when it opened again, a couple of months later, with the acid-blue armchairs that are still there today, I did not recognize the magical palace of my fairytales: it was gone, disappeared into thin air just as a fairytale palace would if a genie picked it up and carried it to the other side of the world in one night. Only then we at least would have had the emptiness that alone can be a fitting monument for the structure that had perished (as Ground Zero remained for years, an abysmal wound among Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but we have seen our share of wounds like that long before—how many of them gape, like knocked-out teeth, in Kyiv’s streets, marking the sites of blown-up churches, of which only those whose place hasn’t been taken by a grain elevator or a Young Pioneers’ Palace are still remembered). But this palace stood right where it had been, obligingly and garishly retrofitted to resemble a humble provincial movie theater, all in one piece, and with the same name, so that one could begin to believe that the other, the original, was a figment of the collective imagination, something we all happily hallucinated together, after too much champagne, but we’re sober now, tovarishchi, and that’s what reality looks like: just an unfortunate mishap, an old story, really, and not even enough to call it a story—a bit of oversight, the guilty have been reprimanded, back to work.

Mom recalled that at first there were quite a few of them—Father’s colleagues from the institute, the Academy of Sciences, and the National Construction Research institute—who were charged with calculating a corrected budget that would demonstrate that the supplies had been overpriced and who had refused to do so, standing by the original calculations. After about a year, during which the whole mess was mostly forgotten, the dust settled, and the Party had a grand time assembling for its annual Congress at the Palace Ukraina, thus providing a conclusive blessing for its humbled innards, and someone especially stubborn had been officially reprimanded, someone else was threatened to be “reduced in force,” and some—these must’ve been the least protected, the poor doctoral students—had to leave Kyiv and go build cinemas (if not cow barns!) in small towns, my father alone remained to brandish, in the shadow of the ax that already hung above his neck, the truth that no one cared to hear. Perhaps, from the vantage point of an imposing paneled office it did look like madness: What the fuck is wrong with that freak? Who does he think he is?

Being, like my mom, a hard-skulled humanitarian, all I managed to comprehend from a cursory inspection of the folders in the attic—touched fearfully, suspiciously, like a clump of dried snake skins—was that after a while the case wasn’t about the construction costs anymore: the plot had twisted and coiled on itself, involving more and more agencies, sprouting new limbs, each one more phantasmagoric than the one before, and only Father continued to attach his original reports in defense of the crippled project to every new petition, to show where it all began—with a precision that his addressees must have found very irksome—so his petitions grew thicker as they rolled back and forth in layers of cross-references and official evasive responses and additional evidence and more evasions from higher-level offices and then his complaints about being threatened in a lower-level office and about the anonymous phone calls relating the same threats he’d received at home and about a bizarre fight at the entrance to our apartment building when several strangers beat him up (this, I remember, happened not too long before the loony bin—it must’ve been the last warning). The case dragged on for years, gathering speed and mass like a paper avalanche, like the nursery rhyme in which every chorus adds a line, growing into a menacing, galactic force—the rat ate the malt, the cat killed the rat, the dog chased the cat, the cow tossed the dog—and the creatures grow new crumpled horns at every turn, and new ones pop up, cartoon-like, bigger and bigger—the cow, the milkmaid, the man, the priest, all the way to a dinosaur, a T. rex—a whole crew of them that one day comes rolling in an ambulance, wearing white coats, what the fuck, what did you want to prove?

And that’s basically what happened—and where is the story in that?

This progressive, thickening nightmare could have been stopped at any time. All one had to do was step out, leave the game; other people did. They stayed alive and did just fine—and to them we must wish many happy returns. These were not just the small fish like Father, convicted on white-collar mismanagement charges—their name is legion—but even the quite conspicuous ones, implicated in the most resonant political scandals, ones whose names thundered across the frequencies of Western radio stations, who performed public acts of civil disobedience—shouted from a public stage, say, before the police could pin them to the floor, or threw themselves against the locked doors of an ostensibly public court hearing, or went to the Shevchenko monument on the poet’s anniversary, a single moment that could earn enough dissident credibility to last one’s life. And then, after 1991, they could write memoirs and book speaking engagements, which is precisely what most of them did, never once mentioning how it was that they got out.

One suspects they didn’t get out completely clean, one surmises they did get soiled, just a little: wrote a confessional letter, say, or perchance performed even more intimate rites of contrition and absolution (complete with promises to behave nicely henceforth) behind closed doors. Who today cares to find out? Who cares? They got out and worked, according to their professions; they received promotions, raised children, and improved their living conditions—so somewhere in those fetid infernal corridors there must have been the door, however narrow, with the green EXIT sign above it, a real, tangible way out, indicated on the emergency evacuation plans. After all we’re not talking about Stalinism here, ladies and gentlemen; this is the era of Socialism with a human face, which, translated, means if you really wanted to live, there was a choice.

This is why there could not be any doubt that my father tightened the noose around his neck with his own hands, and that’s what it must have looked like to the people who ultimately determined his fate, and that’s what it looked like to my mother, and that’s what I learned to think as well, when I got older—that he didn’t leave the already-revved juggernaut any room for maneuver, that he made a strategic mistake, erred, miscalculated. This is sad and painful, but there’s nothing we can do, and we must live on. Really, not that different than if he’d literally been run over by a truck.

And another thing: as I grew older, I began to feel ashamed of him. Compared to my classmates in school and even more so those at the university, my father was a loser, not someone I could brag about. When asked directly, as when one had to stand up in front of the entire class and report one’s parents’ occupations to the teacher, for the roster (and she doesn’t hear it the first time, so one has to repeat it, louder), I would squirm and mutter, eyes down, “Group-one disability,” and sit down, hearing, I thought, the class whisper and giggle behind my back. Such things are hard to digest—children can never forgive their parents for humiliating them.

His death at home—they let him go home when his kidneys failed after another long course of “treatment”—could do no more than add guilt to the shame: mix a spoon of soda with a spoon of salt, and time kept blending the two together into a thinning bitterly salty mix that nothing could sweeten, neither the increasingly frequent enthusiastic letters (especially post-1991, and even more so once my face became a regular fixture on TV) from his former colleagues and students about what a great teacher he was and how much they all, it turns out, loved him (Where were they then?), nor our producer’s very tangible offer to raise the story with Palace Ukraina from its thirty-year-old tomb in the archives and fashion my father a glamorous, albeit posthumous, almost-dissident biography. Here was a real opportunity, a chance to restore to people’s minds the forgotten pages of recent history (as if the people in question had any unforgotten pages of history, recent or distant). The idea was not bad, but it was nipped in the bud by one well-known poet—one of those once widely read, with patriotic verses and a vague victim-of-the-regime claim. Interestingly enough, I wanted to interview her on the occasion of her birthday—and found myself in a knockdown: the draft-horse-sized harpy with a bad bite spent the first half hour spraying me with spit, tossing her head to make the few remaining strands of her dyed hair bounce (which about forty years ago may have signaled to some undemanding men both a temperament of a young ogress and the spirit of an indomitable patriot), and making absolutely sure that I realized how privileged I was to have been granted access to a person who only “interacts with very select people”; she then proceeded to relate, in great detail and with vivid illustrations, as if it had happened the day before, how for her first, fifty-year jubilee—the same year, I quickly calculated, when they gave Stus, also a poet, his second (and deadly) prison sentence—the National Writers’ Union didn’t even send her a congratulatory telegram, but instead mailed her (imagine that!) an invitation to someone else’s reading—the harpy still, twenty-five years later, remembered whose—scheduled, intentionally, no doubt, on the same day, and that’s what it was like, being persecuted! I did not manage to get out of her any other details of the persecution. The harpy didn’t have a story either, only a personal myth, one that must have been promoted by quite a few men dazzled by the then naturally auburn tress-tossing, so that now the glow of their past efforts could warm her vacuous old age, in which she didn’t give a flying fuck about all those friends of her mythical youth who had perished in camps in the middle of nowhere, whose memory, had it survived, perchance would have permitted her to retain some sense of proportion and style.

I left that apartment and fell to pieces. The vision of dragging my father’s made-up cadaver into the same carnival tent of “the persecuted,” where this veteran martyr held court, soured everything with particular potency, and I proceeded to get most ingloriously drunk at Baraban that night, downing the strongest cocktails like a sorority girl—but they all tasted of soda and salt, and in the morning the hangover reeked of the same, salt and soda. There was no story. I had to make peace with the plain, dumb reality: I was the only evidence that the man had ever existed on this planet. I had his eyes and his blood type. Come to think of it, why would anyone expect anything different? Isn’t this the fate of the human race?

this!!!—a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase—turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul, and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed. His only place in any historical narrative was that of a nameless extra, a statistical value—one of the myriad, if they could ever be counted, whose names were not listed by Amnesty International, who had not been arrested or sent to prisons, but who succumbed, slowly and quietly, in their own beds, to legitimate cardiac arrests and kidney failures, and other disorders, whose causes were clear only to their families if they had any. We could also add those who drank themselves to death and those who killed themselves—the only meaningful history we can craft for the future is the history of numbers, and the more zeros—the better. Six (Or more?) million dead Jews equal the Holocaust. Ten (Or fewer?) million dead Ukrainian peasants equal Holodomor. Three-hundred-million refugees equal the fifty-six local wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. History is written by accountants.

During the Khrushchev thaw, officials who issued belated death certificates to the families of those executed in the NKVD prisons came up with all kinds of diseases to fill in the “cause of death” field—thus erasing zeros from the number of executions. Another twenty years later their fictional cardiac arrests and kidney failures became real, as is commonly the case with useful inventions, and literally killed people whose fathers and grandfathers they could beset only on paper, post-factum. Another number was made unreal, and with it, an entire generation lost its common story, leaving its descendants no means of detecting a shared fate—from here, they all look discrete, just people who lived, died, things happened, you know...this one was a decent engineer and a talented lecturer who died from the side effect of a drug, having done his time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis—and that’s it, go ahead, tie those little strings into a dead knot. I needed the inadvertent insight to make the puzzle pieces fall into place—the triumphant snap of fingers, the blue bunny in a school sketchbook, the catchy, generous laugh, the charge of energy that filled the man—to see him from inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that drove him, had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black: his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul (and the soul has its own physiology that does not always agree with that of the body) to reject this fear that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA. If you spend years carrying around something you cannot live with, it might just become easier to crash upon the water than to stop diving.

In the time I spent with the crumbly book, I experienced a rush of fierce, bone-piercing bliss, as if soaring on a glider: I could be proud of him. Not as my father—he had been gone too long for that—but as a person I could admire had I met him now. It seemed forever since I’d actually met anyone like that (Did they really all die out?), and the unfulfilled need to be around them—not even to be close; I’d be happy to admire my heroes quietly, from the crowd, if only there’d been someone to admire—pulled on my insides, like hunger, like vitamin deficiency or sexual dissatisfaction, and the discovery splashed my face like life-giving water: How could this be, I muttered half-consciously? How could this happen? I put down the book and stumbled around the room, blindly, as if feeling for something I had lost there, then fell back onto the chair and stared, just as blindly, at the same page, while my thoughts looped on themselves, tangled into knots, refusing to register the real shock: How could it be that I really know nothing about him? And won’t ever know—won’t ever find any other evidence of his life as he lived it? He didn’t write private letters, didn’t keep a journal, didn’t leave a single impression of his internal self in any material substance I could find, pick up, turn over—nothing, except a random remark in the margin of a random book.

this!!!

***

I can no more pass up these scattered shiny beads than a raccoon can ignore a broken mirror. And I mean literally: I pick them up and drag them to my lair. I have a whole collection of them already: my own disordered notes in various notebooks, on random scraps of paper, on festival booklets and concert programs, on the backs of press releases, on any other printed matter, and lengths of film from the cutting-room floor, twisted and kept, for reasons unknown, in an old computer box—all in utter disarray. Why, you could very well ask, am I holding on to this poorly scanned drawing by a little girl from Pripyat who died of leukemia and whose strangely unbrokenhearted parents were convinced she’d been destined to artistic fame? It’s hard to tell whether this really was the case: all children’s drawings are interesting, and, in this one, a brown hippo stands on the shore of a blue lake, rounded toward the horizon. The picture didn’t make it into the Chernobyl show (I remember I wanted to keep the program austere, somber, inexorable, no sentiments, no snivels), and the girl’s mother was upset with me: I had taken away her role of the tragically lost young genius’s parent, and what could I give her in return—a dead child? Still, even if there hadn’t been the upset mother and my guilt, I wouldn’t have it in me to kill the picture—so I’m keeping it, as if hoping to find, one day, the proper place for it.

Essentially, none of my shows ever grew out of the themes that I so thoughtfully pitched to my producers and colleagues. They were all conceived out of just such small details, some hook that caught my attention and teased with the promise of inaccessible secrets, like a distant glowing window seen at night from a passing train: Who lives there? What are they doing? Why is the light on so late? As a rule, such things did not make the final cut, either remaining somewhere beyond the scope of the lens, or making a brief appearance in the background, so inconspicuous that I alone could find them, like a signature hidden in the corner of the picture. Or, to be completely honest, like a note acknowledging another defeat, equally private, because I hadn’t once been able to make something—something I felt it was possible to make if only one had the lost secret code—of my pile of beads and gravel, hadn’t managed to turn these pieces so that a single change of light could illuminate someone’s life completely, totally, all pieces in their places, hadn’t once created this!!!.

Which does not mean that one should stop trying.

I have no other method—if this even counts as one. I don’t believe in other methods—I think they all have been milked dry. And to do things any other way would simply be no fun.

I don’t know what drew me into the photograph where, among five Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers, second from the right, stood a young clear-eyed, bareheaded woman (“A unit,” Artem whispered, pushing the print across the desk toward me, careful to touch it very lightly with his fingertips as if the picture, if not handled with caution, could explode with a gunshot) with bangs curled into a Hollywood roll, as was the wartime fashion. She seemed to smile at me, this lady whose small waist was cinched so smartly, even whimsically, with the uniform canvas belt, and whose entire posture exuded a calm, self-possessed confidence—not of military discipline, but rather fox hunting on a family’s grand estate: here’s the young mistress waiting for her horse to be brought up, the pack of purebred hounds straining their leashes and whimpering excitedly just outside the frame. She would look perfectly complete with an English riding crop and a pair of white gloves, and yet her sophistication (so out of place in the middle of the woods) also had a wondrously feminine quality—consolingly cool, like a strong, kind hand against a hot forehead—that must have had a soothing effect on horses and hounds, and young men with automatic weapons. She was the only one among them who smiled, her lips drawn in a barely discernible curve.

“What a beautiful woman,” I observed, for some reason in a whisper, although she was not so much beautiful, in the usual sense, as radiant: even in the faded picture, she was surrounded by a visible halo of light, like an Old Master painting of an angel sent to deliver the glorious word—“Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard.” Artem blinked sideways and grunted either in agreement or, conversely, was simply shocked by my silliness, as any historian would be after he’d just shared a prized archival document with a total philistine—all she can think of is pretty women!

Nevertheless he responded, with his thin, crooked grin that seemed to mock preemptively what he was about to say, somewhat lewdly, “So which one of the four do you figure she slept with?”

“This one,” I said, without hesitation, pointing to the guy on the far right, with wolfishly close-set eyes and a crooked nose, letting Artem’s transparent implication slip without acknowledgment. (By then he and I hadn’t had sex for at least three months; I saw no reason to galvanize our naturally ebbing liaison and found a new excuse every time we ran into each other so that he may well have begun to suspect that I suffered from a mysterious chronic illness, a constant menstruation or something.) The wolfish guy posed with one foot forward, as if on the move, hand securely clenched around the hand guard of his rifle, which he used to balance himself like a walking stick, and my certainty about him was all the more puzzling because had I been that woman, I would have chosen another—that one, standing most apart, the last on the left who looked to the side, as if the whole photographing business had nothing to do with him. Of all the men in the picture, with simple, peasant-looking faces, chiseled by many generations of hard physical work (And isn’t war, too, hard physical work?), he alone was truly handsome, a dashing brunet, a perfected and ennobled clean-shaved incarnation of Clark Gable with unaffected, long-buried sorrow congealed in the dark eyes. Clark Gable couldn’t muster such sorrow for the most lavish fees; this was something cultivated for years, not gained in an instant. This was the sorrow that filled our folk songs, all, it seems, in minor key—marches, ballads, doesn’t matter, the words don’t matter because they can’t contain this sadness or explain its origin, only music can—and the brunet had musical eyes, eyes that sang.

Artem’s hand carefully, solicitously stroked my thigh through the slit of my skirt, climbing higher and higher above the knee, and I automatically thought, as I always did, about his wedding ring: I worried about it snagging my hose. I could have just moved away—after three months, that would’ve been enough—but I remained transfixed, bent over the table and riveted to the picture, where, I was now convinced, a silent secret drama played out between the woman and these two men. Artem breathed harder; his thumb found the crease between my legs and went to work on it through the hose and the panties. He was always a very diligent lover: a scholar and a bibliophile, he did everything as if armed with a solid list of reference materials, which sometimes made me feel like I was a rare artifact equipped with an invisible user’s manual, and other times like he was mortally afraid of me, and I’d rush to his rescue, ignoring the taste of long-refrigerated cheese that would linger in my mouth afterward—Artem’s beautiful penis, for some reason, was always cold, and so was his whole body.

But in that instant, eyes locked on the picture and nails cutting into the table, I suddenly felt a fierce arousal, much more intense than if I’d been watching porn—unfamiliarly menacing, desperate, and predatory, as if this were going to be my last time, as if a spotlight had found and blinded me, leaving nothing of me but a base, well-deep scream that did not sink, but instead rose, climbed as through a narrow shaft, pushing aside my aorta, breaking through my clenched teeth, and it didn’t matter anymore who—or what!—jerked up my skirt from behind, ripped down layers of fabric, faster, faster, I focused myself in the point where my salvation would come—and it came, instantly, like a summer storm—and someone’s paw closed over my mouth, and I realized that the scream that thundered in my ears had come from my own throat. I shook my head, refusing the paw, and blinked slowly—murky yellow smears swam in front of my eyes, and the first thing I could see clearly when they began to dissolve was the photograph with the five figures in it: their silhouettes burned with sharp white light, as if on a negative. I had to blink again, and a few more times—until the photograph cooled to its normal condition—and then observed that it wasn’t the picture that was shaking but the table, for the important reason that I was folded onto it in a rather uncomfortable pose, with Artem studiously pounding me from behind, while also attempting to keep one hand over my mouth—this was all happening at his workplace, after all, in the library storage basement, and could have turned quite piquant if a coworker peeked through the door, except that he always locked it as soon as I arrived.

It occurred to me in that instant—an inanimate and vacant blob of cognition, not even a real thought—that this was the only thing that attracted me: the unheated basement with its linoleum floors, the soporific yeasty smell of rotting paper, and the conspiratorially locked shabby door lent our pitiful little fling the exciting air of delinquency, like when you’re students and fuck like rabbits in every suitable nook, and quite simply erased from my memory whatever attempts Artem may have made to transplant the action into a regular apartment, with a regular bed.

I straightened my clothes quickly, checked myself in my compact mirror, all without looking at the happy, sweaty, and confused Artem, who felt the urge to show some uncalled-for tenderness, which, as the poet Pluzhnyk once said, “is born on the far side of passion,” but froze up in the face of my indecent efficiency and monosyllabic grunts. I may have made it look like I was fleeing from the site of shame and dishonor, but my mind, sharpened by the orgasm, ran like a super-computer clicking through an algorithm with maximum effectiveness and minimum use of energy: “You have my 1928 Kyiv guidebook, by Ernst, don’t you? You still need it? And would it be okay if I borrowed the photo, just for a while?” I slipped the photo between the yellow pages of the innocently extracted Ernst, pulled my purse closed around it, made sure I didn’t leave anything behind; Artem caught up with me when I was already halfway through the door with his kiss (sloppy) and the warning that he’d call at the end of the week (Why is it that men always have to stake a claim on the future when they say goodbye? Like I wouldn’t call him if I wanted him?)—and that’s it; that was really it. We did not see each other again, and when he called, I complained of how busy I was, said I’d love to, it would be heaven, but I can’t, I really can’t.... I’m quite good at that if I do say so myself.

Artem (thrilled about a chance to prop up a worn-out romance with a substantive obligation, as often happens when affairs are ending or beginning—when you’re lending books, CDs, and pictures, and inventing shared engagements that are hard to evade later) asked me at the door what I was going to do with the picture, and I mumbled something cryptic along the I’m-thinking-to-do-something-about-UIA lines; it’s a hot topic (as if I were rehearsing what I’d say to my producer). Of course, this was just a flaky-artist excuse—I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. I was firmly convinced that only Western Ukrainians had the right to write, film, or say anything about the Insurgent Army because it was their families who held, just under the surface, either “forest boys” themselves or someone deported “for abetting,” and when someone got deported, the whole village was sent along, just to be sure; so it’s a miracle the Soviets didn’t manage to pack them all off to the other side of Yenisei, as the Poles did when they cleaned out this side of Vistula. Why on earth would I go try to stick my two cents into what, to some, still feels like a bone crushing?

All I had in my personal history were Mom and Uncle Volodya’s, my stepfather’s, accounts of the 1947 hunger in Eastern Ukraine: Uncle Volodya (I never could bring myself to call him Papa Volodya, as he and Mom would have liked), then a fifteen-year-old Odessa boy, worked alongside adults netting fish from under the ice and kept his family alive. Around the ice holes, he said, all day long lingered swollen women on elephantine legs, immobile, like ghosts: they waited for the fry to slip out of the nets, snatched them off the ice, and gobbled them down, raw. To get bread—the blessed, salvific bread—both his Odessa and his mom’s Poltava communities outfitted expeditions to Western Ukraine (“in Western,” Uncle Volodya stubbornly kept saying, as if this illiterate patch on his generally very proper, for someone from Odessa, Ukrainian was inseparable from the events of the past and had to remain uncorrected; “in Western” was his, and “to Western Ukraine” belonged to a different generation). These hunting parties stuffed themselves, like sardines in a tin, into the deranged freight train #500-J that chugged from one station to the next with no order or timetable. Its ghoulish nickname was 500-Joy because it was liable to stop without warning somewhere in the middle of a field and stay there for five hours, or five minutes, and start again just as suddenly, leaving behind a shedding of the unlucky ones who jumped off to relieve themselves. So they learned not to look for cover, and just rolled off the train’s platforms and roofs—head over heels, men and women—all in a rush to bare their behinds with a single feverish thought: to make it, and to claw back into one’s spot before someone else had taken it. This constant fear of losing the spot was branded in Uncle Volodya’s memory, and his spot on that train must’ve been especially hard to win—a starved teenager shoving and elbowing grown men—but I was captivated by the vision of that sexless orgy of the hurried mass expulsion of bodily fluids and solids along the train, the ease with which people could be transformed into a herd.

Those treks after bread were no safer than the ones undertaken in the name of breadwinning today—migrations after work, to Westerner Europe, the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe, aboard a sooty Icarus across Poland and Slovakia, where every clump of trees might conceal an eager Russian gang, quick to block the road with their Kalashnikovs aimed at the bus. Uncle Volodya, who made the rooftop journey on the 500-Joy in the spring of 1947, remembered a flashlight blinding him in the middle of the night and the icy needle of steel against his throat. “Got money, boy?”

Incredibly, he thought to fold back both sides of his threadbare jacket exposing its empty inside pockets and to squeal the first thing that came to mind, “Going to my brother’s,” and they left him alone, didn’t frisk him; though he did have money—carefully sewn by his mother into his boxer shorts—he could not say the same about a brother. (What he must’ve had was a dream, a boy’s secret dream, an orphan’s dream of a brother, an older one for sure, who would come back from the front, beat down every offender, would protect and defend—and the dream did protect him.) In their eyes—the eyes of dirty, famished people who hurriedly washed the railroad embankments with steaming urine—the then newly annexed Galicia—in its eighth year of being whipped, along and across, by frontlines and now a guerilla war—still retained the glow of “Europe,” an oasis of unimaginable luxuries. It beckoned much as the new, Schengen Europe beckons today’s Ukrainian migrant workers—and to those who were lucky enough to make it, it bestowed generously of its riches: a sack of dried biscuits for some, two bags of buckwheat and a bag of dried peas for others, and for the luckiest ones—a packed, shaken-down, and leveled sack of flour. Mom’s older sister, Lyusya, may she rest in peace, managed somehow to carry precisely such a marvel on her back all the way back, with a change of trains in Zdolbuniv, and that’s how 1947 did not become, despite the Ukrainian plans of the mustachioed Generalissimo, a conclusive repeat of 1933, so the UIA can be credited with winning at least this war, one that’s not mentioned in a single history textbook. Not a single food-rationing crew in the late forties would risk going into a Western Ukrainian village to “shake down grain”; if it foolishly did, it would be remembered as last seen on its way to that village, as Uncle Volodya told it, with a satisfied predatory smirk, which still held something of the boy in awe of a friendly power—someone’s in for an ass-kicking!—but which also was colored with a tinge of resentment and something a bit like envy, as in, sure, easy for them to fight, they didn’t swell on the ice with me, Where’d they be then? Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.

Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”

And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.

I just could not leave the photograph with Artem. It was mine—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by someone else’s will. That’s what it had felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)

The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.

And beyond that, I really knew nothing.

***

“What are you thinking about?”

“Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.

Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about it.)

Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your ecstatically adoring gaze that only lacked a pair of hands folded in prayer—of course you were intimidated, with me being a TV star and all), what shook me most, wrung me more cruelly than ever, was the expression I saw on your face when our lips parted: the look of a man who climbed to the top of the mountain, then turned around to look at the valley, and saw the earth swallow the city where he’d come from. You looked at me as if you didn’t recognize me, as if I oscillated and changed shapes every instant, and the flickering of ecstasy and horror on your face mirrored my shape-shifting, and for an instant, before we looked away, I glimpsed through your eyes the ground parting beneath; silently, with the sound on mute, buildings collapsed one after the other, as if filmed from an airplane by an awestruck cameraman.

Since then, the sensation became my own, and every so often I feel its short mournful pang: I am standing at the top of the mountain and you are looking at me, and there’s nowhere for me to go if I wanted to leave.

“You’ll work it all out,” you say, and your certainty sounds unshakeable.

I only now figured out why I felt so ambushed by your Ukrainian when we first met: you move through life with too much confidence. You’re too calm and composed, as if you have not the slightest inkling that one could be otherwise. Among those of us over thirty, who grew up with the constant awareness of our Ukrainian-ness, such natural, unconstrained dignity is rare: composure like yours, even posture like yours, requires three to four generations of ancestors unfamiliar with any kind of internalized social humiliation—not something possible yet in post-twentieth-century Ukraine.

Give me your hand. So hot.

You have wonderful hands; the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen on a man—strong, finely sculpted, with long, well-bred fingers. Why am I not Rodin, or at least someone in marketing? I’d put your hand on a woman’s knee and hold the shot. Buy Hanes hosiery. This must be the limit of my imagination, the best I can do—commercials.

Don’t let me go, you hear me? I know nothing—I don’t even know if this is what people call love, or if I’m possessed again by someone else’s will. Sometimes I think I am. I don’t know what to want from the future and whether we even have a future. I don’t know anything. Just hold me, okay? Don’t let me go. Just like this.