Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Don’t go digging in there! What do you want from it? Leave it alone.

You think it’s fear talking? Well, yes, it is fear! Fine, if that’s what it is. How do you live without fear? Everything will come apart—look at it coming apart now! A whole state came apart as soon as people stopped being afraid. I’m fifty-six, and I spent my whole life being afraid: I was afraid of my father, of my bosses, afraid to make a mistake at work. And now I’m done; I’m not afraid of anything—myself, I’m not afraid for myself. If only you could see how...horrific. The braids she had...in the picture...my mother, Lea Goldman...two braids, out over the front of her shoulders...black. Nikushka has such beautiful hair, too, so thick. Grandma Dunya braided it for her, for school. No one will see that picture. Maybe when she herself is fifty. When she has her own children, grandchildren. If she is curious to know...I saved the picture. Of the whole file, I saved the picture...I didn’t show it to anybody. And I won’t...God forbid...knock on wood...I’ll knock on every tree along this shore, with my head if I have to....

And pressing buttons—no, thank you! I’ve got a child; she needs me. My own mother didn’t need me. She didn’t think twice about abandoning a tiny baby, not even two months old, to be raised by strangers—fine! But my daughter needs me, my only flesh and blood. Everything I have—it’s all for her! The grandparents’ apartment, the dacha—my father-in-law basically built it with his own hands. She wanted the Conservatory—go ahead, child, do the Conservatory! We’ll manage; while I’m alive, she won’t want for anything! Let her study. God willing, she might make it...as some soloist, she’s talented. And she’s got ambition too, thank God, I gave her that, too—the confidence I never had; I was wolf cub. Whatever I could—I’ve given her! And as long as I’m alive, that’s how it will be. My conscience is clear; I’m not guilty before anyone.

Oh, oh, here it goes, here it goes! Come on, sweetie, don’t you fight it, I’m not that kind of a...hang on now...easy...

Fucking bitch! Ripped off the hook. A nice hook, too, made in Japan. You stupid fish, now you’ll just go swimming around with a hook in your lip, till you die.

Darn it...such a shame. It was something big, too; could’ve been a catfish—they’re wily! Or a perch. Agh, I’m sorry.

Is there anything left? In that bottle?

Alright, forget it—have another one! To our parents...and to my...to Ivan Tryfonovych Boozerov who gathered us all here today. Let him rest in peace...on the other side. If it’s out there, of course—the other side.

The file? What file, Daryna Anto...damn it...Anatoliivna? There is no file under that name...Lea Goldman. Never was.

Or, yes, you could say that: it did not constitute historical value. You’re a sharp cookie, miss. A quick learner.

Yad Vashem is where you find Lea Goldman, Daryna Anatoliivna. Yad Vashem, in Israel. She perished in the Przemysl ghetto, in 1942. Their whole family’s there, the list: David Goldman, Borukh Goldman, Iosyp, Etka...Ida Goldman-Berkovitz, and Lea Goldman, too. And it’s better that way—for everyone.

Take a pickle. Go ahead, have one, don’t be shy....

I’m not done telling you about Ivan Tryfonovych, though. I promised you, didn’t I—about your case...about those who died...the woman who died on November 6, 1947—just as you wanted. No, Daryna Anatoliivna, I can’t help you there—I couldn’t find you a document like you wanted. But I’ll tell you something else...about Ivan Tryfonovych again; I think you’ll find it interesting. Hang on just a second; let me get a new hook tied on here. Do me a favor, Ambrozievich, pass me that little jar. Yeah, that one over there, so I don’t have to get up again...thank you.

Plop! I love that sound—“Fishy, fishy in the brook, Papa catch him on a hook.” Isn’t this a great spot I showed you? So quiet—do you hear it? Every rustle...you’d never guess you were in the center of a city. It’s because of the monastery, or else they’d have carved all this up into developments long ago. A little further that way, by the South Bridge, they’ve already got a few little palaces going, did you see? You can’t get to the water anymore—it’s all fenced off. I won’t live long enough to save up for one of those, but hey.

Yes, so...

So I’ll just tell you like this, without any documents. What was it you said—“it’s not a needle in a haystack”—was that it? You were right; it’s not a needle, by any means. So, dear Daryna Anatoliivna...on your day of November 6, 1947 my father who raised me, Ivan Tryfonovych Boozerov, was in command of a combat mission on the territory of the Lviv Oblast. That’s where he was wounded, subsequently discharged. At the seizure of a dugout bunker occupied by four, as they were called then, bandits, as we now say—partisans. Or rebel fighters—however you please. Four: three men and one woman. And you were looking for five, yes? Well, that depends...you could count them as five. The woman, it later turned out, was pregnant. Yes. They found out later, when they collected all the remains—it turned into a bloody meat grinder there; Father was lucky he stood far enough away. Of the guys who were out front, he said, there were only arms and legs left, strung around the trees. Like in that kids’ song, Nika used to sing when she was little, to a cartoon tune, “Off with your arms, off with your legs, out go the eyes, and we lay you to rest...”

That’s the story I have for you, Daryna Anatoliivna. A family saga, so to speak...

Now, who those four people were and what their names were—I’m sorry I can’t help you with that. Father, may he rest in peace, he might have remembered...but there’s no one left, except myself, who is aware of this fact from his biography. So it’s all just between you and me...among friends...so that you wouldn’t go looking for something you may later not be so glad to have found.

The documents are gone, long gone. I checked.

Well...I suppose, you could put it that way—I made sure.

Well, what do you want from me? I had a young child. What good would it do for the girl to find out, when she got older, that her gramps—albeit adoptive, but still her gramps, as good as her own—the man who left us his apartment, secured our position...everything we have, all thanks to him...what good would it do for her to learn one day how he fought pregnant women?

And I’ll tell you what: it’s harder to build than to break. So much effort...you spend all your life working, trying hard to put down some roots, make a home, a life—and to have it all ruined with a single blow, whoosh!—and down it goes? A single shove?

You don’t want it, trust me. It’s better this way...for everyone. I’m the one to know.

“And now,” Pavlo Ivanovych said in a surprisingly sober voice that made both Daryna and Adrian jump, “pull out your dictaphone. And erase this recording.”

FILE DELETED

***

“What are you talking about?”

“Gela, of course. The fact that she was pregnant. You could tell at a glance. The smile she had—a DaVinci smile, a Mona Lisa smile. That’s what the secret was. She was pregnant. Now it all makes sense.”

“I wonder—did Granny Lina know?”

“I bet she did. Yeah, she should have—it was October when Gela went to see them...I bet that’s why she went, actually—to tell her family. To share. Alone in the woods, among men, being pregnant for the first time—that’s no picnic. And plus—of course!—she needed to make arrangements for the family to take the child. Her sister was already married; your dad was a toddler—they could have easily made it look like Gela’s baby was theirs, their second. That’s it, Aidy; that’s exactly what happened! Any woman in her shoes would have run home like that, disregarding any danger, and no MGB would’ve stopped her.”

“You women are something else.”

“Why?”

“Nothing...it never ceases to amaze me.”

“Still, think how she kept silent about it her whole life...Granny Lina.”

“A fantastic granny you had. A beast!”

“Beast?”

“No, I mean, you said beast, and it rang a bell, somehow, in my mind.... Something linked to that word...hmm. Well, that’s alright, it might come to me later.... ”

“There’s only one thing I don’t understand: Why did he say four? Why don’t they have the fifth man on their lists? He couldn’t possibly have survived a bloodbath like that.”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that our dear Pavlo Ivanovych did not tell us everything?”

“I don’t think he was lying. No, love, I believe him. A gang rape, a suicide—that’s not something a normal person would ever make up about his own mother, even if he’d never seen her.”

“Operative word there being normal. Not so much with his background. God, if only we could play that recording! There were all kinds of things that didn’t jive.”

“Yeah, he threw me off royally, catching me with my dictaphone like that...I felt like one of those fish he kept yanking out of the water.”

“You poor fishy! You worked so hard with that thing. My homegrown conspirator.”

“Well, I knew that if I asked him up front he wouldn’t let me record him. And it’s not like I wanted to publicize what he said—it’s just for me, to help remember things. I can’t get over it—how did he figure out I was recording him? That I had a dictaphone in my pocket?”

“He smelled it! What if he really is—talented?”

“No kidding. Nika said he wanted to pursue mathematics when he was young. But he does have a beautiful voice, did you notice?”

“You bet. Our special attraction—a singing KGB man!”

“Not KGB—SBU.”

“Same shit.”

“I wouldn’t say that.... But you’re right; it sort of threw me off every time he’d start singing. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. It’s like his whole self is patched together from different pieces, no? With the frame sticking out here and there. What kind of things would you say didn’t jive?”

“All kinds of stuff. You can’t quantize so much bull to the proper bit rate.”

“Sweetie, could you please use words I can understand?”

“Sorry. He wore me out, that guy. The whole time, ever since I first met him, I have had this nagging feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before—I told you—or if not him, then maybe someone who looks like him, and I can never see him clearly with this weird feeling in the back of my mind, the picture’s always doubling up on me.”

“Same here. Could it be because he’s lived someone else’s life?”

“There’s that, too.... Who from his generation has lived his or her own life?”

“My dad. Your mom.”

“They haven’t. They died. That’s the thing.”

“Still, Aidy. You shouldn’t compare his lot with anyone else’s, God help him...”

“Well, whatever, that’s not my point, actually. The whole time he was talking I tried to figure out where he was going with it—and he’s got more logic gaps in his tale than you can count; it messes up your algorithm. Take his mother, again. If she was in the Przemysl ghetto, then back in ’42, it couldn’t have been the Red Army that freed her, I’m sorry. She had to have escaped somehow—so how did she run into the NKVD? And what on earth possessed them to send her, a Jewish woman, under cover into Bandera’s underground? Nonsense, it doesn’t add up. And he just kept hammering on his ‘she was a Soviet citizen!’ As if every Soviet citizen automatically had to be an agent. Like fucking serfs.”

“C’mon, that was just the natural logic of that government. That’s what a citizen was for them—a serf, a subject. Like in the feudal days. You don’t remember it—you were little then...”

“Yeah, and the new government just thinks we’re morons. Go vote for whoever we tell you to, and don’t make a fuss. If you’re not nickeled, you’re dimed.”

“Yep. Sounds about right.”

“Are you feeling sorry for him, or something?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I thought you might be. He doesn’t seem to bother you...”

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Finally there’s an answer that explains it all. Thank you.”

“What are upset about, love? You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Me? Of him? You’re crazy!”

“No, wait a minute, you actually are.... Look at me, come on, you goof...now. What’s wrong? Captain, my captain—what’s bugging you?”

“I don’t know, Lolly. It’s...it’s all weird. Weird. The whole time back there, he was talking to you—just you; I might as well not have been there, a fifth wheel, you know, the lady’s escort. Someone to pour the vodka, sure, lend a hand. And the way you listened to him...wait, let me finish! I understand, he played a very meaningful role in your life. Your mother’s life. But you cannot forget that it was an exchange and not just an act of charity for which you must forever hang on to his every word. You don’t need to be a genius to see that your mom made something big click in his head, too—it’s obvious. A gear without which he may not have survived at all. He’s pretty hung up on the suicide theme, did you notice?”

“I did, sure. I actually think that’s his greatest fear as far as Nika goes. Lest she find out that her grandmother killed herself, I mean.... He let something slip about a curse, remember?”

“Of course, and Nika’s another thing.... He is making her your responsibility, no? Didn’t you see—passing her on to you, so to speak, as your inheritance! For you to take her as your friend, or who knows what...your charge. By the same old curatorial logic, from the KGB. So basically, he and you have your own story. And I’m just sitting there, pouring vodka into plastic cups. Meanwhile, it was his old man who carried out my great-aunt’s death sentence—and Boozerov has been aware of this ever since I first submitted my inquiry to the archives, last fall. But if it weren’t for his daughter, the concert—like hell he would’ve told us this. Or that Gela was pregnant.”

“You know, I can’t shake that off—this must have been done in some office of theirs, right? The examination, the analysis of the remains.... It was someone’s job to do that, can you imagine? Collect the mangled bodies, sort them: ours over here, the other side’s—over there...the mother here, the fetus—separately, over there.... ”

“Hang on, you’ll make me lose my point. It’s not the different pieces, as you said, that are patched together—it’s as if there were three different processes, and all of them nonlinear, oscillatory, a wave system—the Schrödinger equation. That’s why he’s out of focus, you know, that’s why he sort of...flickers—there are more dimensions than you or I can each individually perceive. Do you understand?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Okay, did you take advanced geometry in school? Do you remember how to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plain?”

“Draw three different views, from three sides?”

“Something like that. So what I’m saying, it’s the same here. The world I—we—live in has fewer dimensions than we need to get an accurate representation of the process, so all we get is a set of random views, and not even a complete set. And the views you get don’t match the ones I get—like, say, if you had the front view, and I got the plane view...and I don’t fall into your dimension, I’m not inside that field.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’m just a go-between, Lolly. Like a semiconductor, you see? And occasionally, a catalyst. And that’s how it’s been for me the whole time, from the beginning: I function as an add-on to your project. Your project that involves my family and for which you needed a guide. A go-between...”

“Weird...”

“No shit.”

“No, it’s weird because sometimes I feel precisely the opposite. That it’s my project that functions as a go-between—between you and me.”

“And I’ve had enough of this going between. I want there to be the two of us, together, and no one else. I want to be your man, period. Your husband, not a go-between. Do you see the difference, or do I have to explain that too?”

“You goof...that’s who you are.”

“I’m not sure, baby. I’m not sure.”

“I am. You cover me. You have my back, all the time; you don’t even notice it because it comes so naturally to you. This is why you got so worked up, too—because you took the whole Pavlo Ivanovych, the brunt of him, and now the aftershock of it is rattling you.”

“Hm. You think?”

“Can’t you feel it yourself?”

“I don’t know.... He really got under my skin, that’s for sure. Like I got some virus from him and it went running through my bones—smashing everything in its way...bowling. And on top of that, I had to swallow it all as I listened. Just think: I’ve been working like a fucking ox for seven years, kissing up to God-knows-who, fighting for every little old tchotchke tooth and nail, trying to save at least a bit of our past, and underwriting the SBU’s fucking budget with my hard-earned coin on top of that; and there he sits, paid, again, with my hard-earned coin—after he burned the archives! And the thing is—he’s still convinced he did the right thing, and you can’t get through to him!”

“Leave him alone, Aidy, others have gotten through already—left plenty of holes in him. He’s a colander.”

“Sure, someone tells you a sob story about his difficult childhood, and you’re ready to feel sorry for him!”

“Someone has to do that, too, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, yeah. Alright, don’t take it the wrong way.”

“I’m not. All I’m saying is he didn’t have any other choice. None of them did—those who were raised on lies, with the natural course of life violated. Arbitrarily warped. Can you imagine what a flimsy existence he must lead—without roots, up in the air? A sort of a show that he plays for himself over and over and over. And there’s no way to keep it going other than to guard, sledgehammer in hand, against the natural order of things reasserting itself, because if you miss a blink—it’ll break through, like mud through that dam.... ”

“Yeah.”

“So much wisdom. So much understanding. Where can I get myself some of that?”

“Why? You disagree?”

“You women just kill me...just sit there, philosophizing, like it’s all water off a duck’s back!”

“It’s all because you covered me. Shielded me bravely with your own body, you could say. Took the brunt of the negative-energy assault. Or, maybe more appropriately, of the informational assault?”

“You just keep kissing up to me...”

“I’m not kissing up; I’m telling you like it is. You are my hero. My knight in shining armor. My Chip and Dale. My Ninja Turtle.”

“Shut up. You’re mean.”

“But wise—you said so yourself.”

“You know I’ve got a whale of a headache...from back there, on the water.”

“You poor thing. Take an Advil.”

“Nah, a cup of hot tea—and off to bed. Lord. Some freaking day we had...I have to say, you seem to be just generally super calm recently. Sort of distanced...”

“I must be slowly developing the ability not to give a damn. What else can I do?”

“No, I’m serious. I noticed it back when you came home from your meeting with Vadym, and I was telling you about Yulichka. Things don’t seem to get to you the way they used to; they don’t affect you as much.... ”

“Is this a bad thing? That they don’t?”

“Hey. Kiddo. What if you are pregnant?”

“Oy!”

“What’s to oy about? What would be so terrible about that?”

“What about it?”

“I just saw this...apparently, I left it on—after I erased the stuff.... Or did I not lock it, and it came on accidentally in my purse?”

“You mean, it was recording the whole way home?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, look, it’s on! It’s still rolling...”

“No shi—”

CLICK.

***

It is real. It exists.

Two lines. Two blood-red vertical lines, exactly in the middle. Like a pair of tiny, very straight capillaries that have swelled up and begun to pulsate, instantaneously, and of their own volition.

Over 99% accuracy.

This has happened. And it cannot be undone. She can close your eyes, flush away the test, not tell anyone, and pretend for a while (How long?) that this did not happen; it was just an illusion, a mirage, a sudden instance of astigmatism, double vision. No one else has seen this; no one could testify that there were two lines.

But two is how many there are.

And this is indisputable. Regardless of whether anyone else has seen it. It just—is.

This cannot be replayed. She cannot delete it from her computer, she cannot set the clock back to the “time before,” she cannot say to the darkness, where she cannot see either the director or the cameraman, “I’m sorry, I misspoke there, let’s go back and record again from this point, here, yes.”

It is.

Well, hello then, she thinks—a single breath of her entire being.

And instantly feels terrified.

Somewhere there, inside her, in an invisible cranny, in the self-propelling churn of her hot cells. (Are they actually hot? What is the temperature, pressure, the relative moisture of air in there? Is there even enough air?) Still no one, still not an existence. No machine can find you. But you already are; you are already there. Here.

Like looking into the wrong end of a telescope—a dizzying flight, an immensely long, spiraling tunnel with a golden speck of light at the far end, and coming from there, a moving black dot. She can’t see its shape yet from this far away, but that’s just a matter of time: its approach is irreversible, its velocity known.

Two red vertical lines on the narrow strip of the test stick. The first portrait of a future person.

Of her child.

Ripened: the word surfaces in her memory, something dropped there like a seed from what seems like a thousand years ago. No one speaks like that anymore—ripened—who spoke like that, Grandma Tetyana?

And right away—the next frame, scorchingly vivid, as if it’s just been digitally remastered (Where does it all lie hidden, in what vaults?): little Darochka, Odarka, as her grandmother called her (and she didn’t like it, pouted at Grandma: how crude!), listens, with a massive down blanket pulled all the way over her head (when you dive under a down blanket, you must tuck your feet under you right away and pull your nightdress over them, so as not to lose the warmth: the sheets are stiff and cold, the bed boundless like a snowy desert; in daytime a fluffed-up pyramid of sundry pillows towers on its expanse, pillowcases decorated with strips of embroidery and openwork, whose patterns are also imprinted in her memory as they were on her cheek when she woke up in the morning—you could run your finger over every stitch). The doors are open from the dark around her (a tunnel) to where the fire glows in the stove, where they are talking: her mom (she is the one who brought Darochka to visit Grandmother), Grandma Tetyana, and Aunt Lyusya. Grandma talks loudly as rural people, unaccustomed to whispering so as not to wake someone else, usually do, and Mom keeps shushing at her—every time she does, all three peer from their end of the tunnel into the room with the enormous wooden bed, where Darochka has hidden. Then Grandma Tetyana inquires—loud as a churchbell—“Is she asleep?” and the conversation resumes at the same volume as before.

Darochka is waiting for Mom to come to bed with her (then it’ll be warm), and words she doesn’t quite understand, the resonant and mysterious ripened among them—at first Darochka thinks it’s about a plant, but then realizes it is not—waft toward her, churning her sleep like oars beating on water: “When I was ripened with you, it happened to me too,” rises Grandma Tetyana’s voice (a contralto), and Darochka wishes desperately that her eyes weren’t so heavy and that she could grasp what it is they are talking about, but she can’t—all she gets is a tinge of something unattainably mysterious and solemn, so solemn that Mom has forgotten about Darochka and says something to Grandma Tetyana in a lowered voice, while tossing one new log after another into the stove, to keep the fire going, like in Darochka’s fairytale rhymes, burning high and bright, and Grandma goes on “and I knew I’d have a girl because I had a dream.... ”

A dream? She’s had no dreams. No special dreams at all—except that one, Adrian’s last dream in which they were together, in the same movie theater the whole night—breaking out of it, every so often, as if for a smoke out in the darkness, surfacing to the light of the nightlamp. She remembers that light shining on Adrian’s head as he bent over the bedside table, the hair at the nape of his neck, a few backlit ruffled strands of it when he sat up to write himself a note, barely awake; and the recollection instantly makes the room go misty before her eyes, as they swell with tears of tenderness, and without realizing it, she spreads her knees like a cello player and touches herself where her yearning furrow took the fallen seed: it’s Aidy’s; it came from him. It’s his.

That’s when it happened. Now she feels like she has known this from the beginning. From that very night. Oh, that night. In the mirror above the sink, Daryna sees her lips stretch in a spontaneous spellbound smile. How could such profusion of life be contained in such a short amount of time? Years packed tight, like electrons in an atom’s nucleus, something else from nuclear physics that Aidy explained....

Love me. Love me all the time—and together, knit indivisibly into one, grown into each other, we enter the same tunnel, the same movie theater, and leave it together, too, wincing at the daylight, unable to tell which limbs are whose, and before that, you were inside me again, while I slept, thrust after thrust, the film rolls; don’t leave me; it’s moist, fertile, fecund; we melt the snow below us; the ground washes away; we are lying in a pool of tears on the bare surface of a sad planet where everything once went wrong and must begin anew—bacteria, amoebas, the first man and the first woman, a new era, did you see? Yes, I did, they all died, and we return again to the place where the same movie is being played for the two of us, the film rips into white flashes inside the single mind knit from our two minds, machine-gun fire goes right through me, the fiery bullets explode inside me, a cannonade.

How many times did it happen that night, seven, eight? He was the one who counted, then laughed in the morning that he couldn’t keep track, either; and she remembered everything as a whole, a single roiling river, hot as lava, that rolled and rolled carrying her with it.... How much life they were given in a single night! Their wedding night. Their wedding, that’s what it was—the night of their wedding. Their marriage—to the toll of someone else’s deathbell.

A family now. Forever.

They married us, Daryna thinks, speaks the thought to herself from beginning to end, completely, for the first time—gives voice to the idea, which, until now, merely stirred inside her, a half-guess afraid to become words: those who died that night in the bunker, married us. They knew.

The tile floor feels cold beneath her feet, and she pulls her nightgown over her knees, unseeing.

It’s pointless now, as it always is in moments when you realize that something irreversible has happened, to let her mind ramble, feverishly shuffling the deck of circumstances this way and that, to pull and tug at them like on a purse caught in the subway doors: How, why, it can’t be, how could it possibly have happened—she’s been swallowing those pills, expensive as hell, religiously, and by the calendar, too, it seemed too early? What went on between them that night could not be contained by any calendar or pharmacological formula—companies fold, factories go under. That was stronger.

And now she has it inside her.

Hello, then.

Everything happened of its own accord. Everything has been done for her—she has no say in it, no will of her own. Someone else’s will is at work, however—whose?—and all she has left to do was to obey it. Accept it. Lie under it.

She is a bit stunned with this new feeling—and at the same time, deep in her heart, strangely flattered: as if she’s been jerked forth from the ranks of indiscriminate figures lined up on a drilling field, pointed out by the commander in chief himself. On the other side of the field, a fire burns in a stove in the darkness, and the three Fates—Mom, Aunt Lyusya, and Grandma Tetyana—turn to look at her with the same expression on their faces: the serene, all-understanding, and unclouded look that is brought to women’s faces by the knowledge of the hardest and most important human work on earth. They turn, peer: Is she asleep? Awake? She’s awake already—come on then, come over here, to our side...

How many of them are out there, on the other side, disappearing into the darkness, no longer visible to her eyes? An army. An unseen, uncounted underground army, the most powerful in the world, one that pursues its war, silent and determined, over centuries and generations—and knows no defeat.

“Women won’t cease giving birth.” That’s what Adrian wrote down on the pack of cigarettes by the light of the lamp that night. Someone said this to him, in his dream. Someone told him to remember it. He wrote it down and wondered later what this might mean and why such an obvious truth should have appeared in such a near-death dream—a dream about war, to boot.

Here’s the answer. In her hand.

An army, yes. A second front. No, the other front—so much stronger than the first.

The two red (growing darker already) vertical lines on the test strip—this is her draft notice.

The only thing she can still do—the only thing still within her power and under her control—is to desert. This option is always available, with every draft. The black dot’s movement from the distant light at the end of the tunnel can be stopped; there is a way—she could blow up the tunnel.

Even a year ago that’s what she probably would have done, Daryna thinks, deeply moved, as if in response to events happening to someone else (“distanced” she involuntarily recalls hearing Adrian say, and this additional evidence of his presence inside her prompts another wave of warmth to fill her). Even six months ago, less than that—when was this?—yes, at Irka Mocherniuk’s birthday: the women sat in the kitchen, and Irka kept lighting up and then stubbing out her just-lit cigarette in alarm (“What am I thinking!”), smearing her mascara on her cheeks and telling them how she’s been trying to get pregnant with her new boyfriend, and how it’s not working, and how she madly, desperately wants to have another child; Igorchyk is a big boy already, and she just can’t help it—she’s got this urge to squeeze and kiss every baby in a stroller she sees in the street—the same eternal female talk around a fire, where each one chimes in with her own “and that’s how it was for me” by means of counsel, and everyone wants to hear it, the principle that was borrowed and then appropriated, without acknowledgement or credit, by Alcoholics Anonymous. And all of a sudden, they all ganged up on Daryna, like a flock of hens, pecking at her from every side: What about you, Sis, what are thinking, you’re thirty-nine already, don’t you know they automatically put every baby born after thirty in the high-risk group; you don’t live in Sweden in case you haven’t noticed, so what’s the matter, what are you waiting for, what do you mean “I don’t want to,” what do you mean you’re afraid? Everyone’s afraid and everyone pushes them out, you’re just stupid!

And she, backed into a corner, answered honestly and, to her own surprise, as clearly as if she’d been reading prepared text for the sound mixer, that her own survival cost too much for her to dare take on the responsibility for someone else’s. She remembered these words because after she spoke them, for a moment, there was silence, the girls went quiet. Not because they granted her point, Daryna sensed, but because this was a line from a different script. From a different front—whose existence they, of course, acknowledged, and which they were perfectly willing to treat with due respect, but which really, secretly, somewhere in their very heart of hearts, they did not take seriously: they knew something more important.

Even a year ago—yes, quite possibly. She’d have tortured herself for a couple days, wavered, cried—and then she’d have gone to get an abortion. Although back then she had, among other things, a secure job with a full benefits package. Now she has to fend for herself. And without any especially exhilarating prospects, truth be told. She ought to be pulling her hair out: Of all things, a baby’s not what I need right now! Forget me—hell knows what’s going to happen to this country in six months!

And yet, somehow, all this no longer seems important. Instead, it all feels exactly like lines from a different script.

This is important: She doesn’t have it in her to blow up the tunnel. This she knows for certain. The mere idea of it, detached and foreign, from a previous life, starts a drum beating under her skin and the wind howling in her ears, like bursts of machine-gun fire punctuated by explosions—Daryna shudders and looks at her arm: it’s covered in goose bumps. How strange that this is her arm. That these are her feet on the tile floor. That it is her thigh—so large—draped over by the shroud of her nightgown.

Her body, as her will, no longer belongs to her—it is no longer her. It ceased coinciding with her. It was meant for one more person, turns out, from the very beginning. A vessel. Ripened.

Because all this has already happened before—she has seen the tunnel explode. She saw it from inside, the way no ultrasound machine or any other contraption can show it. She and Adrian were shown this—no, only she was shown this that night, he did not see it—“The way you moaned...it scared me a little.”—“It really seemed a lot like dying.” No, even before that night, earlier, she was shown this right away, in the beginning, when she first glanced at the photograph in which a young woman in a rebel army uniform, squeezed between two men as between the millstones of fate she had chosen for herself, glowed at the camera with her otherworldly motherhood: a white flash like a thousand suns exploding at once or spotlights fired up in the dark of night—and the earth flies up in a towering black wave. And that’s it, the end. The tunnel is buried. No one will ever climb out.

Only the tapping from below—indistinct, uneven, going on for years, decades: someone wants to be heard, someone is not giving up, someone is calling to be let out...

I was wrong, Daryna thinks. All this time, the entire eighteen months (Is that how long it’s been already? That’s how long we’ve been together?) I believed that Gela called me to her death. But she didn’t—it was the death of her child.

That’s what was tormenting her.

But eighteen, or even twelve months ago, the then Daryna Goshchynska—a well-known journalist, the host of Diogenes’ Lantern, a successful self-made woman who posed for covers of women’s magazines and represented a status trophy for men who are driven around in company-owned Lexuses—would not have understood something like this. She had to change first.

They, the dead, helped her.

Over on the other side of the field, where the fire burns, the darkness begins to lift slowly, and behind the backs of her three Parcae, Daryna sees Gela. She sees the women of Adrian’s line—the ones she knows only from his family photos: Mom Stefania (this is the first time Daryna addresses her that way, in her mind—up until now she was always Aidy’s mom) and Granny Lina and Great-Grandmother Volodymyra, Mrs. Dovgan, and some other ladies, from the ’30s, ’20s, teens, the beginning of the past century, with little cloche hats pulled down over their eyebrows, silk bands, tall laced boots—of course, they are all related to the one who is inside her, he or she is theirs, too, their blood; they have a claim—and they mix in with my Grandma Tetyana and Aunt Lyusya, as if for a wedding photo together.

How could it be, Daryna thinks with quiet astonishment (if it is possible to be astonished quietly—but she can; she is adapting to their ways, to the unclouded, all-understanding serenity of those dead victors who finally won their war)—how could it be? Why didn’t anyone ever tell her that it all began so long ago, long before she was born—that one famine year when Aunt Lyusya got from Great-Aunt Gela that sack of flour that kept Daryna’s mother alive, that that’s when they had met, these two women who have now become family, only Aunt Lyusya did not speak of this to anyone until she died, she had promised not to tell—and did not?

But how do I know this, where does this certainty come from, this sealed, spellbound knowledge—was this also in the dream that night? Gela did not choose me—Gela simply followed her flour to find me. She followed the tracks of the life she once saved—in exchange for the one that had been cut short inside her.

Well then, hello. Can you hear me? Do you have any idea in there, inside me, how many people had to work—and how hard!—to call you forth from the far end of that tunnel?

You know, I’ve seen you. That’s what I now think. I clearly remember that dream having a child in it—a little girl, maybe two, no more, with Gela’s golden braids. She was smiling, laughing at me, and I told Aidy who was also there to see her: I’ll have a girl.... Why did you laugh? Were you happy to see me? A blonde little girl—like the Dovgans, their blood. Aidy’s built more like the Dovgans than the Vatamanyuks, too, only he’s not blonde...I had a dream. Grandma Tetyana, how I wish you were still here—back then, thirty years ago, I was too young to go sit at the stove with the women, tossing logs into the fire—could Mom have remembered what dream it was you had before she was born, whether it was the same as mine? You had two little boys (“lads” you called them, Grandma Tetyana, country-style, no diminutives)—the three-year-old Fed’ko, a year younger than Aunt Lyusya, and the other son, who stayed only a few hours, not living long enough for a name—both were gone in ’33, my unrealized uncles, may they rest in peace. And girls (“gals” as you called them, Grandma Tetyana)—they’re tougher, hardier—“lustier” as you used to say, Grandma Tetyana, people don’t speak like that anymore....

Well then, hello.

Daryna puts the test aside (the lines have turned beet red, but are still there) and feels her legs: ice-cold. And she didn’t even notice when she got cold. A new, unfamiliar anxiety for her own body commands her—for this vessel’s fragility, whose full extent has been revealed to her it seems, only now, for how easy it is to harm—and she starts rubbing her stiff legs energetically: Should she go put on a pair of warm socks, or would it better to just jump under a hot shower—and how hot, precisely, should it be? Lordy, myriad questions pop up from nowhere, stuff that’d never crossed her mind—it’s like landing in a foreign country where you don’t recognize anything except the McDonalds. She knows nothing, absolutely nothing; she needs to read up on this right away, at least look stuff up on the Internet before she goes to see a doctor, and by the way, where should she go? She doesn’t even know that—she’ll have to ask the girls.

***

The same day, around noon, while Daryna is still on the Internet (she’s had an idea for a new column in a women’s magazine—why the topic of pregnancy is so unpopular in our culture?), her cell phone rings.

It’s Antosha, her former cameraman. A voice from her previous life, no longer a stab of pain but of quiet sadness that sooner or later smoothes over the anguish of any loss: that was a nice life she had....

“Hi, Antosha. Glad to hear from you.”

“You’re lyin’. What’s the joy hearin’ from an old knuckle-dragger like me? Yurko says he saw you the other day on Davydov Boulevard with some mensch—he still can’t get over it. Went off his feed.”

Kyiv—always a small town. On Davydov Boulevard—that must have been when they went to visit Ruslana, to see Vlada’s remaining paintings. Nina Ustýmivna’s lawyer came a bit later, so Yurko must have seen them when they were getting out of the car—why didn’t he call out to her? Still, it feels nice to hear Antosha’s words, nice to know she’s been seen with Aidy and the studio is now buzzing with gossip—she used to love that sophomorically careless, permanently simmering, as if on low heat, atmosphere of studio banter, jokes, flirting, “follies,” and parties people spent weeks planning and then months remembering. Kids, she thinks. Grown, sometimes aging kids whose job is a serious game of virtual reality.

“Don’t be jealous, Antosha,” she says, surprising herself with the maternal notes in her voice. “I still love you.”

“Alright, let’s say I believe you. What are you up to these days?”

“Oh, you know...odds and ends. Whatever comes my way...”

“A decent living?”

“Still better than the nation’s average. What’s new on your end?”

“Good for you. Our chickens came home to roost. Whole flocks of them.”

“Must be a chore to clean up after them?”

“You’ve no idea, Sis. Knee-deep in guano doesn’t begin to describe it. Censorship’s worse than in the Soviet days. I’ve got the same ol’ feeling of eating shit again—got twenty years younger!”

“You’re not that old yet, Antosha,” she says, realizing that Antosha has called her to vent. “Don’t write yourself off before your time.” (I should really shut down the computer and focus on the conversation, she thinks, regretfully—but make sure to bookmark this site for future moms first.)

“Heck, I’m not the one doing it; I’ve got help. But I’m getting too old for brown-nosin’, Dara. You know what ol’ Lukash, may he rest in peace, used to say, the one who wanted to go to jail in Dziuba’s place, except Dziuba then confessed, and Lukash just got fired from everywhere...”

“Of course I know who Lukash was—what do you think I am, a total idiot?”

“Well, this was back when you were still walking under tables and I was already working, and I remember how every word he spoke became urban legend.... So when people asked him how things were going, he’d say, ‘I might be flat on the floor, but I’m not kissing any boots.’”

“Nice. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Yep. I’m feeling a little like that myself—not kissing any boots; I’m not a boy anymore to be getting bent over like that. Let their new snot-crop do it, they’ve hired a bunch from the boonies—give them three hots and a cot and they’ll suck on anyone’s dick.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse than bad, I’m telling you. Total beck in ze Yu-Es-Es-Arr. For the news, we get instructions sent down every day: what to cover, and what words to use, and about what to pretend didn’t happen. If you’d just insert ‘our dear Comrade Brezhnev’ here and there, you could recycle your calendars.... In addition to yours, they shut down three more shows.”

He lists them and Daryna gasps—all were original programming, the kind that used to make their channel different from others, so what’s left? “Did they close Yurko’s show too?”

“They changed the format. No more live air. For anyone, wholesale, even talk shows will broadcast in recording lest someone blurt something undesirable. They’re gearing up for the elections. Instead, they bought Russian programming—cop shows, soap operas, you can imagine.”

“Are they launching the new show then? They had plans for some grand contest for young viewers—Miss New TV or something...”

“Oh, the whore school? I didn’t know you’d been apprised. No, they decided to hold off in the run-up to the elections, wait until after. Rumor has it, someone leaked to the opposition that it’s bankrolled by the porn-industry sharks, and the money trail goes all the way to the top, and the administration has no interest in another scandal; they know they’ll have enough egg on their face as it is. Did you catch the Mukachevo story?”

“Yeah, I did.”

So, Daryna thinks, Vadym drew his own conclusions from their conversation. The opposition—of course, he is a member of the opposition, isn’t he? Probably made a pretty penny on the whole thing, too: the new owners of the channel would pay for his silence regardless of whether this came to them as a friendly warning or a piece of light blackmail. The important thing is that they’ve held off with the show: stepped on the brakes, didn’t pursue it any further—Pavlo Ivanovych’s voice surfaces in her mind (file deleted)—and the hook was already cast.

Now she, too, has saved someone. Some nameless girls—the way Pavlo Ivanovych once saved her. Only, unlike herself, these girls will never find out what danger they were in. But that doesn’t matter—she’s done her job. In the run-up to the elections. Everything is now being done in the run-up to the elections, as if the end of the world has been scheduled for this one particular country, a plan for its final and irreversible subjugation by some dark forces. But it’s impossible, something in her protests: it’s absolutely impossible, how can anyone think this’ll happen, have they all gone insane—she’s having a child, for God’s sake!

“And you won’t hear a peep of it from our broadcast,” Antosha drones on. “Not a word about Mukachevo, everything’s hunkydory everywhere, the percentage of fat in butter is growing daily. Long story short, Dara, tell you what: you done good to cut out when you did. You, old witch, always had a nose better than a bloodhound—for people, for situations...we were just talking about it with the boys yesterday.”

That’s a compliment: she can almost see this conversation as it occurred in the smoking room. When you work with men, you don’t get to hope for any word of appreciation spoken to your face—they’re always watching you, waiting for you to make a misstep or just to lash out in irritation, something they can write off, among themselves, to your PMS or, better still, to your not getting any (and how would you know, she always wanted to ask these self-appointed he-men—have you fucked me?), and to restore, in that manner, their male dignity, which is chronically compromised by the presence of an independent, beautiful woman in any role other than that of an office girl. Over the years of working with them, Daryna has mastered a system of signals that must be constantly deployed, as though on a highway in hazardous conditions, to show that she is not crossing the white lines, not aiming to cut into “their” space, and depends, time after time, on their aid, being the weaker sex that she is, and only rarely, oh how rarely—she could count those occasions on the fingers of one hand—did she hear them give voice to what every last one of them must have secretly known: that she was the brains of the channel, its soul, and not merely its showy face, which could, with appropriate promotion, be just as easily replaced with someone else’s. And here it is—she’s lived to see it—belated, almost posthumous recognition sent in her wake. Nose better than a bloodhound’s—that’s their way of appreciating her now that they’ve had a chance to regret not quitting with her, the whole team together, when they could (and they could have, they had their chance—and it would have set precedent for their whole guild, and it would’ve been easier to get funding for VMOD-Film now!). Nose better than a bloodhound’s. That’s what it’s now called. Well, guys, I won’t turn it down.

No point belaboring this—no sense multiplying essences, as old Occam taught, and as Antosha likes repeating; Antosha, who always defends the basest among all likely motivations for anyone’s actions, maintaining that his chance of being wrong lies within the range of statistical error—and Daryna swipes Occam’s razor at him.

“Is that proper language? Mind your discourse, Antosha!”

“Well, I didn’t go to discoursing school, hon. You know, I’m a humble man—a shooter, as we used to say in school...but, fuck me, I’ve had enough. I’ve eaten so much shit in my Soviet days that when the same Komsomol-GB rats throw me back into it and go ‘give me ten!’ it makes me want to hurl, and booze don’t cure it anymore. Plus, one can’t be drunk his whole life!”

This is somewhat surprising, coming as it is from Antosha who always and everywhere had been the first to inquire whether drinks were included.

“So what, you looking for a job?”

“Yep. That, by the way, is why I’m calling you. Come on, out with it, is it true that you’ve bought out all the footage we got on Olena Dovganivna?”

Not I, she thinks. Vadym simply solved that problem too, while he was at it. He chatted with the guys, did them a favor, looked out for himself, and, well, didn’t forget her consult. Plus, threw her a bone to make sure she’d shut up, would never again drag Vlada’s skeleton out of his closet. No wonder he turned it all around so quickly, and without her having to remind him.

“Where’d you hear that, Antosha?”

“Not like it’s rocket science. Who other than you would want that stuff? It’s obvious whose little fingerprints are all over this. Spit it out, Sis. You got it?”

“I do.”

That’s a good question, Daryna Goshchynska thinks. A very good question indeed. She would love to know the answer. Now that the life, passed on to her down the line from Gela Dovgan, smolders somewhere inside her, a not-yet-visible spark, and at this thought a smile rolls out, by itself, onto her lips: what if she went ahead and said into the phone, as she did to Adrian about an hour earlier, “You know, I’m pregnant”?

(No, that’s not how I told Adrian. I said, “You were right, you know,” and he knew it instantly from my voice, from the way it strained to contain the triumphant bulk of the secret knowledge that cannot really be shared with anyone, even with you, my most precious, my love, you whose touch I yearn for, while you, on the other end of the city, are choking on the uncontainable shock of this new joy, while I long for it like for a drink of water on a scorching day. It would be wonderful to have you by my side the whole time, holding my hand, but what I would like best right now is to fall asleep—sink into long, translucent daytime sleep, blissfully unhurried like rapid filming, like smoke rising from a fire in a summer orchard—languor-sleep, doze-sleep, the sweet stillness of the body stripped of will, with the mind dimmed like a lamp not quite turned off—sleep through which I could still sense your presence—you working in the kitchen, you out on the balcony, carrying something from one place to another, nailing, moving things—making a place for the baby, perhaps? Noises that blend with the lisping of rain outside and the whoosh of tires on wet asphalt, with flashes of sunlight that swim around the room from the balcony door when it opens, then closes—and then you dive in with me, under my blanket, hugging me from behind, and purr in a low voice so that even asleep I can feel how hot I am, how your penis instantly hardens pressing against my buttocks—my dreams will be here cut short and will later resume at the same point; the mechanic from the ancient club of my youth will glue the film back together, and on this parallel reel that has been running before my eyes the whole time, without ever obscuring the room around me, with its shifting light, the breath of the man I love and the rain outside, there will be Gela—it is with her I most want to share this; she is the one I want to call and say: come—

and now she finally will come to me—by herself, without any go-betweens: now, that I can finally understand her, now that it’s not only she who needs me, but also I who need her—need her more than my mom, more than a sister or friend, more than any other woman in the world—

I will tell her she carries no blame. That she is now free. And also will tell her the war goes on, that the war never stops—now it is our war and we haven’t yet lost it—

and will ask her: Gela, you see things better from where you are, tell me—it is a girl, isn’t it? Will she be happy?)

“You know,” Daryna says into the phone, “she was pregnant.”

“Who?” Antosha’s voice asks, startled.

“Olena Dovganivna. She was pregnant when she died.”

“For real?”

“Uhu.”

“Get out. How’d you find out?”

“Fuck me. Pardon the discourse. His old man told him? I thought they’d signed papers like in Afghanistan—not a peep about combat operations, if anyone asks—you brought candy for the kids...”

“No, you’re right. It is the same with the GB, but his kid dug it up on his own. As an adult already.”

“Wow. Where did you find this guy?”

“Right here in Kyiv.”

“Mind-blowing,” Antosha says. She can hear him light a cigarette; his excitement spreads through the network. “Awesome. Shit...listen, Sis, so I was right? You’re gonna finish this film? By yourself?”

“Already got incorporated. As my own—don’t laugh at me—film agency. Am now hunting for cash.”

“I knew it! I knew it. I know you, you old witch...you! I’d smother you. In my arms. Tenderly. No. Hats off. Kiss the fair lady’s hand, my respect, my total respect. Goshchynska, you sly wench, take me in, will ya?”

“I...”

“You know you’ll have to shoot more footage! You got that offspring on record yet?”

“All the more so!” Antosha exclaims, delighted: he is comforted to hear that she hasn’t recruited a new shooter. “D’you think those twenty-four hours we shot are gonna do it? Fat chance!”

“Twenty-three forty,” Daryna corrects automatically, not yet believing her own ears.

“All the more so! Doesn’t matter. How much of that is rough, come on, turn on your brain now, how much of that will end up on the floor? And now that you’ve dug up how it all ended, with that firefight in which she died, you can’t do without that scene—with or without the dude, you’ve got to show that somehow. Never mind all the other stuff.... How are you going to patch it all together, without a cameraman, who are you kidding? Meaning without me, the magnificent; it’s basically my film as much as yours! Come on, Dara, what do you say?”

“Antuan, have you not heard me? I’ve got no money to pay you!”

“You mean, like, at all?” he sounds unapologetically sarcastic: the fact that she was able to get twenty-four hours of footage back from the channel appears to have instilled in Antosha a rock-solid faith in her omnipotence, the financial kind included. “Hon, you just think, how much do I really need? It’s not like you’re starting from scratch. I’ve got my own camera, and for editing I’ll talk to the boys at Science and Nature, they’re living on bread and water there and would make us a great deal. You do have to cover travel, to shoot on location, somehow, but that’s not much.... You’ve bought the footage out of there—that’s the thing, and you did it!”

This is precisely what she’s been missing—words of support from someone who knows how it’s done from the inside out, first-hand—professional support, the guild behind her, the brotherhood. Their company. Their community.

I’m gonna bawl, Daryna thinks. How deeply, it turns out, this got wedged inside her—the resentment from last fall, the insult of the boys all plugging their ears and covering their eyes at her departure, each of them already burrowing deeper into his own hole. Antosha, who would have guessed? Antosha—Occam’s Razor—the old wino with his eye eternally askance at any show of uncompensated enthusiasm, like a countryman looking at a political agitator—is he really with her? It’s true, they’ve always had an ambient sort of bond, of that easy, unforced kind that emerges when two people feel good working together—and laughing together. That’s not an afterthought (at meetings and on location they always sat together, exchanging comments and snickering); it’s important, it keeps you warm. Antosha—despite all the cynicism of his act—is a warm person, but for him to give up a sure meal on the table and follow her, on a whim, into the wild blue yonder, it is not enough to be warm; it’s biblical—either hot, or cold, and she feels almost as ashamed, as if he’d suddenly proclaimed his love for her: he’s broken the stereotype. So this film means something for him, too? Something more than the number of shooting hours, remunerated according to a contract?

“I can still manage the travel, Antosha.”

This, actually, was what she and Aidy decided—so that if she didn’t find a sponsor, she could finish the film by herself, out of pocket, only they didn’t count on having a cameraman. But this was before she learned about Gela. She needs a cameraman, oh yes she does, and it would make her happy beyond words to have Antosha do it; he’s a wiz at his job—one of those last Mohicans, old enough to have witnessed the glory of filmmaking in the Kyiv-school tradition....

“So there!” Antosha triumphs. “What else do you want? You know I don’t take up much room; I’m skinny and don’t eat much, as long as I’ve got enough for a drink, I’m happy.... You’ll be saving on me!”

“Will you work for food? I can feed you. Like Lukash. They say that’s how he lived in the ’70s—whenever he’d visit whichever writer-neighbor of his, they’d go, ‘Oh, Mykola, perfect timing, we were just sitting down to dinner, come eat with us...’”

“Yeah, that was their way of justifying their own fat mugs. Alright, woman, don’t fuss. I can always find a gig; there’s life in this old dog yet! One commercial can keep me on the road with you for a month, working for food alone, if that’s how skimpy your operation’s going to be.”

“I’m not skimpy. If I get a grant—and there’s hope—I’ll pay you.”

“I knew it! I knew it. Slave driver. If I don’t get you by the balls, I won’t get snow in winter out of you,” Antosha sounds cheerier: the official part is over, and now he can go to the bar. “So what’s next? When do we start?”

“I didn’t know you were such a romantic soul, Antosha!”

The deal has been struck, and Antosha knows it, so he can allow himself to get serious and drop his usual hayseed tone.

“Dara, I am fifty-three. And, like everyone, I have my breaking point. You can tell yourself all you want that it doesn’t matter who it is running behind with your camera—spit it, wipe it, and don’t give a fuck where it goes from there, the stuff you shot, ’cause, like, it’s not your problem...but what am I going to tell my son? ‘Serve, my boy, as Grandpa did, and Grandpa didn’t give a shit?’ That’s from my army days, sorry.... ”

“He’s in his last year, isn’t he? Will graduate this summer?”

“Yep, from the same ol’ rez. What’s out there for him? Being the escort boy for the goons? I’d rather he didn’t tell himself one day that his father had been a total cocksucker all his life. I’d rather leave something behind. Something that could make him proud of me one day.”

“Antosha,” Daryna says, feeling her throat go numb. “Antosha. We’ll make a kick-ass film, you and I. You’ll see.”

“Of course,” Antosha agrees.

“I promise you. Even if no one ever buys it—you’ll show it to your kid.”

And Daryna will show it to Nika Boozerova. And Katrusya, she must see it—even if she’s too young to understand, she’ll remember it. When she grows older, Daryna will explain. They grow up so quickly! Children—those living clocks and all we can do is try to earn their forgiveness at some point in the future. And this person who will come (a girl? with tiny blonde braids?)—how will Daryna look her (him?) in the eye when they meet if she doesn’t make this? Her film. And Antosha, he is right: the film is his, too, and not only because he worked on it. It was Antosha’s eye, always, no matter how hungover, that unerringly found the best angle, that was hiding behind the camera during every one of those twenty-four hours—Vovchyk, her show’s director, had also done a ton of work on this, but what happened to his work has always been, for Vovchyk, “not his problem.” He didn’t have any trouble letting his employers have the final word about that. Antosha has not betrayed his work. He just hasn’t, and that’s it. Is this what Aidy, when he’s appraising all that antique workmanship, calls, with such purely masculine, guild-like pride (we women can never quite say it the same way)—a master?

“Of all the shit to worry about right now, why would you pick whether anyone’ll buy the thing?” the master grumbles. “I was just so happy, you know, when I heard you got the footage out of there. Good job, Dara, I thought, you stick it to those bitches...’cause I’m telling you I’ve had it with them. You know me—I’m basically an ox: you can hitch me to the plow forever, and I won’t even moo; I’ll just swish my tail at the flies...the Ukrainian temperament, we’re all like that. Until they bend you beyond the breaking point. And then it’s the end of the line: the ox stops and you can forget your plowing. If you’d just told me you already had someone else lined up, I would be quitting the studio anyway. I’d go wherever, to hell and back, doesn’t matter. ’Cause what these bitches are cooking up there, it’s fucked up, I’m telling you. And the people have no idea, they don’t get which way the wind’s blowing.”

“You did. And I did. And I know others who did. And how many are out there that we don’t know about? It’s a big country, Antosha. They can’t just bend it however they want.”

“I’m sorry about Diogenes’ Lantern,” Antosha suddenly says. “Real sorry.”

“Uhu.”

“Devil’s Playground,” she recalls. “That’s how someone put it to me recently. I mean, he said God’s, but it’s actually the Devil’s: he’s one of those people, you know, for whom these concepts are interchangeable, God-Devil, up-down, left-right...depending on the situation, what kind of a hand they get.”

“Uhu, and they seem to be fucking everywhere...and what are you gonna do about it, huh?”

“Make a film,” Daryna says. “Make a film, Antosha. What else would we do?”

***

It will be a film about betrayal, she tells Adrian when they are walking back through Tatarka from the restoration workshop. Daryna asked to come with him to see how they cleaned old icons.

“Any. Of one’s country. Of love. Of oneself. Betrayal as a road that leads to death, but we’ve talked about that already—someone has to pay for every betrayal, one way or another, to restore the cosmic balance of forces that it violated. The greater the betrayal, the greater the sacrifice.”

“So when are you starting?”

“Tomorrow. I invited Antosha to have dinner with us, to discuss the changes to the script, he might think of something—there’re three of us now! There were three of us anyway. Without Antosha. Well, the little one hasn’t made the team yet.”

“Is that why you turned the place upside down today—you were going through your stuff?”

“Yes, and you know what I found? On my dictaphone, remember, it kept rolling in my purse on the way back from fishing with Boozerov, it recorded our entire conversation—at the very beginning, there’s a bit of Pavlo Ivanovych talking.”

“For real? How could that have happened?”

“Beats me—maybe the button got pressed, inside my purse, all the way back at the river, when he kept trying to send all that fish home with us. You can’t hear exactly what he is saying, so it’s just this irritating drone, as if from behind a wall, boo-boo-boo, persistent, like it’s trying to break through and just can’t, and it’s just the timbre and the intonations, nothing else; and you know, it gave me such a strange feeling, this voice, distilled like that to the pure essence of sound—as if I had heard it before, the same intonations, they were so dreadfully familiar, as if they belonged to someone very close...I’m not making this up, trust me. I didn’t even have it in me to erase that bit, even though it’s nothing to do with anything. And you know how it ends, the recording? With your voice—you asking what if I were pregnant. The first time you mentioned that. So weird...”

“Adrian shrugs: What’s so weird about it?”

“I don’t know,” Daryna slowly answers, thoughtful, as if still under the spell of that other voice—“I must be getting superstitious.”

They stop at a crosswalk. In the openings between buildings, the dusk, already pricked with streetlights, smoldering, bluish and ashen; the windows of the top floors flash with every shade of fire; and, in the dusk pooling below the red signals at intersections, the taillights of passing cars glow mysterious and sweet, like pomegranate seeds.

“Look.” She touches his elbow.

“At what?”

Look at how magnificent the city is in this light, she wants to say; this is the only time when you can sense its rhythmic breathing—when all the dirt people tracked in during the day is extinguished by dusk, and even the noise seems muffled, like when you instinctively lower your voice in low light; it does not last long, this time, half an hour perhaps—it is a change of rhythm like shifting gears or catching your breath: the tired masses of working folk, worn, an inexorably uniform look on their faces, head home to their concrete shells, and restaurants-theaters-bars have not yet taken on the next human wave, with its fresh charge of excitement. And in this interval, if you catch it just right, you can sense the city’s own pulse, those anxious currents of waiting, pleasure, and dread that thread through it—an inaudible music—and feel numb with the love for this city, so defenseless in fact, and hear the trees grow through it, unstoppable, fearsome—the cottonwoods on its boulevards, the apricot trees and the cherries in the cubical canyons between its high-rises—you can feel their explosive, autonomous force, the same will to grow that is now inside me, and that is not given to anything made by the human hand (we do not notice it during the day, but should people abandon the city, the force of the trees would break free and run rampant without constraint until the eyeless ruins of buildings begin to sink in the boiling woods, in the wild primeval thickets, the same as the ones from which the city once emerged, some two thousand years ago). If only she could film the city like this, caught at just the right moment—for the film’s opening. Despite the fact that it’s not, at first glance, connected to Gela’s story at all.

And, she tells Adrian, she would like to film the restoration workshop they’d visited. It resembles his dream shop of antiquities a little, the Utopia he told her about: with its unhurried, taciturn men in leather aprons, filled with a special inner dignity, with graphite-black fingers and an assured, almost genetic confidence in their way with objects—an atmosphere of unworldliness, so uncommon in the modern world, and, to an accidental visitor, all but church-like, and inseparable from honest work; the atmosphere she remembers from Vlada’s workshop, and up until recently one could glimpse it in the last relics of ancient artisanry: cobblers’ kiosks, TV repair shops, countless basement rooms smelling of wax and turpentine, where men fixed umbrellas, locks, eyeglass frames, and just about everything that could be fixed.

This disappeared in our lifetime; we watched it vanish, these pitiful remnants of the once-powerful Kyivan commonwealth, wiped out by the Great Ruin of the twentieth century: smiths, coopers, crockers, tanners, and lorimers, the once-glorious guilds that for centuries built up this city, founded churches and schools despite every alien tsar and magistrate—men who sat just like this in their tiny workshops two, and three, and five hundred years ago, and took with gravity into their hands the things people brought them, pronouncing their verdicts once and for all, as only men who know the true and good price for their work can. Not the price people pay at the market, but the one that is measured by the sum of expended life: the number of dioptres added to their sight over the years, the wheezing in their turpentine-laced lungs, their skin burned from constant heat, the high-contrast map of their wrinkles. The absolute concentration and surgical precision of movement with which a restorer, looking through a magnifying glass, dabbed away layers of age-old grit from a spot on an icon evoked in Daryna a downright sacramental reverence—a feeling remarkably similar to the one Gela’s story aroused in her. But this is also something she cannot convey to Adrian—she doesn’t know how to explain to him what these images could possibly have to do with a film about resistance. Except maybe as a metaphor for her own archival work—for her method (if that’s what it was): this persistent, ant-like, unwavering, peeling off of layer after layer, inch by inch....

This is also resistance, Adrian thinks. Daryna’s got it right. To work the way these restoration guys work—in utter self-dedication, for miniscule pay, purely out of devotion to what you do—that is resistance in its purest form, the essence of resistance, like that voice stripped of words down to a bare melodic lament. She’s got it right. An intelligent woman must, after all, have a leg up on an intelligent man because she is endowed with this additional perceptiveness, one we lack—one that stems from her sisterhood with every living thing, regardless of place and time....

A passing trolleybus blows a used ticket at his feet, and he bends down, moved by a sudden urge to pick it up, see, as he used to do when he was little, if the number is lucky, but he misses it: the ticket flies off, mixes with other litter at the edge of the sidewalk. There’s another thing I will never find out, he thinks, and shrugs, surprised at himself: I must be getting superstitious, too.

Aloud, he tells her that what he loves most about the city at dusk is its quiet courtyards—and gold rectangles of light from the windows cast onto the snow.

“Onto the snow? Why snow?” This surprises her a bit.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be snow,” he concedes, without real conviction; it could be on the asphalt. For some reason, he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, and she understands it—their thoughts, in the warm, exhaust-laced air of the spring evening, flowing in and out of each other, like intertwined fingers. The light turns to green and they step into the crosswalk like a pair of well-behaved children—holding hands and not even noticing they are.

***

In the courtyard behind a city high-rise, on the playground, a girl sits—she’s squatting like a young child, but there’s already a frozen, unchildlike grace in her pose. The playground is empty: it’s getting dark; the little ones have all been taken home; the girl is already too old for the sandbox, but still too young to be part of the next shift, which will soon arrive with their glowing dots of cigarette tips in the dark, the strumming of their guitars, and the bursts of silly laughter or a girl’s squeal ripped from the hubbub, or the tink of rolling glass—the chaotic, Brownian splashes of puppy-like youthful sensuousness that will make a late passerby shy and hasten to reach his door.

Later still, in the short hours of night, when everything grows quiet, the couples will arrive, and some retiree, kept up by his insomnia and arthritis, will come out on his balcony for a smoke without turning on the lights, and will catch below a moon-glazed glimpse of flesh freed of clothes, a white stain—a breast, a hip—and will get angry because now he won’t be able to fall asleep until morning for sure. But all this will be later sometime—it’s all yet ahead for the girl who squats very still at the playground.

It is growing dark, the apartments’ windows light up one by one, and the girl can barely see what she’s got in front of her: in a hole dug into the ground (it rained the day before, the earth is moist and sticky, and easy to dig with a toy plastic scoop someone left behind in the sandbox); in a white frame made of apple-tree blossoms barely visible in the dark, a piece of silver foil, spread flat, catches what little light is left. What she is to do next, the girl doesn’t know. And she doesn’t have anyone she could ask, either. But she remembers her mother doing it, like this. She remembers, from when she was very little, that this is how her mother used to begin. The paintings came later.

Somewhere above, a window clatters open—the sound sends a pack of crows tumbling out of a nearby chestnut tree where they had already settled for the night.

“Ka-tya! Kat-ru-sya!” a woman’s voice calls, echoing over the yard.

The girl startles, shielding the little hole she’s dug up. Then she looks back at the building (in the lemony-green patch of open sky between roofs, an inaudible shadow glides by: a bat).

“Coming, Gran!”

Glass! This shard, right here. To cover the hole. And then you bury it, and stamp the dirt flat, smooth it over with the scoop so that no trace remains: no one must see what she was making here; God forbid, someone should find out.... Not now. Not ever.

The girl stands up and dusts the dirt off her knees.