The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Half Past Five

ACQUIRED THIS MONTH:

1. Polish military cross for Monte Cassino (inscription on the medallion “Monte Cassino Maj 1944”), bronze, with suspension ring, no ribbon, award document missing.

Could send out a feeler to our military collectors about this. Be better to find a Polish contact, though—for them, it’s got historical value, too.

2. Commemorative badge issued on the 150th anniversary of Skovoroda’s death, made from tank-grade steel, with the philosopher’s portrait and inscription on the medallion (“Grigory Skovoroda 1794-1944”).

More from ’44, huh? Bulk supply. Must be a sixty-year cycle or something. I’d read something once about the cyclic model of the universe—not much of a scientific hypothesis, but it does make you wonder sometimes how history makes itself known in roundabout ways.

3. Tin-glazed earthenware ocarina, Kyiv region, mid-20th C.

I don’t remember this. Where’zd it come from? What does it even look like, this ocarina?

I’ll leave my office, go sit in the subway, and play my ocarina… make this pitiful sound—there was a little old dude I saw in the subway once, playing a sopilka fife on the escalator landing. Never heard anything sadder in my life. Our folk music is not especially happy to begin with, and underground, laid bare by that frightful resonance, it cut like a knife, like the wail of an abandoned child. The voice of people that cryeth in the wildernesse. An abandoned sound—exactly what I feel like right now. Where the heck is that ocarina?

Let’s get married, I said to her. I’m thirty-four already, and I’ve never said this to any woman before. My dad, in his day, took Mom out to a restaurant expressly for this purpose, and Mom got so emotional she splashed wine on herself. But on Lolly it made no impression at all. Meaning, she snorted, the way she does, like a filly, and tossed her head just like that and said, “So that what? There’ll be the stamp in the passport? So I’d be officially a home-maker instead of unemployed?”

I was going to protest—what’s that to do with anything? Sure, I understand—what happened to her on TV affected her much more deeply than she admits even to herself: she has no concept of herself outside of her work. She simply doesn’t have an alternative role at hand; shake her awake in the middle of the night and ask, “Who are you?” And she’ll say, “Journalist!” She’s got all her eggs in one basket, as they say, and now that she’s had the basket taken away, my girl feels like she’s had her whole life stolen and can’t think about anything else. I understand exactly how she feels; I’m not an idiot. How could I not, really, after I’d gone through the same agonies myself—alright, maybe not exactly the same. I was twenty-five then and it actually seemed kind of cool to try something new, dabble in antiques—why not (just for the time being, I thought!)? Lolly’s situation’s totally different, and when you’re staring down forty there’s nothing cool about it.

But only when she snorted her filly’s snort and said the thing about the stamp, which she’d already had in her passport once before, and then what am I doing (she didn’t say this but she might as well have) filling my—and her—head with this nonsense when she’s got some real problems on her plate, did it dawn on me that our notions of marriage are totally different. I am a Catholic, after all; never mind I haven’t been to mass in ages. And that for her it’s like this part of life’s been painted over with oil paint—like the window in our school bathroom that was painted halfway up and we boys used to scrape out various inanities on it with our penknives; then at the university, I remember, the bathroom window, exactly the same, and someone had scratched, “God is dead. Nietzsche,” on it and below an oval that was supposed to be a head, with a humongous mustache and hair standing on end, a thicket of straight lines—a portrait of Nietzsche maybe, or maybe the God that was dead.

4. Two Russian copper coins, “denga,” 1708, and “altyn,” 1723, both in good condition.

Jeez. How’d I fall for this junk? Hoboes do better picking through trash—they’d laugh at this “business” of mine….

I should’ve explained to her, like to a child: I’m not after the stamp, Lolly—I want us to be wed. In church, at the altar. I, Adrian, take you, Daryna, as my wife; I, Daryna, take you, Adrian, as my husband. In sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, till death do us part. That’s it, and what’s so fucking mysterious about it? And I would also like it, I would, Lolly, to be totally honest, like at confession. (Which you also did not understand that time I’d gone, why I’d done that, and kept asking like an anthropologist: What does it mean that you felt the need to go to confession? Did you mess up somewhere?) I’ll tell you straight, I would, in fact, like to have a little Lolly-tot race a tricycle around our place raising a ruckus and looking like you and me both at the same time—doesn’t matter a boy or a girl. I would like to hold his little hand in the street, and help him collect his toys scattered in different rooms, and sit at his little bed and read to him, and teach him everything I’ve learned in my life—even if I haven’t learned all that much. And that’s it. And Nietzsche, if I’m not mistaken, died in the loony bin after he’d first spent ten years eating his own shit.

What are you afraid of? You tell me. What?

You little terrified girl with tight little fists, determined to betray none of your fear—I saw you. I knew you to be that girl from that first moment, as soon as I’d spotted you among the backstage chaos of the TV studio that looks like a factory floor and a fossil dig at once—among turned-off cameras, dead like pterodactyls, and the twisted cables underfoot that slithered out of nowhere like pythons in the jungle—where, on the brightly lit stage familiar from your broadcasts, you, just done, were unpinning your microphone and talking to your crew, and all of you steamed with a kind of hot, feverish charge—as if you’d all just tumbled out of a nightclub and didn’t know what to do with the rest of your artificially pumped-up high.

Back then I didn’t know yet that this was the condition required for creating any virtual reality, and the one on the screen above all: to be real, it demands from its creators a constant energy feed, new logs for the fire, new kilocalories of living exhilaration—same as with a lie that has to be refreshed, fed all the time, even if it only means keeping it at the front of your mind with a constant mental effort because left to its own devices it would instantly deflate like any parasitic form of life, like mistletoe when the tree it sucked dry finally falls.

You belonged to the army of those who feed it—with their own blood, the gleam of their eyes and the freshness of their skin, and with time I learned to detect in you and your crew this short-lived, drug-like, camera-induced high; I watched you all come down from it outside the lens’s reach—some faster, others slower, and still others, after several years on TV, turned lethargic and limp, like they’d been unplugged, and came to life only on camera; under the lights, they’d flip their tail a few times, like a fish thrown back into water, and then go back into suspended animation.

Back then I knew none of this, and the only thing that stunned me, blinded me, was your sharply lit shape, like an Egyptian figurine in tight black jeans. Before, I had no idea how blatantly the screen can lie: how close-ups make everyone’s faces look equally wide, when in real life you are so fragile and fine—delicate, as Granny Lina liked to say, the highest compliment she could pay a woman. And you seemed to me then not the queen of that other-side kingdom but the opposite—the girl sacrifice, a lamb with your eyes and lips blackened à la Monica Bellucci, like a child who’d painted herself with her mother’s makeup. When I came closer, the crown of your head came exactly up to my lips, and it was like someone gave me a push in that instant, saying into my ear, Here, Adrian, is a woman made to your measure.

I should protect you now, but I don’t know how. That’s the thing, my girl. More important—don’t know if that’s what you really want. In all your childhood photos that I have seen—from the little Lolly with a big bow perched above her comically Socratic forehead, to the teenager with mouse-tail braids, who is, everywhere, shying away from the camera like a small animal wanting to hide (as if you could sense, even back then, that the camera lies)—your little hands are squeezed into fists. As if you did all your growing up like that—in the constant state of red alert. My little warrior. These fists of yours—thumbs tucked under the folded fingers—are all I see these days: you’ve squeezed yourself into a fist, just like that, folded yourself in, and locked me out. Some work is being done in there, inside you, and I am not privy to it.

Can anyone ever understand a woman completely? And do women even understand themselves?

It’s not like you’ve deliberately pushed me away from your problems—no, you told me about what happened in great detail, and you listened very intently, without your usual “contortions,” when I tried to demystify for you how business works in our godforsaken country where government itself is merely a kind of business, and television is also business, and your entire journalistic guild serves, as even I can see from the sidelines, as a mere tip of the iceberg, one of the many means the real players have of laundering their dough—a plug, in a word. A gag. You didn’t like that word; you bit your lip, winced with a pained expression, and recoiled too abruptly in the next instant, when I, stirred by tenderness, reached out to stroke your cheek. You were already closed before me, tense and cocked like a gun, and this short wordless exchange cut me to the quick, almost as if you’d rejected me as a man. And maybe even worse.

There’s one thing I realized, Lolly: you’re a strong woman—much stronger than you appear and you think yourself to be. It is only people of real strength who, on the ruins of their lives’ script, do not rush to grasp the hand extended to them but instead react the way you did: instinctively isolate themselves, escape inward, like a sick wolf that leaves the pack and runs into the forest—to find the herb that can heal him or to die trying. You poor little wolf, what are we going to do with you, huh?

I know you need to find new footing, build your razed little hut anew, from the foundation up. If I hand you the building materials you need, you’ll take them, of course—from me and from anyone else, from anywhere, as long as you can make use of them. And any other kind of help I can offer you’ll also accept gratefully: you’ll drink, say, the bedtime tea with honey I make you, nuzzle my shoulder, and tell me I’m sweet. But you won’t come to my little hut, which, by the way, wasn’t built overnight either and took just as much work as yours—you won’t come live in it. Mine or anyone else’s.

Build Me a House of Straw but One I Can Call My Own. That was the title of this really nice piece I found last summer, a wonderful folk-art painting—from the Cherkassy region, the traditional “a kozak and a girl near a well” subject, circa 1950. Could’ve been late forties even. I did fine with it, primitive art is in vogue these days. And the piece was a real classic, fit for a catalog: the kozak in a long red zupan, the girl wearing a wreath with ribbons, the well with a sweep, the white dappled horse, white house on a green field, and below, yellow on green, in naïve unpracticed lettering—that title. Blows your mind when you think about how people lived back then: kolkhozes, slavery, stone age; wore trousers made from tent-capes; ground a handful of pilfered grain on a hand mill to keep from starving—and when they had a free moment, they still ground alizarin crimson and ocher into thinned poppy-seed oil and painted the world that no longer existed. A world they’d had taken away from them, left only in a line of a song. The abandoned voice, the cry in the wilderness, like the fife in the subway at night. Build a house of straw. There’s some silent tenacity in that, like there is in those tightly squeezed fists: as if to say if there isn’t a way to build even with straw, I’ll at least paint that house of mine—paint it and put it up in my room. The last territory to call one’s own: 30 by 20 centimeters, in a homemade frame, from here to here—this is mine.

I know—you’re of the same ilk as those nameless village painters. You’re one of those who wish to change the world—not adapt to it.

And I, it would appear, am a conformist.

And that’s the way the toad farts.

Shit, the fuck I want those fucking coins!

Adrian Ambrozich, as my Yulichka says (She still wears a miniskirt over her G-strings. Is she still nurturing the hope that one day I will lose it and lunge at her with a hungry growl, or does she consider this to be appropriate dress for a secretary at a successful firm?), Adrian Ambrozievich, you’re an asshole. Yes, my dear, and man enough to admit it. And don’t you go consoling yourself with the fact that everyone else is just the same, or even worse. If they’re not assholes, they’re goons. Either one or the other, and sometimes both. Take your pick, as they say. And tick your ballot accordingly, damn it.

Because really, what’s this house I call my own? When the Soviet military-industrial complex went down the drain, taking all our science with it, all I managed to catch was a different train. That’s if I tell it like it is, as at confession, instead of strutting my feathers the way I keep doing for Lolly—keep fanning my tail, not too much, but who wouldn’t want the woman he loves to think him just a bit better than he really is? Praise me, Lolly, let me know you’re proud of me—such a cool cat I am, got everything running just so.

The truth is that back then, in the nineties, I simply got lucky—took me years to appreciate how lucky I got. I was lucky to have contacts among the people who later learned to call themselves art dealers, was lucky that I’d grown up knowing my way around the junk they were picking up for a song every Sunday at the Sinny Market—you wouldn’t believe what turned up, what wonders could be had for a few pennies. Back in his National Bank days Yushchenko went there every weekend, like he was on the clock, and now he’s got one of the country’s best collections of folk antiques and is running for president (and God help him because those bitches got us by the balls already!—every day a new rule from tax inspection, they’ll squash us, small businesses, like bugs for these elections!).

And my guys dragged stuff from that weekly dump without looking, like raccoons, often not even knowing from which side to open a snuff box, or that a Secession writing table, albeit crippled into a legless bench (which was what they thought they were buying), could have a secret drawer (like the one where we found a sheaf of yellowed old letters, which I guessed in a flash to be love notes—the letters were from before WWI, written in Polish, and that’s how we stumbled into a whole other Kyiv, one the Bolsheviks thought they erased without a trace: the one of Polish nobility that had lived there since the fifteenth century and thought the city their own, and for whom, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Vladislav Gorodetsky set out to build on Vasylkivska Street a new cathedral with the fashionable concrete puffery, only they never got any use out of it. I could not really read those letters, but I had this strange feeling they’d been written to me, personally—back then I was dating Tatyana and kept getting ready to say to her what she kept waiting for me to say—that I loved her; I’d even convinced myself that I did, in fact, love her, but left her apartment every time still not having said it, and when I found the letters something inside me cracked—I got this hunch, that ran wider and wider like a fissure, that the true love of my life was still ahead, and not that far, actually: the letters promised Lolly to me).

For me, it is the world of objects I grew up with—I recognize their musty smells, the traces of tallow drips on their surfaces, the black dots on ineptly polished silver like dirt under the nails—as if I’m back in my grandpa and granny’s apartment, crowded with cracked ancient chests of drawers, and for that reason always sort of shadowy. When they returned to Lviv in 1955, they couldn’t live in the family’s townhouse on Krupyarska because it’d been taken over by a KGB mayor and his brood, but our family still managed to preserve some of its furnishings and wares—and in that, too, I was lucky.

When the university sent me, with a kick in the ass, into the big world, after the instruments at the research lab where I worked got cut off for unpaid electricity bills, never mind paying anyone’s salaries, and I didn’t even have enough for cigarettes, and one day caught myself watching for butts as I walked, it was then I got scared, scared to a cold sweat: I had no idea a person could be debased so easily and that this person could be me! The entire social matrix in which I’d grown up burst like a soap bubble, and the only solid thing I could latch on to, to keep from going down with it, was that world of old things that my ancestors had preserved—my family legacy, why not? There it is, finally, the right word: I began to live on my legacy; I am, basically, just another rat-ass rentier—not a self-made man. I was simply lucky enough to discover I had a legacy—that the knowledge and skills that had quietly imprinted themselves on me when I was little suddenly acquired real value, measured in hard currency.

Cigarette cases, candle tongs, pocket watches, lidded inkwells, and carved umbrella handles (ivory, be so kind as to observe!—I would say to customers in my grandpa’s voice)—I knew it all by touch. I could even sew on a Singer foot-pedal machine because I’d fixed one of them for Granny Lina when I was a teen; and before the market sorted itself out, in the boggy chaos of the time, I somehow came to command the reputation of a freaking guru, and once acquired, a reputation’s as hard to shed as it is to get. By the time the bog solidified and set like concrete, I was already on the inside and had my own two feet to stand on. Had I started a few years later, I wouldn’t have gotten as much as a sniff at the business without some venture capital, so yet again—I got lucky.

And I got unbelievably, fantastically lucky with one of my first partners, our department’s ex-Komsomol organizer, Lyonchik Kolodub, who out of the goodness of his big heart gave us his philandering digs, a one-room efficiency on the ground floor of an old-Kyiv townhouse. He’d bragged he bought it back in 1991 for two grand, exactly one-hundredth of what it’s worth today, but back in 1991 two grand for a regular person was as mythical a sum as a million bucks is today; it was never clear whence it could have come to a man like Lyonchik Kolodub—rat, boozer, womanizer (or, as he would tell you—a hero of the sexual battle front), and an absolute zero as a physicist who, ever since his freshman year, had aimed at a Komsomol career for the single reason of being utterly unfit for anything else.

The puzzle solved itself when one day Lyonchik vanished in an unknown direction, taking, rumor had it, the former district committee’s till along for the ride—people said he eloped all the way to Latin America, and I’m inclined to believe it: for all his faults, Lyonchik did have a romantic strain; he had vision and a love of adventure, which, after all, were the things that made him fun. (Once, when drunk, he confided to us that his grandpa was a Gypsy who the Germans hung for a stolen chicken—at the university it was believed that Lyonchik’s ancestor was a partisan almost as legendary as Kovpak and died a hero fighting the Nazis. Lyonchik played this spiel like a saxophone for the whole five years of Komsomol meetings at the university.)

Who knows. At the bottom of his rat’s soul he may have been dreaming of a Gypsy baron’s grandeur—of having his villa, acquired with the Komsomol dues, guarded by swarthy and jolly saber-toothed cutthroats in Che Guevara T-shirts, instead of the bored and shapeless Ukrainian cops who all look like farmhands so much more than pirates. Maybe his hot blood yearned for the beat of salsa tunes, and the vision of a cocoa-colored ass barely covered with feathers beckoned to him from across distant oceans, like the longed-for reward for all of his Komsy ratting, which, as it later turned out, he could have saved himself the trouble of doing because it did nothing to help the Soviets in the end—or maybe that was precisely why he eloped: because unlike the rest of our Komsy-to-business-converts who’ve already filled our parliament, he was ashamed of his past. Whatever the reason, Lyonchik disappeared, leaving us in possession of his apartment with a Venetto mattress on the floor (so thoroughly permeated with sperm and vomit that we had to throw it out)—a place of our own, our own house, a hundred-point lead in this crappy business, all thanks to Lyonchik, may the old goat have peace wherever he is. And if he’s still alive, may God send him a whole swarm of chocolate-skinned girls, and may the bullets of Colombian partisans miss his old goat head. (Many of them are also Marxists and fight for the Communist revolution, so if they take Lyonchik hostage, he, worse comes to worst, can always become their political commissar and recite to them on steamy tropical nights the decisions of the last Soviet Communist Party Congress if he hasn’t forgotten them all, the program of the USSR’s development to 2000 included. Or he’ll teach them to sing “Lenin Is Young Again.” As you would expect of a Gypsy, Lyonchik Kolodub was incredibly musical.)

I can almost hear Lolly’s voice right now, telling me sensibly—like a cool, tender hand on my feverish head: Why are you making such a big deal out of it? And I am, my golden girl (because you are my golden girl, have been, are, and will be, no matter what lies ahead of us), making a big deal of it, and I don’t even know why. And I can even tell myself, plain and simple (don’t know if I could ever tell you, though) if I wanted to have something to be really proud of, I should have nailed myself, damn it, like Jesus Christ to the cross, to our doomed thermionic generator seven years ago. I should have lived on bread and water, quit smoking, told Tatyana to go where the sun don’t shine with her constant whining about how she’s got nothing to wear (I hope she finally caught herself some fat dickhead after we split; she was still pretty enough for that), bitten off a piece of some foreign grant for the lab, worked eighty hours a week like a bulldozer, and forgotten about the rest of the world—but finished the project! Like that. Then I would’ve shown myself what you showed by resigning from your channel: resistance of the material. I would know then that I couldn’t be bent, that I’m capable of standing my ground. Instead, I split.

I could’ve been a scientist—a real scientist and not just another PhD in physics. But I’ve already missed the age of brilliant ideas—those all happen before thirty. Bohr developed the model of the atom before he was twenty-eight, Einstein published “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” at twenty-six, Bell invented the telephone at twenty-nine. It’s a good age: you’re starting to know what you’re talking about, but you aren’t scared yet because you don’t believe you can lose. A constant upward ascent. I used it up on building my business. My best years, right here—in this office, in these catalogs. In this damn log: two Russian copper coins in good condition, fetch up to twenty-five Euros a piece at Russian auctions, if, of course, one gets lucky. And why shouldn’t I—I’m a lucky motherfucker, ain’t I?

What I’ve never told Lolly is that as a second-year student I caught the eye of Strutynsky himself, God rest his soul—and that was the same as falling into the hands of a living god. When the old man shuffled into the lecture hall, always in his dust- and chalk-powdered suit, everything froze as if a basilisk had just entered. We, young bucks, had no clue back then that we bored this legend, with his scornfully drooping eyelids, to tears: the distance that separated us could only be measured in light years, if at all. And Strutynsky wasn’t a teacher, and did not know how, or feel inclined, to begin to breach that distance. What he did know how to do—magnificently—was to spot, through those leaden eyelids, like a mythical Viy, those in the massive class before him who had the potential of breaching that distance themselves one day, who could rev their thought to the speed required.

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

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

Instead, I split.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And how’s your life?”

“I haven’t eaten in three days!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denga, altyn—I go back to the same line, read it and do not understand what I’ve just read. Nope, I’m no use at work today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still—why am I Adrian?

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

“Adrianabrozich!”

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s going on?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only I don’t know how to obey.

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

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

Or who is coming.

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

Calm down, Adrian, keep it down man.

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

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

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

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

Uf-f—the emperor’s namesake, lips still pressed into a displeased crease, slips back out the door where the bell just happens to have announced someone’s arrival (probably just a stray window-shopper). Thank God. Now I can loosen my tie and gulp some water straight from the pitcher…. What I’d love to do now is my yoga routine, the best thing for restoring composure—just to drop into forward bend and hang there a good five minutes or so, like a shirt on a clothesline with arms hanging, so that blood comes back to my head and my mind becomes correspondingly clearer. Doesn’t look like I have time for the whole routine—how long do I have before the meeting with my so-called art consultant? (Another lummox who can’t focus on one thing, never mind he’d spent his whole life waiting for the chance to do just that. Dabbling in freethinking in other people’s kitchens, amassing in his mind a veritable archive of rare and arcane knowledge, and collecting in his tiny Khrushchev-era apartment the complete set of albums published by the “Art” press that’s not worth shit to anyone now. A guy who wanted to write, one day, once freedom rang, a fundamental work on the history of the Ukrainian underground, and when said freedom finally did ring, boomed, in fact, louder than anyone had ever expected, the only thing he turned out fit for bragging was a treatise for students about his friendship with dead Grytsiuk and Tetyanych. And if small hustlers like yours truly weren’t tossing him bones every so often, he’d still be walking around with kefir in his net sack. All of them, those Soviet-bred “brilliant intellectuals,” turned limp and shapeless on the free range, like jellyfish taken out of the water. In bright daylight all their submarine gloss turned out to be a mere optical illusion, a side effect of the atmosphere of social paralysis so prevalent then, which was the only thing that made it possible to mistake impotence for a kind of spiritual aristocratism. So we’ll have our half past five today—a meeting of impotents from two generations.)

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

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

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

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

“WHO ARE YOU?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgive me, Adrian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not good, puss. Not good at all.”

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

“Dead end, wasn’t it?”

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

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

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

“Won’t I be in the way?”

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

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

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

“Why a fist—a boot.”

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

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

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

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

“You perv. What are they, stronger?”

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

Another chuckle, then:

“Puss?”

“Hmm?”

“I love you.”

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

“Who’re you honking at there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fie, you shameless wench.”

“Be careful, the roads are slick.”

“I will, I promise. Mua.”

“Same to you.”

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

From the Cycle Secrets: I Killed Her

They’re humming along, Aidy and this weaselly looking gentleman with a mournful mouth and thin colorless hair interspersed with bald patches (What’s his name? I forgot already.); Aidy pulls out a file folder, rustles papers, and the gentleman produces his glasses and perches them atop his nose—all this as if behind a glass wall. I can’t, I don’t have it in me to listen, to participate in the conversation. I just sit here guzzling my wine like water, and every so often, when the gentleman blinks at me uncertainly from under his glasses, I convey the peaceful nature of my presence with a wrung-out smile—the habit of controlling my face for the camera helps. I wish he’d go already. His shirt collar is soiled.

“Why aren’t you eating anything?” notices the solicitous Aidy.

Why? Because I feel sick to my stomach already, and without any food. It would be just physically difficult right now to swallow pieces of another creature’s roasted flesh. Bits of some innocent calf that went under the ax in the bloom of his youth. It’d be like dropping boulders down into my stomach where they’d remain lying, dead weight forever. I smile silently, this time apologetically, and reach for my wineglass again—like for the rail in a rocking subway car (this place is just as crowded and smells exactly the same, too—of wet clothing and cigarettes). This is how people drink themselves to death.

Vadym wouldn’t have given me the meeting if he had known what I wanted to talk about. No doubt about it: he’d have hidden and wouldn’t have answered his phone. He’s been avoiding me lately anyway—did he possibly think that I hold him accountable for Vlada somehow? Right away, as if to justify himself, he rushed to tell me about Katrusya—that he’d seen her just the other day, and had taken her to Switzerland for a skiing vacation; how nice of him. As if I didn’t know about this already, from Nina Ustýmivna. He just kept on talking, as if afraid I’d interrupt him. About what a big girl Katrusya is already, and how one German boy had a crush on her up there in the Alps. Only N.U. had told me other things, too: that, besides Katrusya, he’d also taken his masseuse, Svetochka, on the trip. Well, life goes on, you can’t mourn forever, can you? A man accustomed to a monogamous relationship would perish like a zoo animal set free in the wild—someone has to take care of the orphaned guy. Fine, let him have Svetochka. Although I don’t think she makes appropriate company for his stepdaughter. (I generally try to avoid thinking about what kind of creature Nina Ustýmivna will raise that child to be—I know all too well what it took Vlada to get out from under her mother’s influence back in the day. If she actually ever had—if it’s even possible.)

For God’s sake, what, what did this Vadym have that put such a spell on her?

Aidy, noticing that my glass is empty, wordlessly refills it from the bottle—Aidy knows what to do around the sick, a rare gift for a man. No, he just loves me, my sunshine, my bunny rabbit, and I’m an ungrateful beast. I’m so sorry that tears of contrition suddenly well in my throat, tickle inside my nose: Aidy, my love! What’s this threadbare old weasel still doing here? When’s he gonna go already? Shit, what am I—how’d I get drunk so fast? And the roof of my mouth is already numb, as if cowled with a metallic film; I need to get a bite, I do, a piece of bread with butter would be best—the fat neutralizes the alcohol, which I learned from Sergiy way back when. Or was it someone else?

The worst is that now I can’t get rid of this wretched, rotten thought—like when you snag your hose, and it runs and runs, and you can’t put it back together—what would Aidy be like if I died suddenly? Would he go feral, look for a replacement, too? Well, at least I don’t have a child, that’s a plus. And I wouldn’t leave paintings behind—it hasn’t occurred to anyone yet to do a televised retrospective, and thank God for that: a TV show dies the second the credits end and the commercial rolls. It’s the same with a person: as soon as the grave is filled, commercials start rolling, the recently departed becomes an information product, and there’s no way to tell truth from lies anymore. And the more time passes, the less hope there is. Like finding those paintings of Vlada’s, from the Frankfurt flight, something for which Vadym, in his own words, “doesn’t have time right now.” Of course, the elections are around the corner, don’t I understand? No, I don’t. Kill me, I don’t; and I shall not: How could you have lived four years with Vladyslava Matusevych and not have the slightest idea who you’d lived with?

To be fair, Vadym did sponsor the posthumous show at the National Museum, hired a curator—the best one, he bragged (according to Vadym, he always gets the best of everything!), but, in this case, actually just the most famous. I tried (and failed) to convey to him that the two were not the same. It was at that show where I first caught the whiff, like stale breath from a painted mouth, of this vulgar, mercantile tang that had never clung to Vlada when she was alive: the thunderous rock band at the entrance was out of place, all those musicians in aviator helmets, who later cruised through the galleries with benevolently stoned grins; and so were the Gothic-looking damsels with baskets of roses, which they, for whatever reason, strew all over the floor (a creative touch of the fashionable curator who knew how to blow up a budget); and the video, sliced like salami from the footage of the various European museums where Vlada’s work had appeared, was also somehow distastefully pretentious, like a promo for a travel agency. And that’s exactly how it played: “Where is that? And that?” the ladies inquired of their companions, with lively interest—much livelier than for the canvases displayed on the walls—as they crowded before the screens, lined up as if for a glamorous photo shoot, some with feather boas draped across their shoulders to match their gowns. As is always the case at art shows, there were among them a few truly beautiful women, and everyone singled out a model with her linen-white hair in a pony-sized tail as a real, honest-to-goodness prostitute from Crimea, from a Yalta hotel, or so they claimed.

The prostitute, or whoever she was, quickly got drunk on the free wine and danced a solo for the helmeted rockers—she was marvelously supple, as though performing a pantomime. I really liked her, actually, and I think Vlada would’ve liked her too: the prostitute was, in fact, real. Otherwise, it was a bizarre audience, like a mixed salad of diplomats, politicians, officials, bankers, artists, journalists, who filled the rooms and melded with the paintings on the walls in a colorful shimmer that seemed to produce a new chemical compound, an amalgam with the paintings, and in this way seemed surreptitiously to displace, to falsify, Vlada. Vlada who was no more, and about whom this audience, truth be told, couldn’t care less. I saw almost none of her friends there, none of the people who simply loved her—perhaps because they were not VIPs—but I did see a few of her artist colleagues who would’ve gladly drowned her in a puddle with their own hands while she was alive—and enjoyed every second of it—and who now were just as happy to be talking to the proffered dictaphones about their many-year friendship with Matusevych, cropping the edges of their verbal group shots to make themselves appear not only of the same stature as the deceased, but also just a little taller. And someone had already uttered—and kept repeating—the word “generation,” and a thing repeated enough, as everyone knows, ceases to be a lie.

Not to be found among the guests was the aging Rita Margo, “Saint Rita,” the universally known concierge at the studios on the Pechersk hills who was always ready to entertain little Katrusya while Vlada painted, or to run to the store for milk for Vlada herself—anyone who accomplishes anything in art has a guardian angel like this one. Mostly invisible to the public, they are unfailing, self-denying shadows, all those editors–makeup girls–gaffers who are rarely mentioned in brochures and catalogs except in tiny print somewhere in the back where no one would ever look, while in fact they are the ones holding it all together, the ones who glue together, like swallows with their own spit, the whole edifice with the glorious name in foot-sized letters on its facade. Vlada always said that Rita Margo was the ideal “artist’s wife”—apparently comparing her to her own mother, who had spent her whole life in that role never having had any particular qualifications for it; while Rita Margo, with all her qualifications, did not have the fortune of an artist husband and was not, it seems, fortunate with men in general, except for her blind son who sewed or glued something in the invalids’ co-op.

At the show, N.U., although much withered after Vlada’s death, still looked presentable: a black dress, black lace shawl, the wife and mother of artists—alas, both dead. She, for one, liked everything; everything was exactly the way she’d wanted it: “Dara,” she exhaled at me in the bathroom with sincere elation. “Just think, we’ve got six elected representatives here!” I was just dabbing my makeup with a napkin in front of the mirror, and pitied her as much as one would have pitied Rita Margo’s blind son had he appeared suddenly among the guests, but at the thought that in these six damn elected representatives (Vadym’s legwork!), she saw the meaning and justification not only for her own life, but also for Vlada’s, I wanted to cry. Such a feeling of desolation swept over me; I wanted to cry, not to unload it, but to wash it all out, just as I wanted to cry now—without any hope of ever stopping, a quiet drip, like drizzle “Les saglots longs / des violons / de l’automne,” pardon the French, Nina Ustýmivna. Ever since I left Vadym’s office, I’ve wanted to cry exactly like that—like the long sobs of autumn violins—and that cannot be allowed under any circumstances. Better to drink.

Oops, looks like I just devoured the butter meant for the whole table—how rude of me!—the weaselly looking gentleman makes for the empty butter dish with his knife, and his shiny physiognomy, which could also stand to be dabbed (Why is he perspiring like that when there’s such a draft from the door, I shiver every time it opens?), spells blatant disappointment: something’s been snatched from right under his nose again, as has happened to him throughout his life! Aha, so that’s where this mournful mouth of fortune’s redheaded stepchild comes from—been getting the short ends of sticks all his life. But why sweat like that, I wonder? His hands must be moist, too. Now I recall I didn’t shake hands with him when we were introduced; instinctively avoided him, only nodded. I see I get sort of mean when I’m drunk. This is new; I don’t remember being like this before, but something in me, I swear, has quit feeling sorry for everyone—my sorry-meter must be busted. Aidy waves at the waiter; Baldy sits back in his chair and laughs—a piddly, weaselly sound, he-he-he. As our cameraman Antosha used to say, run for your life ’coz you’re getting sober.

Back then, at the show, I couldn’t shake off the sense that Vadym actually couldn’t care less about all those paintings, since the woman who’d made them was no longer there. He needed Vlada alive and warm—and Vlada was gone, and the works that were left behind must have caused him pain just like her clothes in the closet. All those whimsically artistic dresses that she, when she’d had more time, made for herself, and the later ones, hand-picked from designer boutiques, a whole flock of chic outfits in diverse styles—traditional, sporty, avant-garde—but all belonging together by virtue of something elusively Vlada’s own, like exotic birds that alit in Vadym’s apartment on Tarasivska from places she went without him: the pale-pink Milano flamingo with large gold buttons; the blue-black Parisian blackbird of a short trench; the stern, closed-neck, cardinal-red Ralph Lauren dress from the other side of the ocean, bought when she had a show in Chicago; and something else unendurably, tenderly blue, tropically undulant that looks so great on a blonde and instantly fired off the flash of her hair in one’s memory. How could a heartbroken man ever live with that menagerie, which, as soon as one opened the closet door, screamed the absence of its owner at him?

This belonged to the Problems-That-Had-To-Be-Solved category, and Vadym solved it in one fell swoop—called a team from a thrift store and, in a matter of hours, they packed up the whole flock in plastic bags, like a dismembered corpse, and hauled it all away to an undisclosed locale. “You must always give the deceased’s clothes to the poor,” Vadym declared didactically when I gasped at the news, “You… what… gave it all away?” “And you… what… wanted some of it for yourself?” he shot back with morose scorn—meaning, do I also count myself among the poor? (Vadym enjoys disarming his opponents by humiliating them—he is good at it.)

“There were dresses she designed in there, Vadym, that’s also her legacy; they could’ve been exhibited.” (I purposely deployed an argument that ought to have sounded convincing to him, used the language of tangible reality, a language I learned long before I met R. and could be quite fluent in if need be.) A show of her designs—why, what’s wrong with that?—and if I did secretly want not just “something” but her entire wardrobe to be kept intact, so what? What if I did want to put glass over it and bury it, dig a little hole in the ground just so I could know that the feathers she dropped do exist somewhere, are kept safe, and that one could come to that place, slide open the door to the ground, knock-knock—and the revealed secret would shimmer, its colors playing in your eyes, a living smattering of brilliant shards: here is Vlada like a bird in the red closed-neck dress, face half-turned; and here’s the lilac dress, and there was a little amethyst-studded hat to go with it; and that’s what she wore when I saw her for the first time (I remember I’d had time to think, who’s this Snow White? And in the next instant she was stepping in close to me, uncoiling from the bottom up with her head tossed back, like a cat about to leap into a tree, “Good evening. I am Vladyslava Matusevych.”); and here’s the chiffon scarf that flies off in a gust of wind, gets tangled in her hair (it’s August, the café in the Passage, and her pale face opens up in the piercing nakedness of a leafless tree, like that of a monastery novice about to take his vows)? Even if this was what I truly wanted, I was not about to advance such arguments to Vadym, and he didn’t know me well enough anyway to take them seriously: such arguments, pulled from the totality of our inner lives, always sound unconvincing and pitiful; Aidy’s the only one to whom I could ever confide anything like this, with others it’s better to swim closer to shore. How far did Vadym swim out, one wonders?

“That’s not how you do a show,” was all he grumbled at me then; he was obviously not going to admit that there was anything offensive, as far as Vlada was concerned, about so categorically getting rid of her things (out of sight, out of mind!). He organized his show not long after—the way he saw fit. Much to Nina Ustýmivna’s delight. Maybe he should’ve married her instead of Vlada?

They do now make a kind of a family, with Vadym cast as Katrusya’s weekend dad. And Svetochka cast as his help. Katrusya does with Vadym exactly what she does with her labrador, Putty, named after the Russian president: makes a show of jerking his leash—his tie—in public so as to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that this massive and, as she sees it, all-powerful dude is hers alone; she calls him Vaddy the way her mom did and teaches him various useful tricks, such as toting around her skiing gear or anything else she wishes to have toted. Not bad for a teenager—one day, when she grows up, this damsel will avenge us all.

In response to all that, Vadym just huffs like a Gypsy bear, and not without pleasure, and N.U., misty-eyed, beholds the idyll. Vadym, if you think about it, got himself a pretty cushy gig—for one lost woman he gained three, a full set: Katrusya for emotional attachment, Nina Ustýmivna for spiritual understanding, and, of course, there’s Svetochka with her permanently engaged massage organ, where it is always so nice to stick his worked-up dick. Especially if it makes itself known at an inopportune moment—say, when Katrusya, the innocent child, climbs onto her Vaddy’s lap…. Although I highly doubt that a thing like childhood innocence even exists in this post-sexual-revolution generation.

Irka Mocherniuk’s kid has already enlightened his mom about sex—it’s when a mister and miss kiss each other where they “go wee-wee”—and suggested he and his mom do the same, right there in the bathtub, when Irka was giving him a bath before bed. Irka said the thing that shocked her most was the way he looked at her at the moment: wily, askance—like a man, “exactly like a man, Daryna, you wouldn’t believe it!” Grandpa Freud, wherever he is now, is rubbing his dirty hands together in satisfaction, and Katrusya’s already, what, thirteen—high time to, as the national bard did, herd her lambs beyond the village on the lea.

Gosh, now I’m feeling like I can’t breathe—wasn’t there water on the table somewhere? Aha, I see—the water’s been appropriated by the bald weasel; he’s moved it close, to keep it handy. That’s fair: I take something he wanted (butter), he takes something I want (water), and in such manner a balance is maintained in the world, and it (the world) continues to spin. Spins, God damn it, so fast I’m seeing black.

“Excuse me… may I have some water?”

The sound of my voice makes the glass wall between us crack, and noises spill over me from the general hubbub of the café like knives from a sack, discrete and separate: the clatter of plates in the kitchen, the desperate creak of the front door, the sharp soprano, like a car alarm, at the next table; the bald weasel, in an unexpectedly theatrical, self-regarding baritone, accustomed to people taking notes (Is he a professor or something?) cuts in, too. “Of course, of course, right here, with great pleasure.” He’ll even pour it himself. He’s making a fuss, reaching across the table (revealing the moistly darkened armpits of his already dingy shirt—it’s obvious he’s worn it before today); how solicitous of him! Aidy’s sitting next to him in his elegantly unbuttoned sport coat, calm and sharp like a snow leopard; it makes my heart flutter just to look at him—this ability of his to maintain an utterly natural benevolence in the most artificial, contrived situations. Who would ever think that he’s the conductor of this show? It always puts me in a state of mute awe: Is this possibly the same man with whom I made love the night before? Whose cells are probably still swirling somewhere inside me like tonic bubbles? “Oh, I see, it’s Perrier…. Thank you very much, that’s enough…. Pardon?… No, you’re not mistaken…. Yes, on television, quite right, Diogenes’ Lantern.” (Oh God, do I have to go through this now, too?)

Baldy oozes grease (And why did he want to eat more butter?) from every pore like a miracle-working icon dripping myrrh, and suggests, with subtle didactic superiority (He’s got to be a professor!) that I consider featuring a unique subject, unfortunately not yet popularized by the media: the heroes of Kyiv’s artistic underground of the 1960s and ’70s, a whole little-known stratum of our culture, and what a rich stratum indeed! The professorial baritone assumes an elegiacally restrained tempo, as if preparing to launch into a popular lecture right here and now. (Oh, please, I couldn’t possibly take that; it’s too much to suffer in my unemployment: to listen, especially to something interesting, and not have a way of retelling what I hear. To know that I won’t be telling people about this from the screen anymore—that I’ll just swallow it all right here and here it will stay, sitting in my stomach, an undigested boulder. And instead, they’ll have the Miss New TV show steamrolling across their screens.)

“You’re right, Grytsiuk alone is worth a show,” I nonetheless acquiesce meekly: Vlada considered Grytsiuk a genius; she used to say he was one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century.

My sage gentleman darkens for a moment, unpleasantly ambushed by my omniscience—what if it’s his dearest hobbyhorse and he wishes to possess the secret knowledge alone? But he instantly regains his composure and grins indulgently, “Myshko, he-he, Myshko Grytsiuk, poor thing…. It was harder for him than for all the rest of us—he was a repatriate, after all; he was used to the free world, although he’d grown up in poverty back there in Argentina…. One had to teach him so much, and he still never got accustomed to many of our realia.”

I see, so it wasn’t so much a lecture he aimed to bestow upon us as a monument to himself, with Grytsiuk and all the other dead rolled into the pedestal. Only the TV cameras are missing (and I’m supposed to supply those). The expression on his myrrhoozing countenance, meanwhile, makes it clear without any doubt that even if one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Grytsiuk—or for my interlocutor, simply Myshko—was still predominantly a sum of endearing weaknesses (his socks stank perhaps), his weaknesses were utterly forgivable, especially among friends; don’t take it personally, bro, we’re all family….

A “generation,” sure—as that excessively fidgety painter kept saying at Vlada’s show, arranging his fingers into a teepee—only he looked more like a rat. Why is it they all look like animals to me—rats, roaches, weasels—am I going off my rocker here? A hallucination à la Goya: packs of creatures with animal heads root around, twitching their noses, peering into butter dishes—first they mauled the ones who were worth anything and now they feast on their bones.

The old poetess’s mug surfaces in my mind, the one I once had to listen to as she put curses on the terrible Soviet regime—which failed to arrange her jubilee reading the year Stus was sentenced to the ten years that would kill him. She had the same mouth—bitterly insulted, talking with slurps of spit; they passed up her bowl, too, at feeding time, only the old woman wanted no mere spotlight for her bowl, like our art historian here, but a crown of thorns, and she twisted my arm to get one woven for her. Back then I also got fiercely depressed and drank to get drunk just like this, and not very far from here, either—at Baraban, the favorite watering hole of journalists, where I won’t go again because I don’t want to run into people I used to work with and watch them hide their eyes. And see what animals they begin to resemble.

And then a very strange thing happens. Maybe I am really already drunk, but for some reason it rattles me, literally, with a shiver, this coincidence—like the repetition of the same figure in a dance: of the place, the time (back then it was also winter, there was snow on the ground), and the characters, that old hag and this bald weasel, the oppressive sorrow for the waste of my father’s life I felt then—and the sorrow for Vlada’s life I feel now. Then, as now, I carried a death for a life that no longer really mattered to anyone but me, and now, as then, I am drawn, as though by a magnet, to the same spot, the same downtown crossing, into a café where I sit at a table just as I did then, and drink in an effort to dissolve, if only a little, that indigestible sorrow (like a swallowed boulder) in a scorching torrent of alcohol—because this sorrow demands it, not for nothing do our folk songs always speak of drowning our sorrows, if not in mead and wine, then deeper, in a river or a sea—because if you don’t thin it with something, it will, by its own solid weight, squeeze liquid out of you like whey from cheese, in a quiet tear-drip without end, like an autumn mist, until it squeezes out all your life juices and you petrify, becoming one with it, becoming it—this insupportable sorrow, a boulder, a pillar of salt.

I have seen women like that—among the mothers who lost their children, the ones who got them back from Afghanistan as “Cargo 200,” in coffins welded shut and who fell against the zinc boxes, scratched them with their fingers and begged to know, “Baby, baby, are you in there?” They are the women who, twenty years later, remember their vigil at their sons’ faceless coffins and their urge to throw themselves atop them as they were lowered into the ground as their last hour of being alive.

Nina Ustýmivna, it appears, is at no risk for anything like this; she said she’d cried out all her tears already, but she still drips periodically, still has to put a hankie to her reddening eyes every now and then when you’re talking to her—so she mustn’t have cried herself dry yet. She’s still got plenty of liquid, even her Zodiac sign is Aquarius, the life-giving element. And Vadym’s not even worth mentioning—he is not the keeper to something that’s gone to the ground. But Goddammit, shouldn’t someone make it her work to find a story in Vlada’s life? You can’t just let it break and scatter like a string of pearls from a torn thread, can you? No human life should scatter like that, because it would mean that no life was worth anything, not anyone’s; if that’s the way it is, then why are we all still taking up space on the planet?

Again, this taste of insoluble sorrow on my lips—the same as three years ago—and tomorrow the hungover heartburn will parch my lips just like it did then—soda and salt. And this recasting, three years later, of the same plot with different actors in the original roles, strikes me, for some reason, as something incredibly significant, filled with an all but mystical meaning. Lord, what if our whole lives are made up, without us ever noticing, of precisely such repetitions, like a geometric pattern, and that’s where the answer is—the main secret locked in every human life?

Two brightly lit episodes, like windows at night, three years apart, as though placed on a twist of one invisible spiral that links the “then” and the “now” with a single, pervasive meaning. Throngs of other encounters and episodes huddle in the time between the episodes, and maybe some of these will also repeat someday just like this, and pushed by the invisible coil to the top, will flash with the same searing intensity of memory revealing their, as yet indiscernible, meaning—the way a dark shard of bottle glass flashes when you hold it up to the sun: the effect Vlada sought to achieve in her Secrets—amber, thick as buckwheat honey, stitched through with a pulsating golden thread. The world, after you’ve seen it like that, appears at first gray and faded like in an X-ray room. Now I could tell Vlada what she’d spent ten years searching for: not a technique, not a color—but this unseen coil that threads through time.

But Vlada is gone, and there is no one to tell. In that gray and faded X-ray–room light, Aidy and Baldy, cowled in bluish drifts of smoke, nod their heads like puppets in an animated film and pursue their incredibly boring, hiccup-inducing, vacuous game—rolling words to each other like balls on a pool table.

“You, Mykola Semenovych, absolutely must write about this.”

“My dear boy, I’ve long had all the preliminary research completed, all that’s left to do is sit down and write. But you know how busy I am….”

“Uh-huh, and here I am taking up your precious time! But I must, and you must forgive me—where else would I find an expert like you? And, actually, that’s all I’ve come with, I won’t delay you any longer—I’ll just leave you the documentation so you can take a proper look at it later, and just write your conclusions whenever you have a spare minute.”

“You’re leading the old man astray, you realize that?”

“Why astray, Mykola Semenovych? You’ve said it yourself—the possibility of Novakivsky’s authorship is fifty-fifty, the experts’ opinions may very well conflict, some will say yes, and others will say no. What’s so wrong if saying yes, in this case, happens to benefit you and me directly?”

“Oh, I’ve long known you as the demon of temptation; ladies must find you irresistible…. Speaking of which, why haven’t we toasted the fair lady at our own table yet?”

The fair lady—that would be me. That’s my role in their little movie. I smile and nod, my head on a hinge, while Baldy (standing up, how else, officers and gentlemen, and Aidy rises too—reluctantly, like a teen forced to entertain a small child, shooting me a look that’s both conspiratorial and indulgent), with unexpected thirst, as if he’d been kept away from it for ages and then finally set free, drains half a glass of cognac in a single gulp, displaying again the wet underarms of his unfortunate shirt; and it’s obvious that he doesn’t actually want to go anywhere—that he has none of this hyper-important business to attend to, has nothing, in fact, more important and dearer to his heart than sitting like this in the populous warmth of a café, enjoying the good food and drink someone else is buying—and having an audience to boot.

To talk and talk, that’s the most important thing. To knead his life with words, to give it shape like a thinly filled pillow. The Ukrainian underground, the little-known stratum of our culture, Myshko Grytsiuk and I. Pound, pack—stuff—his life with the meaning he’s talked into it: as long as he’s talking, and for some time afterward, the shape holds—even if eventually, inevitably, it all crumbles back into its original form. So he has to keep talking. And that old poetess hag who tossed her dyed curls at me like a starlet in front of a sugar daddy—she also wanted to talk up some other life for herself, different from the one she’d already lived, which was happy and worthless. To install in it, retroactively, the coil that it didn’t have.

Fuck, it’s not my job to be forever feeling sorry for everyone! I grab my glass again, because what else can I do? Especially since the two of them just drank to the ladies, so it’s like they drank to me and now I should respond in kind. I can’t just sit here like a log—I should drink to them, return the favor: to your health, and all the very best to you too, jolly good fellow. Shit, what jolly good fellow? This is no birthday—more like a wake. My wake for Vadym, that’s right. For Vadym who can do nothing, because he’s got the elections. No, worse: for Vadym who turned out to be Vlada’s defeat—the pothole that caught the spinning wheel of her life, a Harley Davidson speeding along the highway.

“No, no, I don’t want any cognac, thank you.”

Aidy says that he has one more little favor to ask, on the fair ladies’ topic, of this Semenovych, a matter in which he could be of great help, not to Aidy himself, but to one young woman—and Baldy pricks up eagerly, ears and nose, like a weasel smelling a chicken house. “Aha, and what is the favor?” That he is not being gotten rid of just yet, that the feast goes on, is enough to make him happy. Instead, it is me who stiffens up unpleasantly: What young woman?

Aidy’s always taking care of something for someone, always helping someone, and all these young girls who’re running loose out there, throwing themselves under every more-or-less financially secure dude, like Anna Karenina under the train, they’ve no decency, no decency or shame whatsoever; I can easily imagine a Barbie doll like that, fresh and tight, just out of the box—oh no, I’d better not! This is also new; I don’t remember having such textbook jealousy fits before, and tonight I’ve already caught myself several times being irritated by that exceedingly vociferous look-at-me soprano at the next table—with her jungle of luxurious hair that makes you want to put your hands in it—it’s a chestnut Niagara like in a shampoo commercial; at least Aidy’s seated with his back to this Niagara—but here we go, this is full-blown paranoia already.

I see—the young woman Aidy is talking about is his secretary. Sure, of course I remember her, met her once (forget princess, she’s a pavement queen, brash and wily, not his type). Secretaries, masseuses, interns, assistants—come to think of it, what a wide choice a solvent man has of young women thirsting for a better life! And what a kick I got at first from being assigned to that same market category on sight by waiters, hotel clerks, or stewardesses (I saw the way one of them looked at me when R. stroked my thighs under the tray table on that Amsterdam flight) when I appeared in public with R. somewhere people didn’t know us—how bewitchingly fun it was, God, what a turn-on! A constantly giggly, champagne-bubbly arousal: a queen at a masquerade, dressed as a shepherdess. Yes, boss, as you wish, boss—a wildly sexy game. I want you right here and right now. The silence of his driver who took us to the airport—a professional silence, impenetrable like the Mottled Hen’s golden egg that no one could break—you pay a premium for such silence, such folks don’t give interviews (and, oh, how I wish they did, and wished back then, too, the journalist in me never quit doing her job!).

When the world takes you for a whore but keeps its mouth shut, or grins politely, like that hotel clerk who presented R. with the room keys (although it was I who did the talking, while R. just breathed noisily at my side because his English is nonexistent, and there’s one more category I could be placed into—an interpreter), it sort of gives you the social sanction to do exactly what, as they believe, this breathing character is paying you to do. Your sexual act, thus, begins, essentially, at the check-in desk, and by the time you reach your room in the impatient, pulsing-like-a-bulging-vein silence of the elevator (where a Russian or a Turk, infected with the atmosphere, nails you with a fiery look as he steps out on his floor, letting it be known that he could take care of you no worse than your companion—it spreads like electricity, men always flare up like lights on a string when they see a woman being led to a good fuck, and this erotic illumination is also part of the show), you quite simply must, as soon as the door closes, drop onto the bed and get to business. So, you’re an interpreter now, let’s see you interpret this.

There’s something of an orgy in this almost-public sex that is being watched through the walls by dozens of eyes—the sex of the information age, sex without privacy, as if at a stadium with crowds of fans: floodlights on, olé-olé-olé-olé, go-go-go, and sco-o-ore! And the result: a couple of vacant, mechanical orgasms and the inevitable popping up of the same postcoital question in your mind. Why the hell am I doing this, exactly?

And on the flight back—already knowing, after that morning with the hotel-window view of the wet roofs below, that I urgently need to break things off with R.—I just had to spot one of those tight Barbie dolls, not long out of the box but already not quite fresh, slightly spoiled by a touch of second-handedness, turned out as unambiguously as if she were wearing a uniform: loose, tar-black hair down to her buttocks, gold chains, silver stiletto heels that made her a head taller than her companion, who looked like he could be thrice her senior. They took the seats immediately behind us, and the man—also, I figured, a big wheel that flies everywhere with his own masseuse (the doll didn’t quite have the goods for an interpreter)—instantly dove into some Russian pulp, some Hitler-Stalin-Zhukov potboiler with a hot-red cover. (Bright, they like everything bright, pop-your-eyes-out bright; they are forever hungry for bling, these children of gray factory developments and mining towns.)

He spoke to his companion exactly once during the entire flight, when the stewardess came by with the drinks. “You want a beer?” The way I talk to Barsik, “You want some scraps?” And it was as if I’d seen myself and R. in a distorting mirror—aped by this couple who embodied the essence of the rich-man-and-his-slut genre so much better than we; they were almost kitschy (for what is kitsch if not a genre’s essence stripped of any individuality?) and seated right behind us, as if to fulfill the express function of visual aid, illustrating the next step on the evolutionary ladder.

Unlike myself and R. (whom I intentionally allowed to pay for that whole trip, so I could wallow in the feeling like the proverbial pig in mud), the kitschy couple was not playing a game, was not pretending to be a boss and his sex servant—that’s actually who they were, and no erotic sparks flew between them. Zilch, nada, you could see nothing, flying or otherwise, aside from vacant, self-congratulating vainglory: the boss took pride in his young mistress, decked out like a Christmas tree. She—in her gold chains, silver stilettos, with her shopping bags in her luggage, a whole trip she could boast about to her friends, eliciting their unending envy; the two had no other motivation for copulating. Sex, at their evolutionary station, was dead—as ours would have been, too, if I didn’t insist on playacting someone else’s life.

I understood then what R. meant when, elated after one of our conjugal acts, which, as far as I was concerned, did not command any special elation at all, he allowed himself to venture into a frankness that was not, generally, characteristic of him, saying in Russian (he always slipped into Russian in intimate situations), “You are so… bright—in everything. I’ve never known a woman like you.”

But Vadym did, didn’t he? He did live for more than three years with Vlada; that’s not counting the months she waited, however taken she was with him—forget taken: she was head-over-heels in love with him. (Somehow, after everything that’s happened, I’m loath to acknowledge that part of her life, as if I’d be humiliating her by doing so. But back then, even the way she moved changed, became more cat-like; it was as if she were stroking everything she touched, rubbing, with an inaudible purr, against the air itself as she walked, as though against a man’s bristly cheek—when such an invisible soft cloud of someone else’s touch envelopes a woman’s every motion, it is the surest proof that she is most certainly loved and in love, and not merely physically sated, and Vlada laughed then and said, happily, that being in love, as it turns out, is a rather deleterious condition for making your way in the world, because instead of telling the extorting cops off like they deserve, you smile a languorously tender smile and they rip you off like their own mothers.) Despite all the feverish heat in her actions back then, she hesitated long and hard, before she finally took the step of transplanting herself and Katrusya into Vadym’s newly acquired apartment.

Vadym had just divorced his previous wife (whose tender mind ostensibly cracked under the weight of the wealth that descended upon it without any warning, and she went cruising for a safe harbor from one shrink’s office to the next—well, why not, it does happen to the wives of the nouveau riche) and bought himself the entire topmost floor in a noble old building on Tarasivska, with the mind to build a penthouse on the roof.

I think what finally swayed Vlada was the chance to play with that big space: Vadym had agreed to let her decorate the entire two-floor apartment according to her own designs. And now Svetochka makes her home in that apartment, decorated by Vlada’s designs. Svetochka goes to the same bathroom where Vlada once sat me down and made me up (“Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do!”), and I saw myself in the mirror as I’ve never known myself and grew scared. (It was too unlike my image for the TV screen—that strange and ominously beautiful, vespertine face, as if carved out of the night by the light of a bonfire, with long, Egyptian eyebrows, and lips that were ultra-dark, as though sated with blood—a face you instantly want to put out, like a fire. It’s suicide to take it out in public. This can’t be. Matusevych, what have you done to me? I’m not like this!) And on the same shelf where Vlada put down her brush (“Wait, don’t wash it off just yet, I’ll take a picture”), Svetochka now keeps her toothbrush and contraceptive cream. Although, no, a Svetochka like that probably has an IUD installed, to spare her man any inconvenience whatsoever. And a dolphin laser cut into her pubic hair—wasn’t it yesterday I saw an ad for a beauty shop on our station? Fifteen minutes of airtime, welcome, fellow Ukrainians, for a mere 500 Euro, and no problem: a dolphin forever.

That is really mean of me to think.

And unfair on top of that: How could I possibly know what’s going on between them? I’ve never laid my eyes on that Svetochka. She may be a perfectly kind and generous soul. Poor Svetochka—sucked into the vacuum of the just-renovated, nouveau-riche apartment: an apartment like that simply cannot stay deserted for long; it must inevitably, sooner or later, draw a body into its orbit—to root around, move from room to room filling in the excess of space, to clatter cups in the kitchen, turn on the TV in the living room, forget to raise the lowered seat on the toilet, and leave, in the mornings, in the bedroom with drawn curtains, the pungent whiff of female genitals, so sharp against the smell of sperm (of which quite enough has already spilled onto the lonesome bed). Nothing wrong about it, it’s quite natural; this is merely the law of large apartments. These are the apartments themselves, by virtue of their gravity, commanding people and fates: a home, once it’s built, always places its own demands on whoever inhabits it; and he who remains to live alone in such a big dwelling finds himself in an undeclared war with the place, in which he sooner or later will be defeated (because dwellings last longer, they outlive people), and then compelled to get out, and should thank his lucky stars if he manages to do so in one piece.

Why did I never make a show about this? It would make a great show, even a series, and it’d have been a piece of cake to find a sponsor, a construction firm, for example. I could call it Personal Interiors or, say, The Personal Home—about how our homes rule our lives. Now that we have crawled out of our Soviet-brand hives and begun cocooning ourselves into our own nests, it is the perfect time. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this earlier, and now it’s too late. Your whole life can pass like that: blink—and you missed it. Those evacuees from the Chernobyl zone, the villagers who went back against orders—they still knew what a home meant, and probably could have told the rest of us, but I, when I made my Chernobyl film, didn’t appreciate this angle, missed it, wasted it. Moron.

I know another home like this—endowed with its own will—that would be worth telling people about: it’s in Lviv, the townhouse that used to belong to Aidy’s grandfather, the one where his granny and Gela Dovganivna grew up. Aidy told me how when he was little his granny took him across the entire city from their neighborhood of proletarian high-rises to what used to be the professors’ colony up the hill behind the Vynnyky Market, to show him—look, Adrian, this is our home; these were the windows of the girls’ room; this is where Great-Aunt Gela and I used to sleep. After the war, the house was given to some KGB type—a “liberator” and, I bet, “a fighter of the OUN gangs,” who eventually drank himself to death, fell out of a second-floor window (the girls’ former room perhaps?), and broke his neck, ostensibly in a fit of delirium tremens. Only I believe it was the house that spat him out—chewed him over for several decades and finally spat him out—the liberator’s children made short work of selling everything off and emigrating when the Soviet Union fell apart, but by then Aidy was studying in Kyiv and had no intention of returning to Lviv.

Aidy (who has long completed his studies) raises his eyebrows at me sensing a shift of mood: Is something wrong? (He and Baldy are swilling their cognac in masculine seclusion now—they’ve come to an agreement and it must be toasted.) No worries, everything’s fine, I reassure him with a silent nod. Everything is really perfectly fine; oh, if only you knew how perfectly fine you are, my beloved snow leopard—what a joy it is to watch you and be ravished by your calm, unhurried confidence: the poise with which you move through life has nothing in common with the impenetrable daftness of those who turn over big money in full certainty that they make the world itself turn. And I know now, I figured out what it is that makes you so unlike all those types. I could stand up tall and declare it to the whole café—listen up; Daryna Goshchynska’s had a revelation: it’s your home giving you shape!

That house in Lviv, lost three generations ago. It’s like those little metal molds—fishes, stars—that I used to pack with dough to make cookies with my mom when I was little: you were packed into the house just like that—when you were still pliable, at an unconscious age, and the hardy frame of that house, where you always knew you could go and see the windows from which your young grannies once gazed at the street, is there, invisible inside you. It keeps your spine upright, that’s where all your grace of natural—unrestrained—dignity comes from. This can’t be bought, or cultivated, or trained—this is given like a problem’s condition, there are things in this world that a person can only get this way—by being given them. Or not. One can build a house, top it with a penthouse even, but it takes more than a single lifetime to learn how to carry that home with you.

You are shit, Vadym. Good Lord, what unadulterated shit you are.

This sentence comes together in my mind suddenly and of its own volition, like a barrel lid rumbling shut. (At the next table, the high-pitched soprano squeals again—damn, she’s loud, should be singing Mozart or something.) I have to smoke. The curious part: no more internal squishiness, none of that drizzly whining of the drunken French fiddler. It’s all gone, shut off. Like a sudden change of weather. Simply: the man with whom my friend had once fallen in love turned out not to be the person she’d thought he was. A crappy and rather trivial turn of events, basically. Of which the crappiest part is that the friend has moved on to a better (one hopes) world, and the man who had once babbled to me incoherently in an empty apartment—“I killed her”—goes on presiding over great flows of money from his office and responds to my claim that his class brethren, his fellow minders of, perhaps, the very same cash flows, intend to use television as a means of netting girls for the sex trade, by telling me he has more important affairs to attend to. Affairs of state, damn it. Of the state.

“Fuck this state, Vadym” (and representatives therein, I added mentally) “if things like this can be the norm!” At this, Vadym, sniffing offendedly, advised me to be realistic. Translated from representative-speak: quit being stupid. But—that’s a chore, as Aidy’s dad says. Once a person’s stupid, you can’t do much about that. One could, I imagine, have put her wits to work and figured out, in advance, that the sex business, for Vadym, does not constitute a good enough reason to rush to anyone’s rescue. That, when he himself needed rescuing from the Misfortune-That-Had-To-Be-Endured that had so unfairly befallen him, he must have tried, besides Svetochka, any number of professional masseuses for his orphaned dick, and found them precisely on the same market that the Miss New TV show is intended to supply.

Everyone makes use of prostitutes, sure—that is to say, everyone who can afford to—why should our elected representative be any different? Is he a man or what? It’s a man’s world, sweetie, nothing to be done about that, nothing to be done, and you just have to be realistic. The more Svetochkas out there, the easier it is for solvent men to endure everything they are supposed to endure. To bear their cross and be pillars of the state—the poor thing’s about to keel over, like the tower of Pisa.

I’d better stub out this cigarette. I’m getting lightheaded.

I asked him about Katrusya after he said that—how’s she doing at school? Does he keep track of that? Vadym thought it was my way of changing the subject and started telling me, happily, how he picked her and some friends of hers up from school just the other day. Quite a sight for a pervert’s imagination: this big-screen, well-massaged, tightly fleshed at the nape, and everywhere else, Humbert Humbert in his Land Cruiser, smack in the middle of a whole flowerbed of sweetly aromatic Lolitas—girls at that age still smell almost as divine as babies, of vanilla or something like that. I’d give anything to know if fathers ever get erections at the sight of their pubescent daughters. Right, like anyone’d admit to that… Vadym believed (and if Vadym believes something, then that’s the way it is) Katrusya had an easy time with her studies; she could get all As if she tried just a bit harder, but (he believes) it’s not the most important thing. Of course not. And does she watch TV? Vadym still wasn’t catching my drift. You know—what would happen when Katrusya watches this beauty contest, girls, you know, need such things, especially at her age: to have a universally accepted standard of beauty before them, something to aim for—and then around eighth grade or so, she’ll want to send in her own picture to be considered for the contest.

“But you’ll warn her, won’t you?” Vadym smiled with the charming immediacy of an adult talking to a child, and I was simply floored—floored, and for a moment fully capable of believing women could find him attractive, even a woman like Vlada. The smile was absolutely genuine, a good, beautiful smile. He wasn’t being dishonest or cunning—he really did not see here a Problem-That-Had-To-Be-Solved situation. And if Vadym doesn’t see it, then it’s not there at all.

I did not ask him, after that, who would warn all the other Katrusyas around the country—the ones who do not go to the British Council School and for whom television is their only window to the world. And I did not even tell him that I resigned from my channel—why? Clearly, the media and everyone involved were low on Vadym’s priority list at the moment; the imminent election tsunami meant something different to him than it did to us, mere mortals—something hard and tangible, some stupendous redistribution of cash masses in the direction I’d be lucky to guess. Only I’m not inclined. In any case, I’ve no doubt that for him things will turn out just fine; Vadym’s not used to losing. It’s only with Vlada he got beat. Got away, that one.

What if she did want to get away from him—only didn’t know how? What if she’d also had her own morning looking through the window onto wet roofs—when she had to force herself out of bed with the new day pulled over her head like a bag and realize that her life took the wrong exit somewhere, that this was no longer her highway, and she had to grab the wheel and twist, back up, back up. Only it’s very hard to do when you live life at the speed Vlada did. Her motor revved till the scenery flew past like a ribbon.

She did. Of course she did—my proud girl who quivered as though set on top of a tightly coiled spring. Proud people who are accustomed to being the ones giving support to others are so bad at sending out their own SOS signals that even when they call you at two in the morning and complain about insomnia, about an irrational fear—if I fall asleep, I’ll die—you do not hear the signal. And even when you can see, having spent five hours straight under the watchful guard of her boyfriend, as if he were ordered explicitly not to leave you alone for a single minute even if his bladder should burst, that something is very much awry indeed, and things are not as good as they’d just recently appeared—you still don’t allow yourself to think that the love glow this couple radiated not so long ago could have been no more than a ghost light, leading a trusting traveler straight into the bog. You do not allow it because you know, in your heart of hearts, that to think so would be to insult your proud friend, because she herself, teeth clenched, must have fought an unimaginably exhausting, life-sucking war before she could admit it—her defeat—to herself.

Now I am absolutely certain that’s exactly what happened.

Now—after today’s Vadym, who has already heroically turned that page (“She was the best thing in my life,” he’d said over Vlada’s coffin, and had I died, R. would’ve said so over mine) of his life and returned to himself—the way he was before Vlada, BV, because people like him do not change and no new experience can turn things upside down inside them; now all the little incidents that had once scraped on my attention as dissonant, accidental splinters line up, in hindsight, into a regular pattern. There was one thing Vadym and Vlada had in common, and it was this thing that like a wrench thrown into a turning gear caught Vlada, brought her to a halt: they both had it living in them and motivating them their entire lives—the fear of defeat.

It was that fear that, ten years earlier, made her break up her marriage with Katrusya’s father (who, ultimately, did not manage to do anything better with his life than to emigrate to Australia, where he, according to different sources, either worked as a night guard or babysat kangaroos). It was that fear that made her hair stand on end when, in the fall of 1990, we were smoking the one cigarette we had between the two of us in the little park on Zolotovoritska—right here, across the street, where the casino now stands (the spot I’ve been circling since—for fourteen years already—as if under the sway of gravitational pull)—and the hot wind of tectonic shifts blew self-published (on Roto Printers back then) leaflets at us, and the bitter coffee from tiny chipped cups scorched the roofs of our mouths. “We had no youth, Daryna.”

We did, Vlada, we did, that was it—our youth, and our country’s youth that was being born out of the tidal roar of the Independence Square, of the boys with seraphic faces and white hunger-strikers’ headbands, not one of whom, back then, had yet thought of paying for being prepared to die. And they were really prepared to die, and those who haven’t died, only got themselves to blame.

Yes, my Vlada had that fear, of course she did, however deep it sat—a genetic fear, inherited from her mother, from Nina Ustýmivna. Or perhaps even older than that—from those grandparents of hers, the Komsomol activists who, in 1933, lit out for the city from the famished country and became teachers at a workers’ night school, and thus did not die together with everyone else in their village—and who knows at what price. And it was because of this fear, which did not allow her, in her own eyes or in the eyes of her jealous community, any right to err, that she got stuck with Vadym for so dangerously long in that stage when you work through your days as if they were wet dirt on a shovel, because in place of your extinguished love, or whatever it was that appeared to have been love, comes emptiness—and into emptiness, always and inevitably, like black water, seeps death: I’m afraid to sleep. I’ll fall asleep—and die.

Shit, now I remember! She even told me, sometime that summer, before our interview, a dream she had—told it to me in detail. The dream was about Vadym, but I only remembered one image from it. (You generally don’t remember other people’s dreams very well; they’re like the plots of movies someone has retold you but that you haven’t seen yourself.) In the dream, Vadym took her somewhere, to a hill, gray as the surface of the moon, and the hill began to slide from under her feet, and she saw it was a pile of concrete sand—really, what could be deader? I think there were even crows in that dream—black, fat, and glossy.

Why couldn’t I have told her then: Vladusya, my dear, cut the cord and run as fast as your legs will carry you—exactly like you did ten years ago; follow your own design, that same mind-boggling pattern of yours. I know you can, you’ve done it before, and you know when it’s time to go under the knife—and to hell with him, this husband of yours, and with his—actually your—penthouse, with its glassed-in floating clouds, mirror surfaces, and white leather ottomans; all that, literally heavenly beauty, with the eternal view of the sky, you could charge admission to that place, that was a heck of a job you did, but to hell with it, tear it from your heart and run. Run because this man, whose one other woman has already gone round the bend, alarmingly, in the loony-bin direction, is clearly dangerous; there are men like that—packed hard inside into an unassailable mass of self-satisfaction that we mistake for strength, and everything they touch, they kill, even sex. Such men like power, and it comes to them easily, because when someone’s plowing ahead with such unassailable confidence, it is very hard not to think that he is the one who has seen the light and will, if you follow him, show it to you, too—hard to believe that such a juggernaut carries with it nothing but itself. But it’s now that I’m all wised up—I knew nothing back then; it was all before I met R., and I was as stupid and naïve as a bunch of parsley. Dara—Dolly—Folly.

Why is the word death of feminine gender in our language; where’d this nonsense come from? Death should be a man; a woman’s death, at least. That’s the way the Germanic people have it, I think, they’ve always been better mystics than we. Spoken by a man, “I killed her”—it even sounds better, more convincing, than when a woman says, “I killed him.” When a man says it, it doesn’t admit any levity of interpretation. I killed him with that one phrase—men don’t talk like that. Or, I killed him with my silent disdain—you’re kidding, right? He doesn’t give a hoot about your disdain, if he even noticed it. What does he notice, really?

I know nothing about the war that may have been raging between them her last autumn, when Vlada was so rapidly withdrawing from us all, cloaked in the cold, otherworldly glint of estrangement, like an acolyte soon to take her vows—I know nothing, and will never know anything more. And Vadym doesn’t know either—I doubt he suspected even then what role he’d been destined to play in her life. (He did get rattled a bit with a chilly draft of recognition when she died—in those first weeks, when he drowned his grief in drink and, like a buffalo, stampeded at nights down the Boryspil highway as if he wanted to catch the runaway and bring her back—but he did not let that recognition rattle him any looser, and no more drafts from the other side will ever get to him again.)

No one, except the dead person herself, can see her death in its entirety. See how it evolved, how it ripened, day by day, like a fruit. The living can only observe, from their side, the result: how the overripe fruit drops from the branch under its own weight. And only the dead, herself, knows how things got that far.

“Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna. I’ve always wanted to.”

The bathroom—impeccably stylish rather than luxurious, without any nouveau-riche bells and whistles, all those Roman therms and gold leaf—still smelled of recent renovation, of paint and varnish, and the smell resembled the air of Vlada’s studio a little. Perhaps that’s what put her in the working mode, made her hands itch to pick up her tools (painting, she loved saying, is first and foremost manual labor, a craft!). She worked differently from the way makeup artists usually did: seated me facing her instead of the mirror, did not talk to me, did not comment on anything she was doing, but instead brought in a tape deck and put on Queen, “The Show Must Go On.”

The longer I sat there, offering my face to her with my eyes closed, the stronger chills that ran through my body. Brushes, multiplying against my skin like a swarm of butterflies, tickled my mouth, temples, cheeks, eyelids; I was being transported to a different place, disappearing, changing form like a sculpture in the artist’s hands. The music blared inside me, and from there, from the darkness of roaring halls, broken glass poured down my veins, a battle call breaking to the surface—like a challenge to life itself—it thundered: the show must go on! And Vlada’s breath on my face froze like the breath of a tightrope walker hovering above the abyss of a great dark hall: this was no game, no innocent playing at dress-up and do-over, but something as ominously desperate as what Freddie Mercury must have felt in the flight of his own voice—she wanted to bring something important out of me, show me something that mattered a great deal to her; and when that scorchingly bright face finally hit me from the mirror, with the long Egyptian brows, the blood-dark lips (the face of a pagan goddess of war, a priestess of a bloody cult, something about it threatening, witchy, something that made you want to stomp it out, right away, like a fire, go back to the ranks, to the polished TV-screen picture that can reassuringly tell you the brand of the anchorwoman’s suit), I recoiled, terrified. But at the same time I couldn’t take my spellbound eyes off this strange mask, marveling at how, aided merely by the masterly blended colors, it grew out of my own features. Incredible. Perhaps only in dark, low-lit windowpanes, with the texture of the details smoothed away, can human faces be as magnificent as this, and afterward it was in dark windowpanes that I’d glimpse this strange face on myself—and shudder every time. By then the emotional overload was making my whole body shake, all but teeth clattering, and all I could manage was to hide behind a nervous chuckle, like a village girl behind her sleeve: “Matusevych, what have you done to me? I am not like this!”

“Then you were like this in a previous life,” she answered, very serious, “you just forgot.”

“You think?”

In response, she stepped in closer, with that balletic move of hers, upward from below—and kissed me on the lips, running her tongue between them, which brought them, with a gasp, right back to life under the rolled-on lipstick, the feeling back in them again: her little tongue, in comparison to a man’s, turned out to be incredibly soft, tender, like an oyster pried out of its shell. I forgot how long it had been since I was kissed by a woman—at school, at summer camp?—and thought to myself, stunned: so that’s what we girls feel and taste like, some lucky bastards those men! Vlada withdrew and stood in the mirror beside me—a bloody smudge stained her lips like the hand mirror in that famous painting of hers, Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident. “Now wait, I’ll take a picture of you.”

And I stayed there waiting, trembling a little—had she told me to slice my wrists at that moment, I would probably have done as she said. But she only brought back her camera—and casually, without aiming, shot off, like a good machine-gunner from the elbow-grip, a whole clip, click-click-click. “And now, the hard-est”—and she stood next to me again, with that bloody smudge across her mouth, holding the camera aimed at the two us in her stretched-out arms, click-click-click. A double portrait: the artist and her (nibbled) model. Or, perhaps, not the model, but the work? No, it wasn’t the model, or the work either. For her, I was something else in that incarnation, a bizarre impersonation of female strength, which she no longer felt in herself. And I remember well the strange alarm that stirred in me when she was aiming at us like that, with both hands, at face level, as if it were a gun muzzle and not a camera lens.

Those pictures remain in her digital archive—Vadym hasn’t destroyed that yet. That’s what he says, at least. I don’t know if I would like to see them now. “Doesn’t matter,” Vlada said, when we looked at the pictures together—“no photograph can ever give you what you get when you look at the thing in flesh, and color photography especially is all smoke and mirrors, bull and opium for the people.” And she was right: The pictures were very impressive but something crept into them that wasn’t there in the mirror—theatricality. We looked like a pair of masqueraders, and my witchy mask no longer mesmerized as powerfully—some magic had gone out of it. This is why, Vlada professed contemplatively, painting can never be replaced, not ever, not with anything. “That’s okay. I’ll use this. I’ll do something with these. I just don’t know what yet…”

And I did not tell her that she’d already done something—to me, only I also didn’t know yet what it was. Washing my face in the bathroom later—with dull regret, as if an unfulfilled promise had breathed so near and passed me by, only brushing me with that one touch on the lips, and then slipping between my fingers (only living beauty can evoke such an aching sense of loss—never the one on canvas)—I felt my knees buckle under me. Just like that, literally, as if the tendons suddenly turned to mush and lost their grip—and up till then I thought “straw legs” was just a figure of speech. Had there been a male artist in Vlada’s stead, everything between us would’ve discharged into clarity by means of immediate sex, and that sex probably would’ve been divine. One of those few times, count them on your fingers, that you remember for the rest of your life—with a complete release from the body such as one experiences in the midst of religious ecstasy, when, as I seem to remember Papa Hemingway wrote, the ground swam, although that was nonsense, too, because there’s no ground left in sex like that, neither ground nor sky, neither up nor down, and love has nothing to do with it. Although I did have one time like that with Aidy, but then I’ve also had one with Artem—that time in the archive, when I first saw the photo of Dovganivna with her comrades and it came over me right on the spot, and that’s when it all started, my life changed.

But Vlada was not a man, and the two of us could not rely on such simple resolutions, programmed into us by Mother Nature herself. Something else, then, was between us, something more unsettling, something akin to the link between a new mother and the fruit of her womb—she gave birth to something in me that night. She set something free, like a large dark bird.

And this remained our secret, one for the two of us—we never talked about it again, didn’t have a chance. Until the day there was no longer anyone to talk to.

How could I have given her the strength I myself did not know was in me?

“B-beg pardon, I didn’t hear you—what was t-that?”

Baldy asked me a question or something. And I tuned him out. Coz I’m drunk. Drink-dong-drunk… I hear bells ringing somewhere, a tinny-tiny little sound. No kidding, I’m drunk, good and drunk, who’d have thunk. Somewhere there was a stage at which I should’ve stopped and lingered, and I didn’t notice how I rolled straight through it. Overdid it. And butter won’t help no mo’.

Baldy was asking whether I am bored. Oh, sure, he needs an audience; he wanted to preen before me, too. And I just tuned him out; how uncivil—did not hear a thing, nada, of what they were talking about.

“I’m n-never bored.”

“Oh, then you are a very special woman. One of a kind—your health!”

But I am bored looking at you, mister. Do you have any idea how boring you are to look at? You’re all so boring, like someone’d just pulled you out of a washer. That’s exactly what you’re like: soggy and wrung out. And you probably imagine yourself all clean and squeaky, right?

“It’s time we got going,” Aidy says. The big sweetie, he’s a bit tipsy, too. And all that alcohol has clarified some things in his head, too: that the only way to get rid of this character is exactly this—to get up and leave altogether. He won’t go by himself, unless someone throws him out. And Aidy can’t throw anyone out for anything. Aidy doesn’t like humiliating people. And thank God for that. Thank God.

Baldy shoots hungry looks all around him, as though he wants to swallow the whole place in one gulp before he leaves, and take it with him, in his gut, like a smuggler carrying diamonds. And sighs sorrowfully, woman-like: oho-ho!

“As old Taras once wrote—”

Who? Baldy quotes with great pathos—although he talks all the time as if he were quoting someone anyway. His generation still uses quotes like scholastics use the Holy Scriptures, sat out their whole lifetimes behind other people’s backs.

“First drink down—makes you spry / second—worry on your mind / third one—now your eyes glow / thought after another follows!”

“Taras Shevchenko wrote that?”

Aidy and I ask him to repeat it, and he does. I love it—like it was written about me. The clinical picture spread out, plain and simple. If only I’d stopped at that third drink—while the eyes still glowed. Aidy hands his credit card to the waiter, and Baldy pretends he is too engaged in the conversation to have noticed this delicate moment. (He’ll ask insincerely later: How much do I owe?—and pretend to be surprised, just as insincerely, that the bill’s already been settled; these old suckers always do that.) He tells me the great bard wrote this on a wall somewhere while he was carousing in a tavern. You know those poets maudits. Although it’s still better than “les saglots longs des violons.” For some reason, this conclusion prompts a surge of patriotic pride in me. (How did I ever get so drunk?)

“It would be good to write it on the wall here somewhere, too,” Aidy contributes, as he always does, a dose of constructive pragmatism. That’s right, this is supposed to be a literary café; no less, they even have some moldy hardbacks huddling on the shelves over there—what idiot would ever want to read in this light? Thought after another follows, that’s very well said indeed.

And, out of some deeply sentimental gratitude to this old art-worm for the aptly supplied quote—as if this quote, for reasons past comprehension, took us to some deeper level of mutual understanding in this place and at this moment, before we got up from the table and parted ways (Will our paths ever cross again, or have they separated forever already?), as if the quote sent us into the throes of an intimacy so urgent we needed to fall into each other’s arms at the feet of Myshko Grytsiuk, whom Vlada considered a genius—in a word, that drunken daze that makes the proletariat, after the umpteenth, by the great bard unforeseen, drink, grab whatever’s handy and crush it on the tablemate’s skull, I open my mouth and blurt, “Did you, by chance, know Vladyslava Matusevych?”

Done, it’s out, can’t take it back. And instantly the face I see before me is no longer weaselly—it’s a hyena’s maw. He-he.

“You know, for me it was enough to have known her matinka, he-he!”

“Nina Ustýmivna?” I’m not being obtuse—I’m slamming on the brakes: something’s coming at me that I do not want to hear, and there’s no way to swerve around it.

“Exactly, exactly. Ninél is her real name.”

Ninél? Yes, indeed, that’s right, Ninél—a name once fashionable among the Soviet bureaucrats, “Lenin” spelled backwards.

“I knew Matusevych Senior, too. He wasn’t actually without talent, as a painter, but that bitch, pardon my language, just drove him to the grave. We used to call her the praying mantis among ourselves, he-he… the spider female that turns the male into protein after the act…. She, by the way, was a beauty, a nuclear blonde; you know—you could bury her alive, and she’d dig herself out with her bare hands, he-he. God spare me from a woman like that.”

Something in his voice, a grating note, tells me he is not married. Or long divorced. Could’ve figured it earlier, not rocket science: his dingy shirt, a general dusting of neglect—it happens when a person has long lived alone and doesn’t have anyone to look him over on his way out. His only consolation—how bad things can be for the married. Especially those who marry beautiful blondes. Vlada also always said that her mom had been a beauty, and I always kept politely quiet: I think the real beauties remain beautiful in old age, and I wouldn’t say that about N.U.

“The fact that Matusevych never fulfilled his potential as an artist,” Baldy continues to gloat, “was all Ninél’s fault, much more so than the Soviets! She couldn’t get him the Government Award, that’s true, although she packed him off to the Central Committee more than once—to confess the mistakes of his youth, and he still didn’t make it to the special-rations ranks, he-he… I’ll finish the cognac, with your permission. No use leaving tears at the bottom—Your health!

“About me, she wrote a denunciation in ’73—to the Union’s political committee and the Art publishing house, whence I was promptly expelled, after that report of hers—for ideological immaturity. And that was the beginning of all my trials and tribulations. Despite the fact that I was a young specialist and they had no right to expel me.” (He is talking as if this all happened just yesterday, the resentment raw in his voice.) “Right before that I published in…” (Bla-bla-bla—he names a periodical from back then, Socialist Painting or Swine Tending, I forget instantly) “my article…” (he rolls out a pretentious multiclause title that whizzes straight over my head and might as well have been in a foreign language) “they called it the generation’s manifesto, the debate in the Union was oh-so-stormy—the last, you could say, stir of freedom.”

“You mentioned a denunciation.”

“And the denunciation, he-he…” (he’s all but rubbing his hands together, so pleased is he to be opening my eyes to the bottomless pit of human depravity) “the denunciation was that beauty’s way of getting back at me for criticizing her husband, among other things. In that article of mine I wrote that he was more successful in his nonfigurative works than he was with the builders of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and that was absolutely true. Except that he’d already been raked over the coals for his nonfiguratives, and it was time for him to distinguish himself. It was a critical year, you know: there’d been one wave of arrests already, Zalyvaha got time, Gorska was killed, a whole bunch of people got expelled from the Union, blacklisted—and Ninél, you know, she was used to comfort, to status; she wouldn’t have taken kindly to being the wife of a persecuted, starving abstractionist. So she packed him off to paint ‘men of labor’ at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Project….”

“Good Lord, why to Chernobyl?”

“Eh, you, young bucks!” Baldy is all but melting, blissfully, like a living block of butter. He is in his element—the guide to the past, where we are foreign tourists, mouths agape. “They just started building it, right then! All the papers blared about it; poets were falling over each other to sing the peaceful atom on the Pripyat’s shores. It was a win-win subject: it’s not the great leaders you’d be painting again, you know, but men of labor—just like Courbet did—and at the same time you’d be manifesting the correct understanding of the government’s and the party’s policies. Back then, you must remember, few knew—it only came to light after the accident—how dangerous a project it was, that nuclear plant. And that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, no matter how deep in Moscow’s pocket it may have been, did not, in the end, give its approval to build the plant in such a densely populated area—only in Moscow, they didn’t give a shit, pardon my language, about some stupid Ukrainian hohlys’ permission.

“It was so ordered—and off went the campaign, and everyone ran to get in line for a creative road assignment. And Matusevych Senior, too. He slapped together a whole series, painted in the realistic manner, of course; it was his first official show. He did have a few interesting uses of color here and there; color was his strength, and you can’t escape yourself at the drop of a hat, just like that—but overall it was a sloppy job, such blatant socialist realism. If they’d given him the award then, it would have been a giant leap for him…” (he spreads his arms, to make his point more visual) “clear to being crowned on the other side of the chessboard, straight into the establishment!” (The establishment seems to drop onto my untouched plate next to the veal filet that’s gone cold, and Baldy blinks at it in passing, with visible regret.)

“That’s what Ninél counted on—and not without good reason. Many careers were made like that at the time—after the best and the most talented went underground, like I did…” (no, I didn’t really hear that last bit, that’s the alcohol finishing my thoughts for me) “the gaps had to be filled somehow. And, sure thing, all this rubbish pushed its way to the top, and the age of the talentless began. But, so that the difference would not be quite so obvious right away, they still mixed in a few of the old beaten-and-denounced; the ones who demonstrated contrition—as long as they were clean on the KGB count, of course…. And they were only too happy—Brecht was fashionable then, and he has Galileo say that it is better to have your hands stained than empty—remember? Many thought so, too: alright, let me get a little dirty, but in exchange I’ll have a chance to do something, in art, in science…. But it didn’t work that way, he-he! All of them, those who went from the underground to the officialdom, met Matusevych’s fate—and never created anything good again! They were left empty-handed, he-he.”

So this, then, is the main justification for his life? And for his own empty hands, which, by his reckoning, are superior to the hands of those who ate better than he did back then, and he wants someone to recognize this. He must make a good professor, actually—he has a way of drawing you in. So much so, in fact, that I’ve sobered back up to that third-drink level: thought after another follows.

And here I am, sitting across from him, some quarter of a century his junior, with my own clean hands, like Pontius Pilate’s—and feel my blouse sticking to my shoulder blades, and notice the stench of my own armpits very clearly; it’s not a hallucination. I, too, am beginning to sweat like him, beginning to ooze, his mirror image on the other side of the table, liquid from every pore. He also drips out of sorrow, I instantly realize and feel, for a moment, remarkably perceptive—a protracted sadness like that, over many years, can make one cry, or it can make one sweat. Looking at him, I see my own future. Myself—in another quarter century, when I, too, won’t have anything left except persuading the grown-up youths (those I manage to latch on to) that I am better than my colleagues because one time, long ago, I didn’t want to soil my hands, and disappeared from the screen. And I’ll have nothing in those hands of mine, either, when those grown-up youths ask: And who exactly are you, miss, and what have you accomplished? Not one more worthwhile thing—just like him.

It all goes around in circles, I realize, horrified (and repulsed by my own indomitable smell)—in circles, over and over again, the same thing in every generation, only the costumes change. It’s a special kind of trap: a whirligig of ruined lives. A Ferris wheel: you’ll get off where you got on. I can’t breathe; I’m going to be sick. Aidy, noticing or sensing something (my smell?), covers my hand with his comforting palm—thank you, love, yes, I understand, it’s time to go, but I have to hear this man out. Hear everything. To the end.

“So Matusevych, then,” the professor carries on his tale, losing most of his oratorical flourish (apparently, he is immune to my smell) “had, at the time, a perfectly realistic chance of improving his lot, and Ninél spared neither time nor effort for this. Wore her own soles off making sure he’d get nominated—and why not, he was practically clean on the KGB count…” (How exactly, one wonders, does he know that?) “a few trifles here and there perhaps, a bit of this and that, dissident acquaintances in his past, but who didn’t have those? The important thing was not to keep them up, and at that, Matusevych was rather abundantly experienced! When he got married, he broke off all contact with his own family—lest someone remind him that his uncle fought in the insurgency. He didn’t even go to visit his mother—this, by the way, also upon Ninél’s insistence; she just couldn’t be too safe, that lady.”

“Wait a minute.” I sober up all the way to the first-drink level. “What uncle in UIA? Wasn’t Matusevych’s family from somewhere around Khmelnitsk?”

Khmelnitsk region—that’s where Vlada went when she was little to her grandmother’s, her father’s mother’s funeral, where she heard the wailing that she remembered for the rest of her life. And that was her only memory of that grandma, because she did not, in fact, ever see her alive, not once.

Baldy magnanimously aims the shiny circles of his glasses at me (and now he reminds me of Beria). “And did you imagine there was no UIA in the Khmelnitsk region?”

“Was there?” Aidy perks up.

“Was there anywhere it wasn’t?” laughs Baldy, a downright homey laugh (his tie has slipped askew). “I come all the way from Sumy, and I remember how my mom hid partisans in the German days! And then when the Reds came, I was told to keep my mouth shut about it, not a peep, because it turned out that partisans they were, alright, but not the right kind… not the Soviet ones. And where Matusevych was from, in Podillya—that was basically Bandera’s backyard!

“But they had to have forgiven him, that uncle of his, long before; Ninél was there at his side, a living, breathing proof of rectitude—she came from the privileged, an apparatchik family, her father started in Party work all the way back with Stalin…. So then, she had a clear plan—to push her husband to the top. And here I come, he-he, a greenhorn, truth-seeking idealist, and plain out declare that Matusevych is rubbish as a Socialist Realist, and that he’s wasting his time doing something his heart isn’t in.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a denunciation, too?”

This slips off my tongue before I can bite it—I’m not quite sober yet, after all. But now, in the pause my words abruptly throw open—this silence is bottomless, and so are Baldy’s eyes as he stares at me, rendered instantly speechless, as if I’d just hit him with a right hook to the chin—in this silence that rings in my ears as though the entire café has also been stunned, lights changed and sound turned off, I finally sober up completely, the daze gone without a trace, like it was never there. Hang on a second. Who was it that looked at me with just such frightened eyes not so long ago? And why did Baldy get so scared?

Aidy is first to come back on line—with an amiable chuckle: he’s getting a kick out of this; he’s admiring me and doesn’t hide it—he can afford to admire me, how awesome I am, how quick my reflexes are. And, since Aidy is the one who is bankrolling the evening, Baldy reacts to Aidy’s signal—and engages again, although he has to force it, creaking and screeching like a rusty machine, flexing the muscles around his mouth: he-he-he. I already know who it was that looked at me exactly like that not so long ago—with the same dread, a cornered animal’s hatred: it was my boss. During our last conversation, when I accidentally, just like this time, reminded him about the dead body buried on his conscience. The reaction’s identical, down to a T; the facial expression’s exactly the same. C’mon, mister, you’re weaseling around, skirting something—you’ve got something to hide, haven’t you?

“He-he… you, my dear, don’t quite grasp the times, do you?” he declares, choosing to resume his magnanimous tone, and partially succeeds, only a few dry sparks crackle under his glasses in the wake of his momentary short circuit. “People took my article as a breath of fresh air! The journal still dabbled then in freethinking, for old times’ sake; it was the last little island like that, but after Ninél’s denunciation the publishers had their air shut off too. Ninél, you see, reasoned somewhat along the same lines as you just did, he-he….” (Vindictive, aren’t we? Put the jab right back where it came from.) “Well, you can be forgiven on the grounds of ignorance, but you know this women’s logic of yours. Women always rush to defend their own, in this they’re much like Jews…”

And anti-Semitic, too?

“There are all kinds of women out there. And Jews, as far as I know.”

Aidy grunts his approval again—resigned to the prospect of not getting out of here as quickly as he thought. He nods to the waiter to clear the dishes from our table, pulls out the cigarettes he already put away in his pocket, and lights one up.

“Could I have one, too?” Baldy asks, suddenly, and unexpectedly.

He hasn’t smoked all evening. Means I really got to him. Got him good, looks like. Ha! Am I Columbo, or what? Time to take the initiative: “So, if I understand you correctly, Nina Ustýmivna decided that your exposé could harm her husband’s career, and responded with a preemptive strike?”

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything—as if he were experiencing that strike again.

“A stab in my back,” he says after the pause, drawing on his cigarette with the greed of an old smoker, his Adam’s apple bobbing hungrily—and I see how worn he is. Soggy and worn. And old. “It was a stab in the back. She, essentially, ruined my life, your…” he mocks with a caustic smirk, “Nina Ustýmivna. Unlike her, an apparatchik offspring, I had no protection or patronage whatsoever. They wouldn’t think twice about giving me time—and not on political count, mind you, but for a criminal offense. Vagrancy or hooliganism—like they did with everyone who didn’t have a famous name—workers, students, all the political bottom-feeders… not a mouse would peep. Do you even realize what it was like…” (his voice swells with an altogether theatrical pathos, it appears he’s getting himself worked up again) “to be fired because of a political accusation, for ‘ideological mistakes’? Can you imagine at all how an art historian might survive in 1970s Kyiv if no one would give him a job? How he might feed his family?” (Here I could have pointed out that I myself had once been a child in a family like that, and that our family, after they locked my father up in the loony bin, was fed by my mom. But I doubt it would trip him up—he appears to persist in the conviction that he is the only man in the world ever to have survived something like that.) “What it means—to beg around for small jobs? To write reviews under other people’s names for twelve rubles a piece and consider yourself lucky when you could?” (Something similar may very well be in store for me in the near future, but I don’t want to bring that up.) “My wife left me. She couldn’t stand it after a while; she, too, wanted comfort—as Shakespeare said,” he twists his mouth as if for another he-he, but this time no sound comes out, “Frailty, thy name is woman.”

Shakespeare, Brecht—all this is also a kind of nouveau-riche gilding, like in their McBathrooms, all these quotes he pulls. He is not lying—he’s just bizarrely off-key, as though he were playing his solo on an instrument in need of tuning. Or is it this iresome pathos of his that’s ringing flat in my ear? You can’t deny it: their generation used up our national stockpile of pathos for centuries to come, didn’t leave us anything that could sound natural. Like Vlada making fun of her mother: “Nous sommes les artistes, maman!” Nina Ustýmivna, it’s you again, Nina Ustýmivna.

“And you call it a preemptive strike! Perfidy’s what it was, my dear, common human perfidy! The instinctive response of a cannibal who bites off the head of anyone who dares stand in her way, and moves on without a second thought!” (I wince unwittingly under this verbal barrage—as if it were Vlada who had to listen to all this instead of me.) “She chomped down her own husband, too, and didn’t even blink! He never did get that award, not then, not later; they didn’t let him to the very top,” again he twists his mouth gleefully. “The competition was too stiff for Ninél, too tough for her to bite, and she broke her fangs, her resources were not immeasurable…. Bet my reputation—on that, the lady left her brand for many years to come. For a while there I was simply crossed out of life—in a dead end! Do you understand? Dead!”

“And that’s when you were recruited by the KGB, wasn’t it?”

He remains just like that, mouth not quite closed, halfway through an inhale: a freeze-frame. I can’t help it—it’s my professional proclivity for dramatic effects: as if I really lived inside a mystery series, where I’m also in charge of creating drama, and every time my trick works I get a small professional satisfaction. Aidy, my audience (the only one I have left)—also my view from outside, the director’s voice from outside the frame, the cameraman on the other side of the camera, and the makeup artist with the powder brush at the ready (how quickly did I invest him with the powers of all my old overseeing authorities!)—makes a short, glottal noise that could, if one were so inclined, be taken for applause. He’s so sharp, mind like a steel mathematical trap, that he’s instantly put together all parts of the equation, and even if either one of us still wondered whether I have, in fact, divined the correct solution or stuck my chalk, at random, straight past the blackboard, one glance at Baldy is enough to erase all doubt: he looked as though all his sweat had instantly dried up all over him. A sudden change of seasons: a night of frost—and everything’s stuck.

Oh, I guessed it all right; I bloody well did. He shouldn’t have counted on my ignorance of this topic—I have, like it or not, done hundreds of interviews, with very different people. I’ve got my own personal Google in my head. I even know how much they were paid, these small-time rats on the take like him, for their monthly written reports on what their charges blurted out after a couple drinks—sixty rubles. A nice number, twice Judas’s fee—I bet some wit made it so on purpose. Enough money, when push came to shove, to get you by. So he did.

He is right about one thing: it’s true I cannot imagine how he lived. How he hung around, for years, showing up uninvited at other people’s homes, at the old-time wooden annexes, not yet devoured by the new developments, at the attics of underground studios to glean his shred of borrowed warmth. How he slurped the borsch the women set before him and drank the cognac, the cheap Armenian stuff—there wasn’t anything else back then, berated the Soviet government, viewed the men’s works and pronounced his unwritten judgments on them—with great feeling, I bet, peppering them with quotes, honing his style—and sweating the whole time: oozed murky liquid from all his pores like under-pressed cheese, under the weight of his secret task. And then trudged home—and worked everything he’d heard into a story for his captain. I can’t imagine a life like that. Or how one could endure it for years.

He’ll write nothing about that “little-known stratum of our culture.” He won’t ever write it, no matter how eager he makes himself sound for Aidy. I could tell him this right now, right to his face, absolve him so he wouldn’t suffer any longer; let him stop sweating under his uneased burden, once and for all: he won’t write it because he’s already described all those people—in his reports. He’s already made a story out of it—the one others demanded of him. And this story has stayed with him, has short-circuited his memory. Because it’s always like that with the story; I know it from my own experience: you remember people, alive or dead, not the way you once knew them, but the way you told others they were. Doesn’t matter whom you told—whether you were speaking to TV viewers from the screen, or to a KGB officer in a room with closed doors: you can’t make a different story from the same material, zero out the first one, new text over the old. The material’s burned. Burned, charred, turned to ash, leaving but one trace—the bitter taste of resentment, the eternal sense of having been robbed of your due, the mouth etched into a mournful arc.

He had his story taken from him, taken away. It was done with his consent, with his own hands, and there isn’t anyone to blame now. Maybe he really would have died if he hadn’t agreed—it was those who didn’t agree that died. And those who lived now have no tale to tell us because they’d already told it once. And, unfortunately, not to us.

They should be telling us another story now—a story of taken stories. The story of their defeat, but no one wants to do that. Vlada, too, probably never heard from her mother about that episode with Baldy—and would Nina Ustýmivna even recall it herself? People often forget the evil they’ve done unto others, but retain forever the antipathy toward those they’ve wronged—reasons for this are found and fit into the puzzle later, retroactively. Vlada may have heard Baldy’s name at home, spoken with a bit of scorn, with a magnanimous chuckle, as one commonly speaks of ambitious losers, and may have thought him one. And somehow I find this unfair and hurtful—as if they’d cheated her, my Vlada. As if everyone, all of them, cheated her and were cheating her her entire life, since she was little—all of them driving her, together, into the ditch.

I am tired. Good Lord, this day’s got the best of me. Was it only this morning that I was getting ready to meet with Vadym, rehearsed in my mind the prosecutorial speech I’d prepared about the girls’ show, made sure to choose the right jacket and turtleneck—the same ones I wore to see him in his apartment on Tarasivska, the day Vlada died, counting on the outfit triggering Vadym’s Pavlovian reflexes, engaging subconscious machinery of memory and guilt? What an idiot!—like men even notice what a woman is wearing unless they intend to rip her clothes off.

God… it’s too much for one day—feels like this morning was at least a week ago. And the intoxication’s passed, blew clean out, and I’m cold. I’ve got this chilly shiver running down my back—I might be getting sick; it’s flu season, and there’s this draft from the doors…. And, please, there’s no need to be yelling at me—I’m already tired beyond belief, and can’t possibly muster the effort to react to any stimuli, except maybe if he picked up a knife and went ahead and sliced me into halves like the circus woman in the box, only I doubt I’d come back together again—Aidy, can you do something about this? Why won’t he stop yelling at me?

And look how red he’s turned—crimson, poor thing, the whole bald spot flushed like a jug of cherry liquor split under his skin. God forbid he “took a conceit,” as Aidy likes to say, meaning, had a stroke…. Only separate phrases break through to my awareness. (“Who’s the injured party here? What, was anyone injured because of me? No, no one can say that; go look as long as you want, you won’t find anyone!”) His monologue refuses to coalesce in my mind; it splits and shatters. Plus he is yelling, and I have trouble with yelling even when I’m fully awake—yelling in falsetto now—no longer a baritone—with hysterical girly modulations, which are also somehow fake, as if he’d memorized in advance the right way of screaming his indignity when he is suspected of collaborating with the KGB. Or maybe, in all those years of leading a double life, he lost the ability to speak spontaneously altogether—just forgot how you do it, say what you think, without prepared notes in your mind? (“It was me they threw out on the street like a dog, and it’s your Ninél’s fault! Hers and hers alone! You can’t ever deny it!”)

Aidy coos something soothing to him, as he’s done the whole evening—now would be a good time for me to make amends, curtsy peaceably, maybe even apologize, say I didn’t mean anything like that at all, tell them I want to go home now—stop, enough, enough of these memories, the ripping open of old wounds, of this eternal Ukrainian self-destruction. Aidy slaps his hands on the table like he’s slamming all the demons I’ve summoned back into the boards—enough, time to step out; it’s stuffy here, the ventilation’s crap, and it stinks like dirty socks—he can be squeamish, my Aidy, only it’s not socks, I think, detached as if in someone else’s mind: it’s the stench of decomposing souls. I’ve been reeling them in all day today, drawing them in like a thread on a spool—first Vadym, now this character, and if this is the new journalistic investigation that I’ve assigned myself to, I don’t want to touch it with an ten-foot pole.

And that’s when Baldy bursts open with a new, no longer false, undeniably honest sound: hurried, the last blubbering argument from the shut-off tap, the triumphant cry of well-aged hatred. “But God sees it! He sees it all! Walked over dead bodies she did, and dead bodies she got—or did she think it would always turn out her way? Thought she’d have her bed of roses—first with her husband, and once she drove him to the grave, then with the daughter she’d make into a Big Artist? Vladusya the genius. Yeah right—stamped out a bunch of those folksy paste-jobs of hers, Ms. Cookie-Cutter. Sure they played in Europe, what doesn’t? It’s been a desert for God knows how long. The Brits give out their Turners for shit you wouldn’t believe, and everyone here’s just happy to play along—fancy that, a world-famous artist, drives a sports car! Not very far she didn’t! Now her old matinka gets what she deserved!”

The next sound is that of a chair falling. It’s from under me—and I, on my feet, loom over the defiled table, like Lenin over a pulpit in an old Soviet movie, and yell, choking, at the lenses of those Beria glasses, something barely sentient and incredibly pitiful, something that begins with “How dare you” and instantly makes me want to disappear from the face of the earth. And when Aidy emerges from the ensuing brouhaha, from the snowstorm of the waiters’ white shirts and the dense smatter of faces that have turned to look at me, when he rises to his full monumental height and waves his arms like a conductor over the orchestra pit where the band’s gotten drunk and is now banging out a loud cacophony, I cede my pulpit to him and flee in a most undignified manner. Tripping and painfully slamming my hip into a corner of a chair or a table, blindly ripping my coat off the hook—out, through the doors with their desperate squeal of hinges, into the rancid, soggy, oily gloom the streetlamps are swimming in, down the stairs, coughing and slipping, to the thump of my own boots—and only on the sidewalk, where I stop, do I notice the napkin clenched in my hand: When did I snatch it, and what for, I wonder—was I going to throw it into Baldy’s face?

Night, snowdrifts, streetlamps fringed with mist, clouds above Prorizna running fast, so fast, unwinding into streaks of smoke above the bluish glow from the moon. When I was little, Mom and Dad used to take me for sled rides at nights—they’d hitch themselves to the sled and run down the long winter street, and one time I fell out of the sled on a turn and just lay there, in a snowdrift, a well-padded bundle. In the minute or two it took my parents to realize what had happened, the whole universe came crashing at me, alone—like an astronaut out of his ship, in open space. I remember the sky above—a star-dotted blackness—and the incomprehensible, cosmic silence, the likes of which I never heard again. When my parents returned, noisy and laughing, I already knew the world was different from what they were trying to make me believe it was. That a person was alone in it. And that to cry—something I remember they were very surprised I didn’t do—was futile. There was no one to cry to under this sky.

I don’t know how much time has passed—maybe a minute or two—when the quick scrunch of snow under a familiar step calls to me from behind my back—slush-slush, the thick vapor of breath, the dear smell of a tobacco-scented coat, aftershave, warmth, skin—home. Keys jingle. “Baby, don’t—here, get in the car before you catch a cold on top of everything, come on.”

And only now—after I turn to him, bury my face in his chest, in his dear smell, clawing through the soft fabric of his scarf, between the lapels of his cashmere coat, pressing, burrowing into his whole self, as if digging deeper into the ground to escape an artillery attack—do I finally let all my tears run at once, all of them, accumulated, it seems, over twenty years—from that day when I cried into Sergiy’s chest, the first man to whom I opened up. I let loose with a single blast, as if the cork were knocked out of me with one terrible, hiccupped sob, and the weeping that had sat all day in my throat like barking, breaks out. Like dogs barking.

Mama, Mommy. Aidy, Aidy. Don’t let me go.

“You asleep already?”

“Uhm-hm…”

“You’re kind of different with me now, you know?”

“Uhm-hm?”

“And when you enter me… inside… it’s somehow different… I don’t wait for the climax anymore, you know? It’s just, you’re inside me, and that’s it. Like in a dream. Or like breathing.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“You silly. Good, of course… it’s good. Go back to sleep.”

“Come to me.”

“What, again?”

“Yep. Again and always. What were you even thinking putting this shirt on?”

“Listen, do you believe that? What he said about Vlada’s mom?”

“That she ratted him out? I think so—why else would one hate someone else’s wife like she was family?”

“No, not that. The part about Vlada’s father—that she killed him? Do you believe something like that could happen?”

“Your feet are still cold, you little goose. Here, let me. All kinds of things happen.”

“Have you ever been with a woman like that? One who is killing you, and you know it—day after day?”

“I forgot. I forgot everything that was before. You’ve got the wrong guy to interview.”

“What do you mean, wrong guy? Who else am I gonna ask now?”

“You’re funny. I want you. All the time. Can you believe that?”

“No, listen… earlier in the day even, when I left Vadym’s place, I was thinking the same thing about Vlada. That she had no other way out, with Vadym. That it was like a tunnel, you know, where you can only move forward. What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? No wonder they didn’t much care for widows in the old days… or widowers, either.”

“Mm-m.”

“No, I mean it. The one who survives, he or she, sort of, didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip. Let death have them, you know?”

“Hush. Don’t think about that. You and I will live happily ever after and die on the same day.”

“Really? You promise?”

“Cross my heart. Worse comes to worst, we’ll blow ourselves up with one grenade.”

“Why did you say that? About the grenade?”

“How should I know? I was asleep, remember?”

“You poor thing!”

“Yep. You’re the one who roused me—and instead of getting down to business, took me to task about who I killed.”

“I love you. Here, put your paw right here, uh-huh, that’s good… I know you didn’t kill anybody. Honest.”

“Cross your heart? You believe me?”

“I do believe you, Aidy.”

“Let’s sleep then.”