The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

The Last Interview by Reporter Goshchynska

Who is he, really—Vadym?

He sits across the table from me, heavy and immovable. He always sits like that, wherever he is, as if he were at home where he owns everything—things, and people, even this unsettlingly empty restaurant, like the setting in a Hollywood horror flick, where he has brought me, after he called, in the middle of the night. It actually looks very much like he owns it, because when we came the doors were locked; he pushed a button I hadn’t seen and as soon as the doors opened, went straight in, not waiting (and not letting me go first, how rude!), pulling the scarf off his neck (Armani, 100 percent cashmere), saying to his door-opening lackey over the shoulder, as he walked, “Valera, have Mashenka lay the table for us.” He didn’t ask for the menu, nor did he ask me what I would like, or whether I would like anything at all, and now here he sits, across the table from me, in the large empty room, like Ali Baba in the thieves’ cave (it is a cave: black lacquer, black leather, backlit surfaces—the all-too-familiar mix of ostentation and grim industrialism that lacks charm but passes for glamour in our latitude). He is capacious and amiable like a shaved, whiskerless walrus, and his breathing is a bit heavy and irregular, as happens to well-nourished men past their prime: an early shortness of breath that, if you’re not used to it, might be taken for erotic arousal. Did Vlada like it perhaps? Or maybe he didn’t breathe like this back then, with Vlada?

“Stay out of it,” he says, looking at me without expression in his eyes, vacant like this restaurant of his (when’d he have time to buy it?). “There are serious people involved. You don’t want any part of it.”

Serious people. Meaning—those who, should you get in the way of their financial interests, might just whack you, another Ukrainian journalist disappeared without a trace. Or you might end up dead in a car accident, or found dead in your own apartment, a suicide. A woman who could not, for instance, get over being fired, why not? A single woman (the boyfriend is not mentioned in the police protocol), without children, all her life in her work, got a pink slip—and that’s it, she couldn’t take it, lost her will to live. And the best thing—no one would even think twice about it: a childless woman is a perfect target, keels over without a thump.

How nice of Vadym to warn me. And I, truth be told, after that ill-advised conversation we had, started to think nothing would get to him. And he, in the meantime, did some legwork, took the time to ask around—how kind of him. There are serious people behind the Miss New TV show, people whose names no one will ever read in the credits. Like the names of the girls who will come to Kyiv for the contest’s preliminary rounds and never make it to the screen, girls who will make it to a completely different place. Not necessarily to foreign brothels even—but right here at home. Someone has to welcome the EU sex tourists and thereby raise the country’s attractiveness-to-foreign-investment ratings; someone has to give a donor a blow job while he is speeding home in his SUV from the meeting at campaign headquarters. Serious people, serious business.

Crying’s the last thing I need right now, but my nose tickles treacherously, and I begin to breathe hard, like Vadym, hard and fast. We sit facing each other, the two of us, and snuffle like hedgehogs on a narrow path. We must be quite a sight. But, dear God, what a nasty feeling this is—to know a crime is about to happen, and not be able to stop it.

How much does it cost—one girl? Those who trade in people—how much do they charge for a soul? Why do I not, after ten years of hard-boiled journalism, know these figures? And why can’t I now bring myself to ask Vadym, who must know?

Who in the hell is he—Vadym?

All I know is that in his previous life, before he became a serious person himself, he graduated with a degree in history, from Kyiv State U. A useful department it was, history: full of country boys straight from army service who paraded around in double-breasted navy suits with Komsomol pins in their lapels and signed up to rat for the KGB for the love of the game. Now the boys are all well past forty and have a new and improved uniform—an Armani suit and a Rolex on the wrist, a real one. And chauffeur Vasya in the SUV—a distant relative from the native village. Who are all these people, and how did they come to manipulate the lives of millions of others—including mine?

“Have some sausage,” Vadym says, nodding at the plate of cold cuts. The slices—beet-red, blood-black, rusty-brown with whitish curlicues of fat—look in the glamorous light like Gothic porn—an installation of vulvas post-coitus. I think I’m going to throw up. Wordlessly I shake my head. Vadym, oblivious, hooks a forkful; a parsley sprig drops from the folded red flesh and remains against the backlit tabletop like an exhibit in a natural history museum. Vadym’s always had a good appetite—a sure sign that the man knows how to enjoy life.

I taste the wine: a 2002 Pinot Noir from an Italian winery with an unpronounceable name. A sunny year, Vadym assured me when his lackey brought out the bottle swaddled in a napkin and, following a commanding motion of Vadym’s eyebrows, proudly presented it to me, like he was a midwife holding up a newborn for the mother to see. Vadym, as is his custom, is drinking cognac, but he knows his wines. People like him know many inessential things that nevertheless make life undeniably more pleasant. Would their life be utterly intolerable without this pleasantness—like a petrified turd under the milk-chocolate cover of a Snickers bar? The long-forgotten face of R., the way he looked after sex, pops up before my eyes, and I take another sip. Indeed, the wine is superb.

“The opposition won’t do anything about this,” Vadym explains, moving more food to his plate. “This show won’t make a loud case, and it’s not good enough for an attack-ad campaign—not much there to work with. This close to elections they want heavy artillery. And your show’s just games, small potatoes.”

“Human lives, actually,” I remind him.

Vadym grows momentarily surly, as if I’d said something tactless, and sets to work on his salmon. I’ve noticed this habit of his before: not responding to an unpleasant remark as if he hasn’t heard it at all. As if the other person farted in public. This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you find distasteful.

“And if that’s how things are,” I go on farting, “then what’s the difference between your opposition and the goons that are running this country?”

Vadym sizes me up with a quick, short squint over his plate. (Where did I recently see this triumphant look—like a card player dealt a good hand?)

“And what, in your opinion, should it be?”

“It’s only in Jewish jokes that you answer a question with a question. I thought we were serious.”

Vadym smiles mysteriously, then says, “The same difference, Daryna, as always separates people: some have more money and others have less.”

“And you think there are no other differences that separate people?”

“In politics—no,” he says firmly.

I can see he is not joking.

“I’m sorry, but what about ideas? Views? Convictions?”

“That was good in the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first—been there, done that.”

“That’s how it is, huh?”

“And you thought?” he retorts, mimicking my intonation in jest—he’s got quick reflexes, like a boxer—and dabs his lips with his napkin: he has large, sensuous lips, almost cartoonish, and they make it hard to notice, at first, what a strong, willful face Vadym has. “All those ideologies that in the nineteenth century set the course for politics for a hundred years ahead have given up the ghost by now. Nationalism is the only one that has survived. And that’s only because it relies not on convictions but on emotions.”

“So did Communism! It relied on one of the most trivial human emotions of them all—envy. Class hatred, in their parlance. Because you can’t make everyone rich, let’s make everyone poor so there isn’t anyone to be jealous of! Isn’t that the way it worked?”

Vadym does not like being contradicted.

“That’s the way, but it ain’t. Remember Marx? Ideas only become a material force when they’ve gripped the masses—remember that?”

“Let’s say I do, so then what?”

“So, no one ever said what came next. And that was the most interesting part, and the Bolsheviks were the first to catch on to it—Lenin really was a genius…. How do you get an idea to grip the masses? The masses never did, and never will, give a flying fuck about ideas, pardon my language—the masses don’t want ideas, they want bread and circuses. Like in ancient Rome, and that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it will always be. It’s just that, until now, no society has ever been able to give the masses a steady supply of what they want, the economics weren’t there. Developed Western nations today are the first to have come within reach of the ideal: a well-fed citizen sitting down in front of his TV after work with a beer. The running of the country is conducted entirely behind his back; he is only shown talking heads on TV, the floor of the parliament—where people are making speeches, debating, working hard to sway his opinion—and he develops a sense of his own significance, a sense that he matters, that he has a say. So every now and then he goes to vote, casts his ballot, persisting in the illusion that he was the one who elected all those people into office, hired them, that he rules the country. And he is quite pleased with himself—and a person who is pleased with himself will never rebel. That he only cast his ballot for those he saw on TV most often, and at the best angles, never occurs to him. And if it ever does, he’ll dismiss the idea on the spot, because it threatens to topple his comfortably ordered world. Do you follow? You don’t seem to be eating anything…”

“I had dinner already, thank you. So what about those ideas that grip the masses?”

“What I’m telling you is there aren’t any left in big politics. That’s the thing, Daryna. Have some cheese. They’re all illusions of the pre-information age—all those socialisms, liberalisms, communisms, and other what-have-you…. The nineteenth century still believed all that—in the last twitches of Enlightenment. But, you can write four-letter words on a wall all you want—it’s still a wall, and everything’s still behind it. Take the Second World War—it was a clash of two socialisms, the Russian against the German, and who now remembers that? What ideas? Who gives a damn? The masses are not ruled by ideas—they are ruled by certain complex emotions, but even those are not so complex that you couldn’t predict and model them. Self-satisfaction, envy, resentment, fear—you’ve studied psychology, you know this yourself. And ideas in politics—whenever politicians really needed the support of the masses—always had the same function as slogans in advertising: they’re triggers.”

“Meaning—they affect the subconscious?”

“You got it. They mobilized certain complex emotions and locked them into a short circuit. Like with Pavlov’s dogs. You said it right, just then: Communism was a mobilization of envy. Thus, your core constituency is the socially disenfranchised; that’s the base you can count on. Everyone knows the best pogrom squads are made of those who’d grown up being pogrommed themselves. Bolsheviks made good use of the Russian Jewry before they secured their power. You mobilize the base with envy, with the desire for revenge—and intimidate the rest, the passive majority, terrorize them to nip resistance in the bud. And that’s it; you don’t need no ideologies after that.”

“Are you trying to tell me that was the Bolsheviks’ original plan?”

“That, or something else—what does it matter? The main thing was that Lenin made the brilliant discovery: it’s not an ideology that constitutes a material force—it’s political technology!” Vadym enunciates the last word with such gusto you’d think it were edible. “You can feed the masses whatever hogwash you want—today one thing, tomorrow another, and the day after something different yet, without any connection to what came before. Today we’re dismantling the army, tomorrow we’re shooting the deserters; today we’re recognizing Ukraine’s independence, tomorrow we’re installing a puppet government with our bayonets; today we’re giving land to the peasants, tomorrow we’re taking it away. Any maneuver can be justified by the political goal of the moment, and the masses will keep eating it up. But—only as long as you keep pushing the same button. That is to say, engaging the same complex emotions. And you can keep pushing it till kingdom come if you not only have the means of enforcement in your pocket, but also the media—and Lenin didn’t even have television! What you can’t do, under any circumstances, is change the button or the whole machine will explode. Gorbachev tried it—and you see what happened?”

“Vadym, you lost me. Are you talking about political history, or the mechanisms by which criminal groups co-opt political power?”

Vadym cringes, but in a friendly way: he heard my fart this time and is letting me know that in the company of serious people it will not be tolerated.

“I am talking about effective politics, Daryna. Have some cheese; it’s Brie, good stuff, fresh…. Politics is by definition the struggle for power.”

“To what end?”

“What—to what end?” Vadym asks, confused.

“Struggling for power—to what end? To come to it, get it, and sit there? Chase away new contenders? Or is power still a means of implementing certain, forgive me for belaboring the point—ideas? Certain convictions about the way your nation ought to develop and, more generally speaking, about how we can all collectively dig ourselves out from the pile of shit your effective politicians have piled on the human society? I’m sorry, I know I’m spouting banalities here, but I do feel like I’m missing something.”

We have never had conversations like this before, Vadym and I. When he called me out of the blue at ten at night—“Hello, Daryna, Vadym here, gotta talk”—and stunned me by declaring he was coming to get me, I could imagine anything (my first thought was, something’s happened to Katrusya) other than this lecture on the fundamentals of political cynicism in an empty restaurant. If what he really wanted to do was to warn me, he could have done that on the phone. And yet somehow I am not surprised; I am playing right along, dutifully posing my questions. As if I were interviewing him for the cameras. (Do they have security cameras, I wonder?) As if one day I were going to bring this interview before Vlada who stands, an invisible shadow, between us: she is the one who left Vadym to me—like a question to which she failed to find an answer.

Vadym finishes chewing unhurriedly, dabs his lips with the napkin again, folds it neatly, and puts it down beside his plate. Then he raises his eyes to me—a statesman’s weary gaze, a mix of boredom, lenity, irony, and pity.

“Do you think that Bush lost sleep over saving the world? Or Schroeder, after he stuck his country on the Russians’ gas needle? Or Chirac? Or Berlusconi?”

“What’s gas got to do with anything? Even if they’re all rotten bastards it doesn’t automatically mean that…”

“Whoa, now!” Vadym cuts in, beginning to enjoy himself. “What do you mean, what’s gas got to do with it? Power is access to energy sources, my dear! Fuel is the key to world domination—always has been, always will be.”

“I seem to remember hearing this before, somewhere—the thing about world domination…”

Again Vadym squints at me with the directed gaze of an attentive, always internally focused person. (Where, where did I see this look? Night, darkness, reddish reflections of fire on people’s faces…)

“If Hitler’s who you have in mind, his case is actually the best proof that having an idea can only undermine a serious politician. Really, ideas are counter-indicated. Of ideas, poor Adolf, unfortunately, had plenty—and believed in them, to make things worse.”

For an instant, I despair: it’s like Vadym and I are speaking two different languages, using the same words that have different meanings for each of us, and I don’t know how to disentangle myself from this confusion. And he is on a roll, words are spilling out of him, and he is clearly enjoying the process—how smoothly and evenly it all comes out.

“It was from the Bolsheviks that Hitler learned the most important thing—the technology of manipulating the masses. And the button he found was good, too: national resentment, the Weimar defeat complex. Plus the same envy of the socially disenfranchised that the Bolsheviks exploited. And there he had it—the German nation of workers and peasants, and on an order of magnitude more successful, by the way, than the one the Russians had built. If Hitler hadn’t had a brain-fuck, excuse me, on the idea of winning world domination for his beloved German people—and that’s a totally demented idea; no people can dominate the world, only corporations can, and that’s how it has always been and always will be—if he hadn’t had, to put it simply, a bunch of idiotic fantasies in his head, history would’ve have taken a different course. And the US today would mean no more than Honduras. Or, say, New Zealand.”

“So what then, Adolf fucked up?”

Vadym does not share my irony.

“Exactly. Fucked up. There was a reason Stalin couldn’t, until the very last moment, believe that Hitler would attack him. He couldn’t fathom that a politician of that stature could turn out to be such an ideological dickhead, like a green student radical or something. They could have—couldn’t they?—just divided the world into spheres of influence as they’d agreed in ’39, and everything would’ve been fine. A lot less blood would’ve been spilled, too. Back in my university days, I wrote my thesis on the Battle of Kursk—I tell you, that was a horrific business: if you didn’t know better, you’d think the only thing either side cared about was how to kill more of its own soldiers. There you have your ideas.”

“Is there any chance it might matter what those ideas are?”

“Whatever you want them to be, Daryna! In politics, all they do is stand in the way—they’re noise. Trust me; I’ve been handling this shit for years. And without gloves,” he clarifies as if this were some especially sophisticated exclusive he were giving me. “We’re on the verge of a new world order—the status quo that emerged after World War II has long been pushed to its limits, the Yalta epoch has exhausted itself. Think about it, you’re a smart woman. Do you honestly believe that toppling the Twin Towers was the homespun work of a handful of demented Arabs from nowhere? And that Bush, who, by the way, has old family business ties to the Saudi oil sheiks, went into Iraq to save the world? And the apartment buildings blown up in Ryazan when Putin needed to send the Taman Guards to Chechnya, a division recruited from that same Ryazan—is that not the same scenario? Only they did a sloppier job in Russia, and everyone knows that those explosions were FSB’s handiwork. But it’s too late now; the deed’s done. The way to the Caspian oil pipeline’s been cleared—Georgia’s still fussing underfoot, but it’ll be its turn soon. Now one of your journalist people over in the States is making a movie about September 11—trying to prove the whole thing was a political provocation, and that Bush knew about it ahead of time…”

“You mean Michael Moore?” I remember I saw the headline on a news crawl somewhere—about the film’s presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, where I am no longer going. “I wouldn’t think you followed that kind of news. So, is there a hypothesis about who engineered that provocation?”

Again, a quick triumphant flame flares up in Vadym’s eyes—as if he himself were one of the provocation’s authors. “Who it was, Daryna, no one will find out for the next ten to twenty years. Until the new redistribution of the energy-source markets is over. And that Moore guy won’t prove anything to anyone, mark my word.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because—again—it’s too late! The button has been pushed, the masses mobilized: they were shown very real horror on television, and they got scared. Bunched together into a herd. And no journalistic investigation can now convince them that that was precisely the goal—to have them bunch together into a herd and put their fate in the shepherd’s hands. On the contrary. Now, the more American blood is spilled in Iraq, the more trust there will be for the administration because it is the hardest thing for people to admit that their loved ones died for nothing. Nothing glues a nation together like spilled blood: the USSR was sealed in the same way—by the Great War. And Bush, you can be sure, will get reelected for a second term this fall. That’s the reality, Daryna. And all the talk about liberal democracy, or the Party’s dictatorship, or whatever—it’s all crap, forget it. The politics of today is an amalgamation of the experience of twentieth-century superpowers and the experience of the marketplace, of advertising. An immensely powerful combination, if you know how to use it.”

“Precisely. Orwell wrote about it, back in the day.”

Vadym ignores Orwell like another fart.

“This is a very serious shift, Daryna. A historical one. The masses no longer choose an idea, or a slogan—they are choosing a brand. And they’re not doing their choosing rationally either—they vote purely with their emotions. Bread and circuses? Here you go—public politicking itself becomes a circus! What are presidential debates if not the same old gladiator fights? September 11 is the most successful reality show in history: every soul on Earth who could find a TV set watched it. Putin is a TV superhero now, and seventy percent of Russian women have erotic dreams about him. In Stalin’s days, they threw people in jail for dreams like that. A public politician today is a showman first and foremost, the registered trademark of the company behind him.”

“And the company—who is that?”

“A corporation of those who do the actual governing,” Vadym answers calmly. “The world has always been ruled by such corporations. Only the post-information society is much easier to rule than societies were sixty years ago. He who ensures the best show for the masses wins. He who, to put it bluntly, puts the picture into the TV. Meaning, ultimately, whoever has the most money. And that’s that.”

“You really believe that?”

Vadym smiles. He does have a really nice smile.

“Believing belongs in church. And Daryna, I am used to dealing with things that are real. You just remember that history is made by money. That’s how it’s always been and will be.”

An unpleasant chill begins to fill me, like in a dentist’s waiting room when I was little.

“The Soviet Union had enough money to wipe its ass with it,” I tell him, mustering as much crudity as possible. “And fat lot of good it did them.”

“Whoa there one minute!” Vadym exclaims, astonished. “Half the world under control—that’s not good enough for you? You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the twentieth century without hitting Soviet cash! Take even what happened in ’33—Stalin got the West right where he wanted them when he flooded the world market with all that genocidal Ukrainian wheat! And remember, it was the Great Depression—d’you think Roosevelt just happened to roll over and recognize the USSR exactly then? There’s your fat lot of good, right there. In ’47, Moscow sent grain to France in silk sacks, and French Communists waved those like flags at the elections: look how the working class in the USSR lives! All those Western Communist parties, leftist movement, terrorism, Red Brigades, all the rumbles in the third-world jungles—do you think it all fed and clothed itself? No, dear, the hand of Moscow could be very, very generous when it needed to be. And not a single peep from anyone—so, alright, they let a couple dissidents out, and maybe the Jews stood up for their own, but that’s it; that’s your entire Cold War right there… Americans can tell themselves they won it all they want since it makes them so happy—but they’re living in a fool’s paradise. In reality, if oil prices hadn’t collapsed in the eighties, and if the Politburo hadn’t started squabbling, you and I would still be living in the USSR. You can be sure about that.”

He is talking like a sports commentator reflecting on the rise and fall of some team like Manchester United, and in that regard I also hear something else in his voice: the time-tested ardor of a soccer fan, a boy’s admiration for the forward—the same intonations with which old retired military remember the USSR. There are so many of them—people who are always ready to see all kinds of good in any crime as long as it goes unpunished.

“That’s exactly what I am not so sure about.” For some reason, my voice goes low; shit, could I possibly be nervous? “I know nothing about any squabbling in the Politburo, but as far as I can tell, if one were to try to find a single reason for why the USSR collapsed, it was under the burden of its own lies. All of it, accumulated over seventy years. Because virtual reality—it is this thing, I’m here to tell you, that can hit back very hard if you play with it for too long. You can’t keep lying and maintain your own sense of how things really are at the same time. If you keep ordering a certain picture on TV, you eventually start believing it yourself. Inevitably. And that’s the end of any, as you call it, actual governing—exactly what happened in the USSR. And this Politburo of yours, a corporation of senile old men…”

“It’s not mine,” Vadym grins, warming a glass of cognac in his paws. “But it does fit the definition of a corporation, I’ll give you that.”

That’s praise—as if he were assessing my performance in his mind, like a judge at an art show or a violin recital. Putting pluses in some imagined columns next to my name. And this, for some reason, really pisses me off.

“So then, this corporation of yours was made up of zombies who’d zombied themselves so thoroughly they knew nothing about the country they ruled! They thought Armenians were Muslims—remember that big shot from Moscow who let that drop in Nakhchevan? The FSB still can’t bring itself to believe that Ukraine is independent—they keep waiting for their made-up picture to come back on. Governors, my ass! Like blind butchers in a slaughterhouse.

“Some folks I know interviewed Fedorchuk not too long ago—the head of the Ukrainian KGB under Brezhnev, he’s living out his days in Moscow now—with not a soul to talk to, his son shot himself, wife also committed suicide, and to him it’s all like water off a duck: like they’d catapulted the dude to Mars decades ago, and he just stayed there—spent all his life in virtual reality. By the way, it was on his watch they packed my father off to the loony bin…. And do you know what this mummy remembers before he dies, the most important thing in his life? That he put up a new departmental apartment building for the KGB in Kyiv: made sure all his cronies had a place to live! My jaw dropped when I heard it: what kind of a Gestapo chief is that? I thought he’d at least lash out at the nationalists he used to fight, you know, regret that he didn’t quite finish them bastards off, since now they’ve brought the great country down. But he couldn’t care less—the only reality he had and still has is this one: a departmental apartment building. A family corporation, like the mob. Beyond that, the world doesn’t exist for these people; that’s how they see it—like a picture they chose for themselves, and on which they can push the delete button if they want to. Not much by way of ideas there, you’re right! What kind of government can there be with ideas like that? You’re a historian, Vadym,” I resort to my last argument (like all serious people who didn’t start out as goons, Vadym likes pointing out his former “civilian” vocation).

“You don’t need to be reminded how that corporate country burst, like a soap bubble, every time it came face to face with a reality on which it couldn’t press its delete button. That’s exactly what happened at the beginning of the war, only Hitler helped them out that time, by turning out to be a worse zombie yet—folks took a good look at what rolled into their backyards and went to fight for real. And in our own memory—when Chernobyl blew up: an idiot could see that the system was on its last legs, an idiot would’ve known people should have been evacuated from the contaminated area. But these zombies herded children to the Labor Day parade in Kyiv, and the KGB was running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, desperately recruiting new finks because it ran out of the ones it already had… pressing the same old buttons, as you say. Lies can get you to the end of the world, but they can’t bring you back, thank God. You can’t keep raping reality with impunity; sooner or later it will take its revenge, and the later it comes, the more terrifying it will be. You don’t kid around with these things, Vadym!”

All of a sudden, Vadym starts laughing—with his entire body at once. His monumental bust in its Armani suit coat shudders above the table like Etna, with subterranean jolts; his face contorts pathetically, as if he were chopping onions, and looks so comical that I, too, can’t help smiling—making both of us look rather stupid. Vadym nods to a long-legged, long-necked, and black-clad young woman who has appeared, like a miniature giraffe, out of thin air next to our table. “Ice cream, Mashenka.”

From his mouth, this comes out as warmly as “sausage” did a bit earlier. Mashenka, before disappearing, shoots me, from the height of her triangular face—a Cubist’s dream—a professionally manufactured smile, a mirror image of my own momentary grin, and, at the same time, a sharp, wary look of the territory’s mistress who is about to leave an untrustworthy guest alone with her male: this is mine, don’t touch it. Wow. Did he really find the time to put his stakes down here, too? She’s pretty stylish, Mashenka is; she could’ve been a model… wow again. What about the massaging Svetochka now?

“At least you still have taste,” I tell Vadym vindictively, following his little black giraffe with my eyes as she leaves the room.

He pretends he didn’t hear, and pours me more wine. He does stop laughing, though. Only breathes heavier and louder than before. Exercise, you need to exercise more, Vadym—what kind of shape are you in, breathing like that at your age? While Vlada was alive, he and I always used to be a little caustic with each other, but back then I wrote it off to the natural jealousy every man feels toward his wife’s girlfriend, an owner’s reflex—so now I keep pushing. “You own this restaurant, don’t you?”

“What if I do?” Vadym replies, looking slyly around the brightly lit, black-lacquer cave and squinting like a cat that’s trying to get you to pet him. “Do you like it?”

Now, this is a look I remember exactly where I’ve seen before—that’s what my boss looked like when he waited for me to praise him at his housewarming, signaling at me with his eyes across a giant room full of people: applaud me now, go ahead, applaud, confirm to me that it hasn’t been all in vain—give my marathon swim through shit its long overdue justification.

So is this what Vadym’s brought me here for—to show off his new acquisition, to get my approval—you’re on the right path, comrade? Now I finally catch on to something I should’ve caught on to long ago (for the smart woman Vadym believes me to be, I can sometimes be incredibly daft): for him, I have replaced Vlada in the bar-setter’s role—if I approve, she would have approved, too. And then everything’s okay, and Vadym’s life is back in tiptop shape. That’s what he wants; that’s what he is trying to extract from me. He doesn’t miss a beat, this guy. He’s a bull!

Do you have to be a toothless old hag to stop falling into the same trap—to stop mixing up strength and resilience in men? In every war there is but one law: the strong die and the resilient survive. There’s no special accomplishment in that, no credit to be given them; it’s the genetic programming they were born with—to survive: like the lizard that grows back its tail, or the earthworm that regenerates its lost segments. Vadym, who so recently appeared to be utterly annihilated by Vlada’s death, has put himself back together like the damaged Terminator—by disassembling his dead wife into the various critical functions she performed for him and redistributing them to other women: N.U., Katrusya, several Svetochkas and Mashenkas, to each her own, like in Buchenwald, and only the niche of the bar-setter (“How am I going to live now? She set the bar for me…”), the one to whom you bring your life like homework to be graded, to receive, in return, a clear conscience and untroubled sleep—this extraordinarily important niche in every Ukrainian man’s life has been, for Vadym, unfilled, and he must be feeling a constant discomfort emanating from that spot. No one will tell him the truth now—he’s got too much money for that. But I—I’m always there. I’m Vlada’s closest friend, and I want nothing from him; I’m the perfect fit. And should I be inclined to blurt out something contrarian—well, that’s exactly why he’s given me, completely for free, his very valuable piece of advice: keep quiet.

Now I am supposed to pay him back for this favor, tit for tat, a fair trade! I am supposed to applaud his new acquisition without interrogating him about where he found the dough for the new glam digs (especially right now, when the powers that be are taxing everything that moves to fund their anti-Yushchenko campaign, which is beginning to look like an actual war and not just a publicity war, and Vadym’s ostensibly part of the opposition, if I’m not mistaken, so what fairy godmother waved her wand and conjured this restaurant?). I should praise the interior design and Mashenka and whatever else, whip up a bunch of compliments and ensure for him the aforementioned clear conscience and untroubled sleep. And I should not, God forbid, ask what the hell he wants from this fucking restaurant, and why, once he had money to spare, he didn’t put it—toward his dead woman’s memory, as she had dreamed of doing (“when I have real money, Daryna…”)—into any of the squalid pig-farm barns our museums have become: the National right here, for one, where to this day they can’t give what survived of the Boichuk School the space it deserves; or the Hanenki, out of which you could, if you fancied, lift a Velázquez or a Perugino as easily as canvases out of a crashed car—oh, the list goes on and on! That’s what Vlada would have told him. But I won’t because I don’t have the right to. And he knows that. He knows, and waits, and squints with pleasure in advance—like a cat about to be scratched behind the ear by the mouse he’s caught. How can you not love the guy?

“You, Vadym, are an amazing piece of work.”

He instantly takes this for the compliment he feels due, swallows said compliment like a morsel off his plate—gulp!—and brightens up so sweetly that only a complete bitch wouldn’t feel disarmed. “You shouldn’t have turned down the dinner! My chef has three international diplomas, beat a French guy at a contest in Venice last year.”

Dare I hope he is not about to take me to view those diplomas?

“As I said, I’ve eaten already.”

“And now you’re missing out; you can be sure about that. You have to join me for dessert, at least.”

“Uhu, as my granny used to say, ‘you haven’t eaten an ox until someone saw you do it.’”

“Mh-hm,” Vadym agrees, either because he doesn’t get it or because he didn’t quite hear me. “Our grandparents lived through some real tough times, what can you say…?”

And that’s why now we take such pride in what we eat, I think but do not say out loud—1933, 1947—it’s all stowed away somewhere inside us, coded into our cell memory, and the children and grandchildren, delirious with the sudden abundance of the nineties are now busy growing new segments, like the earthworms—catching up for everything uneaten in the generations before them. Only it’s as if there’s been an error in the genetic code, a mutation that’s been selecting for the most resilient, the best at chewing and digesting, and it is now they who fill our city with the petrified refuse of their gigantic intestines: restaurants, bistros, taverns, pubs, diners, and snack bars multiply at every step like mushrooms after the rain, only dentist’s office marquees can compete with the eateries in their intrusive density, and if one were to stroll around Kyiv with nothing particular to do (only who now can go strolling like that, with nothing to do), one might very well think that people in this city do nothing but eat, eat—and have their teeth sharpened so they can eat some more.

R., too, took great pleasure in talking about the delicacies he ate in Hong Kong, and the ones in the Emirates, and others in New York, in some stratospheric establishment where they don’t even give you a menu you just order whatever comes to mind, and don’t ask about the price. “And do they really just get you whatever you ask for?” I asked him. “They certainly do,” R. assured me with dignity. “What if it’s an endangered species? Komodo dragon brains? Siberian tiger steak? Or something more environmentally friendly, perhaps—charcuterie of donor kidneys, chopped out of some Albanians or Mongolians no one bothers to count?” R. laughed. And when I asked him, up front, how many starving people could be fed for the price of that one dinner, he took offense and called it bigotry. Although he, unlike Vadym, wasn’t even a bit heavy.

This is who they are, these serious people—all those who, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, rushed to rake in never-before-seen capitals, first as cash knitted into their undershorts, and later as transfers to offshore accounts—this is who they are: the descendants of a pogrom. The kind of pogrom modern history couldn’t fathom, and which, for that very reason, it failed to see or acknowledge when it happened in its own time, simply pressed the delete button. And now it is too late, they have arrived—the ones who, as Vadym said, make up the best pogrom squads. They have arrived and will take revenge on the new century for the mounds of deleted corpses from the past, spawning similarly deleted mounds of new corpses, and never suspecting that they themselves constitute a mutation—a tool of revenge. Flagellum Dei, the scourge of God (where did I just hear this phrase?). They have magnificent teeth, brand new titanium implants, and are insatiable like the iron locusts of the Apocalypse: they have come to eat, and they will eat until they burst—until their titanium teeth grind everything in their path into dust.

Suddenly I feel so tired, as if all the air had been let out of me. As if he’d sucked me dry, this Vadym—although it is not at all clear how he could’ve managed that. A growing ache buzzes at the back of my head; I try to hold it straight. The black-giraffe Mashenka brings ice cream in silver flutes—his own ice cream, made in house, Vadym continues to brag, from that same wonder chef.

“Taste it, you won’t regret it. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?”

Rich, thick-enough-to-cut-with-a-knife ice cream, yellowish like cream, does have an unusual taste—like the taste of country cooking: something filling, dense, unrefined and fragrant, from an era before plastics. One helping of this is enough to keep you full for a day. Obediently, I say this to Vadym. He nods like a professor happy with a student’s answer on an exam.

“Now this, Daryna,” he suddenly says didactically, “is the reality.”

“What—the ice cream?”

“And the ice cream, too.” He is no longer smiling. “All this,” he looks over his cave again, “and many other things. The ice cream, by the way, is all-natural, made with real milk. No chemical dyes, no GMOs. You know what gee-em-Os are?”

“I’ve seen that abbreviation before…”

“Genetically modified organisms. The ones that are winning a growing share of the world’s food market and our national market as well. Soy beans, potatoes with scorpion genes…”

“Good Lord, why scorpion?”

“So the bugs won’t eat them. And they don’t. But we do, all of Polyssya has been planted over with those potatoes. Western importers are dumping all this shit on us with no restrictions or controls whatsoever; another generation—and we’ll have the same problems with obesity as Americans do today. And in a few more generations on such a diet we might very well start growing tails, or, say, hooves, no one can tell for sure which in advance.”

“Come on, that’s straight out of Hollywood!”

“Yes!” Vadym responds, inexplicably encouraged. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You were so full of fire and brimstone when you were talking about reality and how one doesn’t kid around with it, you almost had me. You’re good! You nailed it, as if from the screen. But what is it—this reality? To listen to you, it’s a… a…” he hesitates for an instant, uncertain outside his regular vocabulary, “a fetish. As if reality existed separately, all by itself.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

“For some village grandma—it may very well indeed. But you, of all people, ought to realize that reality is manufactured by people. And you can’t draw the boundary anymore between what you call reality and what’s been manufactured,” he slows down again, looking for words: he is not used to abstractions, “realities that have been manufactured by people.”

“Simulacra?”

Damn that silver tongue of mine! This is not a word Vadym knows—and for a few seconds he studies me with the unblinking antipathy of a redneck whose first instinct is to suspect treachery every time he runs into something unknown. (This momentary clash—as if he and I had rammed into each other at full tilt—makes me instantly dizzy; the world, shaken, lurches into motion like sloshing water, and a queer sense of someone else’s invisible presence flickers by, a near presence, somewhere by my side, where I don’t dare turn my suddenly aching head.)

“It’s postmodern theory,” I hear my own voice say, also as if from somewhere beside me. “Media, advertising, the Internet—they are simulacra. Phantom phenomena that do not bear a direct relationship to reality, but together constitute a parallel reality, the so-called hyperreality. A famous theory—Baudrillard wrote about it. He was French.”

“See!” hearing that he, by himself, came to the same conclusions as a famous Frenchman, Vadym regains magnanimity. “That’s what I’m telling you. Just then, when you didn’t believe me, you said, Hollywood, and that’s perfectly normal, that’s a normal reaction. It’s harder now to believe the truth than something made up. Any truth is the result of so many complicated moves and connections, with so many of those moves hidden, that a regular guy could never dream of making any sense of it. And something made up, a fiction—that’s what they call a slam dunk, every time. And the more information there is out there, the more regular people will favor simple solutions.”

“Occam’s razor?”

“That’s it. Tell the public that Kuchma ordered a journalist killed because the man had criticized him—and everyone will believe it. Because that’s what dictatorship always looks like in movies. But if you tell them it was a special operation of several intelligence services, one whose geopolitical significance for the region could be compared to that of the Balkan war—and people’ll look at you like you’re nuts.”

“So was it really an intelligence operation?”

“Doesn’t matter!” Vadym cuts me off, lips holding back a smile that threatens to slither out like a worm, and that same sensation, of a rocked vestibular apparatus, undercuts me again: a splash, a giant mudslide, the solid ground under my feet slipping apart like fissured ice.

He is bewitching me. He is bedeviling me, like a professional seducer, so that I won’t know what to believe—this must be how he gets all the women: by robbing them, step by step, of their footing, turning the ground beneath their feet into shifting gray sand like in that dream Vlada had, and once he has, all that’s left for his bewildered victim to do is to throw herself onto his broad chest: he is a wall of a man, the solitary rock among a fog of phantoms! A powerful erotic move, to be sure, but where, damn it, have I met a man exactly like this before (not R., R. was simpler)—with the same calmly assaulting manner of persuading and subjecting others, even with the same cunning glint of insanity in his eye? (A patient in a faded grayish gown whom I saw looking at me, a fifteen-year-old, in the yard of the Dnipropetrovsk loony bin, grinning as if he knew everything about me—all the worst, the stuff that would never in a million years even occur to Mom who went twaddling on about something pathetic; neither would it occur to her that a visit to my father could evoke in me any feelings different from her own, and that I, boiling with tears of rage, stood there thinking that my mother was a fool and my father had abandoned me, had betrayed me for the sake of his own, terrible grown-up business that was more important to him than I was, and had become this helpless desiccated old man with murky eyes. At that moment, I hated them both, with all the fervor of teenage resentment, and that’s when it hit me, head on, blinding me—the look of that other character who grinned as if he had read my mind, and I went cold—and only later saw what it was he held in his hand tucked under the loose hem of his robe.)

“Take another example,” Vadym pours out more of his sand. “The White House announced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and everyone believed it. And never mind that they still haven’t found those weapons—and, most likely, won’t. They’ll be morons, of course, if they don’t; if it were the Russians, they would’ve planted some right away, and then no one would ever dig up what actually happened. There you have your reality. And you say—bad governors. No, my dear, the effectiveness of a government must be judged according to the tasks that the government sets for itself. The stuff that goes out to the public—that’s not an indicator, you can’t pay attention to that.”

He lied to her, I suddenly realize. He lied to Vlada. I don’t know how, I don’t know what about, but I know it as clearly as if the right switch finally flipped in my mind and the light came on: he lied. And was perfectly effective at it—Vlada lived with this simulacrum for three years and did not notice it. Only close to the end did she begin to suspect something—all her works from the last year of her life were full of a growing premonition of a catastrophe. Her best works, the ones that triggered such a fit of anger in Aidy’s art-worm (I still blush at the recollection of that ugly scene). And not in him alone—few in Ukraine appreciated Vlada’s Secrets, something about the series transgressed the boundaries of the acceptable.

An intimate knowledge of darkness—that’s what they contained. Her Secrets—of darkness made home, warmed by a feminine hand—adorned with flowers and decoupage, like a wolf’s lair hung about with elaborate patchwork quilts, her own darkness. Mixed media, the mysteriously shimmering collages by the girl who stood at the edge of the abyss and looked down with a child’s thrill—until she got dizzy. As I am getting right now.

He is shrouding me in his language, this Vadym—it’s like a cloud of marijuana smoke. I can’t contradict him: I do not, in fact, know anything, let alone have any of the intimate familiarity, about all that hidden machinery of big politics that he keeps hinting at—with passing, shifty references I can’t quite grip; I have no logical crutch I could lean on to help myself scatter this verbal fog—I am only sensing a fundamental untruth hidden in it, and this hypnotic cocoon in which he is ensnaring me is paralyzing my will, as though taking away my command of my own body. The bifurcation point, a phrase from Aidy’s vocabulary, shoots through my mind: this is the point at which women undress for Vadym. Or tell him to fuck off.

And, pretending that Aidy is watching me (and I am savoring, in advance, the story I’ll have to tell him when I get home), I improvise a husky, deep chuckle—in the big, empty dining room, it sounds more defiant than conspiratorial—“Why are you telling me all this, Vadym?”

Oh, what a look he gives me! A man’s look, sizing me up, taking direct aim—a look that’ll make your knees buckle!

“Are you bored?” he changes tack abruptly.

“No, but it’s late already.”

Music begins to play, low. “Hotel California,” an instrumental version. Mashenka must’ve put it on. Must be the way they do things here: put on music for dessert. It triggers the necessary complex emotions in the current object of wooing. Like in one of Pavlov’s dogs.

“Have you got someplace to be?”

“Just tired you know.”

“You’ll sleep in tomorrow. You’re not getting up for work, are you?”

Such a lovely place, such a lovely place, such a lovely face…

“Pardon?”

“Didn’t you resign? You don’t work in TV anymore. You don’t work anywhere, do you?”

God! It’s like my plane drops into an air pocket. Uncontrollably, my jaw drops: what a brilliant tactician he is! One could see what got Vlada, especially in contrast to Katrusya’s father, the newly minted Australian kangaroophile who’d spent the entire span of their marriage on a couch in front of the TV.

“You are well informed indeed. So you weren’t making your inquiries only about the beauty pageant?”

“Does it bother you?” he glows modestly: it’s always nice to knock your neighbor down a rung or two, lest she think too highly of herself.

“You could’ve just asked me—I’m not making a secret out of it. Or do you perhaps think that I could have gone on working there? In full knowledge of what they were doing?”

I hear how weak that sounds—like I’m making excuses. In this game, as in any kind of business, the what is not important, and neither is the how—the important thing is who got there first. A lead automatically means a better position. Vadym got ahead of me when he found out about my resignation behind my back—and now I’m forced to justify myself, and my obsession with that despicable beauty pageant begins to look not entirely unimpeachable (Could it be retaliation by a disgruntled employee perhaps, instead of simple righteous indignation?)—and he is looking at me like that Dnipropetrovsk nut, as if he knows something about me that’s so dirty I’ll never be clean again. As they say in American movies, anything you say or do can and will be held against you.

From this moment on, Vadym owes me nothing; the moral advantage is on his side. And all I’m left to do is applaud his brilliantly calculated timing—and prepare to hear what else he’s got in store for me: this is no longer my interview, I’m not the one asking questions, our roles have reversed.

“What are you thinking of doing next? Have anything in mind yet?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

“You better start. The clock’s ticking. The reshuffling of the media market is in full swing, the cushiest gigs are up for grabs right now. Closer to the elections you’ll be looking at leftovers and rejects.”

“Somehow, I don’t feel compelled to get reshuffled to accommodate the elections.”

“What else do you want?” he asks, surprised. “An election cycle is an injection of money! Good money, Daryna. It’s like in the ocean where at different depths different currents begin to form, some stronger, some weaker. This is your chance to ride the one that’ll take you to the top. Later will be too late. And you, I’m sorry, won’t be getting any younger either.”

Knocking the last stool from under me. Bingo.

“So, do think about it. I, by the way, might be able to put someone with your experience to good use.”

So this is what we’ve taken our sweet time getting to. All this was mere exposition for the main plot, and the plot comes now—plain as nails: I am being bought. I am unemployed: naked and available. On the block.

And for some reason, I’m terrified. Inside, a sickening chill blasts just below my breasts—as if they have come for me. (Who? The human figures with wolf heads I imagined were behind the door of my bedroom when I was little, Goya’s monsters, mad paramedics, machine-gunners with dogs?) As if all my fears that until this instant had been scattered across my life like shadows on a sunny day rose at once and stood to their full height, leaned all together against an invisible divider and flipped my life to the other side—and now it seems there has never been anything in it, except these fears, not a glimmer of sunshine. Catacombs, dungeons. An artificially lit cave. (Someone will throw the switch now—and it will turn dark, and I’ll never find my way out of this darkness; I will remain here forever, for Vadym to do with as he pleases.)

“I mean that show of yours, about unknown heroes,” he says suavely. “Diogenes’ something…”

“Diogenes’ Lantern.”

“Oh yes, lantern. Was he the guy who went around with a lantern looking for a man? Not bad, only you got too clever there; you gotta keep it simple for the common folks. But the way you created those heroes out of nothing—that was awesome! Super professional work.”

“Thank you. Only I wasn’t making anything out of nothing. They were all amazing people—every person I ever made a show about.”

“Whatever. You know how to package a person—how to turn some Joe Schmo into a cult figure. You’ve got, as they say, the sales pitch. I still remember your show about that priest who keeps an orphanage and how those retarded kids call him Daddy…”

“Not retarded. There was only one kid with Down syndrome.”

(The boy with Down syndrome was already a grown, stout, wide-shouldered youth with the cognitive development of a two-year-old—he laughed, pushed to grab on to the shiny eye of the camera, and hooted, again and again, the same line from a VV song, “Spring comes! Spring comes! Spring comes!”—and somehow was not in the least bit repulsive to look at, made so, perhaps, by the presence of the priest who adored his charge with a real fatherly tenderness, as though he could see in him something invisible to the rest of us. “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord,” the priest said, and it came out sounding especially beautiful somehow, so that I, the sentimental cow that I am, got all teary-eyed: every creature born to this world has the right to live and be happy praising the Lord, and what ever made us think that some of us are better, and others are worse? And then I remember that Vadym has a son from his first marriage—from that woman who lost her mind, and he sent the boy to study in England: to an orphanage, one could say, only of a different kind, a five-star one. Whom does that boy call Daddy there?)

“And are you aware of the fact that later, when the local elections came around, three parties fought each other for that priest’s endorsement?”

“Can’t be! I’d never…”

“Exactly. You’d never. You made him a public figure, a moral authority. Who was he before you discovered him? Just another ragtag village priest, without voice or power. And then you made your show—and he’s a spiritual shepherd! Pilgrims from the whole region mob his church; bigwigs roll up in SUVs, bringing their children. We’ll do as Father says! And you say it wasn’t out of nothing!”

“You have a strange way of looking at things, Vadym. My role was not at all as critical as you see it.”

“Oh, stop it. Modesty, as a friend of mine says, is the shortest path to anonymity.” Vadym pauses to give me the opportunity to appreciate the joke and when he doesn’t get a reaction (my head’s humming like a power substation), winks at me: “And you were a star! And could remain one.”

“You want me to help you create heroes, is that it?”

He looks at me almost gratefully—did I save him from further verbal exertion?

“Precisely.”

Another pause. A kind of very slow approach—millimeter by millimeter, so as not to startle his prey, except that his breathing gets louder. (I heard a man breathe like this once, the two of us were in the same train compartment: I woke up in the middle of the night because he, breathing like a horse, was very carefully, so as not to wake me, pulling the covers off me before dashing back to his berth, the instant I, scared to death, stirred and mumbled something as if still half asleep.)

“A political project. Image focused. We’ll put together a strong team, with first-class foreign experts; you’ll love it. Naturally, they will all work behind the scenes. What’s needed is a public face, sort of like a press secretary. But it can’t be just a pretty face; it has to be someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone from inside the kitchen, so to speak.”

“And what will that kitchen be cooking?”

He nods in approval: we’ve finally gotten to the heart of the matter.

“This information cannot be made public yet. In the elections, besides the two main contenders—from the establishment and the opposition—there will be a number of technical candidates.”

“Meaning what?”

“What—the usual. Candidates who are there to divert votes from the front-runner.”

“From Yushchenko?!”

Now I really don’t understand anything. Isn’t Vadym a member of Yushchenko’s coalition?

“Give me a break, Daryna!” he cringes, and I shudder: it’s Vlada’s phrase, part of her vocabulary, that’s where he got it! “Yushchenko, while we’re on the subject, is also, you could say, a technical candidate. In a way…”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the fact that things are much more complicated than they appear to you. Than what they look like from the outside. And even if Yushchenko wins, although that’s more than doubtful, his victory won’t be the end of the game that’s going on, you can be sure of that. Yushchenko got propelled to the top by a whole series of favorable circumstances, he’s always had luck; you might say he’s charmed.” At this last word, Vadym’s voice twangs with a barely audible note of envy, like the ding of chipped glass. “But there’s no corporation behind him. The ones backing him as a viable candidate today are all the disgruntled ones, the ones Kuchma left standing with nothing when he divvied up the property. And a coalition like that, as you can surely see yourself, cannot last. If Yushchenko does manage, by some miracle, to win, all hell will break loose—the ones who ride his coattails to parliament will waste no time wresting the steering wheel away from him.”

“And you decided not to wait until after the elections?”

Lord, my head hurts!

“And I,” Vadym doesn’t take offense, only swirls the cognac in his glass unnecessarily fast—with a short, slightly nervous circular motion. “I attempt to take a broader view. And to benefit from any outcome. And I would advise you to do the same. What does it ultimately matter if it’s Kuchma, or Yushchenko, or someone else, or the next guy? You can’t teach a pig to sing. Think about it, who are we, really? A former colony, with no statehood tradition of our own, knee-deep in shit. A transit zone. In the current global scheme of things, that’s our only asset: we are a country conveniently located for transit. And that’s where we can earn our commission—and trust me, it’s not pennies. The future outlook is not too shabby either, if one knows how to use one’s head.”

“What kind of outlook do we have if no one cleans up the shit?”

“You’re not paying attention,” he chides me. “I told you, the Yalta era is about to end. The balance of power in the world is changing; new players are coming to the stage… China, possibly India. And until the new trade balance shakes itself out, Russia and America will keep dragging us back and forth, like dogs in a tug-of-war. Neither will let go—the bone’s too big. We’ve always been a trading card in the big countries’ games anyway; it’s a function of our geography. Except that only a few of them in the past century realized that Ukraine is nothing less than critical for any serious political ambitions—Lenin knew this, and, by extension, Stalin. Today, the Russians understand this much better than the Americans. Europe’s not even worth mentioning—they’re off the field, and it’s not a given that they’ll ever get back on it, aside from falling into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Not the least bit. Gazprom already owns a good half of Europe. They have Nord Stream lobbyists in every European government. Everyone, Daryna, loves money. Especially the big kind. Especially when the one paying it is someone you used to fear. That’s power. Money, you know, is not just banks—it’s also cell-phone service operators, and Internet providers. You see what I’m saying? As soon as those losers in the EU implement electronic ballots, you can write Europe off. Politically it’ll mean no more than some Kemerov region; they’ll have all their leaders chosen in Moscow. So the stakes are quite high, Daryna—it’s a big game. And in the scheme of this game, we are the testing ground for new management technologies. The ones that will determine the fate of the world in the new century. Try to see it that way.”

“So what, we are a kind of a shooting range? Like in World War II, and with Chernobyl? Your big players come play here, see what happens, and then bury us again—till the next time?”

“A range—that’s well put. Here’s to your health!” He holds up his snifter to let the cognac flash in the light. “You have a way with words. History’s secret range. Not bad at all, it’s got that something… I bought this book the other day, by a British guy, about Poland, a thick one.” He stretches his fingers, a pair of sausages, to show me. “It’s called God’s Playground. I liked that, too—I think that’s even more fitting for Ukraine than for Poland.”

“Then it shouldn’t be God’s. Should be the Devil’s. The Devil’s Playground.”

(Devil’s Playground, yes—where the best are the ones who perish. The ones who expose themselves, who stand up from the trenches. One can’t expose oneself on the Devil’s Playground—can’t step into the floodlight’s beam, unless one plays for the side that’s sitting in the bushes with the sniper’s rifle; on the Devil’s Playground, one can only make good if one lives the way Vadym says: get low and watch where the strongest current will run—and swim in it. You are a wise, wise man, Vadym, aren’t you; you’ve got it all figured out…)

“Why do you have to be so dramatic,” he mutters, and an absurd hope that he is simply drunk flares up in me—that he is just drunk, that’s it. Look at how much less cognac there is in the bottle; I didn’t even notice how he’d siphoned all that out. This may well be merely the ramblings of an intoxicated man. Damn it, why is my head crackling and hissing so much—like a cell phone with a weak signal! No, drunk he is not.

“Now, a range—that’s well put!” He sticks to his tune. “That’s exactly what it will be. Just you wait and see—there’ll be a whole bunch of interesting new tricks launched for the first time in these elections! Someday, they’ll write textbooks about it. Post-information era government technologies—that’s something! It’s like when they first split the atom. In the beginning, no one could see what possibilities that opened up either. This’ll be an interesting year for you and me, Daryna.” All of a sudden, he rubs his hands together with such a youthful, hungry lust for life, like a teenage boy after a swim that I, taken by surprise, miss my chance to react to his “you and me.”

“Let’s have a drink! Let’s drink, honey, let’s drink here, they won’t pour on the other side…. What’s that, why didn’t you finish your ice cream? Watching your girlish figure?”

“Drink to what, Vadym? To whose victory?”

“Ours, Daryna, ours! Let those Yankees and Ivans tussle all they want; our business is to make profits! The first round in this game went to Russia: after the Gongadze case, the Kremlin’s got Kuchma right where they want him, totally under their control. Now they’re betting on the Donets’k contingent, they do business together; they’re one crew and all that, I’m sure you know this. Going back to the Soviet days. And the Americans bet on Yushchenko—with the goal of keeping Ukraine in the buffer zone. And we shall wait and see how well it works for them.”

“And all the people who actually live in this country—the way you see it, they aren’t a part of this game? We’ve no will of our own?”

“Whose masses do, Daryna? Name one country. Or do you, by chance, believe that bullshit about history being shaped by the people? Don’t make me laugh; we don’t live in the nineteenth century! Seventy percent of people, according to statistics, wouldn’t know their own opinion if it bit them in the ass—they just keep repeating whatever they’ve heard. People are stupid, Daryna. That’s the way it has always been and always will be. People eat up what’s put before them. And you belong to the elite who have the opportunity to do the putting. So, please, do me a favor, don’t take that for granted.”

He squints—quickly, conspiratorially—and again this flicker, like a shadow across the surface of the water (and I’m underwater; I am under the whole time; what gills do I have to breathe?) and a flare-up of another senseless hope: what if it’s a sign he is giving me (Before whom, in front of what third party or surveillance camera?), a sign that all this is not for real, that he is pulling my leg and I shouldn’t believe a single word he says? “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you”—was it Vadym who said that? (When?) But instead, he grows more solemn.

“So when it comes to serious money, Daryna, only Russia is prepared to invest in us. That’s the reality.”

In my mind, I shake off the water—droplets sit cool under my skin.

“The foreign experts you mentioned—those are Russians?”

“What does that matter?” he shrugs. “I am offering you the most interesting work a creative person could have, and right up your alley: take a dark horse, Vasya the gas-station-guy, doesn’t matter who, we can talk about that later…. You take him—and make him a hero! A leader! A cult figure with his own myth—you guys can figure out what that myth is, brainstorm something together. You’re creating your own hero, like the Good Lord from clay—how beautiful is that? And in the people’s memory that Vasya will remain the man you made him. It’s like a whole new kind of art, right there! And with the widest appeal—even cinema can’t come close.”

You couldn’t say Vadym spent four years with an artist for nothing.

(Art, Vlada used to say, contemporary art, is first and foremost the making of one’s own territory, a discrete exhibition space where no matter what you brought in, even a urinal, would be perceived a work of art: modern civilization has allocated its artists a niche in which we can play with impunity, letting off steam, but from which we can no longer change anything in the accepted way of seeing things.)

“That’s not art, Vadym. Art is what you don’t get paid for.”

“Whoa there!” Vadym even leans back in his chair. “And when Leonardo da Vinci painted the Sistine Chapel—was he doing that for free now?”

“Michelangelo.”

“What?”

“Not Leonardo—it was Michelangelo. You’re getting it mixed up with The Da Vinci Code.”

“So Michelangelo, whatever. What’s the difference?”

“From the client’s point of view—none. The same job could have been done by someone else. They were only paying for a canonical treatment, nothing else. That airy lightness that blows you away, and you don’t even know why—that’s just a bonus, it may very well not have been there. Art is always a bonus. That’s how you know it when you see it.”

“Give me a break.” Vadym is visibly irritated by our detour off topic. “That was a different time, so of course the commissions were also different. The church is also a governing corporation, and, while we’re at it, it was the most powerful one of its time. Take a broader view, Daryna! Everyone does this, not just politicians—every person tries to create a legend out of their life, if only for their kids and grandkids. It’s just that not everyone can have this done professionally—that takes money…”

And another splash, and again I am underwater. Why didn’t it ever occur to me to see things the way he talks about them? Aidy’s professor at The Cupid, the old poetess who shook her dyed tresses before me so proudly—they are losers, amateurs who simply did not have any money, and so were trying to buy me with what they had: their thinning tresses, gossip, lies, the peeling gloss of worn-out fake reputations. And there was more, more—crowds of random faces spill out of my memory as if from the opened doors of an overstuffed closet: bosses of all kinds, administrators, directors, princes of tiny local fiefdoms, all performing their greeting rituals for me—television’s come!—in their offices. They click through my mind frame after frame like a newsreel from a military parade: the suits—gray, charcoal, black pinstripe, gray herringbone (one such bundle of tweed with suede elbow patches still calls me, keeps inviting me out to dinner)—rise energetically from behind their desks cluttered with telephones; a front-desk Mashenka brings in the coffee; and, after a short prelude, every one of them turns the conversation to his monumental contribution to one thing or another, blows himself up into a hot-air balloon, bigger and bigger, ready to fly up to the stratosphere, and stoops, and bows, and fawns over his goods. And then there were the high-fliers, the unacknowledged geniuses, the inventors of perpetual motion machines, and the victims of incredibly convoluted intrigues who couldn’t wait to fill my poor ears with assurances that their story was the one that was going to make me famous world over (the breed that, fortunately, has collectively diverted to cyberspace with the arrival of the Internet, like water finding a break in a dam).

Lord, how many of them, in my years of work on TV, danced around me like savages around an idol, with tambourines, hollering, flowers, and toasts—all to sway me to turn them into the fantasy heroes they wished to remain in people’s memories? Like electrons wrenched from their natural orbits by some tremendous explosion, all these people, even when they managed to find perfectly good places for themselves in this world, kept smoldering with the secret conviction that those places were not really theirs, and that they were really meant for a different, amazing and remarkable, life, which had either been taken away from them or was not yet apparent to everyone else—and that’s why they needed an apostle, an advocate, a sculptor with a mass-media chisel who would help bring out the contours of the masterpieces hidden in the shapeless bulk of their biographies, someone who would chisel away everything redundant, and reveal them to the awestruck and speechless world.

They’ve always been swarming around me, these wrenched-from-their-orbit electrons who dreamt of becoming simulacra. Only I used to treat their presence as an inevitable cost of doing business—like the dark side of the moon, a gloomy shadow that trails every vocation—this was just what you got for being a journalist, you couldn’t help it…. Now, when my own center of gravity has shifted, under Vadym’s assault, onto this other, dark side, I see for the first time, in close-up, the way the whole army of them, with Vadym at its helm, sees journalism; it turns out they weren’t the shadow at all—they were my profession itself, its essence, its bare and hard core, cleared of all extraneous layers: advertising.

Not information. Not the collection and dissemination of the information that helps people develop their own views, as I had believed until now. (To journalism students at the university, when they asked me what my gold standard of reporting was, I always said, watching their young faces turn puzzled and surprised, Chornovil’s underground Ukrainian Messenger, which he published in the 1970s—I can name no reporting more chemically pure than that.) But in fact, my shows are in the same class with commercial breaks: I am an advertiser; I advertise people. Others advertise beer and sanitary pads with wings, and I advertise people. Shape them into attractively packaged legends. That’s my specialty.

And that’s all there is to it, as Vadym says.

“Excuse me?”

“Twenty-five grand,” Vadym says. US dollars. A month. Until the end of the election campaign. And sits there looking at me, eyes narrowed. (What color are they?)

I must be really good at advertising people. I am also, it would appear, good at controlling my face before the camera: he doesn’t seem to be able to read anything from it.

Looks like he is a bit disappointed.

“Hotel California” is ending; I hear the last chords. My head is pounding so hard that muscles throughout my whole body reverberate with pain. And inside—it’s empty; the fear’s gone. It’s the strangest thing: I am taking this round—compared to the previous one, in my boss’s office—incomparably more calmly, as if it were all happening to someone else. The reactions I do experience are peculiarly physiological—pain, nausea; the emotional machinery seems unplugged, as if my body has taken on the entire burden of this conversation and I, myself, am playing no part in it. As in a dream.

Wait. What dream was like that?

The pause is getting long (a commercial break without content, the screen burns vacant, and someone’s money is going down the drain as the purchased airtime ticks on: TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…).

“What do you say?” Vadym gives up. Gives up first. So I am stronger than he is. And Vlada intuited it correctly when she painted me a maiden warrior to the accompaniment of “The Show Must Go On”—she had the right instinct: to seek in me the fulcrum she needed to leverage this man up and free herself from under him. It’s too bad I proved such a coward back then, got scared, flailed, and clucked “I’m not like that!” I did not recognize, I couldn’t see. Could not see anything, stuck my head in the sand: I needed everything to be just fine in Vlada Matusevych’s life—for my own peace of mind. I, too, betrayed her; I’m as guilty as Vadym before Yushchenko. I ran. I deserted. I abandoned her.

What I’d most like to ask Vadym right now is whether he has seen those photos in her archive—the ones of the two of us, me in the witchy makeup, in the style of the early Buñuel heroines, Vlada with the bloody lipstick smeared across her mouth. But I won’t ask him this: even if he had found them, he wouldn’t have seen anything in them. And would not have understood anything.

So I ask something completely different—what he least expects to hear. “Why me, Vadym?”

And he looks away.

“Why did you choose me, of all people?”

(Softer, someone at my side seems to prompt—softer, more intimately, less steely…)

“Money like that could buy you any of the super-popular faces from the national channels,” I rumble low like a cello or a bandura, an intimate, chest-deep timbre (of course, the voice is key, folks knew it all the way back in the time of the fairytale in which the wolf runs to the smith, smithy-smithy, cast me a voice—how’s that not an electoral technology?). “My show’s not that popular, it wasn’t even in prime time, never made the top ten…”

“People trust you,” he answers simply. He has chosen to be sincere. Good move.

“Oh. I see. That’s nice to hear.”

A pause. TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

“And that’s it? That’s the only reason?”

“Well,” he smiles wide, his most charming smile yet, “that and then again—we’re family, aren’t we?”

We would be “family” if I agreed. That’s what he’s after—this is it, finally. We would, and the trafficking would vanish between us—delete, delete. Vlada would also disappear—the Vlada I remember. Vadym would’ve bought her from me, together with her death. The way he’s already bought her from her mother, and is now buying her from her child.

Now, this is really slick. Not just slick—it’s awesome, it’s brilliant, it’s all but enough to have me sitting here stunned, breathless, with my jaw dropped again: regardless of the ends a man’s intellect is pursuing, the sight of said intellect at work is always as irresistible to women as female beauty is to men. I applaud you, Vadym Grygorovych. What was it he said—“history is made by money”? It’s only logical that this should apply to the history of an individual life as well—all one needs is to choose his witnesses well. Buy the right witnesses, as in any decent lawsuit. Because every story is ninety-five percent about who does the telling. And he knows that I know this. And I know that he knows that I know…

For an instant, I short circuit, a spasm grips my throat, and I am blind with hatred for this self-satisfied face with its pink-lipped mouth lined with white ice-cream residue—but the hatred, too, is somehow not my own: I watch it inside me as though I were filming it. Somehow now I need to switch to his language—and I find I do speak it; I know how they talk, these people.

“I understand you, Vadym. Now look what we’ve got here. You say people trust me. If I agree, then after all these… interesting experiments of yours, one thing is certain—they won’t trust me any longer. Even if I commit ritual suicide, samurai-style, right on camera, people will say—eh, a publicity stunt. I won’t make any more heroes; I’ll have to retrain. You say profit. Fine, let’s do the math. Twenty-five grand a month, how long do we have before the elections—six months? Okay, let’s say seven. Twenty-five times seven—a hundred and seventy-five. You are proposing that I sell”—(And here I break pace for a second: sell what? My country, which foreign secret services aim to shove back into the hole it hasn’t been able to dig itself out of anyway, going on thirteen years already? My friend whose death is on my conscience too, and whose memory is now on my conscience alone? No, none of that will do)—“sell my professional reputation”—(there, that’s better)—“for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars? For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Pechersk? That won’t cut it, Vadym. I did spend ten years earning it, you know. And you, as my father-in-law says, want to pay a penny for a handful of nickels.”

The father-in-law (and Aidy’s dad does say that) is a bonus, pure art: Vadym’s never heard a whiff of any father-in-law, and it won’t sit well with him—it tells him he missed something (and I’m not as naked and defenseless as he’d thought, someone must’ve covered me). The smile remains on his face as he left it there, and now looks as untidy as an unmade bed. He licks his plump lips, his eyes wander around the big room, as if he were trying to remember something, and then he pulls out his cell phone, flips it open—until now the phone’s been off, that’s how important a conversation we are having—and finally refreshes his smile, bringing it now to a waxy ripeness.

“I remembered this joke about the Place Pigalle… a really old one, from back in the student days,” he starts.

“The one about women who can’t be bought, but are very expensive?” I smile, too: so there won’t be a raising of the price, it’s nice to deal with an intelligent man. “What did you think? That’s exactly how it is; there’s deep wisdom in that joke…. You know something else they say? An honest reporter only sells out once. This is not one of those times, Vadym.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” is all he says. Says it from the heart—he really is sorry.

“Me too. You know why?”

“Why?” he calls back, an echo.

The Show Must Go On. The pain is making the world before my eyes congeal into a yellowish gloom, and I focus hard on the bridge of Vadym’s nose, it’s all I see before me, the bridge of his nose, this one fixed point to which the other parts of his face drift slowly, distorted as if filmed under water. Freddie Mercury’s voice ascends somewhere inside me like a bird set free from the dark spilling broken glass into my veins, invisible brushes multiply on my skin, tickling my temples, cheeks, eyelids—I see myself through the eye of a hidden camera, and the camera is Vlada’s: click-click-click. I grow still in the face, holding my breath, and feel myself suddenly grow more beautiful. I feel the flicker of fire under my skin, feel my features grow smoother as in lovemaking, feel my lips darken as they fill with blood—Vadym’s the only spectator of this show, but I am not doing this for him… smithy-smithy, cast me a voice, and now the cello comes in—a low, chest-deep timbre that no man can resist.

“Why? Because this whole scheme, Vadym, looks to me like one monumental screwup…”

“Is that so?” echoes the bridge of the nose.

“Uhu. These big shots of yours cannot possibly be really good professionals. I suspect, in fact, they are nothing but really good swindlers.”

“What makes you think that?” the bridge of the nose, says, startled. He is scared. So, he’s got his own money tied up in the deal.

“How should I explain it?” Now it’s my turn to play, like a stage magician juggling knives, at being privy to secret knowledge. “There’s this thing—we professionals,” and I lean into this word with my voice as if pushing against a locked door, and feel the door yield under the spell, “call strength of material.” In his language, professional is a magical word, the object of a savage faith, an element of a religion in which the world consists of human demigods who rule it, the masses that provide the gods with a steady supply of ambrosia, and professionals, a breed of creatures somewhere between priests and useful Jews, who huddle in back storerooms like shadows in Hades waiting for the gods to reach down and tap them to carry out their operations. A professional’s position is duplicitous: on one hand he is, most certainly, the help, a whipping-boy runner, but on the other he does command a dose of respect, as a carrier of secret information, which the gods themselves, for lack of time, cannot master. So in this way, he has an upper hand on the gods, and who knows how he’ll decide to play it, and that’s why one has to be careful around professionals, as one had to be around soothsayers and witch doctors in the Middle Ages. One must listen to a professional, especially when he or she delivers a warning, and Vadym is very much listening, my cello call streams straight into his yawing ears. “A professional is born the moment he learns to sense the strength of his materials. Learns to intuit the limits of his pliability. Working any substance is always a contract, like with a living being—up to here I burn you, oxidize you, mold you, and you go along with it. As long, of course, as I am not trying to make knives out of glass or teapots out of paper.”

“More to the point,” Vadym breathes.

“Just think about what I said.”

A professional’s language, just like that of a soothsayer or a witch doctor, must be obscure enough to elicit respect. A political technology, as Vadym says.

“Think how much more complicated this becomes when your material is people instead of brick.”

A pause. Loud breathing. TICK… TICK…TICK… TICK… It feels like I’m working through an algorithm that’s been preprogrammed into me—I barrel ahead without hesitation, without thinking, with a speedy, dreamlike ease, hitting every open target.

“These people are hacks, Vadym. These professionals of yours. They’re puppet masters, snake-oil peddlers. Taking on a scheme as farfetched as this—to win elections in someone else’s country by means of massive PR campaigns aimed at someone else’s electorate—that’s as bad as promising you paper tea kettles: they’re demonstrating their total ignorance of the material. It’s unprofessional, stupid, arrogant, and ignorant. You can’t treat your material like that. It turns on you.”

A pause. Loud breathing. TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

“It explodes. Or cracks.”

His face—I feel it throb, pulse inside me like a second heart—gathers again to the focal point of his nose, as if distorted by a bent mirror.

“It’s the same with people, too.”

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

“That’s what I call reality. That which lies beyond the limit of pliability. The part that we can’t measure because we can’t see it—or only five percent of it perhaps…”

“Five even?” he shoots back, ironically: numbers have a soothing effect on him; with numbers he’s safe, back on his own territory.

“Five percent is the statistical deviation… in accidents, the X factor. They say there are always five percent more survivors than the theory of probability would’ve predicted.”

The face across the table from me remains impassive, only blinks as if against the wind. How did she have sex with him—was she on top? He must be so heavy, unwieldy, like a strongbox full of dynamite.

“Watch out, Vadym. They’ll leave you a royal mess, those quacks.”

And, suddenly and to my own surprise, I realize instantly that this is true. That things won’t go their way. Won’t go their way at all, ever, no matter what illusions they peddle. This comes as an inexplicable certainty, unshakable, clarion-clear, as if all I had to do was speak it, and here it is, summoned, like the “Sesame” that opens a cave—it came and parted the solid rock before me; it broke the spell, and now it’s clear that things cannot be otherwise—that whatever malfeasance Vadym intended toward me is nothing but stuffy, creepy smoke, the miasma of a mind unhinged, moon-blindness that obscures everything unyielding, all that can’t be bought or eaten. How could these people, blinkered, and with nothing but the sewage of streaming dollars under their paws, possibly hope to bring down an entire country full of mysterious, unquantifiable life? That’s just a glitch of the matrix in their ailing heads, a mental affliction—like hell they’ll get it!

The man across the table from me, by contrast, has no certainty of this kind, on either side of the scales, and I can see it: he is left alone at the mercy of his own mind, submerged, as if into his own miasma, into his own calculations that he is so afraid to get wrong, his snappy faculties busily sniffing over the warning he’s just received, weighing whether it merits a revision of his well-composed, multilevel equation, or if it can be brushed off, deleted, in which case he would also have to delete me as an authoritative source right along with it, and that’s more difficult. I am still a professional and, once I’ve been offered a certain amount of money, I can’t be crossed off the books just like that. They are held hostage by their own money and the hyperreality they have created; these people are physically incapable of admitting that something they paid for, or were about to pay for, could turn out to have no value whatsoever, because this would mean they’d been had, and that, by definition, can never happen to gods.

The man across the table from me is throwing sparks, at this moment, like a faulty telegraph wire—a short-circuit, a cognitive dissonance: he must accept one of two things—either he’s just fucked up royally with me, or he is looking at the prospect of fucking up even more royally in the game I just refused to play—and that’s it, a dead-end; this dilemma has no solution within the framework of his system.

And now I remember—as if a new picture finally breaks, easy and free, independent, onto the surface of the one I persist in keeping steady before me with a superhuman effort of my throbbing brain—a picture that has spent the entire evening fighting its torturous way up through my long-suffering mind: a déjà vu, the recognition of a once-seen, completely different face—sharp, eagle-nosed, and thin-lipped, protruding like a wolf’s snout with close-set eyes—but it doesn’t matter that the face is different, because now I know where I saw it before. It emerges in my memory now, a giant dark mass, like a whale surfacing, bringing with it the image that I’ve been groping for, blindly, for so long—that dream of mine, the one dreamt two weeks ago, on that wild night—the night that would not end, as if Aidy and I lived several lifetimes in that single night, on the verge between dream and wakefulness; my beloved tried to run after someone, shouted that he had to kill the traitor, and I was his land, the moist, sloshing darkness that kept him afloat.

I don’t remember how many times we made love. I was exhausted. I was plasma. I was a runny mass; he melted me completely, down to the most secret nooks and crannies. I was dying and could not die, and then it finally came, and I saw death with my own eyes and recognized it, the white flash of it that I’d known once before: a thousand searchlights aimed at me, a new sun exploding in the depths of the cosmos, the birth of a new planet. After a night like that one could go a year without sex. No wonder I hadn’t felt like any for two weeks already, that’s never happened to me before—it was as if we opened the doors to something beyond that night, and that otherworld poured into us more than we could hold, and, aside from our all-night vigil of lovemaking, all that stayed with me were fragments of our conversations when we lay, in the ebbs, spent but still in each other’s arms, and kept mumbling things, interrupting each other like drunks, desperate to scoop up and somehow hold in our words what was already seeping back behind the door. We were dreaming the same dream; the magnitude of memories is finite—the girl in a sailor suit, Aunt Lyusya with a sack of western flour, the childhood secret abandoned in the yard in Tatarka, Aidy’s notes on a pack of Davidoff cigarettes about blood in Kyiv and women who would not cease giving birth—but these were all just words, impenetrable and flat like lids, and the other dimension we had glimpsed beyond them was already hidden from us again. And although in the morning I, too, carefully wrote down all the details I managed to retain, the entirety of it had hopelessly and irrevocably disintegrated.

But now it surfaces again, to prove that it didn’t disappear at all—it bobs up for a single, short sliver of a moment, in the fully renewed, searing sharpness of color it had that night, as if I were looking through a camera zooming swiftly in, framing the night, the woods, human figures cut out from black cardboard, set against a blood-red fire, and right there, smack in the focal point—got it!—a protruding, stern, and stiff face, like a wolf’s snout, not so much handsome as commanding with the sculpted perfection of its features, with eyes purposefully narrowed to Tatar-like slits, so you can’t even see what color they are, and someone beside me (a woman’s voice) prompts with the name Mykhailo! and in this single glimpse—because in the next instant, the ocean’s smooth surface closes back on itself, and the dark mass of the whale’s body vanishes below it—I recognize him. I recognize what I’ve known ever since that night: this is the man who caused Gela’s death—just like Vlada’s.

This is what she wanted to tell me in that old dream of Aidy’s, my radiant girl, my radiant-eyed Gela Dovganivna—when she took Vlada’s seat at the table in the Passage. They knew, Vlada and Gela both, what I did not know: they had been cheated the same way—by loving the force that destroys life while that force pretends to be the power that rules it.

And just as I grasp this, it’s gone. What’s left is Vadym turned the color of a beet in his sloppy sportcoat and droopy lilac tie—there he sits, chair turned sideways, holding his snifter of cognac in his hand, and breathing over it so hard you’d think he were waiting for something to hatch from it. And that’s it. And even my head—thank God—does not ache anymore, is clear as a bell now. And neither do I feel tired, not at all—although it must be bloody late by now, close to one in the morning…

And with the lightest touch, very gently, so as not to alarm him, I push, just as he recommended, the button he was trying to buy from me—he must be vulnerable to this pressure now; he is without defenses, without his usual inch-thick armor.

“Vadym,” I am not asking—I’m pleading; not a prosecutor—an accomplice: “Why do you think she died?”

He startles, blinks at me, and looks down right away.

“Don’t torture me, Daryna. I’ve racked my mind thinking about it.”

“Were you fighting?”

Despite what I feared, he does not bristle or go on the defensive—he is subdued like a little boy before his mom, when he knows he is in trouble. (So my warning did scare him; so he does have something to be scared of.)

“That’s the thing… if only I’d gone out with her that day… or sent a driver at least…”

But she didn’t let him. Maybe she didn’t even tell him where she was going. Maybe they were no longer talking as friends, were not talking to each other about anything at all—a two-level, 3,600-square-foot apartment has plenty of room to keep you from running into each other, and she left unannounced, without a “Bye, honey, be back in an hour”—just bolted through the front door, like a gunshot, and that was the last memory of herself she left him; the next time they met was in the morgue.

“She was about to leave you, wasn’t she?”

He looks at me with a growing alarm.

“She told you?”

“Yes,” I lie.

I know how it can be; I’ve been there—with Sergiy, and with other men—know what a breakup is like when it takes you a long time to find the courage to do it. I know what it’s like when you have to force yourself to drag your own body from point A to point B like a corpse, automatically putting it through the motions it has learned by rote; what it’s like to have a heavy, impenetrable cloud of thoughts hanging constantly over your head, thoughts you’ve done laps around, the same track over and over: “How could this be?” and “What do I do now?” And then you stop suddenly in the middle of the apartment as if someone had ordered you to freeze, trying to remember vacantly, what did I come here for? Things are a little better when you lie in a bathtub and the water slowly washes away the solidity of your body together with the thoughts wedged in it. And another thing you can do is go for a drive, especially outside the city, on the highway; she used to love that—she said that was her way of resting: a monotonous motion, the even ribbon of asphalt unspooling before her eyes, the soothing flicker of trees on the sides of the road, rain against the windshield, the measured back and forth of the wipers, the rain, the rain…. Of course she went alone; she wouldn’t have taken a damn driver in a million years—one would have to talk to a driver….

I can imagine how it was. How it all happened. I don’t even need to go there, following her tracks, as Vadym did—I just know.

And he knows that I know.

“Don’t torture me, Daryna,” he says. From his heart. And adds, “Life goes on anyway, you know?”

As if he weren’t the one who spent the last two hours lecturing me about how he is the one shaping that life, without inviting me to join him on mutually advantageous terms. Apparently he sees no contradiction here, no cognitive dissonance this time: he simply dives instinctively into the current that, at the moment, lifts him from the shallows with minimal losses—while keeping his controlling interest intact, of course. One can be quite certain—he’ll double-cross his FSB crew, too. And pull his money out of the scheme right in time—he will take my advice.

When someone turns to truisms, it’s a sure sign that it’s time to wrap up. Life goes on, most certainly, who could argue with that? I look at the man across the table from me (I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. The embodied dream of an eternally rightless nation of its own, native force that would protect and defend them…) and feel my lips curl, as if in a mirror with delayed reflection, into that same meaningful smirk of the loony-bin nut: I know where I’ve seen you before. But you—you don’t know me.

He expected absolution, and my silence unsettles him.

“By the way,” he says, pretending he’s just now thought of it, “how are you doing money-wise—have something to live on?”

Now it really takes all I’ve got not to laugh in his face. Bless your cotton socks, you could’ve thought of something funnier! Or is that it—he can’t?

“Don’t worry. I do have someone to keep me.”

Then what is it you want, you fucking bitch? his eyes all but scream, hating me. Any rejection of money, in his system of coordinates, is equivalent to blackmail, and my behavior points at some hidden threat that he absolutely has to neutralize—and without delay.

“Not R. by chance?”

So he knows about R., too. That’s no surprise, really, since he had contacted the channel’s management and assembled a file on me; a pile of dirt on a future partner is also part of the controlling interest package.

“No,” I shake my head. “Not R.”

“If you wanted, I could buy your pictures from them… the ones of you with R.” And he grins, as if he’d seen them himself.

And if he had?

“I don’t give a damn, Vadym.”

The amazing thing is that I don’t, in fact, give a damn. And finding out that the new management of the channel has armed itself with the pictures that R had taken of me in various revealing poses (and didn’t he say to me back then, “Don’t be so sure!”) utterly fails to produce the effect Vadym counted on. I just don’t care—and that’s it. As if it truly weren’t me—as if I hadn’t been the one sprawled naked under the flashes, with a strap-on, smeared with sperm. You can wallpaper your whole office with those pictures if you feel like it, boys—you won’t get to me.

“They wanted to cover their bases,” Vadym explains, not yet believing that the bullet he’s been saving for so long has missed by so much. “In case you decided to make a fuss about that Miss New TV show…”

Aha, so my dear ol’ boss must’ve really felt compelled to hustle, bless his heart. He threw everything he had to plug the hole in his wall. I wonder what kind of story about me he intended to spin based on those pictures? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t wonder—not even a little bit. Don’t even feel like flexing my imagination in that direction.

Instead, something completely different occurs to me—with the same dreamlike ease, as if someone else had determined my actions and all I’m supposed to do is leap off the cliff—a plunge, arms at my sides, head first like a swallow, into the dark-blue abyss below…

“If you really want to thank me for the consult, Vadym,” I measure out a pause with just the right dose of sarcasm, “then there’s something else you can buy from them for me.”

Happily, eagerly, he pulls his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and personally writes it down, running his stylus over the screen—he’ll do this, he promises: the materials for my unfinished film, for Diogenes’ Lantern, yes, that one. Working title—“Olena Dovgan.” He really will do this for me, I’ve no doubt—he’ll rescue Gela and all my other Dovgans from that vipers’ nest: look at him perk up, his hands suddenly moving with an unusually solicitous busyness. It’s hard for him to believe that he’ll get away from me so easily, that he can buy my silence so cheaply: I will never again speak of why Vlada died. What we both know will remain between us.

He has no idea that it is Vlada who at this instant is buying, with his hands, my film. The film I now know how to finish, by myself, no matter how much it will cost: I know now what has been missing. And Vlada’s death, too, will be in the film—it’s the only way I can tell the truth about her. And it doesn’t matter that the man who caused her death will have a different face in the film—the face of the man, the farthest on the right in the old rebel photograph. Because aside from the factual truth, grounded in names and faces, there’s a deeper truth of the stories lived by individual people, a truth invisible to strangers, one that cannot be made up or pretended. One that lies beyond the limits of pliability.

And, as if it had just been sitting there waiting for the right moment all this time, a cell phone rings. My cell, I hadn’t turned it off, and I already know who it is, and my facial muscles melt involuntarily into a smile while my lips squeeze out a mechanical “Excuse me” to Vadym.

“Lolly?”

“Aidy!” I holler, so loudly the whole room seems to echo, as I break out from the dark underwater cave into the light of day. “Aidy, I’m here! I’m here, I’m okay! Don’t worry about me, I’m on my way out already; I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”

“Thank God,” he exhales loudly into my ear, my love, my man, Lord, how happy I am to hear his voice! “Alright, kiddo, get on the road. I’ve got all kinds of stuff going on here…”

Forgive Me, Adrian

Brew us some tea, could you please,” Lolly asked.

“Chamomile? We’ve only got chamomile left; I didn’t have a chance to buy anything today.”

“That’s fine, let’s have chamomile.” Then after she sipped it, like a gosling—hardly any, as if forcing herself to swallow—she put the mug aside and smiled: “We’re like a pair of geezers—sitting here with the wrecks of our lives drinking chamomile tea before bed. We just need some aches and pains to complain about to complete the picture.”

Had to have been that fat rat, I thought, that Rep., the bastard, who’d gotten to her with the women-of-a-certain-age talk, the whole now-or-never shtick, up or out. As a client of mine used to say: under forty, it’s enough for a woman to be pretty; after forty, she needs to be rich—and made eyes at me, even though the old battle-ax had ticked past forty back when I was in middle school. And Yulichka must have just sat there, listened, and made another mental note.

“You did everything right, Lolly. You did great; I’m proud of you.”

“You know,” she said, brightening, “my mom used to say that about my dad, in those very same words: that he did everything right. Weird, isn’t it?”

Lolly has changed. Matured? Knowing her and the way she, the straight-A student, reverberates in response to every blow life deals her—taking it as an instance of cosmic injustice—I was afraid, at first, to dump the entire truth into her lap the way it had landed in mine: here’s what happened, my love; we’re in deep shit because my secretary has taken me for a thirty-thousand dollar ride (and I’ve been an idiot; I’ve been such an idiot!). But when my girl, with her gaze turned wondrously inward, told me about the dinner she had with that fat Rep. rat, it totally blew me away, so my own screwup instantly diminished in importance: Are you kidding me? This is war! Unannounced, secretly creeping, real GB war, and no one has a clue about it—everyone’s got their noses stuck in their own shit and can’t even see what’s going on out there!

I ran around the kitchen, smoked one cigarette after another, and shouted that something had to be done; we can’t just let a pack of hometown goons hand the country over to the Kremlin, lock, stock, and barrel, just because they think they can, and that this Vadym was an old Soviet rat for sure. I know his breed; I’ve seen more than my share of them—the ones who first cleaned out the Komsomol and Party purse and then made a beeline for politics where they could clean out everything that was left in state ownership. What was it you said he traded in, kerosene? You know what it’s called? Agents of influence, that’s who they are—the agents of GB influence, every last one of them, on the Kremlin hook, all these former rats, bitches, fuckers; we should’ve run the lustration back in 1991, that was the only way to get rid of these Soviet cancers, and now look how they’ve spread!

I felt a kind of uplift in my rage—a certain purifying relief from having found a more deserving object of scorn than Yulichka, who’d been running schemes with my competitors behind my back—I’d shaken off the nasty feeling of having been robbed that had burned me all day, and felt myself filling with a pure, ethyl-alcohol-like civic outrage: Who do they think we are, these bastards? Do they think they’ll get away with this? I opened my shoulders wide and stood up tall facing a real, worthwhile enemy, one with whom you want to cross swords—while Lolly, by contrast, remained amazingly composed the whole time, as if she weren’t really surprised to hear my news (I’ve always suspected that she disliked Yulichka). She asked succinct, businesslike questions and generally appeared quite calm—as if all the blows that came this evening fell, for her, onto an invisible protective pad. She used to behave differently under stress. When she was resigning from the studio, she went around all but shaking. But something new has emerged in her; she is somehow distant: she even spoke without triumph or melodrama about how elegantly she undid that fat Rep. My poor girl’s nose has sharpened to a point and grown pink with exhaustion; the lamp above the table cuts deep, unmistakable, graphic lines from her nose to her lips—without makeup, she is always so dear, so sweet I get shivers inside when I look at her, but only now do I see how much she’s worn away in these last few days, become all ether, even her face has grown longer and gaunt. She no longer looks like a teen, I thought. For the first time since we’ve been together, I felt that she really is older than me—and not by a mere six years, but by a much greater, immeasurable distance.

“Let’s go to bed, love”—I could barely stand up straight myself, and wondered, what happened to being nineteen, when I could party all night like the Energizer bunny and in the morning grab a breath mint to blunt my hangover breath before running to class all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

“Uhu,” she nodded, “let’s,” and raised her eyes at me, and they suddenly pierced me through all the fatigue, the mental numbness of the late hour, and the burnt-to-cinders adrenaline; they went through me with a living music as though they’d gained a voice and sang—her eyes glowed with tenderness, and obedience, and sadness, and something else so inexpressibly feminine that I a felt a lump rise in my throat.

“Can we go see that man in the country tomorrow?”

“If you want to,” I wheezed in the voice of the old Mafioso from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. God damn it, I was so moved I just about broke down crying right there. The next morning, I planned to go to Boryspil anyway, to see that country hick Yulichka had expropriated—to find out the details and assess my losses (a cuckoo clock, a walnut credenza, what else did that witch hand over to Brey & Co. behind my back?)—but I’d intended to go alone; I’d never gotten Lolly involved in my business before…. The business, however, had never been subjected to anything like what Yulichka did to it. I’d warmed a snake on my own chest, as they say.

This, essentially, is the thing—as it became clear once the ball of initial shock had a chance to settle a bit, to steep, loosen, and unravel into separate strands of damage: where I suffered financially, where I suffered morally, where the firm’s image was damaged, what pieces I had to pick up first to try and patch at least some of the holes—this is what cut me the deepest—that I had warmed a snake. Of all the damage, of all the holes, the breach of trust is the most painful, and there’s no way to fix it. Such a great secretary, my irreplaceable assistant, my right hand! She was so perfect I wanted to pinch myself. And she was always informed of all my plans, damn it, and damn it again! How could I have missed it—the little bitch’s been swindling me for six months? And I just ate from her hand when she fed me the story about the man’s heirs, a son and a daughter, who got cold feet and convinced their old man not to sell any of his stuff. She was all seriousness, so preoccupied—“Gosh, Adrianambrozich, wat are wee goin to do, thei refius to sell nou?”

“We have to make them a better offer,” I said like an idiot. “We’ve no other choice.” And the interested parties, it would appear, made Yulichka a heck of an offer indeed: when I called the guy myself, he wouldn’t even speak to me—know nothing, sell nothing, changed my mind, go to hell—he honestly did not want to talk to me, like someone had really riled him up against me or just told him a boatload of lies about me, but at the time I still didn’t suspect anything. I’ve no idea how I found it in me not to betray myself in any way, to keep my cool today (actually, yesterday already) when my bank director, an old and loyal client, complained to me, with a veiled reproach, that he’d seen a new piece at the minister’s home, a Secession cuckoo clock, and heard that this marvel’d been found right here, not far from Kyiv, in a village next to Boryspil—meaning, how’d you miss it, you moron, right under your nose? That hit me like a truck. The trusting, softhearted Adrian Vatamanyuk, friend of small children and animals. And Melitopol prostitutes. And after I just gave the bitch a raise and got her a tuition-free ride to a degree in art history—go, sweetie, get educated; we’ll get ahead one day… fucking A. And how, as the textbook puts it, should one go on with one’s life? How should one be building up one’s business, or anything else for that matter—if one can’t trust anybody?

And the funniest thing is that Yulichka’s whole scheme would have come to light sooner or later anyhow: a cuckoo clock is hardly a needle in a haystack on our pathetic market, where it’s a like a village, where everybody knows everybody else—you can’t keep a secret like that for long—but the greed must have gone to our little schemer’s head. The chance to bite off a piece of pie she’d never dreamed of… I do wonder what commission Brey’s people offered her, how much she sold me for?

Essentially, these two things are no different: selling a person or selling a country. Lolly’s asleep already, but I go on talking to her in my head: the difference is purely quantitative, Lolly, not qualitative. The single difference between your Vadym and my Yulichka is the scale of operations: your rat charges more. And that’s it. It’s just that there’s us, my love—and then there’s them: those who serve something greater—and those who serve themselves, trading in what’s not theirs (and I shouldn’t call them whores—prostitutes, at least, peddle their own, anatomically inalienable, goods). It’s like a pair of enemy camps, and the line between them is like the line of fire at the front. This may be the only line between people that actually matters. A division that can never, under any circumstances be overcome. A thin line, unseen to the naked eye—and there are turncoats who’ve crossed it, but also the ones who lost their lives to it, as always happens in the line of fire. And it’s not clear of whom there’s more.

This just occurs to me, a belated response to your already half-asleep confession, when we were getting up from the table: go ahead, you go to the bathroom first—no, you go; I’ll have a smoke here. You said, “You know, I understood this thing about Vlada and Gela, too, the mistake they made; it’s your dream from a year ago. I’ve cracked its code: they had the same death.”

“What do you mean, the same death?”

“Well, not literally, of course, but they both died for the same reason.”

“I don’t know, sounds to me like you’re really reaching there, toots.”

“No, it’s true, Aidy. I just haven’t figured out how to put it into words yet, but you’ll see when I finish that film; I will finish it, just let me get the footage from Vadym…”

For a moment, I confess, I thought you were beginning to ramble with fatigue, and I got scared for you about your own old fear, which you’d, apparently, injected into me without my noticing (because in love you exchange everything, to be sure, from sweat and microflora to dreams and fears). Your father was in an asylum. What if there really was a reason? I remember I went all cold inside—and that’s when you said this thing that has lodged inside me and goes on churning like a small engine someone forgot to turn off, propelling one new sleepless thought after another: “She, meaning Gela,” (or did you say Vlada?) “mistook the other for one of her own, and you can’t err like that in love. In love—it’s deadly.”

You saw it in your own way, too, in your woman’s way—this line between us and them. You saw it as it relates to men and women—where it’s like a species barrier that must not be crossed.

“Can’t do it in love,” you said. “And what about sex? Can you do it in sex?”

You see, toots, I actually have, ever since we got together, stopped seeing other women as women. I’m not kidding. It’s not like I don’t see the inexhaustible variety of women, their butts, and all the other things a normal dude sees around him—I do, and quite clearly, but none of it feels like a cause for action anymore. I just don’t want it, and that’s it. As if there were a single woman left in the whole wide world—you—and the all the other members of your sex, they’re just people. So when Yulichka paraded her G-strings and miniskirts in front of me, I sort of felt sorry for her: like a child whom some bad people taught to put on this show, and who wouldn’t get it if you tried to teach her that she’s a big girl now, and it’s not appropriate to act like that. But, to be completely honest, I can’t be sure that if you hadn’t come into my life, I wouldn’t have done the merciful thing one day and kindly fucked Yulichka in my office—to be humane, or whatever, given that the poor thing is always begging so hard.

Vasylenko banged her; he’s the one who brought her to the company. He’d take her to the bathroom in the middle of a day, too. I remember I grumbled (because I didn’t like it, there’s a proper time and place for everything, damn it) that it must’ve been Lyonchik Kolodub’s Komsomol whoring that infected our office with some airborne virus that compels the corporation’s director to unzip his pants when we need him to be thinking with his other head—not for nothing is it said that spaces retain the karma of their previous owners. There was a reason all the Party’s district committees were always housed in former bordellos.

But soon enough it turned out that Vasylenko’s acquisition could do more than wear skirts that end above her panties and bend over in bathrooms—the Melitopol (or Mariupol, I can never keep it straight) orphan had a well-oiled brain, too, and was already taking accounting (or secretarial) evening classes somewhere and quickly became not just our secretary (three hundred dollars a month plus bonuses), but a true comrade in arms: whenever we, the three of us back then (Vasylenko, Zaitsev, and I) discussed any new projects, Yulichka was unfailingly there to assist and, more often than not, would make a useful suggestion right at the moment when we were about to go for each other’s throats.

As long as Vasylenko was there, she felt very comfortable; even the time I pointed out to her that she had semen in her hair; she just smiled at me winsomely and said, Oh! (And that, by the way, was the only time when I felt the tiniest urge to unzip my own pants and ask her to repeat the procedure with me, purely for sport, because how am I worse than Vasylenko?) I don’t know if she rolled over for Zaitsev, too. Apparently, as far as she was concerned, once my partners departed in search of better hunting grounds—from the very beginning, they were both interested in making money much more so than they cared for antiques; they didn’t care what they sold—and I remained the sole owner of the business, with her as my secretary (five hundred dollars a month plus bonuses). I was the one who was supposed to take her to the bathroom. And since I didn’t do that, she decided to teach me a lesson.

What do you say to that, Lolly? What do you think about that theory?

I know, you won’t say anything because you’re asleep already—you’ve sunk yourself under the blanket (you have a very cozy way of curling up there, under the covers, and without you, my own bed now feels like a hotel one) and zonked out, as if unplugged. Very still, only making a small noise as you breathe regularly into the pillow—funny, like a bunny rabbit.

Sitting up with you now, while you sleep, with the nightlight on, I catch myself smiling. Like I’ve smoothed out inside a little. “Sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other,” Mom used to say to me when I was little, kissing me before sleep: a fairytale charm. Sleep, my brave girl, you did everything right; you held your ground, and I am really proud of you. But I can’t sleep, despite how tired I am: I’ve wound myself up, and smoked too much—burned through three packs almost—to a wheeze in my chest and my heart pounding just under my Adam’s apple. And tomorrow I have to be rested and fresh as a daisy, and the pressure—to go to sleep, damn it, and right now—only sends my nerves into overdrive. Classic insomnia, the professional ailment of Ukrainian entrepreneurs. Most of my colleagues have given up the fight with alcohol (three fingers of cognac before bed—and you sleep like a baby, Igor assures)—and some have moved on to sedatives, which is no good at all. And the ones who deal in really big money call in even heavier artillery. Things keep going this way, and people at parties will soon be asking each other, who’s your dealer, the way they now ask, who’s your stylist?

So we’ll go visit that cuckoo dude tomorrow, alright. I checked the map—it’s really not that far at all: right after Boryspil, after the exit to Zolotonosha. Zolotonosha, such a nice name—means gold-bearing. Dude was a gold mine indeed. A Klondike of a dude. The same stretch where Vyacheslav Chornovil crashed—and Vlada. Still no one knows if it was an accident, or if he was murdered—that was also right before the elections, exactly five years ago, and the old camp general, as they called him, was rumored to be thinking of running for president.

That story looked bad, it looked really, really fishy: a KAMAZ truck knocks the car with the future presidential candidate off the road and then vanishes into thin air—that’s textbook Russian. And it was right after that, it seemed, that things went south in general—as if with the death of the camp general, an important spring finally snapped in our society, and we lost, as Lolly puts it, the strength of the material. The journalists didn’t bat an eye at the time. I remember one rookie even made a big boo-boo in the media when he wrote something along the lines of, good timing for the old man to die. If he’d hung on much longer, he’d have risked becoming a caricature, like a retired Don Quixote—which looked bad, like a young high-flyer’s dancing on an old fart’s grave—and not long after that, the rookie himself crashed, only without any KAMAZs involved: he and a buddy of his smashed into a tree when they were driving home drunk from a nightclub. Fate, you could say, really rubbed that one in. Better to refrain from dancing on graves as a general principle.

What was that joke my banker told me? This lady has to walk through a cemetery at night, and sees a man, and asks him to see her to the gates. No problem, he says. Thanks, she says, I’m really scared of dead people. Sheesh, he replies, surprised, why would you be scared of us?

That’s not as silly as it seems. I’ll have to remember to tell Lolly the joke in the morning.

Not scared, no. But we’ve pushed them completely off our radar, the dead—we’ve come to ignore them, plain and simple. And it’s not sitting well with them, looks like. In the old days, people knew how to live with their dead, invited them into family homes for Christmas and so on…. One dreads to think how many have been added to the other side in the last century—the dead that no one mourned. One can very well imagine they’re about ready to revolt against us. A mass uprising, the Great Revolution of the Deceased. What if they do rise up from the graveyards one sunny day and take to the streets?

One thinks such happy thoughts in the middle of the night, doesn’t one?

We should buy flowers when we go tomorrow, put them on that spot on the highway. I wonder if it’s even marked in any way….

Better go make myself another cup of that chamomile tea. Now I know why old people drink it—they also suffer from insomnia.

Suffer indeed. At this very hour.

The thought puts me on my feet. All this piddly shit you do, waste your life on, only for your own family there’s never enough time… I’ll just go ahead and call, right now. Why not?

I shut the bedroom door behind me (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and do the same with the kitchen door, turning the light above the table way down, so it doesn’t shine into my eyes; I noticed this a long time ago: people speak softer in low light, instinctively keep their voices low. Two closed doors and a hallway between me and my girl—I don’t have to worry about waking her.

Man, I smoked the hell out of this place! Rooms where people smoke a lot and for a long time, especially when warm, smell not of cigarette stubs or smoke, but of decay: not quite of cadaver yet, but of the stage right before that. A unique whiff of rot: it instantly calls up, on its associative heels, the aromas of whoring, wet dog, and alcohol from the night before. Boy, have I smelled too much of that. And how many people have I seen off to the graveyard already?—the ones with whom I hung out in this atmosphere of uncouth smell that no AC can filter out; back when we were all young, this was the smell of our jolly poverty, the air of Soviet dorms and sophomore parties—and later it turned out that our money stank just the same. Vovchyk, whom I met all the way back at the Sinny market, died of a heart attack at thirty-five; Yatskevich OD’d one day; people said Red (I forgot his real name) coded, he always drank like a fish. Kukaliuk even had me over to his dacha—a brand new two-level, but it also stank just like that, only even more rotten, sweeter, with cigar and weed thrown into the mix. Kukaliuk complained that some politician double-crossed him so that he now owed everyone, like land to a kolkhoz—and next I heard Kukaliuk fell out of a train he’d never taken in his life.

I throw the window open and suck the prickly night air into my nostrils. I may be losing it to insomnia, but for one instant, I clearly catch the moist smell of the animate earth—a sign that it has already awakened, that somewhere in its depths juices are brewing, running, getting ready to shoot up tree trunks… the first sign of spring.

Gosh, it’s quiet out there. Not a single window lit in the whole neighborhood.

I put on the electric kettle. And pick up the phone.

One, two, three beeps… on the fourth one, the receiver comes to life—see, I knew the old man wouldn’t be sleeping!

“Hullo?” He sounds stern, displeased—who’s this loser calling in the middle of the night?

“Hi, Dad.”

I can hear the TV murmuring indistinctly in the background and can picture my father as if he were in front of me—standing in the hallway of our tiny Lviv flat (the phone’s in the hallway, the TV in the living room), in his broken-in felt loafers with the heels folded in, the bookshelves behind his back packed with old magazines he can’t bring himself to throw out, and above his head—heck, I forgot what’s up there—a coat rack?

“Oh, it’s you,” my father says. “Howdy.”

As if I weren’t four hundred miles away but just walked through his door, the way I did when I was fifteen. I took my shoes off in the dark, tiptoed in my socks through the hallway… and froze at the kitchen door. Dad was sitting at the table with the nightlight on, reading—it was obvious he had not gone to bed at all. Howdy, was all he grumbled at me—and went back to his book, a bit embarrassed even: as if each of us had gotten caught in the middle of something he did not want the other to see. (I was in love with a girl, my first love; I think he’d guessed as much….) And now he is also working hard not to show how happy it makes him to hear my voice—he can’t show he is dependent on me in any way at all. Only now, when he is over sixty, and he’s got high blood pressure, diabetes, and podagra, his reticence has a completely different meaning. For the second time tonight, I feel my throat catch.

“I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“You wish,” he protests vigorously. “You know I don’t go to bed so early.”

Early is before three in the morning. He won’t fall asleep until it’s begging on dawn, and might sleep three or four hours. He does not call this insomnia; he still puts on a tough show, loath to admit any old-age ailments, pretending that this is just the schedule he’s set for himself: he is a busy man, works until late, and spends his nights after work assembling the family archive (Lolly’s idea). Plus, he is very engaged with politics, naturally, like all people who are growing old alone.

“I was just watching Channel Five…”

Recently, this channel, propped up by the opposition in the run-up to the election, has become for Dad what Radio Liberty used to be in the Soviet days.

“Have you heard what these goons are up to in Mukachevo?” And in the same breath, he spills into my lap everything he’s just heard on the TV (which meanwhile goes on muttering in the background, the effect of which is a surreal experience of something like simultaneous interpretation), about how in Mukachevo the powers that be are calling a special election, to replace the current mayor with their own puppet. I’m left making sparse grunts to evince my continued attention, not showing that I have heard all this before—and more than once. About the Carpathian forests, cut down by “those goons,” and that the catastrophic floods that wreak havoc on Transcarpathia every year are nothing but a natural consequence of their criminal lumbering, and how the current mayor, who was determined to reel “those goons” in a bit, was prevented from even running in these elections by having his paperwork stolen, and now the quiet resort town of Mukachevo is suddenly swarming with packs of homicidal-looking men in leather jackets—they’re being brought in by busloads, from who knows where, they stroll around the town like they own it, make trouble in its bars and restaurants, and intimidate the locals, so that folks are too scared to go out after dark anymore; it’s terrorism, pure terrorism, and the indignity makes my dad younger, as if in the course of speaking to me he’s lost about thirty years.

“What do they think they’re doing, bringing back the Stalin days? That’s plain the way the Soviets used to run their elections in ’48! Bring a garrison to every village, herd folks to the ballot box with Kalashnikovs. Some folks still thought it’d work the way it did with the Poles: if we boycott the elections, they won’t be legitimate. That was before they figured how this new power does business.”

The kettle, as if heated with the fire of Dad’s speech, bubbles up indignantly. I can’t help smiling. He doesn’t know this, of course, but Dad is mimicking me—an hour ago I was raising hell just like that in front of Lolly. She’s right when she says that when I grow old I’ll be “a carbon copy of Ambroziy Ivanovych.” Been a while since I last called. I’ve been busy. Been even longer since I last went to Lviv…

“This, Dad, is what they now call electoral technologies.”

I pour boiling water into my mug.

There will come a day when I can no longer just dial a number like this, day or night, and hear my father’s voice. For a moment, this future void gapes before me, as if someone snatched away my blanket while I was sleeping, and left me exposed to the cold. I get up to shut the window, while Dad—alive and well for now, thank God—continues to expose the 1948 vintage of Russian electoral technologies.

“You know what else they did? As your gramps used to tell it, they’d bore a little hole in the booth’s ceiling right above the spot where the chemical pencil lay tied, and let a stream of chalk dust pour from that hole the entire time. When a man came into a booth and bent to lick the pencil to put whatever in the ballot, that little stream of white dust would land right atop his head. And it’s winter, February, everyone’s wearing hats… stepped into the booths with their hats on, too. The booths are private, as they’re supposed to be—no one can see anything, vote however you please! Cross that one candidate out if you please, or put a clean ballot into the box: It’s a free country! Guaranteed by Comrade Stalin’s constitution. And on the way out, everyone who had white on their hats—the ones who put the pencils to use—got snatched onto a truck that stood ready in the backyard, and went to build Communism in the tundra. That’s the kind of elections we used to have, kid.”

“Cool,” I admit.

Really, that’s quite a technological trick. I think Conan Doyle has a story kind of like that: a locked room, a fixed spot for the victim, and a hole above it where a poisonous snake comes out. Dad doesn’t remember it, but offers to look it up: he’s got Conan Doyle on those shelves, an old Soviet edition.

“Do look it up,” I agree, because now I’m curious, too. I’ll have to tell Lolly tomorrow where these political technologies of the information age take their root. He didn’t have anything to boast about, that Vadym of hers, it’s not like his boys have come up with anything new. Maybe they just can’t come up with anything new period—and that’s why they’re hunting for people like her? Then the Church is right: evil by itself is impotent; its power comes when it co-opts the weak into its service….

Not a groundbreaking insight by any stretch, and, correspondingly, it’s not especially valuable, but for some reason it gives me the same boost of consolation as the smell of the awakened earth from the window a minute ago: I can think again! Can think—and not just shuffle endlessly, like a bug in a trash heap, through the causes and consequences of Yulichka’s scheme, with my mind trapped under the pile of lost dollars—an intellectual activity that neither adds to one’s common sense nor makes the world more comprehensible. It’s like my system’s been reloaded: I feel like myself again. Meaning, I feel like the same moron I was before.

And on this wave, as though slightly dumbstruck by relief, I blurt it out in one breath—everything I had no intention of telling him whatsoever, and probably would not have told him in daylight, when things change their proportions—how they tried to recruit my girl today. Without naming names, of course—I’m not that stupid—but most certainly with numbers: twenty-five grand a month; that’s the kind of rates they run these days, Dad.

The TV set in the living room grows quiet, and I can hear in the receiver my father’s heavy breath. Very close, with a slight wheeze: he, too, must be smoking too much.

I don’t often share things like this with him. Back in the day, he was so proud of my accomplishments in physics, so openly glowed with joy when I came home during breaks and sat down in the kitchen to draw for him the scheme of a thermionic generator. And now there’s nothing I could ever do to give him back that fatherly pride. We have both been long and reciprocally silent on the topic of my research career: he no longer asks about the progress of my dissertation—he stopped after the one time I lost it (because his questioning was beginning to sting) and snapped at him in that same kitchen, that I don’t live my life to pay him back for what was taken from his. He did not say anything to that then, shuffled away to smoke, and I noticed, for the first time, how he shuffled when he walked—like an old man. There are, indeed, things that are better left unsaid. Because Dad would have probably made a good scientist—had he gotten the proper education in his day.

His cognitive apparatus was very much in order—enough for me to get some of it, too. It’s not his fault that when he graduated from high school, he fell into the just-instituted quota for admission of the locals to Lviv’s universities—the notorious “twenty-five percent.” It was the sixties; Khrushchev liberalism was over, and admission committees, especially those at universities “with clearance,” were beginning to take a closer look at the applicants’ bios. No one would open a door into fundamental physics—military research, basically—for a “Bandera spawn.” Dad’s single chance was to go to study in Russia—many did exactly that, and that was part of the authorities’ plan: that “the Westerners” not admitted at home would leave, dissolve into the mass of the Soviet people, somewhere out there on that sixth of the world’s landmass that made up the geographical Soviet Union. And that was how, little by little, “the fire of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” would be dispersed.

But Dad did not leave. I think Grandma must have exercised her influence. For her, Russia was exile, the waterless echelon, the drunken guards, the rail line you rode for three days without seeing a single village—she and Gramps learned firsthand how such lines were laid: a dead man for every tie. She left her own unborn son somewhere among those dead, and she would not, having come back from there alive herself, hear of sending her oldest child back voluntarily—her son who lived. That’s the way it must have been, I believe, and I never asked about the details.

When it was my turn to take the entrance exams for physics, it was somehow understood that I had to go to Kyiv—as long as it wasn’t Moscow. Only recently, at Lolly’s prompting, have I begun to see our family—first the Dovgans, and then the Vatamanyuks—not as discrete portraits in a family album, as I did before, but as a connected network of links, like the Internet; only recently has it occurred to me that it was actually Dad who drew the lot of paying with his life for the life his parents had had stolen from them. Except that Dad never spoke of it like that, and may never even have thought of it like that—until I ripped into him that time (and I could’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m such a moron; I knew better already!)—and certainly would never stick me with the bill for all of it.

He eventually graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic, where Gramps had also gone—as a distance student, when he was already working at the factory—but a research career was out of his reach at that point. In my own career’s rocket-propelled launch, amidst the ruins of the Soviet system, he must have seen a triumph of historical justice—our family’s conclusive victory over the power whose mission, for all these years, had been to reduce us to dust, of the gulag or any other variety. He was reborn then, for the first time since Mom died—he was full of plans, even became more tolerant politically, justifying the economic chaos of the early post-independence years, first by the Soviet legacy and then by the lack of any national experience, in the business of self-governance. And even though he found many things about which to boil and rage then also, he generally believed that the country was headed in the right direction. The main thing was—we were free!

My exit into business must’ve come as a serious reality check for him. I don’t know how he learned to live with that, and do not intend to ask him. Ultimately, one learns to live with anything. And if I happen to be bent right now, at three o’clock in the morning, on giving him a synopsis of the lecture on current politics delivered to a famous journalist in a restaurant by an elected member of parliament, it’s not in order to make my old man see the shit around us more clearly or to have him console himself with the fact that his son is not the worst of it. That’s not the thing.

I just like telling him this. I like saying out loud “Daryna says,” like a secret we now share, a family secret: as if with those words, I was drawing a circle of light around all of us together, the three of us (and a golden rectangle falls from our window onto the darkness outside). As if by doing so, I was entrusting Lolly to him—for him to love. For him to be proud of. To be proud, not of the fact that his son in Kyiv lives with a famous journalist but of her, in her own right.

“And that, Dad, is how things are.”

He does have a wheeze in his chest…

“You’ve got to make this public somehow,” he finally responds. “So people will know…”

“How could I make it public? Who’d publish it?” I’m a bit upset to see his thoughts turn elsewhere. “Somewhere on the Internet is all I can think of. But even there, there are already ways to have information buried, with that same money, and you don’t even need to deal with censorship—just hire a spam brigade and in an hour they’ll pile so much junk over what you posted that it’ll just disappear like a needle in a haystack!”

“If you don’t want anyone to find a letter, put it with all the other letters?” Dad replies. “Wait, that’s from Conan Doyle too! Or Poe?”

“There you go. They haven’t come up with anything new.”

“Then you have to print leaflets!” he determines, as businesslike as if he’d spent his entire life doing just that. “And give them out where there are people—in squares, at stations…”

Actually that’s a thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Of all things, leaflets I can still do. And if I got my boys involved… I could talk to Igor, to Modzalevsky, and Friedman… call Vasylenko, for old times’ sake. They’ve all had it with tax inspection, everyone’s had it with all this shit; the elections were our one hope that things would change, and if they’re wanting to cut off our oxygen on that front too and roll the whole country into concrete…

“We’ll be doing something, Dad.”

For a moment, I feel uplifted. As if the clock were turned back to the days of the Student Brotherhood, the fall of 1990—the university deserted, a note on a classroom door—“Everyone’s gone to the revolution!” our tents on Independence Square—hard to believe, but back then it was still called The October Revolution Square, the self-published leaflets I used to give out at the metro entrance, the run-ins with the cops—the whole of that scorchingly magnificent autumn, like a blast of hot air into my face. Why do we so rarely remember it? For the single reason that our then ringleaders wasted no time selling out to the then Communists and now sit together in the Supreme Con-sel?

But we did rouse Kyiv then—we did put fear into them, at least enough to make our Communists sign the declaration of secession from the Soviet Union in August of 1991—like hell the Union would’ve fallen apart anyway, even if Ukraine hadn’t split off! We rocked the boat. And in ten months, the sum of the forces we applied worked, broke the course of history—remember how Kravchuk screamed at us back then, spit flew from his mouth, the day factories went on strike and hundreds of thousands of workers took to the street under our banners: “I’m not afraid of God or the Devil, and I won’t be scared of you!” Never mind that scaring him could not be further from our minds back then; we were just thrilled to see our little pebble start an avalanche—and now some fat-ass will tell me that it was all his oil that did it?

I don’t know how Lolly managed to hold her tongue; she was there, too, in October of 1990. We were probably standing just feet apart from each other in the same crowd.

“Darynka asleep already?” Dad asks, as if hearing my thoughts.

“She is.”

He’s never called her Darynka before.

“Burning the midnight oil, are you?”

“Yeah, a little bit. Had a lot of work today.”

“That’s good,” he concludes, not paying attention. And adds, with a belated explosion of surprise, “But gosh darn it, how could people turn rotten so easily?”

“Easier than you think,” I say, with great conviction thinking of Yulichka again (damn her!). “If it were only the politicians! Daryna says there’s no one left from their echelon—every colleague she could vouch for is no longer in business.”

“Keep her safe,” Dad suddenly says. “You keep Daryna safe.”

Whoa.

I am mute as an ox suddenly. And completely lost; I don’t imagine he means that Lolly is in any kind of danger: Dad’s not one to panic and not an alarmist. He was the one who taught me, when I reached the age of street fights, never to threaten anyone, that only the losers threaten, but you must be ready to strike if someone messes with you, and if you can learn to keep this readiness turned on inside you at all times, no one will mess with you—lessons he carried with him out of his street-gang Karaganda childhood and for which I will be grateful as long as I live. And only after a moment or two, does it come to me, so simple it sends a chill down my spine: it was Mom he was thinking about! The one he loved—and whom he, as he sees it, failed to keep safe.

What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? The one who survived somehow didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip.

You don’t understand squat about your own father until you meet the woman with whom you want to have children. It has never occurred to me before that he might feel guilty for Mom’s death. But right then, he said it as if he were asking forgiveness: keep her safe. Keep her, once you’ve found her, don’t let her slip away, because there’s nothing worse if you do…

To hell with how late it is, this is a solemn moment—there aren’t many like this between us, and perhaps you don’t need many in your entire life—better to appreciate the gold they bear. And only now that Dad and I have become equals, now that he has finally put my love next to his own in a private hierarchy, do I feel a terrible sadness for Mom. Not that I miss her, but that I feel a sadness for her—for the mysterious girl who remained in the photographs and whom my memory, shredded into fragments, can no longer assemble into a whole: a funny biscuit-shaped chignon on her head, as was the fashion at the time, a headscarf tied coquettishly over it, in track pants, carrying a humongous—how did she ever manage it?—backpack (and she carried me, too, just like that, an extra twenty pounds attached to her only in the front like a backpack she couldn’t take off—we do put women through all kinds of hell). And everywhere, in every pose she had the same poignant gracefulness of an accelerating motion interrupted, the ominously unfinished elegance of a sharpened pencil or a flying arrow: when the precision of the lines determines the vanishing point without deviation, and if the vanishing point cannot be seen, the impression left is unsettling, anxious. Where was this girl always running, aimed so intently? (What did she come for, why did she leave so quickly—never having lived to her intended vanishing point?)

And she was always running—she chased after something all her life, didn’t settle down even after she became a mother, as happens to most romantic girls. Well, at least it taught me at an early age that I’d never replace the entire world for any woman…. The Plast scouts were banned back then; Mom, being an alpinist, went hiking and took climbing groups to the mountains for sport. She used to say to Granny Lina that in the mountains one is closer to God, and that before every expedition she’d dream the exact position of stars above her future campsite. She also sang in a choir that eventually got disbanded for “religious propaganda”—they sang carols—and knew by heart what seemed like everything Lesya Ukrainka ever wrote, “Oh, for that body do not sigh.” How was she supposed to live with all that in the hopelessness of the Soviet seventies? A heartrending, incomprehensible life dropped, as if from a cliff into an abyss, into an utterly inanimate time—like a bird that’d flown in through the wrong window.

I am sorry for the incompleteness of Mom’s life, and in comparison, seen from afar, our lives—my own and my dad’s—appear regular, like everyone else’s. And they are like everyone else’s, that’s the thing: it’s the same—for everyone. I don’t see a single complete life around me: they’re all somehow off, crooked, whenever you take a closer look. The only difference is that on this incompletion scale Dad and I are somewhere in the middle, and Mom is closer to the starting point. Much, much closer.

And someone has to pay for everyone’s incompletion. The law of equilibrium, no?

I always knew I could never hurt a woman. Never, in no way, not one. I always felt sorry for them: I saw all girls as ethereal, ever-vanishing creatures marked on their foreheads with a secret touch of death. The fact that boys are also mortal, and with, actually, a much greater statistical probability of mortality, I only came to appreciate later, in adulthood, empirically—yet it did not affect the way I perceived the world. I was so sorry for Yulichka, too, the poor little slut. And—I can’t help it—in my heart of hearts, albeit infinitesimally—I still feel sorry for her.

And that, Dad, is the rub.

Except that I don’t tell him this, of course.

“Consider it done, Dad,” is all I say, like that mafioso in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. I could’ve added, as the security guard at my building puts it, “I’ll shoot if they come”—and I wouldn’t have been lying, but it would’ve been too much, a whiff of that teenage boasting that, as he had once warned me, was the last resort of losers.

“You’ve changed, you know,” Dad says unexpectedly, startling me.

“Me? Meaning what?”

“You’ve matured… gotten more serious, like. And thank God because I was afraid you’d turn out a flake. You were a bit spacey, you know. Grandma, God rest her soul, kept worrying you took after Stefania—she kept thinking you were too delicate for a boy.”

“But I thought Grandma loved Mom…”

“Of course she did, how couldn’t she?” he replies, taking offense at my obtuseness. “But one has nothing to do with the other. Boys are one thing, girls another… Grandma did not have a daughter, so she delighted in Stefania as if she were her own. But a boy is a different matter entirely.”

“Oh, I see what you mean.”

Things are getting a bit foggy in my head (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and I don’t grasp right away that Dad is talking about me from the perspective of his own time, speaking from the apartment where virtually nothing has changed since I was little—except maybe there’s more dust and the upholstery is more worn. And that reality of his is also a part of me—and likely not the worst, and to keep it safely attached to my mental file, all I have to do is let Dad set the course for our conversation and just go with the flow, picking up the cutoff ends of his thoughts: he chops them short because they are obvious to him, and he thinks they’re obvious to me as well. As he sees it, I still inhabit the same reality he does, one which contains a set of quite specific, commonly known requirements for a boy. And the most amazing thing is—I do understand what he has in mind.

“Well, we all know Granny had her own standards.”

“Our lads”—that was her standard. Whenever Granny Lina said that, it was clear she did not mean my dad and me but totally different lads who were light-years ahead of me, and possibly even of him. The same impression was left on me by the silver-toothed old men, all with identically unbending, stiff military bearing, who used to gather occasionally at our apartment while Gramps was alive—to argue about Kim Philby, the Cambridge Four, and other things I did not understand. All of them had been through prisons and camps, but did not seem to mention that much around me, did not seem to talk much about the past in general—they were more interested in current politics and in when the Soviet Union might fall apart, while I, at the time, was mostly interested in girls, Depeche Mode, Formula I, radio circuits from the Young Technician magazine, and other earthly delights, and only came to appreciate the precision of the old men’s forecasts when the Soviet Union did fall apart.

Strangely, the old troops did not speak out even after that. It was only from Lolly’s digging that I managed to put some of the pieces together—and eventually figured out that Granny and Gramps must have been working for the underground right up to their arrest, in 1947, only the KGB never found out: they were deported as family members, “for aiding and abetting,” “for Gela,” and they both had all their own teeth—they never had any knocked out during interrogations. The old Areopagus that came to visit them, just as it must have come at nights to the townhouse on Krupyarska decades earlier, had to have known more, but the men, all of them with the silver replacement teeth that Granny and Gramps miraculously never needed, went to the grave, one by one, never having betrayed their secrets. And when they said our lads, they had the dead in mind—the ones who had fallen and whom they held in their mind at all times as if standing at attention before them—and that’s how they carried their unbendable, military bearing through until the end.

And I was growing up surrounded by dead women—I throbbed with a lasting, ever-present caution: What would Mom say if she could see me right now? Great-Aunt Gela, too, somehow imperceptibly resembling Mom (the two of them, with time, have melded for me into a single entity), wearing a large round, white, lace collar, a bit like a bib, watched me from atop Grandma’s writing desk. Out of a 1941 filigreed frame: the picture was taken the day that Gela, wearing this very bib, arrived from Switzerland, where she had been studying to become an engineer back in Nazi-occupied Lviv—“to gain Ukraine.” In October of 1990, at the height of our strike, Granny Lina (she was in the hospital already) sent me that photo from Lviv, along with the one of Gramps. She took it out of the frame, sealed it in a plastic bag, and sent it with some man on the train. And was gone herself before the year’s end.

Granny may not have drilled me into a soldier with unbendable bearing, but she did accomplish something else: gradually, without me noticing, she pushed Mom, the way she had been in real life, out of my memory and replaced her with the image of another woman, shrouding even Mom’s death in an aura of heroism that was borrowed, as I understood only later, from another life—and another time. Whenever the name Stefania was spoken in our home, everyone would fall reverently silent for a moment—as if we were remembering a great heroic act. Or at least that’s how I always thought of it when I was little. I even made up a story for myself, which I came to believe and told my friends in perfectly good conscience: that my mom had died on Hoverla saving beginners who only survived thanks to her. This sounded heroic, almost from the same department as our lads, and that there was nothing especially heroic about a mountaineer’s death in the mountains, that it only proved that a person couldn’t very well stand her bland and slow life down in the valley, were things no one ever said out loud.

Granny did with her daughter-in-law’s life as she saw fit—as she saw necessary. And it was as if Granny’s own dead sucked Mom into their fold, vacuumed her in, and dissolved her within them. Made her for me, forever, indiscernible, leaving me only that piercing pity for all the girls—like small birds, who’d accidentally flown through the wrong window into this world and at any moment would flit through the smallest available opening.

And dreams—they left me those, too. The dreams. This is mine, no one can take it away from me: the ability to see in my dreams what’s invisible during the day, it’s from my mom; it’s my legacy from her—the girl “not of this world” about whom I have no more stories to tell.

Dad, on the other hand, fresh and chirpy at three in the morning—invigorated by the chance to fill a sleepless hour with all the memories he’s bursting with all the way over there—could talk about his mother until broad daylight: even now, thirteen years after her death, Granny Lina remains inexhaustible. She is the ever-present fourth member of our family circle in the middle of the night—here, where the emptied tea mug glows white in the lamp’s circle of light and the woman I love sleeps behind this wall: she, too, was brought to me by Granny Lina. Reached over from the other side and got her. Reeled her in with the same bait, Great-Aunt Gela…

And that, by the way, is exactly how things worked.

She is in charge here. She made it all happen. Made all of us happen. She, Granny Lina. Ms. Lina, as the neighbors used to call her. Polina, Polyenka—as the Moscow women she met in exile called her. My own grandmother, Apollinaria Ambroziivna Dovgan, may the good Lord rest her soul. Put everyone where they belong. What a woman.

I have reached that stage when you don’t feel tired because you’ve lost the sense of your own body altogether (except that raising it off the chair requires an effort beyond anything imaginable—you’d sooner just fall asleep right on the spot!) and your mind is operating on an oscillating, revved-up frequency, and thoughts and impressions, mixed together, rush through it in a single fiery current you have no hope of quantizing. But this incredible sensation, intoxicating and effervescent—like what a marathon runner feels at the eighteenth mile, when you get a second wind and endorphins come gushing from who-knows-what secret reservoirs in your brain; when everything that had been so obvious that it blended right into the wallpaper—suddenly flares up, all at once, as if at sunrise, and all you can do is wonder: how did I not see this before, how all of us, our entire family, the way we are, have been shaped by Granny Lina—and her alone? Like the Easter paska breads, big and small, that she didn’t allow anyone to touch—always kneading the dough by herself in the kitchen, shaping them and settling them into the oven herself, and all we were required to do was step around the apartment lightly and refrain from jumping or stomping, lest the paskas cave.

From somewhere else, somehow I remember this sense of awe (pride, admiration) upon seeing a person so close to you (a woman! a weak creature, as you’d gotten used to believing…) suddenly rise before you into a magnificent, grand figure, while you just stand there like a tree stump (woods, snow, fir branches…) and reel with wonder: How did she manage that? She is so small. (Grandma’s head barely reached my chest.)

“That brown notebook,” Dad’s voice scrapes its way into my awareness, “in which she made notes for her memoirs…”

The slight cognitive dissonance finally shakes me awake.

“The brown notebook?” I ask, surprised and almost conscious. “Granny’s? The one with the cryptograms? I thought it was dark green, wasn’t it?”

I would have sworn it was green. I can see it as if it were in front of me: the dark-green cover and a couple dozen pages inside, laced with mysterious acronyms—like the code of a compromised intelligence service.

“You clear forgot!” Dad bristles. “I showed it to you the time you came filming—a brown notebook, a thick one, with a calico cover. I’ve got it right here on my desk!”

Maybe when moving from one time to another there’s something like the refraction of light when it enters a different medium—and that’s why old objects change their shape and color in our memories. (Then what about sound? What would happen to sound, to voices sounded long ago?)

“Speaking of which,” Dad says into the receiver from his small corner of the world, still illuminated by Granny Lina like the light of a dead star, “would you happen to recall a comrade of hers who had the initials A.O.?”

“You’re asking me?”

Jeez, how does he think this works—that we’re the same age? I couldn’t remember a single of those old guys’ first names, forget the initials. Although, wait, maybe if I think really hard…

“A-O,” Dad spells out clearly as if to someone deaf. “Or also, Ad. Or.”

“Ad. Or.?” I echo stupidly.

“I’m certain it’s a name,” Dad says proudly. “I’ve already deciphered two names from her notebook: Krychevsky—he is that friend of Grandpa’s that died in Norilsk, during the uprising—and old Banakh, the doctor, do you remember him? He visited when you were little, came all the way from around Sambir—they wouldn’t let him live in Lviv after the war.”

“I am just a Sambir lad, Mother’s sick and Father’s dead. I’ll go sing, and I’ll go dance. I am here to raise hell…” my mind fires off a couple of lines from an old street song, instantly swallowed by a blast of machine-gun fire—ha, missed me, didn’t you, dog your mother?

“No, Dad, I don’t remember.”

“Neither do I!” he says, interpreting my answer his own way. “And it comes up quite a few times in Grandma’s notes—sometimes A.O. and sometimes Ad. Or. And the Ad. Or. is sometimes spelled without periods, as one word, Ador, so it’s like in French—je vous adore, I adore you. Same root as adoration. Doesn’t look like it’s an alias; I do think these are someone’s real initials, but I can’t remember any of their circle who’d fit. Whom could she possibly have coded this way?”

“What if you’re thinking of the wrong people? This could have been an admirer of hers back when she was a young girl, and you’re just fixated on the war; you want to keep the shrapnel coming…”

“Nonsense! She’s got whole chains of events spelled out with these initials! Like formulas. You just listen. I’ll read it to you… hang on; let me grab the notebook…”

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—he shuffles off away from the phone, the heels of his loafers slapping against the floor, before I have a chance to say anything. If I end up not getting any shut-eye, Lolly will have to take the wheel in the morning. We’re having some serious fun with this night, the old man and I—catching up on all our unspent hours worth of talk at once. Or, to be more precise, it’s Granny Lina who’s having fun with us. How much longer does she have in her?

“Here.” Dad reappears noisily in the receiver, fumbling with something. I hear the rustle of pages being turned. “Here, found it! 1944—Grandma had a separate page for each year and, looks like, filled each page in gradually, as she recalled what happened that year. Here you go: Meeting Iv.—she means Ivan, your grandpa; she has him as Iv. throughout… then, capital B, Briefcase. That’s how they met, during a Nazi raid…”

“I know. Grandpa dropped his briefcase with leaflets into her arms, and she then carried them all the way home, right under the Germans’ noses, through the streets.”

“That’s right! And just after this briefcase, in parentheses, like a comment, she has G. with A.O. to, and then a cross, meaning death, then PZK and the date, in Latin letters—November 1943. P-Z-K—that’s an acronym, German most likely… PZ was how they referred to the police, K for Kommandant. But there’s a cross, too, which means it was a person, a Christian. Looks like a PZK died that November of ’43, maybe he was a German… they could have had a raid after something like that…. In any case, G. and A.O. were both there, and looks like it also involved a briefcase with leaflets in it…”

“Or a gun.”

This pops out of me totally by itself, as if someone else thought it. While Dad was talking, I was thinking of nothing, only saw the entry in Grandma’s notebook scrolling out before me like a news crawl on a monitor: Meeting Iv. Briefcase (G. with A. O. to † PZK. XI 1943).

She was going to write where she learned that trick with the briefcase: from G. and A.O. This is no cipher—just notes she made for her outline, which she, unfortunately, never fleshed out. But I have heard a story sort of like that before—about a briefcase, with a gun in it, and which, for that reason, needed to be gotten rid of, and also with the Nazis, and in the street, and in the middle of the day. Or did I see it in a movie?

“Or with a gun,” Dad concurs, rustling pages; he is focused on his own ideas. “Or here, here’s another one! 1947, October. G.’s last visit. This has a whole string of initials, and separately, among them, Ador lives—see, here she has Ador!”

“And who is this G.?”

“What do you mean, who’s G.?” he’s asks, stunned, taken aback by the depth of my idiocy. “Gela, of course!”

Sweet Jesus! Dad—he’s still working on preparing material for Lolly’s film—we never told him that the show’s over. He knows nothing—neither about the pre-election acquisition of Lolly’s channel by Russian investors, nor about Lolly’s unemployment. He only watches TV, so the only information he has is what they say on the air.

And how could I tell him now?

“You probably oughtta go to bed, Aidy,” Dad determines sympathetically, having interpreted my slowness in his own way. “You go turn in, and I’ll play around for a bit longer.”

As if I am still the eight-year-old boy who lost his mother, and he, who promised to be both Mom and Dad, is wishing me a good night standing in the door of my bedroom—before he goes back to the kitchen where he will stay up late solving the problems in the take-home math exams for well-connected students, the main source of supplementing his engineer’s wages. At eight, I could not yet understand that his promise to be both Mom and Dad meant not remarrying—and he did not remarry, he kept his word. Granny Lina did implant in him some of her generation’s unbendable resolve.

I would give anything to be able to hug him right now—to grab him in a bear hug and hold him close, my lonely, aging dad, who has podagra and diabetes and smokes too much, and has a wheeze in his chest, and flakes of dandruff on his jacket (when we went to film in Lviv last year it was Lolly who noticed it, said to me: you should tell your dad about anti-dandruff shampoo)—if he were here, that’s exactly what I would do, although our family has always been sort of ashamed of any displays of male sentimentality. Grandpa and Dad, caught in a fit of tenderness, would at most ruffle my hair, or slap me on the shoulder, meaning, it’s all good, pal, hang in there! And if he were here, it would’ve been enough, after we hugged, to slap him on the shoulder in silent understanding: it’s all good, old man… so he would know that I’m here for him, that he can count on me.

I know I’m not a very good son—although I’m considered to be good because I regularly send him money. But a good son—that’s not money, or even taking care of one’s father when he begins to need help. It’s having the balls to accept your father’s legacy and everything it means and make the honest payment for it with your own life—without trying to jump off that train. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes years and years to become a son—biology alone doesn’t cut it.

“I only asked you about this,” Dad explains apologetically, as the vision I had of him in his spot of light over in Lviv, backed by the bookshelves with old magazines and dusty pennants (pennants! I remember them now—the pennants! and the trophies—the trophies Mom won—that’s what’s up there on top!), now goes out of focus before my suddenly moist eyes, “because this Ador must somehow be connected with Gela, so I thought maybe Darynka could use it…. It might be important… and I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”

“Probably a man,” I force myself to say. He doesn’t need to know anything; let him sleep easy (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other). “Or. must be Orest, no?”

My voice sounds normal. Almost.

“Nope, can’t be,” Dad perks up. “If it’d been Orest, it’d be first! Grandma kept the same order of initials throughout; she’s always had ironclad order in everything! First the name, then the last name. Or. has to be the last name, but this Ad…. could be anything—Adam, Adela?”

“Adrian,” says someone else for me, in my own almost-normal voice—and I feel the unleashed word fly through the receiver like a rock thrown into a deep well, an incredibly deep well like a dark shaft… cutting the air with a whine, and while I, above the curb, wait for the sound of it hitting the water, cold goose bumps crawl up my legs… Whoosh! A splash, bubbles, circles on the surface of the water, a slowing down of movement, a change of medium, a passing into another time, “Forgive me, Adrian.”

Crackle, houlin, laik wind in ze wires…. Clicks, and somesin laik laik mashin gun shutin…

Miss Yulichka. Comrade-in-arms, my right hand, Mata Hari…

A fluctuation of air is all it is, I say to myself. Sound is simply fluctuations of pressure that fade exponentially because they cannot last forever: the first law of thermodynamics. The fluctuations cannot remain because they are not recorded on physical media—not anywhere. There is no virtual, open-access audio library of once-sounded voices out there. One cannot welcome visitors to a museum of children’s secrets.

I know all this. But I also know that “Ad.” is him. Adrian. The one after whom I was named. My godfather, in a certain sense.

I just know it, and that’s it.

“You’re right,” Dad says. “How did I not think of that?” And he instantly moves to the next level, like in a computer game, “In Temirtau, when she was pregnant, she kept saying to me, you’ll have a little brother, Adrian. She was so certain it would be a boy. And she was right, as it turned out.”

She wanted to have this name in the family, I think to myself. She wanted the name to belong to our family—as the man who had borne that name was supposed to belong to her.

“And when you came,” Dad unspools his tale, “as soon as we got word we had a boy, she greeted you: Adrian! I can hear her the way she said it, now—it was like she… exhaled it. Sealed it.”

“Uhu.” What else can I say? That to name both her son and grandson after some unrelated guy, a woman must have once really wanted to have that guy be their father and grandfather? I don’t see any other reason—but maybe I don’t really know women?

She must have loved that man very much, my Granny Lina. Only he loved another—Aunt Gela, her precious sister.

“Now, Stefania, she wanted our boy to be Ostap,” Dad mumbles on like a somnambulist. “And if we had a girl, she wanted to name her Lesya. And I thought to name the kid after Grandfather—Ivas, or Ivanka…. But Stefania agreed with Grandma right away: Let it be Adrian! We could see it really mattered to her.”

Of course it did. Both in 1950, and then in 1970, when I was born, it mattered just the same. Twenty years changed nothing. In her own way, however she could, Granny Lina also spent her life trying to set right something that had not come to be. Something that was meant to happen—but did not.

“Do you have any idea who it might have been?” Dad asks. A touch fearfully, as it feels to me. Now he is the boy who is afraid of losing his mom: the image he’d had since he was little has suddenly come alive, like a statue that’s drawn a breath and is ready to leave its pedestal and set out in an unknown direction—and I bite my tongue before I let my ready answer roll off of it: I’ve seen him.

For a split second, the unspoken words billow out from my lips like bubblegum—and then burst inaudibly: poof, and they’re gone. And it’s not true, anyway, because I haven’t seen him—I’ve only seen pieces of footage from inside his head. (His later-to-be-exploded head.) My beloved has seen him. No, my wife—from the night the two of us dreamed the same dream, something has changed between us: she is now inside my life, like a part of me. Apparently, this is exactly how married people experience themselves. And this is the change Dad meant when he said I’ve matured.

“He died, Dad,” I say out loud. “In battle.” And because this sounds suddenly curt, as if I were suggesting that this dead man be buried and forgotten posthaste, I add, “At the same time as Aunt Gela. With her.”

“Oh, I see,” Dad sighs—relieved, it sounds to me. “Then it all makes sense,” and catches himself, “but how do you know?”

“From Daryna,” I say. Since that’s basically how it, in fact, is.

“She’s a trooper.” Dad reaches for the highest praise it was ever acceptable for a man in our family to give.

“Yep. Something like that.”

“Alright then… you go now, go to bed, son.”

He is letting me go—and I understand: he wants to be alone now with his newly gained knowledge, to roll it over in his hands, hold it up against the light, work it into his previously undisturbed picture of the past until he can’t see the seams. He might have to move some things around in that picture in order to do this; that’s not out of the question, things have to be cleaned up as always happens when one brings a new piece of furniture into a well-lived-in room. This is indeed work that takes time, and I understand him perfectly.

“You oughtta turn in too, Dad. The notebook can wait till tomorrow.”

“Uhu.”

But of course he won’t; he couldn’t possibly—he’ll go sit right back down and read it all over, picking out, with his new eyes, the A.O. and Ad. Or. from the web of Grandma’s acronyms, like one glowing light in a dead string. Who knows, he might get at something else this way, light by light… Lolly’s method.

“Thank you for calling.”

Wow, it really got to the old man.

“Don’t mention it. I’m sorry I don’t call as often as I’d like… been totally buried at work.”

If only you knew, Dad!

“Of course, of course, like I don’t know how it is,” he mutters on. “Sure, it’s a chore. Nothing to be done, though.” And, as if plucking up his courage, he exhales from somewhere very deep, all the way in his gut, “You’ve got to make your own buck, since your father left you no means!”

And this bursts with such fierce, ancient bitterness—like the pain of defeat, for years unmentioned—that it cuts me to the quick, makes me draw in air sharply, through my teeth.

“Dad, why would you say that? Did I ever ask you for any?”

And how exactly did you pull off the trick, I want to ask him, of keeping that unwavering old Galician mandate buried inside you well into your old age: a man must provide for his family! Some people these are? You’d think they didn’t spend their best years in slavery to the “Union unbreakable,” but lived somewhere in Switzerland or at least in their old prewar Poland, where there was no shame in owning a townhouse one paid for, because one could, still, honestly earn enough to pay for a townhouse instead of stealing it. How could they keep the two together—spend fifty years waiting for the Union to fall apart, and yet somehow believe the entire time that a man could live in it according to Grandfather Ambroziy’s standards—a man must provide for his family!—and not go rotten?

I could have also added that I know only too well who did manage (and how) to accumulate certain means for their children. I have to deal with these children of Soviet apparatchiks—the current politicians, government officials, and—less often—bank directors (few of them are smart enough to be in finance) much more often than he can imagine, because they are the ones who constitute the lion’s share of my clientele: they were the ones who, armed with their stolen capital, were the first to begin collecting what used to be my ancestors’ property. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve tried to remind myself that a collection, no matter who owns it, is always a collection—a way of preserving things that otherwise would have been destroyed, or the more valuable of them smuggled out of the country. And until the country, from which for centuries people have pilfered anything that wasn’t nailed down, learns to value its own inheritance, I can help to keep what has survived—twig by twig, crumb by crumb, like an ant—safe and at home. Despite all such self-comforting, this kind of clientele remains the most distasteful part of my job, and I try to separate, in my mind, the collections from their owners, and add to the collections for the collection’s sake, just so it’ll be there.

Or does Dad think that I somehow begrudge him not crossing the line to cooperate with the KGB, not growing fat and stealing his own share, with which he could have secured for me the opportunity to be doing physics now instead of making my own buck? Well, I don’t recall many offspring of the Soviet elites among our physicists; the few that dabbled in science have long split to rake it in at gazproms and naftogazes.

And God knows there is much else I could have said to him to make him stop feeling guilty for having honestly worked like a dog his whole life and not being able to provide for his son, because there is no fault of his in this—this is… it’s really beyond the pale. But a wall of my father’s deaf and stubborn silence rises in the receiver like a concrete dam—the kind of silence that deflects every possible argument well before it can be leveled; no words of mine can reach him. Any words I might say would be too small. It doesn’t matter that I never asked him for anything—he failed, in his own eyes, to fulfill the obligations he had taken upon himself. And I have no weapon or tool that could crack this petrified pain in him.

So I retreat.

“You ever think of cutting back on smoking, Dad?” is all I say.

“No worries!” he responds, unexpectedly chipper, apparently happy to hear the topic change. “You can’t fell me with an ax!”

“Yeah, that’s what you think… I can hear it all the way over here—‘the box of whistles playing,’ as Grandpa used to say.”

We exchange a few more routine lines—fading fluctuations, an exponential process…. He’s right, it’s time to sleep. Now—I can feel it—I’ll go out cold as soon as I put my head on the pillow, just like Lolly did earlier. And will sleep like a log, without dreams.

“Tell Daryna,” Dad reminds me before he hangs up.

“About what?”

“About Adrian, what else?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, I will.”

“Good night then. You all take care of yourselves now, okay?”

“You too, Dad. Good night. Sweet dreams.”

Click.

Beep-beep-beep…

I sit, holding the receiver, now mute, in my hands, and stare at it as if waiting for something else. A thought pops up—a last bubble of oxygen from the bottom of the well, stirred up by the rock: if I ever have children, I’d like a girl—they have it a bit easier in this world after all.

Dude, time to sign off, you’ve still got the whole day to figure out tomorrow. Or rather, the whole day today.

And the day after. And the one after that.

Alright. How do I get to my feet again?

From the Cycle Secrets: Untitled/Ohne Titel/Sans Titre

“Where did you get this?” Daryna asks.

“What?” the cuckoo yokel replies, half-spooked.

Just about had it wit’ dem all, he did. Dey’d come and talked up such a storm you couldn’t hear your own self think. Da other ones, dose come before, bought da clock and sideboard and wanted the other clock too, dat littler one over dere dat father brought from the war, when da wife put her foot down, said I ain’t gonna let you clean me all out—dey didn’t wag dem’s tongues for nothing, one-two, counted off the dollars, loaded up da things into dem van and gone oft! Dese new ones catechize you worse than cops, God forbid.

But, he’s no fool; he’s caught on to which way da wind’s blowing, right off. If not for dis skirt he’d seen on TV, he’d of told her boyfriend to go stick it and dat’d of been end of story. Wouldn’t of listened to nothing. Clear as day, he’s that antiques-Yulka’s boozer ex who’d called here before, and tried to get him. Da one who scared the daylights out of Yulka, so she asked to not come to her work and meet up in da park instead. Looks like he couldn’t suck anything off of Yulka no more, so he’d gone found him a new one.

She’s not bad to look at, either, he’s done well…. What’d she seen in him? Tho, you wouldn’t tell he’s a boozer just by looking at him, and his hands don’t shake yet. Must be a heck of a fucker—milks ’em all dry, and dem girls probably thank him afterward…. Heck, I got nothing to complain about either, thank God. Do one a good turn myself if da chance arose…. No helping it—he squeezed the antiques-Yulka in the mudroom after she’d let him pinch her tit. She’d of let him hold it and ball it, too. She clucked right back at him, and stuck her hand into his pants, and said, Wow! You could tell she’d took a shine to him right off, back when he first came to her store and she took him out to an expensive diner, said, if my boozer turns up now we’ll have no peace….

Young girl like dat, they always got eyes for a man with some ’sperience, ’specially if she’d got burned already once. But—dat’s all bygones, old news. And he’s a family man hisself: might get hungry somewhere else, but likes to sup at home anyhow. Dis one here—she’s quick as a fox, look at her eyes sweep over this whole place here! Now dey think I’m s’posed to tell em like at confession—who, and what, where’d it come from?

“Where did you get this?” Daryna repeats.

“What?”

“This,” Daryna says, rising from her chair, and walking, like a sleepwalker, across the room with one hand outstretched in front of her.

Seeing the change in her face, Adrian springs to his feet, too, as if she really were a sleepwalker stepping along a ledge and could slip to her death at any second; the yokel rises after him, drawn inexorably into the same flow of motion, as though they were all in a wind tunnel. And this is how the procession presents itself to an ample-bodied wife, in a stretch T-shirt and a bra one size too small, who appears at this very instant in the doors between the room and the kitchen: the three of them, spellbound, moving in the same direction, one after another, as if in a slow-motion game of tag—and what are they all after, it’s just a wall?

“This,” says Daryna, coming to a halt against the wall and pressing her fingers to “this” like a blind man who’s just recognized a dear face under his fingers.

Adrian can’t see what it is—Daryna is standing between him and whatever object has arrested her, her hand in place, not moving. Before he got up, he was sitting with his back to that wall, and did not get a good look at what was pasted over it—a deep colorful blob, a poster or something…. As soon as he’d stepped inside the house, he quickly and professionally sized up the decor and the furnishings, and his spirits lifted: this may not be a gold mine, but there was wool to be shorn off this yokel yet.

One is surrounded in this home by such a noxiously packed and savagely motley mix of bric-a-brac from the last two generations that Adrian would not be surprised to spot an antique gramophone from a Stakhanovite grandfather or some other marvel like that. And while there is no gramophone in evidence, and neither are there any of the oilcloth wallrugs with swans on them that have recently become such a hot item, most of what is here is 1970s junk—the peak of this rural boss’s prosperity no doubt.

Displayed, museum-like, behind glass in a monumentally cumbersome hutch is a gilded Madonna dinnerset; also present are the most impractical Bohemian crystal ashtrays in the world, chaste as virgins and heavy as icebergs, and right next to them (Adrian could barely keep from smiling)—a painstakingly cross-stitched picture of hunters at camp from Perov’s painting. The hunters are draped over a Samsung TV, on top of which—now we’re getting somewhere!—stands an old stone clock, a splendid piece, a German Manteluhr with a carved oak facade, likely by W. Haid (make sure to check the back), Third Reich, 1930s or ’40s, definitely a trophy. The yokel’s ancestors must’ve done well for themselves in that war if that’s what they managed to sneak back home—as Daryna’s mother says, one man’s war is another man’s bonanza.

Experience has taught Adrian that such rural honchos (those who in the Brezhnev era had clawed their way to where they could steal)—kolkhoz administrators, farm managers, warehouse managers, machine- and motor-pool directors—did not hold on to things that were actually old and instead rushed to replace them with whatever was new and “city,” naming their daughters Ilona and Angela rather than Katrya or Mariyka. He figures the yokel had daughters by the heap of Cosmopolitans and Teens on the bookshelf and the glam advertising posters that are plastered, it seems, over every inch of bare wall, hitting one, like ammonia, with the acrid whiff of the present.

Apparently, the family isn’t doing well enough to replace all their furniture with the newest set from an Otto catalog in one fell swoop, and the most current symbols of material comfort were fit into the Gypsy-caravan density of their home bit by bit, patch over patch: a monstrous multitiered chandelier of several hundred crystals, a faux leopard skin on the floor in front of the couch. It isn’t hard to understand why the yokel decided to part with the old clock and the credenza (How on earth did it fit anywhere in here, you can barely turn as it is?), but there can be only one reason why it took him until now to do so, the one Adrian chose instinctively as he formulates the best strategy for negotiating with the man: he is loath to part with his stuff.

All these things, accumulated in his home over decades, must be, for this man, the “goods” that he would be very sorry to see go, evidence of his former special status in the village. He probably thinks that all his stuff is still worth astronomical amounts of money—the kind that, in his day, neither a dairymaid nor a tractor driver had, and still do not have today. Puckered up tighter than a snare drum, the yokel sits on his pile of junk like a gnome, imagining himself the master of treasures uncounted. A type like that would actually sooner refuse to sell anything than give an inch on the price. So in a certain sense, Yulichka did not lie, or, rather, like all competent liars, she built her lies on half-truths: the yokel really did turn her away at some point, didn’t let her strip him of everything that had any market value—he let her have only the most valuable objects, because at the end of the day, a few tens of thousands of US dollars, a few suitcases full of crisp new Benjamin Franklins present a temptation no gnome can resist (and afterward he probably whined that he let it go too cheap…).

Focused on the business at hand, Adrian missed the colorful picture in the far corner of the room, so packed with ads and posters that it looked like an iconostasis—deciding instead to ignore it and intentionally sat with his back to it. The blob held no antiquarian interest and would only distract him from the conversation, because (now, looking at Daryna’s stiffened back, he remembers this clearly) there was something about it that did draw one’s eye, much more so than an airbrushed poster. It’s not a poster at all, in fact. What is there?

“What about it?” the yokel answers cheerily. The woman’s tone got him a bit scared—she’s gone all nervous, and he’s got no desire to get mixed up in any stories or anything. “You like it?”

She turns to face him, her lip bitten down hard, and the way she looks at him scares the man for real.

“Where did you get this painting?”

“And is dat, ’scuse me, any business of yours?”

“It is, very much so,” Daryna says, hearing her own voice return to her as if from a great distance: it is calm, but quiet, and very, very slow, as if spun at a lower rpm, like on an old turntable—the last time she heard this voice was in her boss’s office.

“The author of this work is a friend of mine. The police are looking for this painting. They’ve been searching for four years.”

“It’s Vlada’s?” Adrian gasps.

Daryna nods. Her lips are trembling. “Her signature’s even on it. Only it’s been cut off…”

The movement continues: now all three of them are huddling in front of the painting, like seals caught in one net, in a narrow gap between the couch and a massive mirror-faced mahogany wardrobe, which, apparently, replaced the old walnut credenza (most likely Art Deco, but possibly even older than that; in any case, that trophy was locally sourced from a landlord’s estate and redistributed by the Bolsheviks). Each tries to push the other away or peek over their shoulder at the painting—and the yokel is the most enthusiastic of them all, as if he’s never seen the painting before and it wasn’t in his own house that it hung. Pinned to the wall the same way rural folk used to pin up their oilcloth rugs with swans on them—unframed and unmounted, a snakeskin, the Frog Princess’s pelt shed and splattered with colorful blood, used here to cover a hole in this improvised iconostasis, between the dazzle of a glossy blue seascape from a 2001 calendar and a silicone blonde, smiling a pearly toothed smile and holding, in her hand, as triumphantly as if it were the Russian flag, a toothbrush with a dollop of Aquafresh on it. That’s quite a sizeable hole, and a nonstandard one, too—the canvas is cut to size to fit over the whole gap, at once.

Daryna holds her fingers to the sliced-off edges of the canvas like a surgeon to the edges of a wound. It’s a collage, she thinks, feeling sensation drain from the tips of her fingers—they just went ahead and made themselves a collage, the best they could. In the past, rural families used to compose these using family photographs—framed them and hung them up in the main room in between the icons; she’s seen this in the abandoned homes in the Chernobyl zone: grandfather, grandmother, a group shot from a high-school graduation, wedding pictures with the maid of honor and best man in red sashes, a boy in a Soviet Army sergeant’s uniform, a whole iconostasis of the many-sized and many-colored (from black-and-white to Kodachrome) kin; and in the gaps between the pictures—which must grate on a rural eye like patches of untilled land—they would carefully paste in strips of colored paper, sometimes even decorative cutouts. That was the place Vlada’s work took here. What was left of her painting, to be exact. A piece that had once been a collage, composed according to the very same principles of this primitive aesthetic—and now returned to its source. Collage to collage. Ashes to ashes.

“Dis here?” the yokel fumes. “Come on! I can drawr better dan dat myself!”

Any idiot could, he boils genuinely, in his mind, irked that he let himself be intimidated so easily—big deal, splatter up some paint so it gets all wrinkled up on itself. Lioshka-the-tile guy, the one who did the loo, could do a better job of it—he puts his heart to it, never was dat he didn’t line it all up nice and tidy, smooth as a baby’s bottom! Dis stuff here’s all puckered, what’s dere to stare at? What’s dere to be going searching for it? Wanna play chicken? Well, I ain’t one to let anyone piss on my parade; I ain’t born yesterday, thank the good Lord!

“Hang on just a minute, sir,” Aidy interrupts, having some-how—the yokel can’t tell when—edged him away from the subject of the discussion and ceased to address him directly; were he not so consumed at this instant by going from defense to offense, the yokel would very well begin to doubt whether this character is indeed the worthless good-for-nothing the antiques-Yulka had told him he was: the yokel knows how bosses talk and ought to have recognized in Yulka’s “boozer ex’s” calm ease a boss’s professional habit of moving people around without resistance, like pawns on a board, in order to achieve a result important to all, that is demonstrated in the army by ranking officers from platoon commanders on up—but the yokel hasn’t yet caught on to what, exactly, result these two are shooting for, and this man’s question, asked of the woman, fails to sound important to him.

“Where did you say you saw the signature?” Aidy asks.

“Right here,” Daryna points. “She always signed this way—VlMatusevych, without a dot.”

“I see, yes… it’s cut off in the middle—you can see the ‘u’ but the ‘s’ is questionable…”

“This is hers beyond any doubt, even without the signature, Aidy. No need for an examination—this is one of the works that was flown in from Frankfurt. From the Secrets series. I saw them all, remember, at her workshop, before they went to Germany for the show. And there are slides; it can be identified.”

“Who has the slides? Vadym?”

“Nina Ustýmivna. She is the legal heir, until Katrusya comes of age.”

“Splendid.”

“I just can’t remember the title right now. It should have been on the other edge, there on the left, but that part has all been cut off… this used to be about this wide,” she spreads her arms like a fisherman showing off the size of his catch, “and it was taller too, I remember the composition well.”

“I cut it to size,” pipes up the wife.

Her appearance in the kitchen door has gone unnoticed, and at the sound of her voice all three turn and stare at her with various degrees of shock; before speaking, just in case, she’s crossed her arms defensively under her breasts, which are already spilling out from her overburdened bra; and her thusly proffered bust, taken together with her powerful neck and arms, looks magnificent in its way (rolls of fatty dough around the edges of her undergarment are thrown into high relief under her Lycra T-shirt). She puts this bust before her like a shield—evidently picking up on her husband’s alarm—and is rushing to his rescue before the old fool can screw everything up from here to Tuesday.

She’ll do the cutting alright, Adrian thinks, contemplating, not without interest, this menopausal socialist-realist milkmaid in front of him. She’ll cut all sort of things. He quickly exchanges glances with Daryna, and pulls out his business card.

“And you must be the lady of the house? Pleased to meet you.”

The shield is shattered—the wife takes the business card, but does not know what to do with it, and walks over to the shelf where her eyeglasses sit—to read it over. Daryna gets the chills—it’s the familiar shiver that runs through the body in the presence of death, like a short circuit—and she keeps silent, afraid that her voice will fail her.

“So where did you say you got this painting from?” Adrian casually inquires of the wife, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

“Found it downa track!” she cries out, almost pained that such a trifle could cause such a ruckus. “It just laid there in the mud, so we took it—why waste? And the spots that got mudded up—I cut those off. It just laid there downa track, ina rain. Been a while now, four years since—right, Vasya?”

“Could be more,” Vasya confirms with gravity, happy to have reinforcements. Might all blow over yet, and dey won’t ask too much questions.

Where?—Daryna starts to ask, but figures it out before she speaks: “Downa track” is down the road, meaning on the dirt road that runs from the main highway to the village.

“You mean, on the highway?” Adrian asks—he didn’t understand the woman either.

“Yeah… I mean, no,” the wife stumbles. “Ona turn,” she waves a mighty discus-thrower’s arm in the direction of the mirror-faced wardrobe, “dere, where you go from track to asphalt. I mean the highway,” she corrects herself quickly and solicitously, demonstrating the traditional strategy of Ukrainian rural politeness: adopting the language of one’s interlocutor. “Wherea tree-line ends, ona knoll, ona very turn… that’s where it all got skittered around.”

And as soon as the last words leave her mouth, she panics, and her honest blue eyes for an instant go all glassy, like a celluloid doll’s. But it’s too late: the word’s been spoken, and it can’t be put back.

“All? So what else was there?”

Now it’s the husband’s turn to rush to the rescue. “A bunch of stuff. A car must of crashed dere, looked like.” He does, just in case, hide his eyes.

“There’s accidents there alla time!” the wife picks up his line cheerfully. “Would you believe it, no more’n three months passes before someone gone crashed there again! And thank goodness when it’s not to death.” Judging by her intonation, she finds those accidents far less satisfying than the ones that actually are “to death.” “And this year, there’d beena crash already, not long since, a month, right, Vasya? Showed it in TV, you didn’t see it? A whole family slammed to death in a Honda, ana baby, too!” This sounds all-out triumphant, like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “Ana woman, they say, she was ’specting, too, just think… coming from Pereyaslav—and hit a Mercedes…”

“Not a Mercedes,” her husband corrects her, “a Bee-Em-Doubya!”

“Same difference!” the wife laughs, flushing with excitement. No, sir, Adrian thinks, she’s not in menopause yet, she’s got all her hormones alive and raging, just look at her go! “I don’t tell them apart, Mercedeses or Bee-Em-Doubyas, I just know was some big cheese driving!”

“Big cheese, phew!” the yokel snorts with scorn. “Sure… teenage punk more like it, one of dose that bought hisself a driver’s license but Daddy couldn’t pay for a brain to go with it. Dem, when dey drive, think dey god and king, and don’t need rules, ’coz all the right lawryers sittin’ in his pocket. Part, sea, let shit pass! He went to pass on the double and jumped into incoming traffic. Must of been in a great hurry—well, he ain’t hurrying now.”

He reports this without any glee, only with the legitimate satisfaction of a man who likes things to be fair. The woman, on the other hand, delights in the topic and can’t wait to savor more details of this reality show—it is, after all, much more interesting than any soap opera, and these visitors know nothing of it, “And two years since we had a real big crash, a whole rig flipped over! Five cars slammed to pieces, right, Vasya? Took them two days to wash alla blood off the asphalt.”

A ripple of cold shiver shoots through Daryna again. Blood, she didn’t think about blood. She didn’t go to the site of the accident, did not see Vlada’s blood….

“Dat’s a special spot over dere,” Vasya nods. “Chornovil died here at our corner, too.”

“Oh yeah,” the wife echoes, proud as if she’d personally contributed to the event. “Folks put wreaths round that cross over there, alla time—d’you see it? You came from Kyiv, didn’t you? That was a bit over that way, toward Kyiv, after a turnoff to the Kharkiv bypass.”

Time to put a memorial here, Daryna thinks. This place is like Checkpoint Charlie was in Berlin. Only this one’ll give you a real thrill—it’s still operating. And these two could be the tour guides as living eyewitnesses—they’d do a heck of a job. Again she sees, as if in rewind, the highway stretching away from her—only not the dry one she and Adrian drove earlier in the day, but the other, from four years ago, with the lonely Beetle speeding along: the road is silky-black, flashing with the nebulae of puddles, the cloud of water kicked up by the car falls onto the windshield and the hood, streaks of rain meander down the glass. The road is empty, not a soul in sight, the signs float by—Pereyaslav-Khmel’nytsky 43, Zolotonosha 104, Dnipropetrovs’k 453, Thank you for keeping the shoulder clean—rain, rain, and tears streaming openly and freely, and the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, and back and forth again, like two scythes over a hayfield.

Adrian’s voice reaches her as though through water. “Couldn’t they put rails along that turn, at least, if that’s how things are?”

“It won’t help.” The yokel shakes his head.

“It would make it safer than it is now!”

“Won’t help,” the yokel repeats with unshakeable fatalism. “Dat’s a special spot.”

“What if you brought a priest out to consecrate it?”

“Dat’d be a whole lot of consecratin’ to do.”

There’s something about the way he says it that brings on an awkward pause, the way it happens when a conversation slams on the breaks at a crossroads trying to decide whether to go on or to make a U-turn and head back. The woman ventures, “There ona other sidea track, back ina starvation, they hada grave… drove bodies froma village there and buried em. We, when we were kids, useda run over there in spring—to look: where it’s shallow, the dirt settles and sometimes human bones come up… humongous grave, they say it was! It was later they rolla asphalt over it.”

“Over a cemetery?!”

“Dat’s no cemetery!” the man cuts in, almost as if he’s angry. “Who’d go ’bout settin’ up a cemetery back in da ’30s? Dey just piled dem all into a hole, covered it with dirt, and left no signs. Da old people, dey just remembered da place, da ones who’re still alive.”

“Yeah, the old Moklenchykh woman, who died last year, she useda go there every spring the week after Easter to light a candle… she’d just put it down ina dirt, and it’d burn. Once it burned all day till night, remember, Vasya, we seen it alla way over here through our window.”

“You got no better business dan bringin’ dat up?”

But it’s too late to try to rein her in.

“And once, when we were kids, tha boys found a skull over there and kicked it around to play soccer…”

“Now you’re full of it!”

“Fulla what? What?” The wife pouts and again assumes her defensive position, arms under bust. “You count ’em: Lionka Mytryshyn—that’s one!”

“Lionka was drunk…”

“Were you dere drinking with him? And even if he was, then what?” she objects, not in the least concerned by the mild inconsistency of her dual objections. “Just think,” she turns back to her guests, “boy served in Afghanistan… the one who founda skull. Graduated military school, got the rank already, and no bullet could get him! And then came on leave to visit his parents—and bam! Drowned. Went to a pond for a swim…”

“He was drunk, I’m telling you—dat’s why he drowned,” her husband persists. “You people just live to wag you tongues…”

“Didn’t end with that, did it tho’? Allose boys who kicked the skull back then with him—all toa last one, none of em alive! Kol’ka Petrusenkiv smashed to death on his motorcycle; I was still in school then. Fedka got trampled over by horses one day when he was drunk—took him three days to die ina hospital, poor bastard, and Vit’ka Val’chyn—that’s way beyond even…”

“Dat’s a separate story altogether.”

“Just think—man dranka poison for Colorado beetles!”

“Drunk, wasn’t he?” Adrian inquires stupidly, having fallen, unwittingly, under the spell of this macabre graveyard litany.

“Nope, was not, dat’s another thing with him: got mighty insulted. Ninka, his neighbor, went missing a wallet, so she went after dis Vit’ka. Meaning, like he took it. And he got mighty insulted. Drank da poison at work, went home, and says to his wife, Valya, I’ll be dying here. Folks rushed to call da ambulance, but ’twas too late, dey couldn’t flush him.”

“Ana wallet later turned up!” the wife triumphs. “Ina pasture. Ninka herself dropped it, the scatterbrain!”

Daryna feels an urgent need to sit down. Her legs have suddenly turned to straw; this has happened to her before. When? Yes, of course, that night in Vlada’s bathroom, when she was washing the warrior-maiden makeup off her face.

“So what’s dat soccer got to do with it? Like dat’s what killed dem! People talk nonsense—just to wag dem tongues!”

Somehow, the yokel finds his wife’s mystical interpretation of the story decidedly unnerving. That’s weird, Adrian thinks—he’s the one who first brought up “dat special spot.” Or, perhaps, the man himself kicked around human skulls when he was little—and, like most, remains receptive to the idea of a metaphysical payback only for as long as it is someone else’s—never his own car that crashes on a defiled grave? As long as it is strangers’ blood being washed off the asphalt—that’s a reality show, same as on TV. But when it’s folks from his own village who are found guilty on the same count, that means you yourself aren’t completely safe and secure either, and that is something you shall deny with vehemence, right, Vasya?

“Razing a church—dat’s another matter, I get dat,” Vasya proceeds to reason, businesslike. “Dat—yes, den—things happen. Dat’s better left alone, of course… Father said when dey had da church razed in dem village, all da ones who lent a hand dere—all were gone before da year was out! One fell to death right away—dropped off da belfry where he’d climbed to rip off da shingles. So da belfry just stood dere like dat—unstripped—no one would go up dere, until later, in da starvation already, dey trucked some soldiers in. But dat’s a church! I get dat, dat’s different. A skull—dat’s just a skull, of someone dead, and dat’s it!”

Daryna has sat down on the edge of the couch and is hugging herself to contain the trembling. “Too many deaths.” That’s what Vlada said to her in the dream, the one in which she was looking for “a bill of ward” for those deaths. So that’s it! That’s how things are.

Another ripple of chilly shivers runs through her: the angel of death has gone by. The conversation she had with Vadym the night before, still undulled and uneroded, still living on in her memory, now stuns her with its macabre absurdity, like a madman’s grimacing or kids playing soccer with a skull: it’s cheekily caricaturish, grotesque incompatibility with everything that is now happening here in front of Vlada’s work. Daryna feels, all but physically, the dense heat the painting radiates—like a fragment of skin that’s just been ripped off a living being. Biker girl, life was her racetrack, and she was always the winner… to hell with all those victories, they’re not the point. How could all those bloodsuckers have missed the most important thing? You were a genius, baby. It came out of you with this uncontainable force; you burst with it. And how is it that no one had your back?

“Too many deaths.” You’re right, absolutely—there are too many. Perhaps, when there are so many deaths piled up in one place, and there is nothing to ward them (And what should be warding them, what kind of a bill?), their accumulated mass creates its own gravity—and draws in new ones, again and again? Like an avalanche? An avalanche—of course!—only this is from an earlier history, of the Kurenivka neighborhood in Kyiv: in the fifties, the city had Babi Yar paved over too—they built a dam and for ten years straight pumped loam pulp from a nearby brick factory into the biggest mass grave in the world, to leave no trace of it. They even built a stadium and an outdoor dance floor on top of it—and in 1961 the dam broke and a forty-five-foot wall of mud wiped out an entire neighborhood in thirty minutes, burying hundreds of people—no one had their backs, either. And the bodies that washed out of Babi Yar rushed down Kurenivka to Podil together with the living who were swept up in the flood.

As a girl, Daryna had heard her fill of horror stories of the kind this woman loves so much: about a child’s hand torn off and left in her mother’s grasp when the child herself was ripped away by the avalanche, about a pregnant woman, trapped alive in a cement bubble. Babi Yar rebelled, adults said, only back then one said such things in a whisper. In a whisper and with a pillow over even one’s cradled phone: Soviet superstitions had it that you could be listened to through your phone even when you weren’t talking on it. And then the stories of it slowly faded—survivors dissolved in the masses of newcomers, the city grew, and the newcomers never learned about the flood. They just went to play soccer in that same stadium, Spartak, which was so quickly built up again.

The dead were the ones who took you, Vlada, weren’t they? Other people’s dead—exactly when your own life shifted and slid, losing its footing? They are strong, the dead; they can do things. Oh yes, they are strong. Lord, how strong they are. We couldn’t dream of matching them.

This jolts her again. The woman will think Daryna’s got the hiccups. Or a concussion. One thought follows on another’s heels, in a series of spontaneous discharges, uncontainable like labor contractions or vomiting; after another surge, Daryna’s mind suddenly achieves final clarity: she knows now how it all happened then on the highway, “downa track,” at the Pereyaslav exit. She knows what the yokel’s afraid of—because he is afraid, has been the whole time, from the moment she recognized the cut-down canvas, glancing at her when he thinks she doesn’t see it, and then looking instantly away, like he’s been burned. Even though she, with no qualms whatsoever, does not take her eyes off him, as if they were each other’s dearest people in the world about to part, as if she were hoping that at any moment he might work up the courage to tell her everything he has to tell her, to the end, even though she’s already understood everything and does not need his explanation. It’s only Adrian who hasn’t yet figured out how Vlada’s painting found its way to this home—so she wills herself to knock down the barrier of disgust, releases her jaw, which has been clenched the entire time, and asks the yokel, unexpectedly loudly, as if speaking on camera, “Did the two of you search the car together?”

Now it’s the yokel’s turn to be jolted by electricity. For a second, he’s covered in a cold sweat: Moderfucker, he thinks; now I’m fucked! And—for what?! Dat’s da worst of it—get caught over nothing! Go ahead, be a good dad, give your daughter a house-warming present, damn it! And said to da wife—don’t take it. It’s not worth da trouble, but no, she’d put her foot down—it’s pretty, she said, real pictures, in frames, like they sell in stores in Kyiv for big money, put it up nice in Ruslana’s new flat. Dey all gonna be sitting pretty now, and Ruslana, too, when dey get us for robbery—hell on a fucking stick, to get caught on such crap!

And such an intolerably bitter sense of resentment for this outrageous injustice fills the yokel that instead of defending himself, he shouts out, straight at Daryna, almost desperately, as only an innocently wronged man could shout to a woman with such maternal eyes, “Like dere was anything to look for in dat car of yours! Nothing but dese here pictures!”

In the silence that follows, a fly buzzes loudly somewhere under the ceiling: it’s spring, Adrian mechanically observes, as he regards the yokel with new curiosity. The spring will show who shit where. What is it that the cops call the dead bodies of the missing they find in the spring? It’s something lyrical, oh yes—snowdrops. Goddamn, the dude sweeps crashed cars, then. And this mustn’t be his first time either. And really, no reason for good stuff to go to waste—and the dead don’t care anymore. That’s why he went into such a huff over the tale of the avenging skull, the delicate soul that he is. Impressive. No wonder he and Yulichka reached an understanding.

“Where are they?” Daryna’s voice trembles. “Where are the rest of the paintings? There should have been five—where are the other four?”

Their hosts glance at each other: a pair of schoolchildren who’ve been caught smoking in the bathroom. Adrian wonders if the dude has connections among the local cops. The cops might be in on the action, too—the law doesn’t require photographic records for highway accidents, so they’re free to pick over the fresh carrion. Why not? It’s their loot—money, jewelry… one man’s war, after all. Adrian blinks automatically at the Haid mantel clock on top of the TV (quarter to noon): a respectable, well-made clock, straight from somewhere in bombed-out Königsberg or Berlin. Let anyone try to prove, after the fact, that the victim was wearing jewelry. And who would try to prove that—the victim’s grief-stricken family? Time to reclaim initiative, Adrian decides.

“A bad story you got yourself here, Vasyl Musiyovych.” This time Adrian leaves no doubt about his police-inspector intonation, and the yokel, who’s been half ignoring the “boozer-ex” all this time, experiences a stab of confusion. “A really bad story. The police have been looking for these paintings for four years already; the accident made quite a stir in the news; it was on every channel. And the painter, the one who died, was not only a close friend of Miss Daryna,” the pair of schoolchildren obediently, as if following a teacher’s pointer, move their eyes to Daryna, “but also the wife of an elected representative.” Adrian says Vadym’s last name and watches, not without glee, an intense—he’s all but got steam coming out his ears—thought process manifest itself on the yokel’s face before being replaced by an expression of genuine pain: aha, he’s getting it—he’ll have to kiss the pictures goodbye; no way around it, no matter how loath he is to part with them.

But the wife reacts faster.

“Well, who knew what was ina car! It sat turned upside down…”

Daryna freezes. Adrian can feel her thoughts as clearly as if it were his own brain being bombarded with electric shock; another instant and he’ll lose it, let it rip; only his worry for Daryna helps him to keep his cool.

“But don’t you know that you had the duty to call the police and the ambulance? What if she were still alive, inside that car? Consult the Criminal Code, ma’am!”

At the mention of the Criminal Code the woman shudders but does not back down.

“Well, it was all just skittered ina mud!” She takes a new angle, now pleading. “Just think, that’s a whole load of trouble. If we hadn’t took it, it’d of been ruined anyhow!” she’s finally found her lifeline. “It was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand, right, Vasya? If it’d laid there some more, the paint would of come straight off. This way, I saved them pictures, you see.”

She steps up to the canvas and runs her hand over it, with a sense of ownership, as if smoothing out a rug she’s selling, and shoots Adrian a sly sideways look (unlike her husband, she intuited Adrian’s status right away). In different circumstances, Adrian would have smiled at this—just watch her go!—but at the moment he is in no mood for comedy. The yokel catches on, too.

“If you want to take this picture, I won’t mind… what about you, Galya? Let ’em take it, right? We don’t need it dat much. Only how do I know you’re telling da truth? Can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies.”

Adrian understands they’re now haggling. The pair has realized they’re in trouble, but will keep kicking until the end, to try to get out with some sort of gain for themselves—if I can’t eat it, at least I’ll bite it. They don’t know how to be any other way; otherwise, they’d be as “mighty insulted” as that poor bastard that drank the poison for Colorado beetles. Only these guys won’t go drinking poison—they love life too much.

And that’s when Daryna begins to laugh. She is not hysterical, nothing like that, she just can’t help it: the redneck’s last sentence, together with his offended look, gets stuck inside her and keeps spinning there, producing, with every turn, a new wave of raging hilarity—“can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies”—and she is shaking with laughter like a loose-bolted old truck on a dirt road; she is a rattletrap of unglued muscles and tendons, oh my goodness, wiping tears—rewind and rewind, again like contractions or vomiting, “can’t just anyone come over”; she can’t breathe, and the thing is the phrase loses none of its effect with repetition; it remains, to Daryna, insanely funny, and she cannot stop, even though no one else is laughing, and she herself could not possibly ever explain what’s so funny about it, but God, she’s about to burst—her panties are wet already, and tears are running down her cheeks like streaks of rain down a windshield; the redneck and his wife are a blur in her eyes, “can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing”—and she jumps to her feet, shaking her head and choking on a new fit of laughter, waves at Adrian, meaning, it’s fine, she’s fine, she’ll be back to rejoin the company in just a minute, she just has to laugh it all out….

At this moment, the one who cannot not be watching the two of them through the mangled, swollen, and poster-clogged eye of her painting on the wall must clearly see Adrian and Daryna caught together, at once, in a lightning-quick flash of déjà vu.

As Adrian watches Daryna dash out the door, grabbing her purse on the run, he recalls a recent scene exactly like this one, at The Cupid—a stunning coincidence, like a repetition of the same movement in a dance, almost a rewind, but not quite; something has changed, because something always changes, and the elements of “then” and “now,” so brightly lit in our awareness, though they do call back and forth to each other with all their apparent congruity, like a repetitive geometric design, are still never one hundred percent identical. This time, Adrian realizes, there’s no need for him to run after her—she really will come back in a minute, as she said she would; she is fine.

Daryna’s déjà vu, however, comes to her as a direct extension of her negotiations with Vadym the night before—still warm, still swirling in her mind in shreds of dirty foam: in the yokel and his wife’s naïve determination to bite off a piece of the action, no matter how small, and hide it in their cheeks, even when backed into a dead corner, Daryna recognizes the same element of a behavioral matrix she encountered the day before, the same “election platform”—to get off the shoals in a way that allows one to keep the controlling stake. And in this very instant, as Vadym and the cuckoo yokel become in her mind a single entity, the laughter that took her over lets up like a sudden spring downpour—as if she’d heard a joke that stopped being funny after it was explained—and Daryna, still shaking her head in amazement (Can you believe this?) feels for a pack of Kleenexes in her purse, sniffing, and pushes at a white plastic door, decorously hidden in a niche, on which a stenciled peeing boy glows proudly like polished brass on a military uniform.

The bathroom smells of sweat and perfume: this is a well-off home, built to every city standard. From the mirror above the sink a woman she has seen somewhere before but doesn’t recognize right away looks back at Daryna: a clown or Lady Dracula. No—rather, a silent movie actress washing her face in the dressing room: the shoot is over, the role’s been played. (The terrifying beauty with fire hidden under her skin who once flashed up from under all that artful makeup is not coming back—and there isn’t anyone left to make her up anyway.) Her mascara is smeared into dense, predatory black fans around her eyes, and those eyes themselves, still not quite conscious, as if drunk with laughter, radiate, in contrast with their grotesque frames, a glowing, uncanny detachment, as if focused on something unseen. Something beyond reach.

A sudden understanding intrudes upon Daryna: I am not alone, she thinks. Who else is here? Who is with me?

She runs the water and puts both hands under the icy stream. What bliss, what boundless joy—just water, even when it’s merely coming from the tap, like this. The living water, the same as that which flows in the Dnieper. Or do they have their own well?

She bends over and catches the stream with her lips, drinks, swallows, and drinks more as she once saw a pigeon drink from a fountain where he perched: beak open hungrily, his whole body feasting on every sip. Or was it a dog? Lord, there’s so much life all around, and—dear Lord, what unthinkable things we do to it.

She raises her head and looks at the woman in the mirror: the Revlon lipstick smudged around her mouth as if she’s been kissed—like on a compact mirror in a purse found on the scene of the accident. That was a painting, that was a photo, I’ll use this somehow, I just don’t know how yet—wet streaks run down her chin, hang there like tiny stalactites of sweat, her wounded lips move, and on her skin, she somehow feels her own breath as she whispers, “I did everything as you wanted, Vlada. Everything. I will take them back. You go now.”

“I got him to sell me the clock, too!” Adrian announces.

“You should be in the right lane,” Daryna advises, focused on the road. She’s allowed him to take the wheel because he is now in better shape than she is, but she hasn’t relaxed; she’s alert; two heads are better than one, and the Lord helps those who help themselves. “What clock?”

“The one that they had sitting on top of the TV, you didn’t see it? A prewar piece, German-made—a trophy! He said his father brought it back from the front.”

“Sweet. And my gramps brought back a piece of shrapnel in his chest, which killed him within a year. And two cans of American meat stew from his rations—he didn’t eat it, saved it for the kids, as a treat.”

“You can’t compare. Didn’t you see, they have a tradition? Runs in the family.”

“Oh, look, another cemetery!”

“That one’s new, clearly.”

“Yeah…. Look, gas and food—do we need to fill up?”

“You know I wouldn’t mind filling myself up with something. How about we stop after Boryspil somewhere? All these Petrivna’s-and Mariyana’s-type places don’t inspire much confidence in me; there’ll be better places closer to the city.”

“After the interchange? Sounds good. I’m hungry too. Could eat a horse, actually.”

“That’s from an overdose of emotions in a single twenty-four-hour period.”

“If you say so. But you know, I’ve still got no clue what got me back there—what was so damn funny about anything?”

“A normal defensive reaction. But you wouldn’t believe how agreeable they got after that! All warm and fuzzy. The wife started asking me right away if you were the one she’d seen on TV. They were so scared; they must’ve thought you were about to broadcast them to the rest of the world. It worked even better than Vadym’s name. They cracked on the paintings without any fuss—said their daughter has them. So you, my dear, basically made the breakthrough in high-level negotiations. For which you shall receive a special commendation.”

“In the form of a big smooch? Hey—you should go ahead and just hire me as your secretary! At least I won’t rob you.”

“Can you start today? If you really mean it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

“But I know nothing about antiques, Aidy.”

“I’ll train you. No problem. You won’t even have to go to college.”

“I see you’re skimping on me already.”

“I’ll be your dream boss! You’ll see.”

“I don’t remember you ever propositioning me like this before…”

“Do you now appreciate the seriousness of my intentions?” He smiles but receives no smile in return. “Do you know, by the way, how Yulichka got him? He told me this at the very end, when we stepped out for a smoke—turns out she claimed that she was the owner from the beginning. Like it’s her gallery, and she’s this hotshot businesswoman who’s being stalked by her ex-husband, an alcoholic maniac. Meaning, me.”

“I’ve always suspected she was a crook.”

“But not this big! And I kept wondering why the dude disappeared and how she, with her bulldog grip, let him slip away. First she called me to say we got this diamond in the rough—and I, naturally, squealed like a little girl, said I was on my way and she should keep him there—and by the time I swooped in, the dude was gone. She told me this whole story about him being late for his bus. And proceeded to handle him behind my back from that day on.”

“Why did she call you at all?”

“She must have wanted to make sure that this particular hide was worth tanning, you know? That this was the right moment for her to go in on her own. And I was so thrilled, I blurted it all out—that we’d never had such luck before… which, by the way, is the sacred truth: that yokel’s cuckoo clock, turns out, was also from his father, and also a trophy—from Schwartzwald! That’s the top manufacturer, goes back to the eighteenth century. That’s where they all came from, the cuckoos—Schwartzwald in Germany; it was only later they got called Swiss clocks, after they started making the body in the shape of a chalet…”

“Watch out! He’s got his turn signal on!”

“Yeah, I see him. Come on, jack, turn already!” Adrian honks at the gray Mazda in front of him. “And the yokel, when he decided to sell the clock, just went from store to store and asked—to see who’d pay more. That’s how Yulichka got him.”

“Well, they’re meant for each other. A fine pair.”

“Indeed.”

“You got the daughter’s address, right?”

“Yep. And I got the number in my phone too, the dude called her on the spot. She lives on Berezniaki, Davydov Boulevard. Name’s Ruslana. I thought it’d be Lolita or Angela or something.”

“Ruslana’s not much better… and Aleksei Davydov, by the way, was that Kyiv city administrator who was in charge of liquidating Babi Yar.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Not even a little. They just never got around to renaming that street from the Soviet days.”

“No shit. So it was on his watch that the dam on Kurenivka broke?”

“His alright. The project, of course, came down from Moscow; he was just the one who implemented it… for which he was recognized accordingly. That’s how it goes, Aidy.”

“Makes me wonder—is anyone ever gonna set this country straight?”

“’Tis a chore, as Ambroziy Ivanovych says.”

“And Granny Lina used to say, call it a chore and treat it like your job. I called him yesterday, by the way. My dad. He sends regards.”

“Thanks.”

“He is still putting together materials for your film. He’s dug up some interesting stuff. I didn’t tell him that the film won’t happen…”

“The film will happen, Aidy.”

He looks at her sideways, blinking.

“It will,” Daryna repeats, with the unshakable certainty of an ancient Sibyl in her voice, so much so that Adrian gets goose bumps. “I have not a shred of doubt about that now.”

Adrian doesn’t say anything. He keeps his eyes on the road.

“You don’t see it yet, do you?” she says softly.

“Don’t see what?”

“Remember the tape of my interview with Vlada? The one in the Passage, the one you dreamed later, only starring Gela?”

“Not very clearly. Why?”

“In that interview, Vlada promised to give me one of her paintings as a present. From this very cycle—Secrets. You’ll just come over and choose one you like, she said.”

“And then she died. And you didn’t have a chance to go and choose one. Lolly, I understand how much you regret not having a single tangible memento of her. Pictures or video—that’s totally different, it’s not the same as the things a person leaves behind that she made with her own hands. I understand this very well….”

“You don’t understand anything. I did have a chance to choose.”

He blinks at her again. This woman will never cease to amaze him.

“It was this very work, Aidy. This one, the one we took back from them.”

“Can’t be.”

“This very one. Only intact, not cutoff, of course.”

“Are you certain? Are you sure it’s not just something you think now, in retrospect?”

“No, there’s no mistake. I recognized the painting right away, the moment I saw it. It’s her present. Vlada’s. She’s the one who brought me there. To the place where her Secret was buried. Except for the two of us, no one knew about the painting she’d given me.”

“God almighty.”

“Nah, it’s simple, really. She was a very neat girl. You know, one of those people who always picks up after herself and hates to have unpaid debts. I think she is closing her earthly accounts. She is fulfilling all the obligations she took on. Apparently, she cannot leave until she’s done. I mean, leave for good. You see?”

“Uhu. Looks like she’s not the only one either.”

“Yeah, I can’t get these 1933 dead out of my mind…”

“A road over a mass grave, how about that?”

“Well, almost every village this side of Zbruch had a pit like that, but not every one of those has cars driving over it, thank God.”

“Horrible story with that skull.”

“You know what occurred to me as she was telling that story? The place of the skull—that’s Calvary in Latin!”

“Lolly. My Lolly.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Hey, you know what—come be my secretary?”

“And we’ll go around together buying up trophy mantel clocks from the descendants of the ‘liberation army’ and selling them to the new breed of pillagers?”

“Nope, wrong answer. Try again.”

“Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, Aidy, but that’s what it looks like to me…”

“You know what I would really like to have?” Adrian says. “What kind of a shop?” he is not looking at Daryna; his eyes are fixed on the road. “Not a boutique—boutique is a bad word, too glam, something for the new little Russians—a shop. One that would carry things that are no longer made. Good, necessary things—from a Singer sewing machine to a hand press for rolling your own cigarettes. Clever everyday things that one could use today. Things that were meant to serve a long time but have been made redundant by industrial production. You would agree with me, wouldn’t you, that tons of women out there would be thrilled to make clothes for themselves and their kids instead of wearing something made in China. And how many people would smoke honest tobacco instead of this trademarked trash!” He nods at the pack of Davidoffs next to the gearshift. “And so on… that sort of thing. And next door to this shop, right behind the wall—I’d have a few repair shops. Like the ones on Khreshchatyk, you know, in the courtyard next to the McDonalds, where we went to have the clasp on your necklace fixed last autumn. Good, honest repair shops. Staffed with serious men who’d spend their time giving new life to all these things. So that people would buy them not just to show off, but because they want them. And would go on using them.”

“A store called Utopia, no?”

“Let it be a utopia. Let it be a dream. Call it what you want.”

“And put up a handloom in there, would you please? That’s for me, personally. I’ve always wanted a real homespun dress.”

“No problem. I’m ordering it as we speak.”

“I like this game.”

“It’s not a game. You said it yourself—it’s a utopia. That’s better.”

“Actually, I think you’d pretty quickly attract your circle of dedicated customers.”

“I think so, too.”

“And you’d find other followers, too. Maybe you’d even start a brand. Like those Swiss Freitag guys, only yours is more ambitious.”

“See now?”

“And then one night, a bunch of boys would roll up in SUVs and burn your utopia to cinders, with all its wonders inside. As soon as their sales of made-in-China shit drop.”

“Eh, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. You don’t know until you try, right?”

“This is a very nice idea, Aidy. I mean it.”

“You like it?”

“I do. And you know who else would’ve liked it? Vlada. She’d have been insanely in love with it. It’s her style. She brought me a Freitag bag back from Switzerland, as a present, that big black one…”

“Are those the ones they make from old truck tarpaulins?”

“Yeah. Vlada loved them so much, you’d think she made them herself—it wasn’t so much the design for her as the idea. The rehabilitation, as you put it, of honest craftsmanship. She considered herself a craftsperson. She always said so, even to the press…. Oh, Aidy, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to know her!”

“I am sorry it’s impossible to know all the good people who are already gone.”

“The two of you are very much alike in a way. Very much. You both have an abundance of some essential spiritual vitamin that I chronically lack.”

“Man, you must be hungry. We’re almost there; just a bit further there’ll be a nice little place. In a forest, under pine trees.”

“I’m serious! I may not have put it the best way; I’m sorry, but that’s only because there’s too much stuff coming at me all at once…”

“Try not to fuss so much. You’re vibrating like you’re plugged into the wall. You’re jumping up at every car we pass. Baby, don’t.”

“Aidy. Listen. I’m thinking about this one thing. A bad thing, a terrible thing. I’ve been thinking about it the whole time, since that woman told us about the grave. I’m afraid to say it out loud even to you.”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s about Nina Ustýmivna. About her parents, actually. About Vlada’s grandparents.”

“What do they have to do with anything?”

“I’ll tell you. Listen. Vlada suspected that back in ’33 they worked the hunger. They were redistributing property, going after the better-off farmers, the kulaks—and it was somewhere here, around Kyiv. That’s where Vlada’s grandfather got his career started; it was only later, when the starvation began, that they were transferred into the city itself. They never spoke of it at home, of course, but Vlada accidentally overheard something somewhere once. And it matched their bios. She said her grandmother, when she was already a distinguished—for outstanding service to the country, what else?—pensioner chasing kids from the apple trees in their yard would, if she got really angry, call them kulak spawn. That was her worst cuss word.”

“You’re a two-faced and evil folk, you the kulaks who’ve been thrice-cursed!” Adrian recites with pathos.

“Good God, where’s that from?”

“Ukrainian Soviet poetry, of course. Stuck in my mind since high school, I don’t remember who wrote it. Didn’t you guys cover that, too?”

“Jesus, Aidy, don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

He puts his hand over hers.

“Of course I do, Lolly. Don’t think about it. You shouldn’t.”

“But it’s unfair!” Daryna all but moans. “Why did she have to…? Why did it have to be her? That she’d be the one, on that very spot… Aidy, she was so full of light, if only you knew! One of the best people I’ve ever met in my life…”

“That, Daryna, is not for us to know,” he says, flipping on the right-turn signal, causing Daryna to glance back instinctively to make sure the road is clear. They turn off the highway and, kicking up gravel with a great noise, pull up to a small roadside restaurant. “You’ve said it yourself—Golgotha,” Adrian says as he pulls the key out of the ignition, and in the silence that descends upon them, like a healing compress on a burning forehead, they remain, her head on his shoulder, his lips touching her hair. “And Golgotha,” he utters, barely audibly, “is, among other things, death for the sins of others. Also, you could say, a way of tidying up, of leaving things clean. Someone has to do it when too much stuff piles up. A way of purifying the system, according to the law of large numbers: many, many small Calvaries…”

He kisses her behind the ear and raises his head.

“I tell you what, Lolly. Think simpler: a deeply depressed woman went for a drive, not even knowing where, on an empty road, just went for the sake of going. Her reactions were dulled, the road was wet, it was raining, and then a critter ran across the road in front of her, a dog or something…. She slammed on the brakes at great speed, the car swerved, it was probably pretty slippery too—and that’s it. Shoulder, ditch. The end.”

She raises her head, not taking her eyes, wide and childlike in their incredulity, off him. “Is that what you really think?”

“No,” he says. “But it doesn’t make the least bit of difference—neither what I think, nor what you do. Or anyone else. The statement is unprovable within the system. It’s a Gödel theorem. And now, let us go and eat something. As long as we remain within the system, we certainly have to keep doing that.”

Finally she smiles—he’s managed to make her smile for the first time after that fit of hysterical laughter.

And only on the path from the parking lot to the porch does he notice that she is carrying a white plastic bag bulging with the edges of a canvas rectangle wrapped in several layers of newspaper.

“Oh no.” She shakes her head when she sees him looking at it, and smiles, a bit sheepishly this time. “Say what you want, but I’m not leaving it in a car again.”